Marxism and Problems of Linguistics - From Marx to Mao

aristocracy? How can one possibly deny the existence andthe necessity of a language common to the whole people onthe basis of anecdotic “arguments” like these?There was a time when Russian aristocrats at the tsar’scourt and in high society also made a fad of the Frenchlanguage. They prided themselves on the fact that when theyspoke Russian they often lapsed into French, that they couldonly speak Russian with a French accent. Does this meanthat there was no Russian language common to the wholepeople at that time in Russia, that a language common to thewhole people was a fiction, and “class languages” a reality?Our comrades are here committing at least two mistakes.The first mistake is that they confuse language withsuperstructure. They think that since the superstructure has aclass character, language too must be a class language, andnot a language common to the whole people. But I havealready said that language and superstructure are twodifferent concepts, and that a Marxist must not confuse them.The second mistake of these comrades is that they conceivethe opposition of interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,the fierce class struggle between them, as meaning thedisintegration of society, as a break of all ties between thehostile classes. They believe that, since society has disintegratedand there is no longer a single society, but only classeds, asingle language of society, a national language, is unnecessary.If society has disintegrated and there is no longer a languagecommon to the whole people, a national language, what remains?There remain classes 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 anywhere. But that does not16