Political economy limited Marx’s grasp of nationalism in workers’ movements

Evidence

Thus the dispute between Lassalle, Marx, and Engels had not merely raised questions as to the nature of the political relationship between them (that is whether Lassalle had the right to disagree publicly with an anonymously authored position) or the extent to which Marx and Engels were themselves victims of a Germanic chauvinism. Certainly these were important issues, but they could just as well be understood as the inevitable excesses of personality and political ambition to which intellectuals such as Marx and Engels in the midst of a workers’ movement fall prey. More important, however, is the effect that political economy, the central analytical tool of their materialist conception of history, had on their ability to conceptualize correctly the ideological character of industrial social movements. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the book’s thesis: Marx’s economic categories left him structurally unable to see racial and national consciousness — the analytic gap the Black radical tradition fills.
• QUESTION: Follow whether Robinson substantiates this claim later with the Engels/Lassalle texts themselves or builds a broader methodological critique of economic determinism.