The authors analysed what is called "existing socialism" by stressing that it was doomed to failure from the beginning as it was unable to free itself from the effects of world capitalism. The analysis is supplemented with very detailed tables of the economic indexes of the individual socialist (and capitalist) countries.

During the burial of the planned economy, the American author speaks out in favour of some of its advantages seeing in them a form of mixed economy of the future.

As world capitalism is rapidly moving into the historical stage of a global information society, different countries relate in different ways to the transition. The author argues that instead of following the U.S. ideological lead, the Central-Eastern and Eastern European countries have the alternative of transitioning toward partially privatized systems, modelled on French and Japanese planning, which are much more appropriate to a global information economy. Moving toward such historically progressive systems is all the more essential because these systems may well signal the limits of capitalism.

The structural analysis based on the idea of "contract" compares the contradictions of the capitalist and state controlled socialist systems and considers the possibilities of a truly humanistic third road.

The essay argues that the world system actually began its development five thousand years ago and capital accumulation has been the driving force of this development since its beginning. The authors define the world system by reference to a systematic network of transfer of economic surplus among regions, which links their own systems of exploitation and accumulation into an over-arching system of super-accumulation. They contend that the center/periphery/hinterland complex is the basic hierarchical ordering pattern of the world system. It can be shown that there has been continuous and cumulative accumulation in world system history, the study of which identifies better bases for system-transforming socio-political praxis.