How I Became a Socialist
It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion
somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became
Christians--it was hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for
Socialism at the time of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I
was very young and callow, did not know much of anything, and though
I had never even heard of a school called "Individualism," I sang
the paean of the strong with all my heart.
This was because I was strong myself. By strong I mean that I had
good health and hard muscles, both of which possessions are easily
accounted for. I had lived my childhood on California ranches, my
boyhood hustling newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western
city, and my youth on the ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay
and the Pacific Ocean. I loved life in the open, and I toiled in
the open, at the hardest kinds of work. Learning no trade, but
drifting along from job to job, I looked on the world and called it
good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism was because I
was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor weaknesses,
never turned down by the boss because I did not look fit, able
always to get a job at shovelling coal, sailorizing, or manual labor
of some sort.
And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my
own at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very
natural. I was a winner. Wherefore I called the game, as I saw it
played, or thought I saw it played, a very proper game for MEN. To
be a MAN was to write man in large capitals on my heart. To
adventure like a man, and fight like a man, and do a man's work
(even for a boy's pay)--these were things that reached right in and
gripped hold of me as no other thing could. And I looked ahead into
long vistas of a hazy and interminable future, into which, playing
what I conceived to be MAN'S game, I should continue to travel with
unfailing health, without accidents, and with muscles ever vigorous.
As I say, this future was interminable. I could see myself only
raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche's BLOND-
BEASTS, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and
strength.
As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed,
I must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely
felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they
wanted to real hard, and could work just as well. Accidents? Well,
they represented FATE, also spelled out in capitals, and there was
no getting around FATE. Napoleon had had an accident at Waterloo,
but that did not dampen my desire to be another and later Napoleon.
Further, the optimism bred of a stomach which could digest scrap
iron and a body which flourished on hardships did not permit me to
consider accidents as even remotely related to my glorious
personality.
I hope I have made it clear that I was proud to be one of Nature's
strong-armed noblemen. The dignity of labor was to me the most
impressive thing in the world. Without having read Carlyle, or
Kipling, I formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the
shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation.
The pride I took in a hard day's work well done would be
inconceivable to you. It is almost inconceivable to me as I look
back upon it. I was as faithful a wage slave as ever capitalist
exploited. To shirk or malinger on the man who paid me my wages was
a sin, first, against myself, and second, against him. I considered
it a crime second only to treason and just about as bad.
In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox
bourgeois ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the
bourgeois preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the
bourgeois politicians. And I doubt not, if other events had not
changed my career, that I should have evolved into a professional
strike-breaker, (one of President Eliot's American heroes), and had
my head and my earning power irrevocably smashed by a club in the
hands of some militant trades-unionist.
Just about this time, returning from a seven months' voyage before
the mast, and just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go
tramping. On rods and blind baggages I fought my way from the open
West where men bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the
congested labor centres of the East, where men were small potatoes
and hunted the job for all they were worth. And on this new BLOND-
BEAST adventure I found myself looking upon life from a new and
totally different angle. I had dropped down from the proletariat
into what sociologists love to call the "submerged tenth," and I was
startled to discover the way in which that submerged tenth was
recruited.
I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good
as myself and just as BLOND-BEAST; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-
men, all wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and
hardship and accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many
old horses. I battered on the drag and slammed back gates with
them, or shivered with them in box cars and city parks, listening
the while to life-histories which began under auspices as fair as
mine, with digestions and bodies equal to and better than mine, and
which ended there before my eyes in the shambles at the bottom of
the Social Pit.
And as I listened my brain began to work. The woman of the streets
and the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture
of the Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and
at the bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and
hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I
confess a terror seized me. What when my strength failed? when I
should be unable to work shoulder to shoulder with the strong men
who were as yet babes unborn? And there and then I swore a great
oath. It ran something like this: ALL MY DAYS I HAVE WORKED HARD
WITH MY BODY, AND ACCORDING TO THE NUMBER OF DAYS I HAVE WORKED, BY
JUST THAT MUCH AM I NEARER THE BOTTOM OF THE PIT. I SHALL CLIMB OUT
OF THE PIT, BUT NOT BY THE MUSCLES OF MY BODY SHALL I CLIMB OUT. I
SHALL DO NO MORE HARD WORK, AND MAY GOD STRIKE ME DEAD IF I DO
ANOTHER DAY'S HARD WORK WITH MY BODY MORE THAN I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO
DO. And I have been busy ever since running away from hard work.
Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the
United States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed
by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not
guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days' imprisonment for
having no fixed abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed
and chained to a bunch of men similarly circumstanced, carted down
country to Buffalo, registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had
my head clipped and my budding mustache shaved, was dressed in
convict stripes, compulsorily vaccinated by a medical student who
practised on such as we, made to march the lock-step, and put to
work under the eyes of guards armed with Winchester rifles--all for
adventuring in BLOND-BEASTLY fashion. Concerning further details
deponent sayeth not, though he may hint that some of his plethoric
national patriotism simmered down and leaked out of the bottom of
his soul somewhere--at least, since that experience he finds that he
cares more for men and women and little children than for imaginary
geographical lines.
To return to my conversion. I think it is apparent that my rampant
individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and
something else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been
an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without
knowing it, withal, an unscientific one. I had been reborn, but not
renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I
was. I ran back to California and opened the books. I do not
remember which ones I opened first. It is an unimportant detail
anyway. I was already It, whatever It was, and by aid of the books
I discovered that It was a Socialist. Since that day I have opened
many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the
logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and
convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls
of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down,
down, into the shambles at the bottom.
-THE END-
Jack London's essay: How I Became a Socialist
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