Marx, Kafka in His Communist

Marx, Kafka

In his Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx at one point states that a foreign language is only appropriated by translation. In other words, what Marx is saying, at the most basic level, is that a foreign language only becomes a foreign language when it is identified as being foreign and thus set off from the "normal" or accepted language through the process of foreign language translation. At the same time, in his An Introductory Talk on the Yiddish Language, Franz Kafka once described the relationship between the German and Yiddish language as being related in that Yiddish is the only language that allows the Jew to describe their suffering at the hands of the German language. Taken together, what both authors claim is that the act of translating a foreign language is futile in that, within the translation, the concepts or emotions of the words and language becomes lost and thus the result of the translation is a foreign language.

According to Marx, language and political or economic power does not intertwine. Take for instance the case of Russia. For centuries the dominant language of Russia has been Russian. This has been the language of all classes of people. Even after the fall of the Czar and the reign of Communist Russia, Russian remained the national language. Likewise, after the fall of the communist regime and the establishment of the Russian Federation, Russian remains the language of the nation.

However, when the Soviet Union began to colonize the surrounding states, such as the Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, and the nations of Central Asia, part of the plan was to enforce the Russian way of life onto these people and thus make them Russian. To do this, the Russian language was forced onto them. However, as can be seen, this plan did not work as it is through language that one maintains an identity (see the current situation in Belgium, for example). Once one loses their language, they lose their self-identification to the foreign language. Thus, when Marx claims that a foreign language only becomes foreign through translation, he means that a language is given an identity when it is forced to translate into another language. When this occurs, the parameters for revolution become ripe.

The reason that language persist, whether it be Estonian or Moldavian in the face of Russian or of Yiddish in the face of German, is because it is language that allows a specific society to express itself. In other words, language has been created for the precise purpose of serving the society as a whole by serving as a means of intercourse and to crate a thread of commonality between people. In a Marxists sense, language is the one commonality that overcomes class differences, as it is language that allows the ruling class to connect and relate to the ruled class and the ruled class to connect and relate to the ruling class. Within this shared common language they are able to see a commonality or a common existence and, despite the many other differences that exist, this common thread will hold a society together.

Thus, it can be said that, according to Marx, language is the great equator. Within language a society is able to claim equality as, at least at the time of his writing, societies, regardless of how many classes it may have had, shared one basic language. However, this is not necessarily the truth today. As societies become more and more intermixed, due to immigration and the global economy, languages are beginning to clash and the emergence of class-based languages are starting to arise (such as Ebonics). When these clashes occur, one begins to see sub-societies rally behind their language and thus, their right to identification. When someone else tries to translate ones language as being the foreign one, the great equator of language begins to unravel and thus so does the ties that bond the society.

This belief is along the lines of how Kafka viewed the Yiddish language. Kafka existed in a unique world as he was a German speaking, Czech Jew. Thus, he, in a sense, represented the modern day, mixed-language society. However, although Kafka saw Yiddish as a limited language, he still held it dearly as, according to him, it was in Yiddish that Jews could find their true identity: an identity of sorrow and repression.