Monopoly capitalism has made no real effort to organize a functioning world economy.  On the contrary, it has established, maintained and consolidated centers of economic interests and activities at the national level.  In theory and in practice the bourgeois-dominated planet is divided into economic and political states and spheres of influence, each equipped with the separatist institutions of political sovereignty.

Politically the task of setting up a competent world government has not been seriously taken in hand.  The same may be said for the organization of a planned, organized, supervised planetary economy.  So far as we know, such world economic institutions and practices cannot exist in the chaos of one hundred forty sovereign states, each exercising authority over its economy, each with its own program for growth and expansion, and putting its claims for wealth and power above peace, order, justice, and mercy for the entire human family.

General economic practice throughout the 1450-1970 experiments with nation building, empire building, competitive struggle and sporadic efforts at world conquest, occupation and exploitation have crossed national boundary lines as a matter of necessity.  It could not be otherwise, because no nation has been able to reach the cultural level of civilization on a basis of economic self-containment.  Primitive agriculture can maintain a high degree of self sufficiency.  City populations abandon self-sufficiency and adopt the principles of expansion, occupation and utilization of foreign territory and exploitation of resources and manpower, at home and abroad.

As western civilization has matured, power struggles at the top, conquest, occupation and exploitation have come more and more to the fore until, in the era of monopoly capitalism, they dominate the field.  In this period of human history nothing less than the just sharing of available goods and services will implement the principle of “to each according to his need”.

Monopoly capitalism, throughout its entire history, has tended to function internationally, moving across frontiers in search of raw materials, markets, and fields of profitable investment.  Inter-group trade has been carried on between and through “foreign” markets, cities and states.  Not only has the flag followed the investor, but the investor has used governmental agencies, including the military, to protect economic interests, promote them and expand them.  Early in their history, western nations subsidized private organizations like the Dutch East India Company and the British Hudson Bay Company and authorized them to exercise quasi-public authority.  International banking and insurance paralleled international trade.

Western civilization, from its earliest beginnings in foreign business relations and ideological adventures like the Crusades, has spilled across national frontiers in its search for adventure, for experience, for information, for pelf and power.  A part of the expansionist drive was “strictly business” in character.  Another part—­international conferences, public and private; tourism; the export of artifacts and of information, were promoted by mixed motives, from missionary zeal for the propagation of The Faith to international business for profit, public and private.