and ‘class languages’. Naturally, every ‘class language’ will have its ‘class’
grammar – a ‘proletarian’ grammar or a ‘bourgeois’ grammar. True, such
grammars do not exist in nature. But this does not worry these comrades;
they believe that such grammars will appear in due course.^19Here, we see the function of good sense and its limits. In attributing to the
supporters of a relationship between language and class a counter-intuitive
absurdity – the existence of a ‘class grammar’ (one can then imagine linguistic
forms of the proletarian passive as opposed to the bourgeois passive) – Stalin
effects two politico-linguistic operations. He implicitly criticises the ultra-
leftist position that counter-poses proletarian to bourgeois science (hence the
relief of Western Communist scientists); and he focuses the issue of language
on that of the national language, common to all the people. The price to be
paid for an operation manifestly bound up with nationalities policy in the
post-war USSR is the fetishisation of language, which escapes its social and
political determinations to become a neutral object, independent of the struggles
of the human beings who use it as a tool of communication. In this respect,
Stalin’s position is situated four-square within the ideology of communication.
The fifth thesis anticipates a possible objection, since Marxists maintain
that the division of society into classes involves cultural differences. It therefore
applies itself to the task of dissociating language and culture, postulating that
‘culture and language are two different things. Culture may be either bourgeois
or socialist, but language, as a means of intercourse, is always a common
national language’.^20 The argument is that, in the socialist USSR, the Russian,
Ukrainian, Uzbek, etc. languages serve the common socialist culture as they
served the bourgeois or feudal cultures that preceded it. We therefore have
two or more cultures, probably coexisting, since superseded cultures leave
behind survivals, but only one language. The effect of this thesis is to fetishise
language in another way: it is not only in some sense released from the
struggles and contradictions that constitute the social formation, but is also
released from history, which alone can explain the present state of the social
formation. For cultures develop, succeed one another, and divide up the field,
but not language, which is therefore a stable object unaffected by cultural
change – i.e. history.
The Marxist Tradition • 81(^19) Stalin 1973, pp. 417–18.
(^20) Stalin 1973, p. 419.