First, although Marx and Engels were clearly aware of the globalization
of economic and social life, they believed that class conflict within separate,
but not autonomous, societies would trigger the great political revolutions
of the time (Giddens 1981). Their assumption was that revolution
would quickly spread from the society in which it first erupted to all
other leading capitalist societies. According to this view of the world,
burgeoning transnational capitalist activity shattered the illusion of
apparently separate societies – an illusion created by geographical
boundaries separating peoples governed by different political systems.
It has been argued that the relatively peaceful nature of the international
system in the middle of the nineteenth century encouraged such beliefs;
the theory of the state gave way to theories of society and the economy
(Gallie 1978). Reflecting one of the dominant tendencies of the age,
Marx (1973: 109) argued that relations between states were important
but ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ forces in human affairs when compared
with modes of production and their laws of development. In a letter to
Annenkov, Marx (1966: 159) asked whether ‘the whole organisation o