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PARTISAN REVIEW
institutions; the fact that, unlike the previous wars of capitalism,
the war of 1914-18 was unprofitable for both victors and losers,
whereas earlier wars were invariably profitable for the victors and
often for the losers as well; the demonstrated inability to devise a
workable peace. From 1928 on, a renewed and far more devas–
tating crisis set in, as shown not merely by the unparalleled eco·
nomic depression, but equally plainly by the consolidation of
Stalinism and Nazism, the rupture of the state from its traditional
capitalist limits in all other nations, and the beginning of the
breakup of the political order (Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, the
spread of Germany, and finally the new war).
The political division of the world into a comparatively large
number of sovereign national states, each with its armies and forts
and currencies and tariffs and civil bureaucracies, is no longer
workable for modern society with its complex division of labor and
its needs for wider planning, control and trade exchanges. But in
the Versailles peace, capitalism demonstrated that it was unable to
smash the traditional political structure. The preservation of capi–
talism in the victorious powers (above all in England, the heart of
capitalist society) meant the continuation of capitalist-nationalist
divisions, indeed their exaggeration; but such divisions, the lut
generation has proved, cannot any longer endure. The process of
changing the world political structure involves also a change in the
world social structure. The second world war comprises major
initial steps in both these changes.
Already the world system of managerial society emerges: a
comparatively small number of "super-states/' fighting for and
dividing the world among themselves. An economic map suggests
the probability that the outcome will be three great super-states,
each based upon one of the three main areas of advanced industry:
northcentral Europe; the United States, especially northeastern
United States; Japan together with the east coast of China. In the
future conflicts the managerial super-states of tomorrow cannot, in
reality, hope to achieve a definitive military conquest of each other.
The struggle will actually be, not for control over the central areas
of advanced industry-the European area will be ruled by Euro·
peans, the East Asian by Asiatics, the United States area by Ameri·
cans-but for prime shares in the rest of the world.
The world conflict, however, is not at all divorced from the
