State, capital, and class struggle in Australia: reflections on the global capitalism perspective

At the heart of the capitalist mode of production, since its earliest days, has been a tension between the national and the international dimensions of global capitalism. This was something captured by Marx and Engels in 1848, when they wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations,” and yet at the same time “the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle” (Marx and Engels, 1967).