Monopoly capitalist society assumes that productivity, wealth and
fire-power, effectively co-ordinated under competent authority, will
guarantee survival and perhaps win supremacy. Beginning its life in one
of the backward areas of the planet, the Soviet Union has met all of
these tests by converting itself into a first class world power. Its
productivity is second only to that of the United States. In wealth it
stands second among the nations. Its fire power has carried the Soviet
Union to victory in civil and international war. Its ruling
oligarchy--the Soviet Communist Party--has maintained its authority
through the stresses of domestic strife and major international
conflict. In terms accepted by the existing free-for-all West, the
Soviet Union is an established world power.
Through the first three decades of its existence the Soviet Union was
the only government avowedly engaged in building a socialist rival to
monopoly capitalism and determined to replace capitalism as the dominant
planet-wide social system. After 1943 it was joined by a dozen other
European, Asian and American countries, dedicated like the Soviet Union
to the task of building socialism. In addition to these dozen countries,
several others such as India, Burma, Indonesia, Ceylon, Ghana and Libya,
declared their intention of building socialism by legal, and gradual
stages. Almost all of the countries busied with socialist construction
were in East Europe and Asia.
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