African developments were even less fruitful than those in Asia and Latin America.  Asians and Latin Americans generally had reached the level of self-identification necessary for statehood and national self-determination.  Large parts of Africa living at pre-national levels of tribal identification, devoted their energies to the realization of nationhood.  Their constitutions announced their frontiers and proclaimed their sovereignty, but inter-tribal rivalries and personal ambitions turned each new nation into a battle field for prestige and authority, with the military often making the final decisions.

Asians and Africans had won telling victories in their struggle to drive out their former imperial masters.  When it came to the affirmative task of organizing responsible regional federations, their failure was dismal.  Asia and Africa were regionally disunited.  Former colonial people, still monitored by alien representatives of monopoly capitalism, were fragmented by the self-determination struggle into theoretically sovereign nations many of which lacked the experience and the local expertise which are the indispensible prerequisites of self-determination and of fruitful regional federation.

Another aspect of the world revolution produced more tangible results.  The latter half of the nineteenth century brought into being a grass-roots movement of peoples demanding everything from petty reforms of administrative machinery to planned revolutionary transformations of the established monopoly capitalist structure.  This movement crystallized as an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-socialist national and international struggle.  From the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 until the beginnings of socialist construction in 1917, it was a movement of protest against poverty, unemployment, war, waste, inequality, exploitation.  After 1917 it became a movement to end imperialism, war and exploitation and substitute a planet-wide social system that would give every human being a chance to play a meaningful part in utilizing nature, improving society and creating socialist women and men, capable of cooperating for the general welfare of mankind.

The Enlightenment had diminished ignorance, spread information and brought elementary education to the masses.  Self-government had given people confidence in their ability to make the phrase “we, the people” a working formula for social improvement.  The Industrial Revolution had converted millions of superstitious, frustrated peasants into craftsmen and professionals confident in their ability to use nature effectively, to advance their own interests and to improve society.  These and secondary social forces laid the foundation for the social revolution that mushroomed across the planet during the opening years of the present century.  The occasion for the revolution was four years of destructive war (1914-18) during which two rival gangs of imperialists led their dupes and victims to shed blood and destroy property in a struggle to decide which band of plunderers should exploit natural resources and labor power for its own advantage.