No economic system lives for ever. Each system has in it the germ of its own successor. The feudal system came to its end when Columbus broke through its geographical walls. (Gutenburg and Leonardo and a thousand others broke through its intellectual walls at about the same time, and Luther through the social and religious barriers.) With these clues we can see that Democratic Capitalism is the successor to Feudalism. From this point Marx had to go into prophecy and according to his followers he did rather well in predicting the next stages: he saw, in the 1860's, the kind of capitalism we enjoyed in 1914. He did not see all its results--the enormous increase in the number of prosperous families was not in his calculations and he might have been surprised to see the least, not the most, industrialized country fall first into Communism. But to the sceptic only one thing in the Marxian prophecy is important. He says that in the later stages of Capitalism, it will become incompetent; it will not be able to handle the tools of production and distribution; and suddenly or gradually, it will change into a _new_ system. (According to Marx, this new system will be Communism.) There were moments under the grim eyes of Mr. Hoover when all the parts of this prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled. There are apparently some Americans who wish that the New Deal had not interposed itself between the Gold Standard and the Red Flag. These are the great leaders (silenced now by war) who might have studied Marx before flirting with the fascists. For even the rudimentary analysis above shows that Capitalism cannot _grow into_ fascism; fascism moves _backward_ from democratic capitalism, it moves into the system which democracy destroyed--the feudal system. The capitalist system may be headed for slow or sudden death if it goes on as it is; it may have a long life if it can adapt itself to the world it has itself created; but in every sense of the words, capitalism has no future if it goes back to the past. And fascism is the discarded past of capitalism. We think we know this now because the fasci-feudal states have declared war on us. Now we see how natural is the alliance between the European states who wish to restore feudalism and the Asiatic state which never abandoned it. Now we recognize the Nazi or Fascist party as the equivalent of feudal nobles and in "labor battalions" we see the outlines of serfs cringing from their masters. But we do not yet see that a feudal state cannot live in the same world as a free state--and that we are as committed to destroy fascism as Hitler is to destroy democracy. We strike back at Japan because Japan attacked us, and fight Germany and Italy because they declared war on us; but we will not win the war until we understand that the Axis had to attack us and that we must destroy the system which made the attack inevitable. _Walled Town and Open Door_