>>2438119On the question national liberation, I don't know how can anyone view it as a defect of Marxism instead of it's primary strength after Lenin started emphasizing it and it only became ever more important since then, seeing as every single surviving socialist experiment is a product of a national liberation struggle and the biggest win of the communists movement were due to imperialist wars. In fact, if Marx can be criticized for anything, it's that he was too eurocentric and he only theorized how the pure form of capitalism worked that existed in England instead of fully incorporating into his theory the fact that industrial capitalism came to be as a result of European colonialism. As history showed, imperialist wars and open robbery of resources have remained a constant feature of capitalism instead of an "original sin" as Marx or today's apologetics of Western hegemony would describe it. Even then he was much ahead of his time as a great deal of his contemporaries in the burgeoning international worker's movement were open social-imperialists and/or anti-semites.
On "bourgeois" democracy, universal suffrage was a massive advancement for the working class that was mainly forced by the waves of unrest and revolution that sweeped through Europe after WW1. Feudal structures of the time enforced a joint dictatorship of capitalists and the landed aristocracy. It hasn't been that long time ago when feudal structures were used against the working class (see the dismissal Gough Whitlam by the royal governor of Australia). It's hard to chastize Marx, whose main activity was building political representation for the working class, just because was opposed to systems that made such a thing impossible legally.