Dec 23 2008
Commodifying Revolution! Jack London 8
His own way of life had produced the change. He had lost contact with the people; he had grown wealthy, had forgotten his lessons in socialism and his own lectures and essays on imperialism; and, as a tired and confused man, no longer bothered to look beneath the surface for basic causes. Perhaps his daughter, Joan London, analyzed it best when she wrote: “His was a more tragic sellout, for he had been subsidized, bought body and soul, by the kind of life he had thought he wanted, and it was destroying him.”*
It is this unfortunate set of circumstances that has made Jack London one of the first in American history to use revolution as a means to wealth. Jack London was the beginning of the Commodification of Revolution. It is unfair to place the entire burden of the Commodification of Revolution on Jack London, as there are others from the same period that profited as well, including his good friend Upton Sinclair and John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World,** but he set the standard and helped to create the tradition in America of Commodifying Revolution.
* Ibid., 118.
** To be fair to these authors, they were integral in raising awareness to social ills of their day, sometimes within the system, sometimes outside of it, and historically have had a lasting impact.
