Written at a time when socialism had mass-support across the USA, Sinclair's Millennium explores the two divergent paths humanity might take at the turn of the millennium. It's the year 2000, and America's corporate oligarchs live hermetically sealed off from the rest of society, upon whose exploitation and oppression their dominance rests. When a nuclear cataclysm wipes all but a tiny network of individuals out, the survivors are left to figure how to rebuild human civilisation.
At this point Sinclair poses an alternative to the robber-baron capitalism he had previously exposed in The Jungle. The group splits, with one faction deciding to pursue the status-quo - a society built on the whims of the individual, which takes on ever-grotesque proportions; meanwhile, the other group pursues a commonwealth of co-operative human endevour. Which of the two will prevail?
