Gramsci's article constitutes what is probably the most profound anal- ysis of Esperanto from a Marxist point of view. He makes abundantly clear the reasons why serious attention to Esperanto is unacceptable to Marxists. First, it has its origins in outmoded utopian ideas; second, it seeks to overcome differences of language in the present, and therefore, by an equally utopian jump, outruns the orderly passage of affairs. Like Kautsky, Gramsci puts his confidence in the ineluctable movement to linguistic unification accompanying the process of economic concentra- tion, in which Esperanto has no role. He refuses to accord Esperanto even a temporary status as an auxiliary language and directly questions whether there is even a need for international communication at the lower levels: 'The majority of citizens [...] carry out their activity stably in a fixed place and do not need to correspond too often by letter with other countries.'[796]
Not directly related to Gramsci is Lanti's confirmation in 1920 that 'the socialist leaders come close to boycotting our publicity [for Esperanto]'. He turned for help to Romain Rolland. Rolland's reply was positive: he declared that if the Communist International did not pay attention to the question of an international language the International would remain 'just a word'. Rolland complained that the French socialist press does not give enough space to the 'great international questions of a general inter- est—not exclusively socialist, but human'.[797]
Gramsci's article on Esperanto appeared a few months after the October Revolution, which inspired communists in all countries to hope that world revolution was not far off. Lenin, creator of the Soviet state, expected that the proletariat in the developed countries would soon fol- low the Russian lead. Like earlier theorists of socialism before him, Lenin imagined that 'The aim of socialism is not only to end the division of mankind into tiny states [...], it is not only to bring the nations closer together but to integrate them.'[798] But because Lenin primarily consid- ered the situation in the territory of the Tsar and saw great revolutionary potential in the minorities rebelling against Tsarist Russification policy, he believed it inevitable that the Marxist position on the national problem would be revised. Against considerable resistance, particularly from Rosa Luxemburg, he advanced the view that the working class should cam- paign for the equal rights of nations and even that the right of oppressed nationalities to secede from the state should be guaranteed.
Lenin's wish to win the confidence of the non-Russian peoples was nowhere more evident than in the field of language. He argued that pop- ulations should have schools in which instruction was delivered in the mother tongue,[799] and in February 1920 he personally ordered Stalin to see that interpreters were available in all army units: 'This is absolutely essen- tial—as far as language is concerned there must be every concession and the maximum of equality.'[800] His uncompromising position culminated in the famous statement 'No privileges for any nation or any one language!'.[801]
However, Lenin strongly opposed transfer of the principle of self- determination to the Party; on the contrary, the structure of the Party had to be centralist. The 'amalgamation of the workers of all the nationalities in a given state in united proletarian organizations'[802] should serve as a prototype of the ideal communist state of the future. Clearly, for Lenin as for Marx, priority should be given to coherence in the socialist movement and, after the victory of socialism in the various national settings, they too should—freely—meld into one.
Self-determination, then, was an exception to the general premises of cen- tralism. Lenin insisted that this exception was 'absolutely essential in view of reactionary Great-Russian nationalism'.[803] He sharply opposed a compulsory state language, and therefore the openly proclaimed priority of Russian.[804] He defended this position all the more vigorously because at the same time he was convinced that people living in Russia, if freed from all pressure, would themselves understand the advantages of knowing the Russian language: 'the requirements of economic exchange will always compel the nationalities liv- ing in one state [...] to study the language of the majority', that is, 'to study the language most convenient for general commercial relations'.[805]
Lenin did not leave any precise statements about how or in what direc- tion the process of linguistic unification would proceed on a worldwide scale. The formation of the world language was not explicitly addressed. The above statement evidently referred only to Russia. But it did not exclude the interpretation that Lenin expected a similar, economically dictated, solution to the problem of international communication.
In fact, it seems that on this point Lenin agreed with Kautsky, regard- less of his condemnation of Kautsky's 'great power chauvinism'. A brief summary of an essay on the national problem contains a table that Lenin evidently borrowed from Kautsky. It addresses the growing significance of English and, to a degree, French and German; in parentheses the follow- ing is added: 'English, or perhaps & Russian, may be a world language'.[806]Lenin said much the same thing four years later, when, shortly after the October Revolution, Carl Lindhagen, mayor of Stockholm, asked him whether the Soviet government would be willing to join an interna- tional convention on the introduction of a world language (Lindhagen had Esperanto in mind) in all schools. 'We already have three world languages', Lenin replied laconically, 'and Russian will be the fourth'. In any case, Lenin did not consider an artificial language for this role.[807]
That in Lenin's theory there was no room for an international lan- guage like Esperanto is perhaps most clearly seen in his description of the character of international culture. In 1913 he emphasized that by 'the international culture of democracy and of the world working-class move- ment' he understood the fusion of the democratic and socialist elements of the individual national cultures, and not—as Jewish socialists mis- understood—'a non-national culture': 'Nobody has proclaimed a "pure" culture, either Polish, Jewish, or Russian, etc.'.[808] Within every national culture the struggle between bourgeois and proletarian elements occurs, he maintained, through the 'indigenous' language. Therefore, despite the formation of working-class internationalism, the national cultures and languages will continue to exist. Lenin never thought of a culture com- pletely emptied of nationhood whose means of expression would perhaps be Esperanto.[809]
Lenin's thoroughly negative relationship to Esperanto was reported by his wife Nadezhda Krupskaia[810] and sister Mariia Ulianova.[811] Worse, two leading Bolsheviks made similarly unfavorable statements: Nikolai Bukharin in 1920[812] and Grigorii Zinoviev in 1923, the latter in a speech to party functionaries in Petrograd, in which he criticized the adepts of Esperanto for their simple-minded approach to the problems of language and nation.[813] The Soviet Esperanto movement, as far as the theoretical basis of its work was concerned, accordingly found itself in the worst possible position. After Drezen, leader of the Soviet Esperantist Union, in 1922 wrote an essay he described as 'an attempt at a materialist con- textualization of the problem' of an international language,[814] not unrea- sonably the anarchist Natan Futerfas mockingly commented that Drezen 'has against him all Marxist authorities'.[815] In such a situation it seemed more prudent (as Drezen intended) to reason purely pragmatically and stress the argument that Esperanto is as essential an aid to communica- tion as the telephone or airplane and therefore needs no explicitly Marxist justification.[816]