Gramsci, language, Esperanto

In the late 1980s I investigated Antonio Gramsci's views on language including his hostility to the Esperanto movement. On a totally different track, encountering the Gramsci boom in the '90s I developed serious reservations about the transference of Gramsci's notion of organic intellectuals to contemporary circumstances. All of my suspicions were confirmed. I know I've mentioned this here and there but I don't recall writing anything systematic about it. But here are a couple short commentaries:

Antonio Gramsci, Organic Intellectuals, and the Division of Labor 

Marxism & Totality & Gramsci & Della Volpe

None of this touches on Gramsci's view of language, but it does suggest my suspicion of organicism. It might relate to Gramsci's treating Esperanto as anathema. I just chanced upon this article:

Gunster, Shane. "Gramsci’s Linguistic Turn: Critical Theory, Vernacular Materialism and the Grammar of Revolution" [Review of Ives, Peter. 2004. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.], Topia 13, pp. 165-168.

Gunster begins in a most unconvincing fashion:

Conceived in linguistic terms, then, the construction of a hegemonic cultural formation involves the molecular translation of diverse, immanent communicative practices into a coherent and (relatively) unified grammatical structure. Gramsci contrasts the progressive, organic character of this process to regressive forms of cultural domination that involve the external imposition of arbitrary, fixed linguistic regimes that serve to displace or repress, rather than integrate, indigenous patterns of language. Hence, for example, his fierce opposition to the naive, technocratic utopianism of those socialists and communists who advocated Esperanto as a means of artificially overcoming the communicative barriers that slowed the fashioning of a unified class consciousness among workers and peasants in different parts of Italy.

Clearly, Gunster  understands Esperanto no better than Gramsci did, or why the voluntaristic internationalism of proletarian Esperantists would be an imposition but national cultural unification is not. The balance of the review is not illuminating about any of the ideas discussed. I cannot draw any conclusions about Ives based on Gunster's useless review.