The second thesis concerns the materialnature of language:
Man’s first object – man – is nature, sense perception; and the particular
sensuous human powers, since they can find their objective realization only
in naturalobjects, can find self-knowledge only in the science of nature in
general. The element of thought itself, the element of the vital expression
of thought – language– is sensuous nature. The socialreality of nature and
humannatural science or the natural science of manare identical expressions.^28These two passages are still formulated in the language of the young Marx –
the language of an abstract, grandiloquent humanism. That these theses
survived when Marx became Marxist emerges from the following passage,
which is drawn from the Grundrisse, in a chapter of the ‘Principles of a Critique
of Political Economy’ devoted to precapitalist forms of production and the
types of property they involve:
As regards the individual, it is clear e.g. that he relates even to language
itself as his own only as the natural member of a human community. Language
as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for
property.
Language itself is the product of a community, just as it is in another
respect itself the presence...of the community, a presence which goes
without saying.^29A note clarifies this passage: ‘The abstraction of a community, in which the
members have nothing in common but language etc., and barely that much,
is obviously the product of much later historical conditions.’^30 Language is
therefore described as a form of praxis– that is, as a social phenomenon (here,
we encounter the Marxian version of Wittgenstein’s argument for the
impossibility of a private language), finding its materiality in social relations,
which are material relations, and in the institutions to which they give rise
(the comparison with property is illuminating). It is also, inextricably, a
historical phenomenon, in as much as it is the mode of expression of a
community that is not a simple community of speakers defined by its
competence in an abstract system, but a national, historical community of
which it is simultaneously the ‘mode of expression’ and the ‘presence’: this
The Marxist Tradition • 91(^28) Marx 1975, pp. 355–6.
(^29) Marx 1973, p. 490.
(^30) Ibid.