e its efforts around an agreed division of
labor, share the goods and services produced and move from one level of
affluence to a level of abundance.

Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most
prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization
consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by
forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that
human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of
each nation in the suicidal formula: "might makes right; every nation
for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser."

The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and
hatred. Its outcome was a competitive life and death struggle for wealth
and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of
competition. The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local
wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.

Before the great revolution such struggles were waged chiefly with
weapons wielded by human muscle power, supplemented with whatever animal
power was available. Equipped with the products of the technological
revolution, the struggle became a war of machines, powered by the
energies of nature. Retail killing and destruction was replaced by mass
murder and wholesale annihilation.

Given the assumptions, the practices and the institutions of
civilization, the catastrophic losses of the present century could have
been foretold and, with competent leadership and disciplined
followership, could have been averted. But leadership was self-serving,
shortsighted and for the most part untrained, while followership was
split up into national and local segments, each following the suicidal
doctrine of every nation for itself and the devil take the laggards.

Socialists-communists around the earth have spent a wealth of time and
energy during several generations predicting the present revolutionary
upset and preparing for it. They have been derided, denounced and
persecuted for their efforts. Despite bitter opposition they have
prepared for change, they accept change, they welcome it, because in
change they see the only path to improvement and betterment.

They are learning to live with change and even to welcome it because the
time of troubles through which their society is passing is warning them
of the dangers they face. At the same time they are learning, bit by
bit,