Re: [A-List] Melvin

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> "Bring Melvin back for the benefit of all of us".
> I endorse this position.  Strong language is not a good reason for censure.
> Authenticity and convictions generally are translated in strong language.
> Many soldiers and generals in Red Army used also a strong language.
> Jorge Figueiredo

But we are not in combat. We are trying to have a debate about important
political questions. There's a time and a place for everything. If you were
in a Marxist organization debating a "line" document, you wouldn't get up
at a meeting and say something like, "Comrade X is a punk-ass motherfucker
because he believes the Puerto Ricans are not a true nation." You'd get
expelled on the spot. While these mailing lists are not really the same
thing as a party, we seek to achieve the same kind of seriousness and
civility that you find in such parties. Lenin never used language like
this, nor did any leading Bolsheviks.

Anyhow, here's another perspective on this:

I read lately in one of our papers that at a general meeting of the workers
at the "Paris Commune" shoe factory, a resolution was carried to abstain
from swearing, to impose fines for bad language, etc.

This is a small incident in the turmoil of the present daybut a very
telling small incident. Its importance, however, depends on the response
the initiative of the shoe factory is going to meet with in the working class.

Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and
disrespect for human dignity--one's own and that of other people. This is
particularly the case with swearing in Russia. I should like to hear from
our philologists, our linguists and experts in folklore, whether they know
of such loose, sticky, and low terms of abuse in any other language than
Russian. As far as I know, there is nothing, or nearly nothing, of the kind
outside Russia. Russian swearing in "the lower depths" was the result of
despair, embitterment and, above all, slavery without hope, without escape.
The swearing of the upper classes, on the other hand, the swearing that
came out of the throats of the gentry, the authorities, was the outcome of
class rule, slaveowner's pride, unshakable power. Proverbs are supposed to
contain the wisdom of the masses--Russian proverbs show besides the
ignorant and the superstitious mind of the masses and their slavishness.
"Abuse does not stick to the collar," says an old Russian proverb, not only
accepting slavery as a fact, but submitting to the humiliation of it. Two
streams of Russian abuse--that of the masters, the officials, the police,
replete and fatty, and the other, the hungry, desperate, tormented swearing
of the masses--have colored the whole of Russian life with despicable
patterns of abusive terms. Such was the legacy the revolution received
among others from the past.

But the revolution is in the first place an awakening of human personality
in the masses--who were supposed to possess no personality. In spite of
occasional cruelty and the sanguinary relentlessness of its methods, the
revolution is, before and above all, the awakening of humanity, its onward
march, and is marked with a growing respect for the personal dignity of
every individual with an ever-increasing concern for those who are weak. A
revolution does not deserve its name if, with all its might and all the
means at its disposal, it does not help the woman--twofold and threefold
enslaved as she has been in the past--to get out on the road of individual
and social progress. A revolution does not deserve its name, if it does not
take the greatest care possible of the children--the future race for whose
benefit the revolution has been made. And how could one create day by day,
if only by little bits, a new life based on mutual consideration, on
selfrespect, on the real equality of women, looked upon as fellow-workers,
on the efficient care of the children--in an atmosphere poisoned with the
roaring, rolling, ringing, and resounding swearing of masters and slaves,
that swearing which spares no one and stops at nothing? The struggle
against "bad language" is a condition of intellectual culture, just as the
fight against filth and vermin is a condition of physical culture.

To do away radically with abusive speech is not an easy thing, considering
that unrestrained speech has psychological roots and is an outcome of
uncultured surroundings. We certainly welcome the initiative of the shoe
factory, and above all we wish the promoters of the new movement much
perseverance. Psychological habits which come down from generation to
generation and saturate the whole atmosphere of life are very tenacious,
and on the other hand it often happens with us in Russia that we just make
a violent rush forward, strain our forces, and then let things drift in the
old way.

Let us hope that the working women--those of the Communist ranks, in the
first place-will support the initiative of the "Paris Commune" factory. As
a rule--which has arceptions, of course--men who use bad language scorn
women, and have no regard for children. This does not apply only to the
uncultured masses, but also to the advanced and even the so-called
responsible elements of the present social order. There is no denying that
the old prerevolutionary forms of language are still in use at the present
time, six years after October, and are quite the fashion at the "top." When
away from town, particularly from Moscow, our dignitaries consider it in a
way their duty to use strong language. They evidently think it a means of
getting into closer contact with the peasantry.

full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/women/23_05_16.htm



Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org