In 'The Iron Heel' by Jack London, what is the name of the socialist revolutionary?

In Jack London’s The Iron Heel, the socialist revolutionary is Ernest Everhard.

Ernest is a forceful socialist organizer and speaker who argues that the existing economic system is built on the exploitation of workers. His political arguments initially challenge Avis Cunningham, the daughter of physicist John Cunningham. As Avis investigates the poverty and violence Ernest describes, she becomes convinced that his critique is correct and eventually marries him.

The novel follows the rise of the Iron Heel, a coalition of wealthy industrialists and financiers who establish an oligarchic dictatorship to prevent a socialist movement from taking power. Ernest helps organize resistance to this ruling class, but the first revolutionary revolt fails. The book’s framing device—a manuscript by Avis preserved and annotated centuries later—reveals that the Brotherhood of Man eventually succeeds, although Ernest does not live to see that victory.

Avis is the novel’s narrator and arguably its central viewpoint character, which can cause confusion in questions about the protagonist. Ernest is nevertheless the clearly identified socialist revolutionary and the character who articulates the movement’s political program. London published the dystopian political novel in 1908, decades before later totalitarian-fiction classics such as Nineteen Eighty-Four.