Marx treated the national state as the decisive instrument of bourgeois class victory

Evidence

Marx conceived the triumph of bourgeois society over feudalism as a victory won by the most extraordinary instrument of class struggle: the state. He was inclined, then, as we have already noted in Engels, to see the nation (the manifest form of the state in the nineteenth century) as a sine qua non of bourgeois rule. In turn, bourgeois rule and capitalist production were necessary for the development of the socialized production that the immanent society required. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 345

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Marx’s theoretical placement of the nation-state as a sine qua non of bourgeois rule, which is the scaffolding for later chapters on why Marx mis-read non-European nationalism.