Marx rejected the ethical standpoint, which one finds in Kant’s writings,
that human beings can agree on universal truths by using reason, but he
shared Kant’s conviction that all political efforts to realize freedom
within the sovereign state were ultimately futile because they could be
rapidly destroyed by the sudden shock of external events. For Kant, war
was the dominant threat to the creation of the perfect society; hence his
belief in the priority of working for perpetual peace. For Marx, global
capitalist crisis was the recurrent danger. Consequently, the idea of
‘socialism in one country’ was irrelevant in his view in the context of
capitalist globalization. Human freedom could be achieved only through universal solidarity and cooperation to remake world society as a whole.
This is one reason why Marx had little to say about relations between
states, but focused instead on the significance of capitalist globalization
for the struggle to realize equality and freedom. Marx and Engels
(whose nickname was ‘The General’, given his keen interest in strategy
and war) were aware of the importance of geopolitics in human history;
they knew that conquest in which economic motives were usually
predominant had led to the development of ever-larger political associations. They were aware that the struggle for power between the
European states led to imperial expansion, although they believed that
economic motives were the main reason for the development of world
trade and a global market. In short, their analysis was far less concerned
with what warring states had contributed to the process of globalization
than with explaining how the internal dynamics of capitalism led inexorably to this condition. Although states may have contributed to the
globalization of social and political life, they did this largely and increasingly, in Marx’s view, because of the internal laws of motion of the
capitalist system of production.