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, of the spectacular achievements of the billion human beings in socialist-communist countries.
The majority of mankind has been unprepared for revolutionary change.
When change came they resented it, maybe resisted it at the outset.
Those who have a vested interest in capitalist imperialism—the real backbone of the counter-revolution—join and support counter-revolutionary organizations and take part in counter-revolutionary activities.
Planners and organizers of the counter-revolution have the bourgeois state generally on their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble, fumble and bungle as their system flounders into one disastrous crisis after another.