Nation is a political-economic category. A nation is a historically constituted, stable community that is formed on the basis of:
- a common language,
- a common territory,
- a common economic life,
- and a common culture.
Common language and common culture are social formations; a common territory and common economic life are both economic formations. When a community has all of these qualities, it should be recognized by Marxists as a nation, and capable and deserving and desirous of the right of self-determination.
Nations are formed “only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation.” Nations, like all historical phenomena, are subject to the law of change; they have history; they have beginnings, and they have endings.
Nations are, then, self-aware communities that share both economic and social relations, and to which individuals commonly feel strong attachments. Nationhood could not exist until the material basis for unifying large regions was developed: sufficiently advanced technology, the construction of roads, the advent of long-distance trade, and so forth. Stalin identifies the period of nation-forming to be the epoch of rising capitalism, the period beginning in approximately 1500 or 1600 and resulting, mostly through violence, of the welding of disparate groups into nations for the very purpose of exploitation and mobilization of a large-scale workforce by the growing capitalist powers.
The creation of nations is not a function that was confined to the unification of regions at the end of the feudal period through the welding together of those who already shared a common language. One of the latest of these creations can be seen in the Unification of Italy, which fused the peoples of Italy, who considered themselves to be of different ethnic groups and lacked any real identity as Italians, which occurred as late as 1871.
But nations were and have been themselves constituted by the violence of capitalism. Colonial transportation and imperialism have created, from disparate peoples, nations. Colonial oppression is a form of national oppression.
