Marx and Engels’ German nationalism was distorted by exile and ideology

Evidence

The nationalism in question was German, a nation from which Marx and Engels had been in enforced exile for several years. Exile, however, is hardly a satisfactory defense in this instance since Marx and Engels, as leaders of the German democratic (socialist) movement, were in almost daily touch with German correspondents. It is true that as émigrés from Germany, Marx and Engels can be expected to have drawn increasingly distant from the ambitions and moods of working-class organizations at home. Franz Mehring, one of Marx’s most sympathetic biographers, notes that in Marx’s and Engels’s argument with Lassalle over the consequences for the German revolutionary struggle of a war between Germany (Prussia and the German League) and Italy (the Kingdom of Sardinia) and France, “the two friends had to pay for having lost touch with conditions in Germany for so long.” Given the world-historical scope that Marx and Engels attempted to achieve in their work, however, Mehring’s intervention by interpretation appears excessively apologetic and not particularly instructive. He failed to come to terms with the political-ideological effect that Marx’s notion of the logic of capitalist development would incur. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 317