Today about a billion human beings live in countries of East Europe and Asia calling themselves socialist-communist.  A second billion human beings live chiefly in West Europe, the Americas and Australasia calling themselves capitalist.  A third billion, the remaining segment of mankind, living chiefly in Africa, Asia and Latin America make up the “Third World,” most of which consists of former colonies and dependencies of the 19th century empires.

At the beginning of the great revolution in 1750 the planet was occupied by the European empires, their colonies and dependencies, with a segment under the control of the crumbling Chinese and Turkish empires.  The ensuing two centuries witnessed a political, economic and social transformation that reached across every continent.

The revolutionary process is far from complete in 1975.  Capitalism and Marxism are still pitted against each other—­ideologically, politically, culturally.  The Marxians form a revolutionary front.  Capitalists retort with counter-revolution.  Nation by nation the third world is taking sides.

The capitalist world is suffering from the rise and fall of the business cycle, from inflation and unemployment, from the scourge of militarism; from the exhaustion of two general wars in one generation; from absence of any positive common program or commonly accepted means of administering public affairs; from its failure to provide its young people with a satisfactory reason for existence, and from the fatal malady of fragmentation which is the logical counterpart of every major effort at coordination, consolidation and unification.  Western civilization, despite repeated efforts, was never able to establish the kind of superficial unity that marked the high point in the Egyptian and Roman civilizations.  The stresses and strains of the current great revolution have introduced into western civilization new disintegrative forces of which the capitalist-Marxist confrontation is the most extensive, divisive and decisive.

The Marxist world, in its spectacular rise during less than a century, offers the only workable alternative to declining and disintegrating western civilization.  It presents an alternative theoretical program for dealing with the transition from the built-in competitiveness of western civilization to the built-in cooperativeness of a planned, coordinated, federated socialist-communist world order.

The Soviet Union and its East European socialist neighbors have survived the wars of 1914 and 1936; have survived the capitalist conspiracy to strangle infant Marxism in its cradle.  In a remarkably brief period the Soviet Union has moved from a position of cultural backwardness to become the number two nation in productivity and perhaps even number one in fire power.

Today Asia’s active development of several variants of Marxism is defended against any repetition of Hitler’s 1941 drive to the East by the massive land barrier of the Soviet Union and its East European Marxist associates.