Marx on globalization
Marxists of course usually maintain that there are no nation-state boundaries for capital, and that when the idea of national culture comes up against the logic of capitalist expansion, then the latter always triumphs.
For many Marxists the nation-state is a ‘bourgeois' concept that creates false consciousness about divisions between peoples across the globe, when the real unifying factor is those that own the means of production versus those that are forced to sell their labourpower. But even within this framework, the ‘false consciousness' idea of nationality cannot explain all the differences between and within capitalist economies, and why some non- or semi-capitalist systems differ from others. If capital has a universal logic, how come it still operates alongside the Communist Party in China, but does not do so any more in Russia?Marx was not quite as unambiguous on globalization as some commentators have made out. His most recent biographer, Jonathan Sperber, declared while discussing the world market that ‘Marx's own globalized views differed from those of a later era', i.e. from those of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and ‘when he thought about global politics, it was the Tsar's Empire that had his attention' (Sperber, 2013, 401). Sperber also showed Marx analyzing the ‘positive' effects of British rule in India (‘countering Oriental despotism' and the ‘Asiatic mode of production'), illustrating how different the nineteenth-century understanding of imperialism was from the twentieth. In fact, it can plausibly be argued that in the early twenty-first century, it is precisely Marx's national-based commercial-globalization conception that is relevant to current trends, not the twentieth-century view of a bi-polar ideological-globalization into two opposed political camps.
In contemporary discussions, when globalization is being considered, it is not ‘the entire world' that is being referred to, but the rise of previously less-important states like China, India and Tsar-Putin's commercial Empire, compared to the ‘established' powers of Western Europe and North America.
In this view globalization is ‘merely' the rise (in international commerce) of some states alongside the relative decline of others, as it was in Marx's time and is also today.Marx himself understood that the global search for new markets was always both controlled and bounded by nation-states, whilst at the same time being forced to erode the national differences within them. It was no accident that Marx and Engels wrote in The Manifesto of the Communist Party that: ‘Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way', i.e. capitalist internationalization was facilitated by new national developments (Marx and Engels, 1933, 4). In volume one of Capital, we read about ‘the universal market, whose integral parts are the individual countries’ (Marx, 1906, 612). In Marx’s conception of ‘capitalist globalization via the nation-state’ it was the differences within the nation-states that were being eroded, not the nation-state/regional entities themselves.