PARTISAN REVIEW
parison of capitalism and socialism and of their respective merits in
the light of historical experience. Essentially, we find instead a his–
torical account of the main features of capitalist-imperialist develop–
ment since the eighties (with a short background section as an intro–
duction) and up to the present day. Six hundred pages are clearly
not enough to treat adequately such a vast subject, and the facts and
materials used are invariably well known to students of the subject.
What Sternberg attempts, however, is not so much a historical account
as an analysis of the broad outlines of contemporary history.
Sternberg's main thesis is that, while many of Marx's predictions
have proved incorrect, the main prediction of Lenin and Luxemburg
concerning the decline of capitalism in the imperialist age has been
borne out by events. Modern capitalism, the author maintains, is in
rapid decline over the larger part of the area where it predominated
unchallenged only a generation ago. It is still strong and expanding in
the United States, but this involves our growing isolation in a world
becoming more and more non-capitalist in structure and anti-capitalist in
mood. Also, as he has pointed out in another publication now five years
old, the rapid expansion of American economy makes it particularly
vulnerable to the threat of another slump, because, so the author
maintains, capitalist economy entirely living upon itself, without out–
lets into pre-capitalist agrarian, middle-class and colonial markets, is
intrinsically unstable. It collapsed in 1930, was very insufficiently re–
constructed by the New Deal, and ever since has lived on windfalls such
as the war, the post-war buying rush, and now upon the new armaments
drive, which, however, will come to an end some day and leave the
country confronted with the old unsolved problems.
As
against these gloomy perspectives, the author is much more hope–
ful concerning the British socialist experiment, whose only basic fault,
in his view, is that it proceeds upon too narrow a geographical and
industrial basis. But according to Sternberg all Europe is now tending
toward various types of non-despotic socialism, and if the countries of
Europe succeed in pooling their efforts under such a dispensation, then
they will constitute a third force capable of resisting Russian pressure
militarily, and exerting overwhelming political pressure upon the Soviet
bloc owing to the higher standard of living they could oppose to Rus–
sian misery. The problem therefore is to bring about such a coopera–
tion and to steer it safely through its initial stages, when it will still
be
exposed to Russian aggression backed by a stronger military establish–
ment.
Concerning Russia, he maintains that though she is now taking an
aggressive and oppressive "imperialist" path, she is, in contrast to cap-
