______________________________________________________________________
PROPOSED RESOLUTION
ON
THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY NATURE
OF
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
It is clear that our movement has come a long way in the last two
years. Beginning from a preoccupation with essentially liberal issues like
student power and peace, we have arrived at a perspective through which we
have aligned ourselves with the revolutionary working class against American
capitalist imperialism.
The achievement of a correct position does not, however, mean that
our intellectual struggle is over. We must explore the implications of
working class politics for every area of our activity, in order to reinforce
those politics and free them from contamination by bourgeois individualist
thought. This proposal is a modest contribution to this effort.
Concern with correct thinking and proper expression of that thought
is a hallmark of the true revolutionary. Our vehicle for thought and
communication is language; to be concrete, it is the English language. Now
it has never occurred to us that this language is by its very nature
counterrevolutionary and that truly correct revolutionary thought in English
is therefore impossible. Yet we intend, through careful analysis, to
establish that the English language is little more than a tool of
imperialism designed to stifle genuinely radical ideas among the
English-speaking masses.
We can talk about language from the standpoints of meaning and
structure. Although bourgeois linguists introduce complex terminology into
their discussions of meaning, chiefly in order to prevent us from
understanding what they mean, we shall consider it only in terms of words.
Now English has a great many words, and this in itself is suspect: what it
suggests is that no matter how hard the worker tries to educate himself, the
bosses and their lackey politicians can always produce new words from their
lexical grabbag to confuse him. Even in our own movement this elitist
duplicity manifests itself in the use of esoteric words like "chauvinism,"
"reification," "dialectical materialism." and so on. It is almost axiomatic
that the revolutionary status of a language is inversely proportional to the
weight of its dictionary.
Lest this sound farfetched, we may cite the pioneer linguist Otto
Jesperson in _The Growth and Structure of the English Language_. He notes
that the Norman invasion and subsequent domination of England for centuries
by descendants of the French-speaking conquerors produced a class division
of the English vocabulary, with the French imports reserved chiefly for the
upper classes. The other great influx of foreign words came during the
Renaissance when scholars, not content with the language of the people,
imported quantities of Latin and Greek, thus widening the semantic gulf
between the educated elite and the masses.
Significant though consideration of meaning be, it is in the area of
language structure that our analysis is most fruitful. Structure or syntax
is the sum of all those rules which govern the ways the words in any
language can be put together to make sense. We use the rules of syntax more
of less unconsciously because they are inculcated in early childhood along
with religion, patriotism, etc. It is the unconscious nature of syntax which
makes its influence so insidious.
The foundation of structure is the categories, which are theoretical
divisions of human experience imposed on all languages. In English the main
categories are tense and number; centuries ago we had gender as other
European languages still do. There are many other categories: some languages
divide all mater by shape, so that one cannot speak of an object without
adding some word ending to indicate whether it is round, square and so on,
while others classify things by their tangibility or lack thereof. The
categories are classifications of thought; in English we cannot, for
instance, speak of anything without indicating number (singular or plural)
and time (past, present, future).
Bourgeois scholars pretend to make a great mystery of the
categories, in order to conceal the perfectly plain facts. Edward Sapir, for
example, baldly states in _Language_ that the origin of linguistic
categories is altogether unknown. It is crystal clear to the proletarian
analyst, however, that the nature of the categories arises directly from the
nature of the ownership of the means of production: how else explain the
preoccupation of English syntax with time and number? It is the capitalist
factory system which necessitates an emphasis on time, and it is the
capitalist money economy which causes the obsession with "how much, how
many" that pervades our society.
Sapir completely gives himself away when, in an unguarded moment, he
lets us know that Chinese grammar expresses neither number nor tense. Can it
be only coincidence that the Chinese, with their progressive syntax, have
created the greatest socialist revolution of history, while no
English-speaking people has achieved a successful proletarian revolution?
Can it be possible that the incisive brilliance of Mao Tse-tung's thought
owes nothing to the inherently revolutionary nature of the Chinese language?
There is one other point about English syntax which needs to be
clarified. As the proletarian linguists S. and K. Freedman point out in
their monumental work _And the Word Was Marx_, the English sentence is a
beautiful example in miniature of the relationships which prevail in
capitalist society. The indispensable components of the sentence are the
subject and verb: the subject is the capitalist, who runs the whole
operation, and the verb is the worker, who carries out the capitalist's
orders but can do nothing on his own. We may ask, how could a sentence be
otherwise? this question only proves that the nature of English is so
oppressive that it prevents us even from considering alternatives.
Linguistic structural analysis provides us with a key to much that
has previously been confusing in the history of the radical movement. For
example, according to the revolutionary Polish investigator B Marszalek, the
total ideological sell-out and intellectual bankruptcy of the British Labor
Party and its American counterpart, the Socialist Party, are directly
attributable to the onerous influence of English grammar.
Having posed the problem, albeit briefly, we are now faced with the
difficulty of providing a solution. In a nutshell, our alternatives,
linguistically speaking, are between reformism and revolution. The bourgeois
sentimentalists will speak touchingly of our "mother tongue" and plead in a
thousand devious ways for superficial changes which would only rationalize
the fundamentally imperialist character of the English language. Our only
real choice is the total overthrow of the decadent tongue and its
supplantation by a new speech fit to express our revolutionary ideology.
After long consideration, we propose the adoption of an altogether
new language. This language must be totally unrelated to English and to the
tongues of other imperialist oppressors, as well as to those of revisionist
regimes. It should be the language of a non-white people, to express our
solidarity with the Third World. Having search (sic) extensively, we have
found a suitable language. It is a little-known Amerindian tongue called
Durruti, of small vocabulary, and has the virtue of having never been
written down, thus making it possible for us to develop a simple spelling
system, unlike that of English. (It is well known that the irrational
complexities of English spelling are a tool of the power structure to keep
working class children in their place.)
We recognize that Durruti cannot be put into instant use. We offer,
however, the following specific proposals:
1. The major effort of the movement during the following year should
be committed to the setting up of centers in factories and working-class
neighborhoods to teach Durruti to workers and their families, along with
education in Durruti within the movement;
2. Funds should be allocated for the translation and publication of
proletarian literature in Durruti;
3. All resolutions of the 1969 Conventions of the Students for a
Democratic Society are to be published in Durruti. It is our conviction that
these resolutions will be at least, if not more, meaningful to the workers
in Durruti as in English.
Proposed resolution submitted by the Louis Lingg Memorial Chapter, Students
for a Democratic Society, June 1969.
(printer's bug "IWW Printing Co-op Chicago, Ill. - I.U. 450)
_________________________________________________________________
Tom Walker
