The Austro-Marxist response to the twin forces of globalization and
fragmentation imagined a world in which human beings would enjoy
levels of solidarity and cultural diversity which had no parallel in earlier
times. These were controversial ideas which clashed with the socialist idea
which developed in Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin but they indicated one way of building on the Marxian legacy and of reconstructing
historical materialism. However, the rise of Soviet Marxism–Leninism
meant that what Gouldner (1980) described as the anomalies, contradictions and latent possibilities within the Marxist tradition were suppressed in a closed, quasi-scientific system of supposed truths that
destroyed the potential for further growth and development. Numerous
encrustations formed around Marxism in this period, as Anderson (1983)
noted, but the Marxist literature on nationalism and imperialism early in
the twentieth century did move the discussion of capitalist globalization
and national fragmentation forward in intriguing ways.