Marx’s politics formed after democracy’s worst defeat in Europe

Evidence

Neither the Marxian theory of democracy nor the Marxian view of national evolution is fully comprehensible unless it is remembered that they took shape on the morrow of the worst defeat democracy and nationalism had yet suffered in Europe. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 325

Categorization

• XREF: This bears on the reader’s core question: the failure of 1848 shapes Marxist (and by extension radical) theory formation, directly relevant to the arc of revolutionary traditions.