The main premise of the book is the rise of a socialist mass movement in the United States – strong enough to have a real chance of winning national elections, getting to power, and implementing a radical socialist regime. Conservatives feel alarmed and threatened by this prospect, to the point of seizing power and establishing a brutal dictatorship in order to avert it.
There were some grounds for London to speculate in that direction. In fact, the labor activity in the U.S. had been growing since the late 19th century, with a fourfold increase in union membership in the U.S. from 1880 to 1890 and a tide of union activity in the next few decades. The armament industry of U.S., among others, became strongholds of worker and antiwar militancy.[3] Labor unrest peaked in 1919 with over four million workers on strike.[4] By the 1930s and into the 1940s, the largest share of the total labor unrest was in North America; from 1941, with over 4,300 strikes involving two million workers.[5] In 1945, a strike by Oil Worker's International Union at a Standard Oil facility spread, affecting the highest number of workers in U.S. history – over 10 percent of the U.S. labor force, with over 5,000 strikes of 4.6 million workers.[6] All that labor militancy was, however, never channeled into a political party with a radical Socialist program. American unions found a political home in the Democratic Party, and American conservatives never felt impelled to take such drastic steps as London foresaw.
Something like London's scenario did happen in other countries. Mass left-wing movements arose in Italy in the early 1920s, in Germany in the early 1930s, and in Spain in the late 1930s, leading conservatives in those countries to support, respectively, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco, out of motives similar to those of Jack London's "Oligarchs". London foresaw the oligarchic tyranny arising in the English-speaking United States and Britain while Germany and Austria would, for a time, hold out against it before finally succumbing. In actuality, it would be Nazi Germany which spearheaded fascism in its most virulent form, while Britain and America stood against it.
The book is considered to be "the earliest of the modern dystopian fiction",[7] in the form of social science fiction as employed by novels such as We, Brave New World, and A Canticle for Leibowitz. It chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. London's socialist views are explicitly on display. A distant forerunner of dystopian political novels and stories of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, such as Aldous Huxley's aforementioned Brave New World, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes. The book is unusual among London's writings (and in the literature of the time in general) in being a first-person narrative of a woman protagonist written by a man. Much of the narrative is set in the San Francisco Bay Area. Other events take place in Sonoma County.
