Marxism by Fuchs Christian;

Author:Fuchs, Christian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Communication as Translation

Marx argues that in revolution, revolutionary movements often refer to symbols and events from the past as inspirations for their struggles:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.12

Revolutions “conjure up the spirits of the past” and in doing so borrow the language from the past in order to try to create the future. Marx here makes an interesting comparison to learning a new language. Learning a new language is a matter of constant translation between that language and one’s mother tongue. In a more general sense we can say that communication is a translation of the social world, experiences, and ideas of one person or group into the social world, experiences and ideas of another person or group. A can only understand what B communicates to him if the content of communication translates into his own experiences. Communication translates experiences from one context into another and the past into the present and the future.

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