Translated and adapted from GegenStandpunkt 4-2006

Anti-critical political correctness:
Language hygiene

The language of politics is morally contaminated, but especially the words for races, peoples, and social classes. Political talk is and is seen as a sphere of rights and partisanships: those who speak up want to proclaim the rights or wrongs of a class or national collective, i.e., to make their partisanship heard; readers and listeners, for their part, look for signs of partisanship in order to know where they stand when someone comments. In a nice circular fashion, they compare the partisanship they detect in an author with their own sympathetic prejudices or antipathies and accordingly find the comment either agreeable or outrageous. Simply in the choice of labels for various groups, an author signals respect or contempt for those being referred to; this alone allows the audience to recognize the position being represented. The deliberately used offensive word or honorary term often replaces or constitutes the entire judgment. For example, anyone who calls an entrepreneur a capitalist reveals that they are a critic of the propertied class, which is being accused of exploiting the labor force; anyone who calls a capitalist an entrepreneur puts on the record their appreciation of the important role played by this species whose acumen the entire society depends on; and anyone who calls him a job creator explicitly acknowledges the social role of profit-making on behalf of the workers who depend on it. The choice of words says it all – and all is understood.

That’s not our thing. When we explain actions, interests, financial or military conflicts, we don’t want to take sides with one party or the other, nor do we end up agreeing with one side and condemning the other in light of that agreement. Incidentally, we have no interest in honor, neither our own nor that of others. We have too little regard for the roles of capitalist classes and imperialist actors to want to dishonor anyone by measuring them against the yardstick of noble tasks. Nor do we want to cater to and reinforce the general craving for honor and recognition. That’s why we are not sensitive about labels – to put it mildly. Negro or Black, Kraut or German, “capitalist” or “entrepreneur” serve the same purpose when it comes to nothing more than a label. What we have to say about the collectives mentioned is not expressed by the name of the subject of the sentence, but rather by the predicate and its justification, the argument. We sincerely hope that the argument in our texts will not be replaced by derogatory or disparaging expressions.

At the same time, we cannot avoid using ideologically biased language. In doing so, we seek ways to distance ourselves from the incorporated and expected evaluations as well as from the ideological character of many terms. Some resort to excessive use of quotation marks which the editors then remove again in the interests of readability. We would have our work cut out for us if we were to put every employer, employee, economic expert, defense minister, peace process, and so on in quotation marks. Without punctuation, the allusion to racist and social prejudices becomes an implicit quote, so that only the meaning of the sentence makes it clear that it is not we who consider immigrants to be wetbacks and welfare recipients to be parasites, but the bourgeois world that treats them that way. We are just pointing this out. At times, we refer to how words are morally charged by both highlighting and counteracting them through the addition of sharply contrasting attributes (“bloody peace mission”; “soldiers as election workers,” “proletarian ladies and gentlemen”) or by using words against the tendency of the values inscribed in them (“pious anti-imperialism” for Islamist assassins, “giving democracy to the peoples of the world” for the USA’s regime change wars). If this language causes irritation, or even provokes thought, that is a good thing. We are trying to deflate the self-righteous position that one deserves approval for professing a generally accepted, incontrovertibly good evaluation, and has done all that is necessary in forming an opinion.

The case is different with “nigger” or “homo” or the refusal to use feminine pronouns when referring to people – it is said that one must not do this because such language puts people off or is highly offensive. This testifies to a highly developed sensitivity in matters of political honor – and that is not a minor matter of taste, but a democratic bad habit.

Take the German word for members of the black race [“Neger”], which according to its Romance origin means nothing but: niger = Latin for black. This is perceived as a racist insult; the analogous use of the word “white” – for example in South Africa or the USA – is hardly perceived as such. The difference has nothing to do with the words themselves and everything to do with the political and social position of the racial collectives they refer to: whites are the upper and ruling class wherever they are referred to as a special part of the population. In the USA, as in all capitalist countries, blacks, former slaves or destitute immigrants, are mostly relegated to the lowest social stratum; sub-Saharan Africa, where most of them live, is the universally impoverished region of globalized capitalism. Firstly, it is the political-economic world order that assigns them these miserable living conditions; secondly, it is the racism of political judgment that then blames them for this position as their own shortcoming. As always and everywhere in bourgeois society, those who fail in competition – and, yes, some must fail – prove to others that they lack talent, seriousness, diligence, a sense of responsibility, and intelligence. Their poor social position is justified by a poor opinion of them. They are despised and seen as having a despicable nature. Originally neutral names for races, peoples, classes, and social characters who end up at the bottom of the global hierarchy of classes and nations are reduced to derogatory terms. The word “nigger” shares this fate, more so in the USA than in Europe, with quite a few names for peoples – wogs, kaffirs, gyps – and with terms for lower social classes – the farmer and the proletarian (“You yokel!”, “what trailer trash”), as with “broads”, “cripples,” and “illegals.”

In our view, it is not the sound that is bad, but the thing itself. That is what needs to be straightened out. Democratically-minded progressives see things differently. They interpret the derogatory terms as a violation of the abstract recognition to which everyone in this egalitarian society is entitled, regardless of social status or material circumstances: Negroes, proletarians, asylum seekers, and disabled people “are human beings too,” and as such deserve to be referred to respectfully. Their democratic friends are more outraged by actual or perceived contempt than by the social conditions that give rise to contempt for the unsuccessful. They seek new names for the victims which are intended to serve one purpose only: to deny the contempt they hear in the formerly neutral terms. The language purists then make the use of their neologisms the touchstone for politically correct attitudes. Everyone must tip their hat to members of the lower classes and express their high regard for impoverished migrant workers. Then, they believe, the greatest injustice inflicted on them will have been eliminated and a decisive step will have been taken toward ending exclusion.

The mental contortions required when every label becomes a matter of honor are simply comical. After all, language reform is of little use if an honorable name is supposed to revoke the contempt directed at a class or individual. The improved name which corrects derogatory connotations quickly wears out, precisely because nothing changes in terms of the thing at hand, the situation, and the actual assessment of those who are despised. The decline of the English word “nigger,” which was initially just a Germanic pronunciation variant of “negro,” is a case in point: After the slave word was banned, “colored people” was politically correct, but people soon began to hear a veiled racism in it because it avoided mentioning the embarrassing skin color; “blacks,” the color word from the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, was then much better, and now we have ended up with “African-Americans.” The German term “Krüppel” (cripple) became ‘Behinderter’ (disabled person), until even that became unacceptable and is now “Mensch mit Behinderungen” (person with disabilities), so that no one forgets that the disabled person is a human being and no one sees the person as defined by their disability, even if their private and social life is defined by it. For the same reason, foreign guest workers first became “migrants,” then “people with migration backgrounds.” The process of wearing out politically correct names only comes to a temporary end when the despised group adopts one of these names, proudly calls itself that, and sees its self-respect honored through the general use of the word. Some homosexuals, following the principle of reevaluating all derogatory terms – as the Black Panthers did with their “Black is beautiful” – have embraced a particularly malicious slur and elevated it to a new honorary name: they want to be called “queer.” Here you have to be on your guard so you don’t miss the shift from honorary title to curse word and vice versa. It becomes completely confusing when the same word takes on one character in one person’s mouth and another in another person’s.

The futility of protesting against linguistic conventions in order to improve conditions is strikingly evident where it has been entirely successful: among the fairer sex. For perhaps 25 years, feminists rejected written and even spoken language that was not “gender inclusive.” They objected that “man” should not be used to refer to humans in general and that occupations should no longer be gendered: neither “fireman” or “stewardess” or “executive chairman.” If a feminine form of address is not used, they feel excluded and ignored; so feminist language reformers and their male sympathizers always say “he or she” or “s/he,” insisting that the female half of humanity be showed respect always and everywhere. When feminist critics of the German language correct grammar, they confidently confuse grammatical and biological gender, as if they did not know that the sun [die Sonne] is not a woman and the moon [der Moon] is not a man; in Romance languages, incidentally, the gender is reversed without any harm – il sole, la luna –; it is not identical to gender. When feminist language reformers and their male sympathizers add feminine endings to collective nouns, they are admitting that sex is the most important factor in their own judgment: in the midst of capitalism, with its abstract and egalitarian subjugation of people to the civil code and the rule of money, everything in their world revolves around the battle of the sexes: woman or man – who honors, disregards, dominates whom? The request that the female half of humanity should always and everywhere be given special mention has been granted. The Duden dictionary, a new Bible translation “in fair language,” and even the last macho man in the Bundestag bows down before this Gessler’s hat [an institution whose sole purpose is the public enforcement of subservient behavior – translator] of political correctness: Politicians in particular never forget to say “Bürgerinnen und Bürger” instead of “citizens,” “Wählerinnen und Wähler” for “voters” when looking for female approval. Apart from the honorific form of address, the situation which once sparked a women’s movement has not improved. On the contrary, in the emancipated quarter-century since, the double burden on women has become ever greater due to increasing female employment.

After some detours via the democratic protest culture, the effort to achieve politically correct language has thus “arrived” among the social elite, who deal with the imperatives of linguistic hygiene in a manner that is as appropriately uncritical as it is suitable for their purposes. On behalf of all those who are humiliated and insulted, politicians and entrepreneurs publicly protest against the use of derogatory terms to describe less privileged fellow citizens: “proletarian” or “underclass” are forbidden words! Those who benefit from relations of subordination become advocates for the honor of those whom this order relegates to the shabby role of exploited labor or are even excluded from this privilege. They know that the pride one takes in being a worker, an unemployed person, or anything else is nothing more than a thoroughly affirmative relationship to the status one has been reduced to: proud workers put up with a lot! The elite serves and promotes the craving for recognition of the less fortunate: A full-fledged human who is properly appreciated as an “employee” doesn’t need to let himself be insulted as “the commodity labor-power”! The fact that he belongs to the dependent group of people who cannot even work unless a wealthy person gives them work can be taken as a benefit in the sense that they are at least as important as the employer in ensuring that “the work gets done.”

Whether naive or calculated, in all the cases listed, language hygiene serves as a defense against unwanted judgments – without those judgments, let alone their reasoning, ever being mentioned. Criticism of the circumstances in which people find themselves and the roles they play is interpreted as an insult to those who play these roles and is therefore rejected. It is not that we provide easy pretexts for rejecting our arguments; it is the fixed rejection that seeks its pretexts. There is no way to prevent someone from reading a text only to find what they are looking for in it. And if he searches it to see whether it expresses the expected, customary – politically correct – respect for the creators and victims of the capitalist and imperialist world, then he will just discover that this is not the case. Those who no longer want to know anything about the reasons why, because they already know enough, can’t be helped. That is why we do not want to bite our tongues in advance and accommodate the censorship stance of a linguistic critique that rejects the substance, but doesn’t admit it.