Karl Marx and the language sciences – critical encounters: introduction to the special issue

Abstract

could perhaps add, on a personal note, that I have been struggling with these issues for nearly 40 years now, off and on. Having embarked on a linguistics PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1976, initially on a Chomskyan topic, my own political allegiances led me to search out Marxist thinking on language which I found in Vygotsky's Thought and Language (Vygotsky, 1962), in the tantalising eighth chapter of Ilyenkov's Dialectical Logic (Ilyenkov, 1977a), and in Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov, 1973). And so, with the kind support of my doctoral supervisor, Terence Moore, I changed topic mid-stream. I was awarded my PhD in 1982 for a dissertation entitled 'Materialism and the Structure of Language' which, for its doctrinaire and mechanistic 'Marxism', makes excruciating, though salutary, reading today.

English as a Southern language

“…Taking off the imperial garb from English is imperative as the language is at the heart of epistemic struggles in the Global South. As Pennycook & Makoni (2019: 123, original emphases) argue: Global South perspectives are encapsulated in struggles for basic, economic, political, and social transformation, struggles that are relevant to applied linguistics because they are intellectual and political contestations ‘ over language, about language, in language and for language which enables and promotes the consciousness and organization upon which such transformation depends’ (Jones, 2018, p. 3).…”

Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: methodological discussions on the role of language in social transformation

“…Did not Lev Vygotsky, after all, aspire to create a 'Marxist psychology', informed by the method of Marx's Capital (Vygotsky, 1987)? The issue is by no means straightforward, as readers will know, since scholars differ on what aspects of Vygotsky's approach could be said to be Marxist in origin or inspiration (cf) Jones, 2018aJones, , 2019Ratner,2017;Stetsenko, 2017). The sustained line of work by Peter Keiler, uncovering and elucidating the specifi cally Feuerbachian source and inspiration for key principles of cultural-historical psychology (Keiler, 2017) further complicates the picture.…”

“…Progressive social movements, consequently, 'are at once struggles for foundational economic, political and social change and at the same time necessarily struggles over language, about language, in language and for language which enables and promotes the consciousness and organization upon which such transformation depends' (Jones, 2018a: 3; see also Collins, 1999).…”