Marxism and Problems of Linguistics - From Marx to Mao

to your article I was firmly convinced, in conformity with yourspeech at the Sixteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), thatunder communism, languages would merge into one commonlanguage.”Evidently, having discovered a contradiction between thesetwo formulas and being deeply convinced that the contradictionmust be removed, Comrade Kholopov considers it necessaryto get rid of one of these formulas as incorrect and toclutch at the other as being correct for all periods and countries;but which formula to clutch at — he does not know.The result is something in the nature of a hopeless situation.Comrade Kholopov does not even suspect that both formulascan be correct — each for its own time.That is always the case with textualists and Talmudistswho do not delve into the essence of the matter, quotemechanically and irrespective of the historical conditions ofwhich the quotations treat, and invariably find themselvesinv a hopeless situation.Yet if one examines the essence of the matter, there areno grounds for considering the situation hopeless. The factis that Stalin’s pamphlet Concerning Marxism in Linguistics,and Stalin’s speech at the Sixteenth Party Congress, referto two entirely different epochs, owing to which the formulas,too, prove to be different.The formula given by Stalin in his pamphlet, in the partwhere it speaks of the crossing of languages, refers to theepoch prior to the victory of socialism on a world scale, whenthe exploiting classes are the dominant power in the world;when national and colonial oppression remains in force; whennational isolation and mutual distrust among nations areconsolidated by differences between states; when, as yet,there is no national equality of rights; when the crossing of50