{"id":1058,"date":"2019-03-11T15:58:09","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T15:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=1058"},"modified":"2019-10-21T15:58:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T14:58:13","slug":"a-rose-by-any-other-name","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/a-rose-by-any-other-name\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cA rose by any other name\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cLanguage is social consciousness, in as much as it exists only for other men\u201d, Marx noted in the German Ideology <\/em>\n . It takes its place in the social superstructure, on the battleground \nwhere the conflicts between classes are fought \u2013 speeches, laws, \nslogans. These are all merely words, but words through which groups of \nhumans seek to map, describe and create images of the world around them,\n and through so doing, create and signal an identity for themselves. \nWithout language we would not have society, we would not be able to \nco-operate the way we do. It is an integral and constitutive part of \nbeing human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the better part of this century language has intrigued \nphilosophers. How does it work? What effect does it have on our \nconsciousness, on our ways of seeing the world? One of the most \nimportant discoveries of this line of thought, is that words do not have\n any intrinsic connection to the object they refer to (this may sound \nobvious, but much of previous though, especially in the nineteenth \ncentury, assumed an unmediated connection between word and object). \nWords are just arbitrary signs, used to carve up the world. There is no \nreason D-O-G means a small stupid furry canine animal, it could as \neasily be C-A-T meaning the same referent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This arbitrariness, however, does not mean that we can make any word \nmean anything we want it to, otherwise we would all be like Lewis \nCarrol\u2019s Humpty Dumpty (in Alice Through the Looking Glass <\/em> ), \nnor can we just make up new words as and when we like, like Mr. \nBlackadder (Blackadder the Third) . According to the theorist M M \nBakhtin, this association between the word and its object comes about \nthrough use. A dog is a D-O-G because the last time D-O-G was used it \nreferred to the stupid furry canine. Thus social \u201csignifying practise\u201d \nis the driving force behind linguistic meaning, words get their meaning \nthrough human lived interaction and co-operation. But, further, it means\n that the individual is not the source of meaning, the ultimate deciding\n authority over their own words; it means that society, and its \nunderstanding and shared practice is. We do not own our own words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Words get their meaning from use, every word is saying \u201cthis is like \nthe object I referred to the last time I was used\u201d. As such every word \nis a metaphor, for itself. Further, all words can therefore have their \nmeanings changed, through a metaphorical slippage, where once it \nreferred to one thing in the world it becomes another through a change \nin the world and in the way of using the word. Raymond Williams examines\n this point in his book Keywords. <\/em> He pointed out how centrally important words have changed their meaning over the last two hundred years. Industry <\/em> moved from meaning to work hard to meaning the abstract sum of factories; economy <\/em> moved from meaning household management, to referring to the value of shares in the stock exchange; individual <\/em> from being the constituent part of a greater whole, to being a unique, atomised, autonomous subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way in which these words found themselves changing was through \nthe rise of a class of people who used them to describe their world, and\n the eventual control this group of people took over the means of \ncommunication, and thus of language. Effectively, the changes in these \nwords map the changes in society over the past two hundred years. These \nwords were weapons in the class war, battering rams to change the \nperceptual world of society from its old feudal outlooks towards \ndescribing the world in capitalist terms. With these words came others, \nall of them fought over, between the different groups that used them. \nFor the capitalist class, freedom <\/em> meant the freedom to buy and sell, equality <\/em> meant abstracted equality before the law, not social equality; property <\/em> became the goods of the individual, rather than of the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, however, another idea arose, with a new word to \ndescribe it, an idea about common ownership of the goods of society, of \nco-operation and mutuality \u2013 socialism <\/em> . Its first use (in English) was apparently in the Owenite Co-operative <\/em> Magazine <\/em>\n in November 1827. Very early on it became tinged with a radicalism, \nimplied by its connotations of a change in the whole social system of \nsociety. Right up until the 1920s socialism was the preferred term \nmeaning a society of common ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, as the word entered into a field of political combat, that \nmeant its meaning became more and more disputed. The \u201cimmediate demands\u201d\n of the Social Democratic parties of the Second International meant that\n in many minds socialism <\/em> became associated with the specific \nstatist reforms associated with these immediate demands. Furthermore, \ncertain groups of \u201cSocialists\u201d (such as the Fabians) began to see socialism <\/em> more and more as a compliment to Liberalism, rather than as a society of co-operative common ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The break was further exacerbated by the Bolshevik revolution, and \nthe renaming of their party \u201cthe Communist Party\u201d, and the theoretical \nshift to \u201ccommunism\u201d as being the ultimate state to be attained, with socialism <\/em> becoming a transitory society to this stage. With this predomination of meaning socialism <\/em>\n soon became utterly associated in the majority of minds with state \nownership and reformism. Its older meaning lost, except to a few \nbothered scholars, and to the likes of the Socialist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This change of meaning has suited conservatives and reactionaries. It\n is easy to pigeon-hole opponents, lump them all in together under a \ncommon pejorative name, as it means they can all be dismissed out of \nhand. Thus conservatives, in an attempt to define themselves, and hold \ntheir own camp together, were more than willing to call the Labour Party\n socialist: \u201cYou are a socialist\u201d, screamed Thatcher, to Neil Kinnock, \n\u201ca crypto-communist!\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the while, a word, an essentially meaningless jumble of \nconsonants and vowels is being bandied back and forth, while the idea \nthat lay behind it, the idea that spawned it as a word, was all but \nforgotten, or banished to some alleged fantasy land by the pernicious \npractitioners of the possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some quarters, the World Socialist Movement for one, this original\n idea has not been forgotten, and all through the shifts and turns in \nthe meaning of this word, we have been adding our own, albeit small, \nvoice into shaping its social meaning, so that the idea about what \nsocialism \u201cactually\u201d means isn\u2019t forgotten. The idea has been held up \nabove the jumble of letters that make up the word. It remains, though, a\n word worth fighting for, for its history, for its associations of \nco-operation and mutuality, and because it describes something positive,\n a situation to be aimed for \u2013 a just state of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Socialism remains a good word to put our arguments across. Because of\n our different understanding of it, people are surprised by our answers \nand perspectives, and become genuinely interested, broken out of the \nstale old left-wing right-wing arguments. And just as words such as queer <\/em> or Quaker <\/em> have been wrested from negative senses to have positive meanings, thus can socialism <\/em> , with all its history and associations be wrested back as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is our ideas, our practices, and our values, that makes us the Socialist Party, not simply the word socialist <\/em> , or even our party name. It wouldn\u2019t matter what we call ourselves, as our ideas grow a word would be found to express them, in their full meaning. Since we think that, historically, that word already exists, we choose to use it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Society and Culture index<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLanguage is social consciousness, in as much as it exists only for other men\u201d, Marx noted in the German Ideology . It takes its place in the social superstructure, on the battleground where the conflicts between classes are fought \u2013 speeches, laws, slogans. These are all merely words, but words through which groups of humans…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2083,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1058","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2682,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1058\/revisions\/2682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}