Motherhood Quote by Jack London

London’s line lands like a thrown brick: not an argument, a verdict. “Scab” is already a slur born of strike lines and broken solidarity, but he sharpens it into a three-count indictment that hits faith, family, and politics in one breath. The power is in the escalation. You can disagree with a union; you can’t easily shrug off being branded a traitor to God and mother. By stacking those sacred loyalties, London frames strikebreaking as more than economic self-interest. It becomes moral apostasy.

The intent is disciplinary. Labor movements survive on collective action, and collective action depends on social enforcement as much as wages or ideology. This sentence functions as a cultural weapon: it raises the cost of crossing the line by turning a private choice into public disgrace. London’s choice of “his class” is key. It suggests class is not just a category you occupy but a community you owe. In that logic, working-class identity carries obligations, and violating them is betrayal, not merely pragmatism.

Context matters: London wrote as an avowed socialist in an America rattled by violent strikes, Pinkertons, blacklists, and a press that often treated labor agitation as criminality. Against that backdrop, his absolutism reads less like poetic excess and more like counter-propaganda, meant to harden resolve when employers could buy desperation one worker at a time. The subtext is blunt: the real enemy isn’t only capital; it’s the worker persuaded to act alone.