TY - JOUR

T1 - Language and critique

T2 - Some anticipations of critical discourse studies in Marx

AU - Jessop, Robert Douglas

AU - Sum, Ngai-Ling

N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Discourse Studies on 28/03/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - We examine Marx’s critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx’s work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.

AB - We examine Marx’s critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx’s work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.

KW - Marx

KW - Critical Discourse Analysis

KW - Semiosis

KW - Historical Materialism

KW - Eighteenth Brumaire

KW - Das Kapital

KW - German Ideology

KW - Rhetoric

KW - Language

KW - Base-superstructure metaphor

KW - capitalist mode of production

KW - critique

KW - cultural political economy

KW - intellectuals

KW - philology

U2 - 10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945

DO - 10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945

M3 - Journal article

VL - 15

SP - 325

EP - 337

JO - Critical Discourse Studies

JF - Critical Discourse Studies

SN - 1740-5904

IS - 4

ER -