ABSTRACT
Globalization has been celebrated as a progressive transformation that blends different cultural traditions as the boundaries of nations fade. This scenario is not unfamiliar to social scientists. Once the capitalist world is set into motion, as Marx and Engels (2000:248) claimed in the Communist Manifesto, ‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ With the increase in global intellectual interactions, Marx predicts that certain solids such as the nation, national industry and local culture will vanish in the end. National industries are doomed to be destroyed by ‘industries that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe’ (Marx and Engels 2000:248). Likewise, nationalism, conceived of as the ‘egoism of the nation’ by Marx (2000:162), can be curbed in globalization. To use literature as an instance, Marx and Engels contend: ‘National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature’ (Marx and Engels 2000:249). This is the way how the bourgeoisie ‘have given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’ (Marx and Engels 2000:248).
