Ralph Dumain: "The Autodidact Project": Giorgio Silfer: "Gramsci and Esperanto: history of a misunderstanding"

Gramsci and Esperanto: history of a misunderstanding

by Giorgio Silfer

What is the attitude of Italian culture, in particular of politically engaged intellectuals, toward Eperanto?

We have already spoken of the generally favorable position of Catholic men of culture, influenced also by various positive judgments of the Church hierarchy.

Esperanto supporters had many difficulties because of fascist nationalism, which however was not as bad as it was in Nazi Germany.

Our readers will not have missed the link between Mazzinian and liberal humanitarianism, and the idea of an international language, as proved by the publication of Mazzini’s On Man's Duty.

The situation of Esperanto in the milieu of Marxian left is a complex one. Next to pro-esperantism of the Social Democrats is the striking anti-esperantism of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Why is this the case?

We know that in the Soviet Union the Esperanto supporters were decimated. But this anti-esperantism of many communists (there are some militant Esperanto speakers in the PCI, one of whom, if we are not mistaken, is Togliatti’s brother-in-law) has deeper roots, that precede the vulgar theories of Stalin, and are connected to the major theorist of Italian communism, Antonio Gramsci.

From 1911 to 1913, Gramsci was at University of Turin, where he studied under the glottologist Matteo Bartoli. Among other reasons, Bartoli was interested in Gramsci because of his command of the Sardinian dialect, which had conserved many features of classical Latin. Gramsci was indeed deeply interested in his own regional Sardinian. Gramsci ceased university studies in 1915.

In his linguistic research, Gramsci proposed to apply the critical methods of historical materialism. Quite early on he began to consider the formation of a literary language as an historical and cultural fact tied to the formation of a dominant intellectual group: his polemics against Esperantists form part of this conception of the cultural and social historicity of language.

In his article "Against a prejudice” of 1918 we read:

International language is an error. Languages are complex and multi-layered organisms, that cannot be artificially created. The claim to unify peoples on basis of a communicative instrument is a cosmopolitan concern, not an international one, of bourgeois who travel for business reasons or for pleasure, of wanderers--more than of regularly productive citizens.

This same article recommends that only by working for the advent of the International will socialists be working for the possible advent of a single (unique) language.

Before examining the question on a linguistic level, it seems useful to make a few sociological remarks. It’s strange that Gramsci hypothesizes Esperanto as a single, unique language. No Esperantist could have suggested to him, at that moment, any function but an auxiliary one.

Gramsci’s reasons for opposing Esperanto were groundless. Moreover, Gramsci seems to have looked at Esperanto in an ahistorical way, as if it had not already had, at that time, thirty years of history behind it. He also disregarded the contribution of a thinker such as Zamenhof, whose anti-nationalist (and anti-Zionist) polemic had received broad attention in the Jewish press, including the Italian Jewish press. Nor did Gramsci understand the educative effectiveness of an instrument such as the international language, with its usefulness as a cultural medium for the masses.

Without citing specific cases of working class people who have benefited greatly from their knowledge of Esperanto, we can respond to Gramsci by saying that it is not the bourgeoisie, but rather the proletariat, that needs Esperanto. The bourgeoisie can afford to study various languages; the proletarian has neither the means nor the time.

As indicated above, Gramsci had intuited the difference and the coexistence of diachronic and synchronic aspects of language. Nevertheless he did not have a clear understanding of the connection between the two. (The article then indicates ways in which external and artificial interventions have effectively influenced languages.)

The error was due to the literary and linguistic formation of Gramsci. Although open to sociolinguistics, Gramsci was formed by the literary idealism of Benedetto Croce.

Gramsci slipped on the “Esperanto” banana peel again in 1935, in a note devoted to the stdudy of grammar, while dealing with the theme, How many forms of grammar can exist? In this note he alludes to the Esperantists, with the sentence “The stupid resistance [of the popular masses against a unitary national language] determined by the fanatical supporters of international languages.” Thus in 1918 Gramsci erred by defect, while in 1935 he erred by excess. In both cases the real qualitative and quantitative dimensions of Esperantism eluded him. Hence his erroneous judgments.

| have found only one other reference to a personal polemic between Gramsci and an Esperanto speaker: between him and the mayor of Milan, Filippetti, the last mayor elected democratically and removed from his post by fascism {in the early 1920s).

After many decades, we must conclude that Gramsci was in large measure responsible for the misunderstanding of Esperanto in Italian communist circles. This has not occurred in other Marxist milieus, except for the most Stalinist ones.

Perhaps the most up-to-date explanation of such an attitude can be seen in the substantial difference between the Esperanto speaker and the Italian speaker influenced by Marxism. For the latter no social change is possible outside the framework of economic developments, to which he grants absolute priority. On the other hand, the most important reforms seem to be those of everyday manners and mores―among which those that modify the mentality of the individual, by opening up personal contacts that are not controllable by any multinational or bureaucratic apparatus, appear to be of primary importance, and are realizable, right up to today, only through learning a language like Esperanto.

SOURCE: Silfer, Giorgio. “Gramsci e l’esperanto: storia di un malinteso,” Lombarda Esperantisto, n-ro 14, novembro 1983. Roughly translated from Italian by my erstwhile colleague Frank Rosengarten circa 2000. (— RD)

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