Foreword This book attempts to trace underlying historical trends to-ward state-managed economies to their culmination, and to do sofrom the vantage point of the capitalist metropolitan centers. Theinquiry is therefore directed primarily to the industrializeddemocratic countries. Although we know that nations havegrown more interconnected than they ever were before, and thatthe great multinational corporations are binding economiesthrough their own intricate networks, there is essential validityin looking at the process from the watchtowers of Washingtonand her allies. After World War II America took over the reins of advanced capitalism to impose a world tutelage more thoroughgoing than Britain's in her heyday. Even thirty-five years later, with Ameri- can hegemony on the wane, the capitalist powers, added to- gether, retain dominance. The result has been a unique, ambiva- lent international standoff. On the one hand the enlargement of the Soviet world, Soviet industrialism, and Soviet attainment of rough or near military parity with the United States constrict the capitalist domain. Capitalist perspectives are further clouded by the arrival of the ex-colonial nations on the world arena. Their rising assertiveness and their maneuvering between the two su- perpowers weaken the world complex, making it more vulnera- ble to disorder. On the other hand divisions and inadequacies, deprivations and absurdities within the Communist sectors, as well as general chaos in the Third World, have reinforced the power, particularly the economic primacy, of the centers of capi- talist industrialism. In the words of a prominent African scholar: "Even the largest of the Communist countries are sensing a grow- ing dependence on the world market, which is in turn domi- nated by capitalism and its methods." It has to be kept in mind as well that the ideological banners vii