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Language
Dear MIR,
As Peter Taaffe wrote in MIR issue No.53, Marxists have a lot to gain by studying the origins and use of language.
Helen Keller, blind and deaf from birth, described what life was like without language: "Before my teacher came to me, did not know what I am. I lived in a world that was a no- world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness... Since I had no power of thought I did not compare one mental state wih another".
Language is evidence that early humans collaborated on every important project, from food gathering to child-rearing. Weaker members of the community, particularly the elderly, were valued because they could share society's knowledge and pass it on to the next generation.
Control over language has always been used by the ruling classes to exclude other from power. Often the ruling class would speak a 'court' language, entirely different from that of their subjects. In this country the most powerful used French, Latin and Greek. Until very recently a qualification in Latin or Greek was needed to get into Oxford or Cambridge.
Religions used secret lan-
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guages to preserve their 'mysteries'. When the rising North European bourgeoisie translated the bible into their native tongues, they unleashed a whirlwind as ordinary people realised that it contained much that contradicted what their priests and masters had told them. In the English civil war radical Protestant soldiers used bible passages to express their opposition to the aristocracy.
Today the bourgeoisie firmly controls language. TV, radio and newspapers belong to multi-millionaires or the state. Sciences such as psychology, economics or sociology are full of jargon, detering workers from studying them, to the benefit of the ruling class.
The legal system excludes us by using language that fell from use hundreds of years ago. Justice is denied to those who cannot afford it.
Language reflects class society, but social change will not come about just be changing how we speak. Some intellectuals have attempted to tackle society's problems by inventing politically correct terminology when dealing with oppresed social groups but, like any artifical language, it excludes those who do not speak it - ie the members of those oppressed social groups!
The Tories now refer to unemployed as job seekers'. changing their name does change their situation.
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In the end, the language of jobs, decent housing and real power over your own life will be more attractive to workers than those who hypocritically convolute the language while offering no real solution to the problems cause by capitalism.
Max Neill, Preston
Contradictory Economics?
Dear comrades,
I thought that Lynn Walsh's article in MIR No.53 was excellent but on page 25 he stated: "There has been a sharp reversal during the 1980s (compared to the post war boom years - JF) of the limited but significant shift of wealth and income away from the capitalist class and towards the working class through higher wages, full employment, progressive taxation and higher state expenditure". Does this not contradict the position expressed in previous material produced by Militant?
While it is true that living standards did increase in absolute terms during the post war boom, was it as a result of a net transfer of wealth from the capitalists? There was an enormous market for goods due to the destruction of the war and increased investment in capital, machinery etc. Was it not the case that the workers received a relatively smaller share of a larger cake, so to speak? If it were true that the workers share increased relative to the capitalists then this would have reduced the surplus value going to the capitalists and would not have resulted in the enormous increase in investment which was a main feature of the boom. Joe Foster, Birmingham
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