The short story Love of life (1905) by writer and socialist Jack London is well worth the read today. It is a powerful call to overcome all obstacles.
A gold prospector finds himself abandoned by his colleague and lost in the forest of North of Canada, with only a few matches, an empty gun, an injured foot and no food. With all odds stacked against him, he battles to survive. The 20-odd pages keep you anxiously waiting for the dénouement, genuinely not knowing how it is going to end.
Two days before Lenin died, his wife and comrade Krupskaya read that story to him. No wonder why she says that “Ilyich was carried away by this story.”
As I read through the first pages, I could not help but see the Russian workers and peasants fighting to defend their revolution during the civil war of 1918-21. After a devastating world war, the sabotage of industry by the capitalists, and the famine and terror brought upon by the 21 armies of foreign interventions, the workers moved mountains to defend the socialist revolution. They won thanks to an unbreakable will to make their supreme act of liberation survive. They successfully transmitted this sentiment to the workers in uniform invading Soviet Russia, with mutinies spreading through the foreign armies. One can imagine the Russian workers battling the powerful counterrevolutionaries as London’s lost man: “He was no longer susceptible to pain. Stomach and nerves had gone to sleep. Yet the life that was in him drove him on. He was very weary, but he refused to die.”
The passionate love of life transmitted by this beautiful little piece is what drives communists today. The capitalists are destroying life on earth. They will throw every obstacle in our way, but we fight and we will win.
