Marxist theory viewed nations as instruments of the bourgeoisie.

Evidence

The logical extension from Marx or Engels would have been to identify the Blacks of America as a national minority or as a nationality, but not as a nation. For Marx and Engels, the nation was a quite particular historical phenomenon: … Since the end of the Middle Ages, history has been moving towards a Europe made up of large national states. Only such national states constitute the normal political framework for the dominant European bourgeois class and, in addition, they are the indispensable prerequisites … without which the rule of the proletariat cannot exist. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1062

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s focus on the Black radical tradition’s relationship to orthodox Marxism-Leninism; echoes the broader tension between nationalism and socialism.

Related

• Marxist theory could not logically class American Blacks as a nation (similarity 0.92)
• Marx distinguished nations from nationalities by economic independence capacity (similarity 0.90)
• Marxist orthodoxy denied American Blacks nation status. (similarity 0.89)
• Marx treated the national state as the decisive instrument of bourgeois class victory (similarity 0.89)
• Marx’s world-historical vision of the bourgeoisie contradicted its national-territorial development (similarity 0.85)
• Marxist theory underestimated nationalism due to a flawed grasp of capitalism’s depth. (similarity 0.84)
• Engels regarded national states as necessary prerequisites for proletarian rule (similarity 0.84)
• Marxist theory was built by bourgeois thinkers studying bourgeoisies, not proletarians (similarity 0.84)
• Marxist theory could not theorize nationalism and so evaded it (similarity 0.83)
• Marxism was a theory about the proletariat, not a theory produced by proletarian intellectuals (similarity 0.82)
• Marxian economism led Marxists to dismiss nationalism as backward ideology. (similarity 0.82)
• Marx’s theories of democracy and nation formed in response to the 1848-49 defeats (similarity 0.81)
• Pre-romantic mercantilist thought fixated on the state, not the nation (similarity 0.81)
• Engels held that capitalism favored some nations’ boundaries and not others’. (similarity 0.81)
• Marx and Engels’ German nationalism skewed their judgment of Slavic liberation movements. (similarity 0.81)