Language, Class and Nation (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is their possession and use of language. Within a few shorts years, every person acquires a knowledge of their native language, including a vocabulary of thousands of words, enabling them to express original ideas and communicate to others on all sorts of topics. Language is also one of the most specifically human attributes, for no other animal possesses a communication system anywhere near as flexible and useful as human language. Animals such as bees and sticklebacks can convey a united range of information to each other but cannot, for example, refer to events in the past or future. The languages of the world, with their rich structures and histories, are a fascinating subject of study. But in the class divided society of capitalism, language is a basis for hostility, prejudice and discrimination.

Our impressions of other people are partly formed by the way they speak. Too often people are regarded as ignorant or unintelligent because they pronounce  the r in a word like cart, say they was, or use a double negative (as in I ain’t done nothing): they are condemned for speaking a “sub-standard” dialect. But from a linguistic point of view, there are no such things as sub-dialects, only non-standard ones which is very different. In the course of a language’s development, one particular form of it, usually that spoken in. a particularly powerful or important area, becomes the standard dialect. This means that it is taught in schools, used in literature, and then spread by radio and television. Becoming powerful and “successful” in such a society usually entails becoming proficient in the standard dialect, so that speakers of other dialects are looked down on as backward and uncultured. But prejudices of this kind are social, not linguistic, judgements. Every dialect of a language, standard or otherwise, is linguistically as good as any other; I ain’t done nothing conveys the same meaning as the standard I haven’t done anything. Speaking a non-standard dialect does not make a person stupid, untrustworthy, or whatever.

Prejudice against non-standard speakers is taken even further when it is said that they have no proper language at all. In particular, some psychologists have argued that black children in the United States have no grammar and speak merely by stringing a few words together. This type of misconception arises from a failure to realise that the children in question simply have a different grammar from standard English. For instance, when a black kid says they mine, is not simply putting two words together (in the way that young children may do).  Instead, this is his equivalent of standard they’re mine, both being reduced forms of they are mine (in standard speech, are is “contracted”, in non-standard it is deleted). The claim that black children have practically no language has been put forward as explaining why they do so badly in American schools, justifying a “compensatory education” designed to make the child fit into the school system. Obviously, this avoids the less comforting conclusion that the children do badly because of the appalling conditions they live in!

A slightly more sophisticated version of this verbal deprivation theory is associated with the name of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein draws a distinction between elaborated and restricted codes, the elaborated code being less tied to the specific “here and now” context than the restricted code. It is claimed that “middle-class” children have access to both codes, while manual working-class children have access to the restricted code only. Allegedly (and Bernstein is none too particular about citing actual data) a “middle-class” child will tend to describe the scene in a picture by saying Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball, while a working-class child tends to describe the same picture by saying They’re playing football and he kicks it. From anecdotes like this, he leaps to the conclusion that, as the elaborated code is expected to be used in school, working class children’s lack of access to the elaborated code is the reason for their comparatively poor scholastic performance. Quite apart from the incorrect view of class, this is unacceptable. All children are able, outside the artificial experimental situations referred to by Bernstein, to use a range of styles, from formal to informal. All speakers of a language, whatever their social status, speak a language which is as flexible and creative as that of any other speaker.

It should also be stated that there is no such thing as a primitive language. No language which exists today, or for which past records are available, consists of just a few words and no true rules of grammar. Nor are there a people, however primitive their way of life, which does not possess a language which is perfectly adequate for all the uses to which its speakers put it. Even where a language lacks a particular concept because its speakers do not need it, they are not cognitively unable to handle it. For instance, some Australian aboriginal languages have no words for numbers higher than two (just words for a few and many), but when their speakers learn English they have no difficulty in mastering the English numerical system and counting as high as you like. There are no such things as backward races speaking primitive languages.

But different people do speak different languages. In a rational society, there would be no reason for this to cause problems, but in capitalism it is the cause of much misery. Nearly every country in the world has more than one language spoken within it (even excluding recent immigrants). Great Britain, for example, has English, Welsh and Gaelic, while Spain has Spanish, Catalan and Basque. Where one language is spoken by an overwhelming majority of the population, that is likely to be the country’s official language. Members of a linguistic minority may be discriminated against in various ways: no books or newspapers may be published in their language, it may not be the medium of teaching in schools, and so on. Speakers of a minority language will often need to learn the official language in order to “get on”. Resentment against such treatment may lead to the demand for political autonomy, as a means of converting a linguistic minority into a linguistic majority, for instance the aim of an independent Basque state. Let it be said that discrimination on the grounds of language is as odious as discrimination on grounds of race. Nevertheless, the call for independence as a means of ending linguistic oppression is not one that workers should support.

To start with, people do not live in blocks consisting of speakers of only one language (there is no part of Wales where no English is spoken), so that independence would create new linguistic minorities. The demand that speakers of each language should have their own nation also overlooks the consideration that the distinction between a language and a dialect is by no means clear-cut. The standard definition is that, unlike different languages, dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible, but this raises a number of problems. Intelligibility is a matter of degree, may go in one direction only, and is not transitive (which means. that dialects A and B may be mutually intelligible, and also B and C, but not A and C). Between Paris and Rome there is a chain of dialects, each intelligible with its neighbour, even though the end-points, standard French and Italian, are not mutually intelligible; on purely linguistic grounds, it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between dialects of Italian and of French, or between those of Dutch and German. In practice, language and dialect are defined in cultural and political terms, and any attempt to define a nation or state in terms of language is circular. As one American linguist aptly put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.

But above all, independence does not solve the economic problems of the speakers of a minority language. A separate Basque state would not free Basque workers from unemployment, insecurity and exploitation. These are caused by the economic set-up of society, not by the wrong placement of political frontiers. Capitalism is a world-wide society, and no part of it can escape from world trends and crises. Separatism, whether motivated on linguistic or other grounds, offers precisely nothing to the working class.

Socialism, too, will be a world society, but one without states or frontiers. The concept of linguistic minority will then have no meaning. A language with comparatively small numbers. of speakers will not be discriminated against, and there will be no problem about arranging education in that language, if its speakers so wish. Publishing material in that language will not be restricted by considerations of profit, but by the needs of its speakers. It is possible that an invented auxiliary language, such as Esperanto or Ido, will be used to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. We look forward to a world in which learning another language will not be the drudge it so often is today, but an enjoyable adventure. All children could be brought up bilingual, and then travel to other parts of the globe to learn a language in its native environment. Becoming multilingual in this way would be the best way of becoming a true citizen of the world socialist community. Socialist society will mean the liberation of all mankind, without distinction of race, sex or language. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Paul Bennett

Word Magic or Double Talk (1950)

From the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is truth?” asked Jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer. If the Roman's question referred to truth in an absolute sense he may have thought that there could be no answer. Hence his refusal to tarry suggests that he was not an unwise man.

For centuries philosophers have vainly sought for that “adumbration of a light that never shone on land or sea ”—“Absolute Truth." Towering edifices of involved mental processes have been erected in an attempt to reach to the edge of infinity; but in vain. Truth has always had the character of a recurring decimal which would not cancel out into any philosophic whole without remainder. So philosophers great and small have with airy verbalizations blown up a vast balloon of emptyness and called it—“The Absolute.”

Because a word has been coined it is often assumed that something must exist in the real world to which the word itself refers. The word truth having been contrived people have thought that there must exist some absolute to which the word alludes. If of course one holds that there is no absolute but only particular truths then the verbal difficulties associated with the word truth, vanish.

It is the age long magic of words which has the power of conferring on things that exist, attributes and virtues which in actual fact they do not possess. The relics of the magic of language can be traced in such rituals as the coronation of kings, the christening of babies and the dubbing of knights.

The witch doctor of old well knew the magic of words. The more meaningless they were the more by incantation and ritual could they be invested with awesome significance. Their modern archetypes, the psychologists have also invented a magic vocabulary of their own. Most of what they say is so trite and even trivial that if said in ordinary words would hardly be worth saying. But touch this jargon with the magic name psychology and it becomes the subject matter for a treatise or text book.

Advertisement copy writers also make great use of word magic. They have long realised the selling superiority of tuppence coloured words over those which are merely penny plain. In many cases the name of the advertised product and the alleged magic ingredients of the product itself have become so associated in peoples minds as to make the name of the product and the product itself, indistinguishable.

In the ordinary business of life we communicate with each other by means of words without difficulty. Here the words used correspond with actual events in the world, otherwise the detailed activity of everyday life could not be carried on. There are other words however which are at what is termed a higher level of abstraction than ordinary label words like butter, cheese or beer; such words or strictly speaking concepts as gravitation, inertia, energy, velocity, etc. Because these terms embody a number of highly generalised ideas they are more remotely linked to our everyday experiences. As long as the people who use them are aware of what is involved in the use of such terms, and other people with whom they communicate are similarly aware, then no mystification of meaning takes place.

There are however other concepts of a high order of abstraction like Democracy, Liberty, Freedom, Justice, etc. Unlike the scientific terms, gravitation, inertia, etc., which are generalised statements about properties of matter these concepts take on the character of timeless truths and form the cornerstone of social philosophies. Nevertheless politicians, pundits and propagandists, go on talking and writing about them as if they were as real and circumscribed as a suet pudding or the print on this page. Indeed they give these concepts a concrete order of meaning attached to label words like the aforementioned butter, cheese and beer. It is this indiscriminate use of language which treats ideal abstractions as if they were real things that so effectively hides meaning. Little wonder when fiction and fact, illusion and reality are so inextricably blended by propaganda and word magic that the social pattern for many people becomes confused and blurred.

The term democracy for instance is severely limited in its present social context to mean the right of adults to vote for representative government. Yet such are the idealistic notions which have been built round the term that its meaning has been expanded to include vague misty meanings like “the embodiment of western ideals and spiritual values.” It is also presented as “A way of life” with of course suitable labels like American or British attached to it. It is also “a social principle” which we are supposed to live by and if necessary fight for and on occasions die for. Yet what ever claims are made for democracy by capitalist apologists and that goes for “Freedom,” “Liberty” and “Justice” too, the great and undeniable social fact of today is the capitalist class ownership of the means of living. It is this which gives them power over the non-owners, the working class who are compelled to use these means in order to live and which extends to every phase of their social and private lives.

Another term which has been going the propaganda rounds is “Free Enterprise.” A euphemism of course for a profit producing system. It has been pictorially depicted as a lissome sprite rushing through space trailing clouds. Around the term has been woven other terms such as “individual initiative,” “free labour,” “free choice"; in fact freedom for anybody and everybody. That land of trusts, monopolies and mighty corporations, America with its long history of graft and political pressures is held up as the exemplar of “Free Enterprise.” By the use of such terms it is hoped to build up in people’s minds when they see or read the words free enterprise a favourable reaction to it.

Socialism, which means the replacement of the present social order by one based upon free and democratic access to the means of living, has, as a result of Labour Party propaganda, been identified with theories of nationalization and state capitalism. Their political rivals have thus been able to attach to the term socialism unfavourable words like bureaucracy, officialdom, red tape. Communism which is synonymous with socialism has by a deft propaganda stroke been separated from it to mean a more advanced form of Labour Party nationalization theories. It is then described as a more “drastic” form of socialism, a more “ruthless” outcome of socialism, and so on. And because the alleged Communist Party has identified communism with Russian state capitalism its political opponents have further added ugly words like totalitarianism and dictatorship, we can see then by what standard there has occurred the falsification of the word socialism. Propaganda and word magic have combined to convert the coinage of political terms into a debased and worthless currency.

One might of course attempt to keep words more precise by constant references to the dictionary. Words however take on an emotional significance which often has little in common with their dictionary definitions, especially when unchecked by knowledge. The word foreigner to those with parochial minds is not merely or even primarily a person born in another country. It has other associations of a vague and misty character which carry uneasy notions of the unfamiliar and even unknown. Add to that idea some one with dark and sinister motives and you have for many people the kernel of meaning the word conveys.

Its antonym, the word native, means one indigenous to a country. By association it has come to mean for numbers of folk just coloured people. Many white people in their own country seldom think of themselves as natives because the word has come to have a coloured connotation and with it notions of racial inferiority.

Words also come to have political and social associations which have little or nothing to do with their real meanings. The word republican today is the name of a major American political party, many of whose names possibly appear on the “social register.” In the 18th century the term republican was a word of abuse. The overthrow by the French middle class of the old feudal aristocracy had its repercussions in England and elsewhere. Republican came to mean not only those who were against monarchy but those against all established institutions who were regarded as lawless and unprincipled people. To be a republican and an atheist was considered in some circles to have touched bottom in human depravity. The historical conditions which gave force to these words have passed away and with it the stigma attached to them. Even “atheist” has lost much of the traditional hostility which the word once aroused.

Take another word; bolshevik. It means merely one who formed a majority section in the Russian Social Democrat party. The minority were called mensheviks. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 it became greatly in vogue as an abusive political label like Jacobin or republican. It was greatly used by sections of the daily press and certain conservative politicians who made it a verbal daub brush to smear the activity of some of their political opponents in unfavourable colours. The name bolshy often had an effect upon certain members of the privileged class in England such as the term republican had on the 18th century squires. To a wealthy and well nourished stockbroker travelling first class to the city the emotional backlash of the word might have been sufficient to have caused a quivering of his pink and portly flesh. Today the bolsheviks, like their French prototypes, the Jacobins, have gone their way and with them has gone most of the significance which the word once had. The modern counterparts of bolshevik are “communist” or perhaps the somewhat more abusive expression, “red.”

We ought to mention that there are people called semanticists who believe that a major solution to world problems lies in the reform of language. In fact the more voluble of them like Stuart Chase hold for all practical purposes that social problems are at bottom, linguistic problems. It seems to him and others that due to faulty communication ideas are unable to be effectively and rationally expressed. Although vide Stuart Chase there are important differences between countries, words and dialect which accompany these differences far transcend them in actual fact and kindle emotional fires which if language communication was on guard would never be started. It seems then that capitalist powers quarrel, arm and as is often the case, send men to fight, less over the question of raw materials, markets and spheres of influence, than the irrational and emotional use of words. The semanticist remedy is the making of language more precise, more scientific and neutral in the main spheres of social activity. We can only say that in a world of international rivalry, power politics and threatened atomic catastrophe the most neutral language will not make the environment less hostile. Men’s economic interest and their feelings are very much wrapped up in each other. To express such partial interests in impartial language would be to make speech more confused and hidden than it is today. The solution of social problems is not to be found in reconstructing our sentences or in perfecting syntax but in the reconstructing of society on vastly different lines. The semanticists setting out to be a lighthouse of reason in the stormy seas of life merely become themselves, towers of confusion.

Today a vast social mythology exists in capitalism, a mythology greater in scope and extent than the mythologies of ancient Greece and Rome. And if we ask who benefits by the perpetuation of these myths then the answer plainly is the economically privileged capitalist class who alone benefit by the perpetuation of this system. Because those who directly control the means of production indirectly control the sources of information and avenues of communications, the schools, radio and press, a flood of myth making and word magic propaganda is incessantly poured through these channels.

Words are then virtually important things because how we understand and use them measures both our knowledge and our ignorance. In the S.P.G.B. the correct use of words and clear definitions are basic; not as an end in itself but as a means towards the furthering of a social goal—Socialism. The meaning we have given to terms such as capitalism, democracy, socialism, etc., have their reference in the actual and verifiable facts of the present social order. Only in this way can concepts and meanings be tested, checked and verified. Because our terms and definitions have been framed in this way they have been proof against the ravages of time and the assault of shifting social and political phases. For that reason the words uttered by us now and in all our yesterdays are a source of enlightenment and understanding for the vast majority.

With other political parties they have become a trackless verbal wasteland lit only by the treacherous glimmer of ideological will o’ the wisps. It becomes then a matter of grave urgency for workers to understand the world they live in. Only then will they cease to be the slaves of words and become masters of them. From word mastery based upon understanding it is but a step to world mastery.

Ted Wilmott

Let's Get Our Terms Right (1976)

From the March 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this world of double-talk and double-think, most workers in every country unquestioningly accept the different terms chosen by their own particular governments to describe the self-same factions and events. It would be in the interests of such workers to scrutinize carefully all the terms spewed out by their respective bosses.

For instance, according to the commercial and strategic interests held by different capitalist groups, the latter, through governments, will refer to the same body of duped workers either as “patriots and freedom lighters’’ or as “terrorists and subversionaries”.

Moreover, depending upon where the conflicting interests of two opposing groups of bosses lie, they will describe the same invading armies as “liberators” or “imperialists” respectively.

In war, opposing governments (i.e. big business’ spokesmen) refer to the warring troops either as “our gallant lads” or “their screaming hordes”. And, of course, a retreat can be a “headlong rout” or a “strategic withdrawal” depending upon whose propaganda you choose to listen to.

But the biggest sell of all in the bosses’ repertoire of appeals to nationalism lies in the use of the term “our country” when, in fact, they mean the private ends of the bosses of “our country”.

The workers of all countries would be well-advised to make it a rule to prefix the words “business interests of”, whenever they hear or read pronouncements about “our country” or “the nation”. 

Thus, when being urged to be loyal to one’s country, remember what this actually means; i.e. “Be loyal to the business interests of one’s country.

“Make Britain great” means “make Britain’s tycoons’ profits great”.

“Fight for your country” means “fight for the business interests of your country”.

In times of war, inflation or depression, “Sacrifice your personal interests for the good of the country” should read, “Sacrifice your own interests for those of business”.

“Work harder for less returns (and even accept redundancy) to make a prosperous England” really translates “Help the English businessmen to grow fat at your expense”; and remember that at the time of “Britain’s” enormous prosperity as “the workshop of the world” during the Industrial Revolution, prosperity for the workers meant long hours of arduous toil for pittances. Even the "prosperous” children worked at the benches thirteen hours a day.

R. B. Gill

What we say (1984)

From the May 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human beings have very complicated systems of communication; a facility for spoken and written language. What is language? One helpful analysis describes it as a code that we develop to organise, interpret and communicate our experiences to each other. Human languages have developed historically in a way which is related to what we have experienced. Although languages, including people's native language, are taught formally in schools, we always learn the first and most important aspects of our language by listening and experiential learning. Babies are generally not taught the basics of language with a grammar book.

Because language is rooted in experience, it usually makes little sense to describe particular accents or dialects as superior or inferior. They are simply different. We are traditionally taught that a particular variety of the English language is superior to all other varieties. The grammar must be the sort which is described as Standard English and the pronunciation should conform to a style known as Received Pronunciation. This is the sort of English used by newscasters. The reason this brand of English became elevated to the status it now occupies are historical and geographical, not linguistic. London became a key location because of the suitability of its ports for commercial and military purposes in relation to Western Europe. With the growing strategic importance of London from about the fifteenth century, various governmental, military, commercial and financial institutions settled in that city. These were the factors which endorsed the type of language which was used by the Establishment, although at that time a very different sort of language was used including a form of court French. If Liverpool or Newcastle-upon-Tyne had been a more advantageous base for the ruling class, then Standard English would have evolved in a different fashion.

Although we are taught otherwise, it is pointless to judge the inherent qualities of one grammar, accent or vocabulary. There are many examples in English which illustrate this point. The regional accents in English which stress the letter “r” when it comes after a vowel are by formal standards looked on as rural and inferior, for instance the way a person from the West country might pronounce the word “cart”. The same stressed “r”, however, in some North American dialects is regarded as refined. Linguistically, Standard English is no better or worse than Cockney or Geordie, no more so than French is better or worse than Italian. All languages and dialects are complicated, rule-governed systems whose rules are known to and used by their speakers.

The fact that languages arise from experience is significant. Many contemporary aboriginal communities live on the basis of sharing the work they need to do and then sharing the product of their work according to need. They have a word to express the idea of all that they have, common property (naolimba) but no vocabulary for “tax- man”, “UB40” or “neutron bomb”. Similarly with another contemporary group, the Panare Indians. The lifestyle of this group in Venezuela is characterised by the principle of cooperation and sharing. Apart from the enjoyment they find in their work they thrive on a great variety of songs, dances, drinks and festivals. They completely reject the principles of the commercial system and are free from all of the neuroses it produces in the people who suffer such a society. An American evangelical organisation, the New Tribes Mission, which recently attempted to convert the Panare and to make them become meek, fearful and obedient wage-slaves, met with some difficulty. There is no vocabulary in Panare to describe “guilt”, “sin”, “punishment" or “redemption". Nor, because these ideas are outside their social experience, was there any adequate way of paraphrasing these notions. Tragically, some of the Panare have been converted through some peculiar guile from the missionaries. The fables in the Bible were rewritten in Panare casting the ancestors of the Panare as the killers of Christ. The missionaries then said that unless the Panare were obedient to their every instruction they would be burnt alive in hell forever.

Today the social experience of most people takes place in capitalism—the social system in which the means of producing and distributing goods and services are in the hands of a minority. In capitalism goods are produced as commodities. Things are produced primarily to be sold on the market. In this system the abilities of the majority of people are commodities (or prospective commodities) because they are bought and sold on the jobs market. It follows that capitalism is a global system existing in state capitalist areas like the Russian Empire as much as in avowedly commercial places like the United States of America. Because capitalism puts the need for profits before human needs the system is constantly creating social problems. The lives of most of us are made unnecessarily miserable and difficult because of the social system which we live under.

Language is directly related to ideas and ideas to language. From the time when we are very young and begin to receive and develop ideas about the world in which we live, we are fed with words and ideas in a way which generally encourages us to make serious misjudgements about society. Two of these misjudgements, if we do not correct them, create a distorted view of society. The first is that we are encouraged not to see the organisation of society as a system. The state of society we are born into is just “the way things are". The fact that humankind has developed through a series of different social systems, like slave society and feudalism, is presented in such a way as to make it seem that our development has now stopped and that the basic principles of the profit system are correct forever. According to this fallacy it becomes acceptable to question the desirability of various aspects of capitalism but not to question the necessity of capitalism itself.

The other perversion we are encouraged to accept is dependence on leaders and employers and politicians to run society in a way that will be best for the majority. All the useful work in society—the design. manufacture, servicing and distribution of goods and services and all of the supplementary work needed to run society — is daily carried out by men and women who are not investors, financiers, politicians or economic experts. The process by which we are indoctrinated to lack confidence is a subtle one. The picture of the world we form from the words directed at us by parents, comics, schools, colleges, churches and the communications media all contribute to this process.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell described the Newspeak principle of “doublethink” as

the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them . . . The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

In criticising some of the emergent contradictions Orwell saw in 1948 he chose to have the three Party slogans plastered everywhere in his 1984 society as:

WAR IS PEACE 

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY 

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

We notice the type of contradictory thought signified by these slogans around us today. "Join the Peace Movement” the banner headline proclaims from a newspaper advertisement. The small print beneath the headline informs us that the Peace Movement referred to is. in fact, the Army (The Guardian, 25 November 1983).

What of Freedom?
We are all linked by a common belief in freedom and in Britain's greatness. (The Conservative Manifesto 1983)
We urge the British people to reject the Tory drift to catastrophe and to support our alternative strategy for peace, jobs and freedom (Labour’s Call to the People, NEC. 1980)

In these contexts the idea of freedom is bound up with wage-slavery. The freedom to be given employment and to be used to make a profit for a minority. It means freedom in a society of governments and armies and prisons and police forces. The idea of nationalism and of making sacrifices for “Britain" is first installed by the acceptance of a set of false assumptions about property. The vocabulary of possession is instrumental in the inculcation of this myth. We are bombarded with talk about "Our country . . . our need to stimulate trade ... our investment overseas ...” For most people this "our” business is quite inappropriate. It should be "their”. In Britain, according to the Inland Revenue Statistics, the top 2 per cent of the population own 64 per cent of all the land and the top 13 per cent of the population own 91 per cent of all housing.

The idea that ignorance is strength is again one which is repeatedly pul to us in the form of exhortations to trust leaders and politicians and bosses. The notion is that by harnessing your mind to that of a leader you will divest yourself of great responsibilities and, with many people transferring their power to the same leaders, those leaders will become very powerful and the better placed to run society efficiently. Minority power exists by consent because power is always, if only potentially, with the majority. We have only to get up off our knees.

Although language and ideas can influence the majority to be acquiescent in capitalism and to regard change as undesirable or impossible, the dynamic, changing nature of society can never be arrested by language. Socialism will entail a society without nations, armies, the rivalry which causes war, employment, money and all of the paraphernalia needed to support the profit system. The idea of socialism is thus born out of capitalism. When people’s experiences clash with the prejudices they have acquired, they can either reinterpret their experiences to conform with their prejudices or allow their experiences to refute their prejudices. Human history, including the development of the sciences, of technology and of language is evidence that experience is mightier than myth.

Gary Jay