industrial nations presented difficult challenges. The
organization, expansion, defense and improvement of the American,
British, Japanese and any other contemporary empire, posed even larger
and more complex problems which have nagged mankind during recent
generations. Recently, the planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 has
brought the entire human family with 3,700 million members isolated in
140 different nations, face to face with political, economic and social
problems on a planet-wide scale. These problems are planet-wide in their
dimensions. Measures designed for their solution must be equally
planet-wide.

Villages, cities, regions and nations have learned, often the hard way,
how to think, plan and act in terms of their own interests, or, more
concretely, in the interest of their owners, masters and exploiters. It
is with politics and economics of this planet-wide level that we of the
present generation are particularly concerned.

Dwellers in western Europe and North America have to deal with the
politics and economics of monopoly capitalism. Its central offices are
generally located in particular countries--Britain, Holland, France,
Germany, where big business enterprises had their beginnings and from
which representatives of oil, steel, textile, motor and banking
enterprises spilled over into the territory of their competitors as well
as into the "third world" of erstwhile colonies and other dependencies.

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 experime