It was unwise to claim too much for Marxism in the 1990s, notwithstanding
considerable prescience about how capitalism was becoming
the dominant form of production across the world. This was not only
because Marxism took the view that the triumph of capitalism would be
short-lived and that its inexorable laws would lead to its destruction and
eventual replacement by Communism. Nor is it just because Marxism
had a poor grasp of the importance of the nation-state and violence in
the modern world, a point that Marxists conceded in the 1970s and
1980s (see Giddens 1985). It is also because modern forms of globalization
have been accompanied by renewed ethnic violence and national
fragmentation which Marx and Engels, insightful though they were
about the march of capitalist globalization and growing economic
inequalities, could not have foreseen. Other Marxist writers saw things
differently. Lenin, for example, believed that capitalism caused national
fragmentation as well as unprecedented advances in globalization, but
that does not necessarily mean that Marxism offers the best explanation
of how globalization and fragmentation have unfolded in tandem in
modern times and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union.