the Mother Tongue¶
Marxists
Marxists
On the Mother Tongue
Marxists are, above all, scientists and historians. Yes, we are revolutionaries: that is our mission, and it's the lens through which we refine our practice. But the light we shine through that lens is analytical. And analysis requires data. (1/11) The data of history comes through the sources who lived it. Sometimes through their writing, sometimes through oral retellings, sometimes through material clues they left behind. (2/11) All are subject to being skewed through the passage of time: details dramatized or forgotten in oral traditions, biases and lost context in written words, fragmentation and erosion of material culture.
Hindsight is not 20/20. It passes through the frosted window of time. (3/11) Sometimes, it is up to modern historians to piece together narratives from these warped fragments to try and make sense of them. But to do so as objectively as possible, we need to understand the history as it exists. (4/11) Central to all of this is language. Thousands of languages, tens of thousands of years of evolution, an untold number of regional nuances in between. They cannot be so easily parsed with just one common tongue.
The work of Marxists is to make sense of these fragments... (5/11) ... and without the language to do so, we are completely in the dark. That is why we have a duty to preserve languages – and also to build literacy.
Marxist literacy builds a common language: a shared, mutual, unambiguous, and uncompromising understanding. (6/11) Understanding with which all this raw data can be synthesized and disseminated. But that effort is pointless without the ability to collect that data.
We must preserve the native languages of all of our peoples: (7/11) The dialects, the traditions, the cultural nuances – not just because it is "good" and "just," but because it maintains a direct line of communication with our collective history.
Marxists must be bilingual. (8/11) Not necessarily in the petty sense of knowing two languages; we only need some of our movement to have this particular skill. But in the broader sense of having literacy in two realms: the realm of context and the realm of communication. (9/11) We must be able to understand our history and our people, the context of how our current conditions came to be. And we must also understand each other, to communicate what we know with a million-tongued movement.(10/11) Marxists are scientists and historians, and we are also translators. By preserving cultural literacy and building collective literacy, we create the common language of liberation: the communist language. (11/11) For a practical example of what it means for Marxists to act as the translators of history, check out the work Chunka Luta does, interviewing elders and preserving their words for the rest of the movement: