This chapter examines the current state of historical materialist analysis in order to contribute to the larger project of analyzing global English within global capitalism and the states system. The collection of essays entitled Historical Materialism and Globalization has as its primary objective 'to establish the relevance of historical materialist approaches of today's international social, political, economic and cultural life to help explain this globalizing world'. Van der Pijl builds a theory of what he calls the 'mode of foreign relations' to fit into Marx's productive forces, class relations, and the state dynamics. This framework is very useful and complements Antonio Gramsci's more specific insights concerning language politics in Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Gramsci's typical fashion of adopting and then subverting standard concepts, he develops the term 'normative grammar' in order to reveal the necessarily political nature of language standardization.