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The Russian language of feudalism and capitalism was the same language as the Russian of communism, he said. The economic base had changed as a consequence of revolution, and with it the cultural and political infrastructure had changed too. But in its essentials, language had not changed and would not change.

Nicholas Marr then became an object for Stalin’s vilification. Marr was a widely published linguist from the University of Baku, famous for having theorized the existence in the distant past of shared protolanguages. The obverse of this argument had been that as society moved in the direction of internationalist communism, languages would move back in the direction of a shared, world language. This had originally been Stalin’s view, but now he had changed his mind.

Stalin said that Marr “introduced into linguistics the incorrect, non-Marxist formula that language is a superstructure.” As a consequence, he also “introduced into linguistics another and also incorrect and non-Marxist formula, regarding the ‘class character’ of language … Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula.” And more: “N.Y. Marr introduced into linguistics an immodest, boastful, arrogant tone alien to Marxism and tending towards a bald and off-hand negation of everything done in linguistics prior to N.Y. Marr … I think that the sooner our linguistics rids itself of N.Y. Marr’s errors, the sooner will it be possible to extricate it from its present crisis.”¹⁴⁰

Language is intrinsically neutral, Stalin was saying, without bias towards any particularistic interest of one social or political bent or another. Nor was it integral to the productive forces, either in capitalist or socialist societies. “[W]ere language capable of producing material wealth, wind-bags would be the richest men on earth,” he said.¹⁴¹

In the twenty-first century it seems that the windbags have inherited the earth. Nearing the end of the first quarter of this century, high in the list of the richest companies in the world are Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. Mostly they peddle language (or in our twenty-first-century reconception, multimodal meanings), or they have made multimodal meanings integral to the means of production and distribution of material things. Multimodal meanings are central to the twenty-first-century global economy. And they are loaded with interests. These interests have come to be arrayed in a program we will call “differentiation.”

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¹⁴⁰ J.V. Stalin, 1950 [1972], Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

¹⁴¹ Ibid.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 228–229. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Joseph Stalin’s “Problems of Linguistics” §AS2.2.1e