Recently had a friendly discussions regarding whether it was useful for Brazilian parties to buy into the (settler) notion of a “Brazilian Nation”, but from a leftist lens.

Being from a peripheral region, I tend to disagree with this perspective, but I couldn’t properly articulate whether it’d at least be an useful tool or not. He also didn’t seem very theoretically advanced, basing his perspective on the (kinda racist) notion of regional “underdevelopment” rather than “dependent capitalism”.

Since the text is from even before the Revolution, I wonder if there are other interesting texts building on Stalin’s perspective or critiquing it fairly from a Marxist position.

Anybody know some?

Edit: elaborating some more, Stalin defines a nation as requiring a common language, territory, and economic integration.

To me, in Brazil all of those three feel like technicalities, as

• the Portuguese language in Brazil is incredibly diverse throughout the country (specially due to various indigenous and African influences);
• the territory is very vast and mostly disconnected regarding population centres (for example, there’s no rail between even the litoranean capitals, and only a couple roads for the Amazon capitals);
• and the economy is structured around an industrial centre in the southern regions, and mostly extractive economies everywhere else (that either export to the southern regions or to foreign countries).
  • This means that the regions aren’t “underdeveloped”, just that they’re developed around extracting value for either the global imperial core or the national industrial core.