World War I expressed aristocratic reaction, not rising industrial capitalism

Evidence

Mayer’s analysis offers a distinctive perspective on the dynamics of the crisis whose culmination was the First World War, itself the opening episode of ‘the Thirty Years War of the general crisis of the twentieth century’. The motor of this crisis was the increasingly reactionary stance of the European ruling classes from the 1890s onwards, which found expression not simply in the widely noted polarization of official politics and rise of ultra-conservative mass parties, but in the popularity of Nietzsche and Social Darwinism. … The ‘rupture of the international system into two rigid blocs … was more effect than cause’ of this wave of reaction. ‘The Great War’, therefore, ‘was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy.’ Nor did the collapse of the Central European monarchies in 1917-18 settle matters: ‘It would take two World Wars and the Holocaust … to finally dislodge the feudal and aristocratic presumption from Europe’s civil and political societies.’ — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 185

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the research: this counter-history of the European crisis as aristocratic self-defense parallels the aristocratic counter-narratives Foucault traces in Society Must Be Defended.
• QUESTION: How does Mayer’s claim that aristocratic presumption took two world wars and the Holocaust to dislodge square with the standard periodization of the interwar crisis?