Some of the most striking passages in Marx and Engels’ writings
emphasize the logic of expansionism which is peculiar to modern capitalism. The essence of capitalism is to ‘strive to tear down every barrier to
intercourse’, to ‘conquer the whole earth for its market’ and to annihilate the tyranny of distance by reducing ‘to a minimum the time spent
in motion from one place to another’ (Marx 1973: 539). In a famous
passage in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1977), which
reveals that Marx and Engels were among the first theorists of globalization, they argued that: