- The founding fathers: Marx and Engels
The harvest is sparse, but not non-existent: a few digressions on language by
Marx, mainly in the early works; a rather more assertive discussion in The
German Ideology; the pamphlet by Engels referred to above, which is somewhat
disappointing; a marginal note by Lenin in his Philosophical Notebooks– ‘the
history of thought = the history of language??’ – enclosed in a square
surrounded by a circle.^25 Nothing particularly striking, except perhaps for
Marx’s early texts. The most famous and most precise text is a passage from
Dialectics of Nature, where the elderly Engels is gripped by dogmatism and
offers us the Marxist myth of the origin of language in labour:
Much more important is the direct, demonstrable influence of the development
of the hand on the rest of the organism. It has already been noted that our
simian ancestors were gregarious; it is obviously impossible to seek the
derivation of man, the most social of all animals, from non-gregarious
immediate ancestors. Mastery over nature began with the development of
the hand, with labour, and widened man’s horizon at every new advance.
He was continually discovering new, hitherto unknown properties in natural
objects. On the other hand, the development of labour necessarily helped
to bring the members of society closer together by increasing cases of mutual
support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantage of this joint
activity to each individual. In short, men in the making arrived at the point
where they had something to sayto each other. Necessity created the organ;
the undeveloped larynx of the ape was slowly but surely transformed by
modulation to produce constantly more developed modulation, and the
organs of the mouth gradually learned to pronounce one articulate sound
after another.
Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of
language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one.^26By now, we are familiar with this language, which combines scientistic
dogmatism (‘this explanation...is the only correct one’) and unbridled
imagination, and which does not hesitate to lapse into cliché (‘necessity created
the organ’): it is the language of the spontaneous philosophy of the scientist.
The Marxist Tradition • 89(^25) Lenin 1961, p. 89.
(^26) Engels 1976, pp. 172–3.