The People of the Abyss

The Chicago Commune is the book's climax, and it's a catastrophe London makes you feel from inside.

The revolutionists plan is elegant in theory: simultaneous blow, wireless stations destroyed, bridges blown, officers captured, the whole nervous system of the Oligarchy severed at once. Before it can recover, it would be over. The plan requires near-perfect coordination across hundreds of points.

The Iron Heel gets wind of it. Picks Chicago as the target city for a lesson. Engineers a premature rising by deliberately mistreating everyone in the city until the pressure is unbearable. Plants fake newspapers describing a national revolt already in progress. Withdraws Mercenaries strategically, then pours hundreds of thousands back in by rail once the rising begins.

And then it uses the people of the abyss.

The people of the abyss are what the book has been building toward all along. The long chapters about the machine's operations, about the squeezed-out middle class, about the subjugated farm workers, about the labor castes that did and did not get favored — all of this produces two populations. The favored few, bought off. And everyone else: the ghetto dwellers, the unskilled, the sick, the elderly, the destroyed. The people of the abyss have nothing to lose. When the Oligarchy engineers the rising, they rise.

The revolutionists had planned to use them — as a diversion, to keep the enemy occupied while the real work was done. "Never mind the destruction of life and property. Let the abysmal brute roar and the police and Mercenaries slay."

That line is in Avis's mouth. The revolutionists, the good guys of the novel, coolly planning to expend the people of the abyss as a strategic asset. "Various dangers to us were harmlessly destroying one another." The people of the abyss were going to die anyway. Better that they die usefully.

What the plan did not account for was that the people of the abyss would not be a manageable instrument. When Avis and Hartman see them in the street, it's not a column — "it was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street." Drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood. "Men, women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their features and all the fiendlike stamped in."

The description is horrifying and is meant to be. London doesn't romanticize the abyss. It's not workers rising in dignity. It's what happens to human beings when you have ground them for generations under the iron heel — they become something that looks less like people than like the forces you've subjected them to.

And then the Mercenaries mow them down with machine guns.

The wave of dead in the stockyards district — "it was for all the world like a wave tossed up by the sea" — bodies from pavement to pavement. Avis wanders through the Nightmare chapter half-delirious, stumbling over the dying, seeing a street entirely paved with the dead. "There was no movement, no sound. The quiet buildings looked down upon the scene from their many windows."

And she sees Bishop Morehouse in the dead. The gentle bishop who took in prostitutes and thieves, who was led off the stage at the I.P.H. when he spoke the truth, who was committed to an asylum when he persisted, who somehow ended up in the streets of Chicago in a cotton shirt in the wave of bodies.

"It was Bishop Morehouse," Ernest says quietly.

The book doesn't give him a death scene or even a sentence of explanation. He's just there in the wave, in a cotton shirt, and then they drive on.

What London is doing with the people of the abyss is refusing you the clean narrative of revolution. The revolutionists are right about the analysis. They're right about the economics. Ernest's mathematical demonstration of capitalist inevitable collapse is correct. The system is genuinely unjust and genuinely doomed. And yet: their plan involved using the most destroyed people in the country as a strategic distraction, and when it went wrong, those people died by the hundreds of thousands. The revolutionists won the intellectual argument about the system and lost the battle utterly.

The abyss doesn't care about the argument. The abyss is what the argument produces when it's been going on for seventy years and no one has won.

"Slave-levies for the rebuilding of Chicago," Ernest says, watching trains of people heading west. "You see, the Chicago slaves are all killed."

The people of the abyss die in the Chicago Commune. More people of the abyss are imported to clean it up. The Iron Heel continues. The manuscript breaks off.