endencies 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