The failed 1848 revolutions forced Marx to abandon immediate-catastrophe theory

Evidence

Crudely put, the relation of base to superstructure is thought, in The German Ideology , as some kind of fairly direct or immediate correspondence—i.e., within the framework of an identity theory. Marx progressively criticizes and departs from identity theory. Essentially, two things provoke this “break.” Historically, the antagonisms multiplying at the economic level fail, in the revolutions of 1848, to produce their “corresponding” political resolutions. Marx is therefore forced, not only to abandon the perspective of “immediate catastrophe” which had been ringingly tolled out in The Communist Manifesto , but to look again at the much more complex interplay between the political and the economic; and to consider the ways in which “solutions” could be found, at the political level, which thwarted, modified, or even displaced the contradictions accumulating at the economic level—taking them forward, in their contradictory form, to a higher level of development. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 506

Categorization

• XREF: The notion that political ‘solutions’ can defuse economic contradictions prefigures Hall’s mediation and articulation theory. — connects to: Marx’s theories formed right after democracy’s worst European defeat yet.; Marx’s own theory anticipated its eventual negation as historical ideology; Adorno read Marx’s turn to political economy as historically forced by revolution’s failure. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1196
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 506

Broader Connections

• Marx’s own theory anticipated its eventual negation as historical ideology #corroborates (0.40)