ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon how Marx’s specific social and political philosophy led to attempts to merge language with its practical ramifications. Attempts to establish a socialist state were based on Marxist principles and how they related to an understanding of society and equality. Various authors sought to integrate language within this understanding, focusing on Marx’s historical materialism and Lenin’s dialectic materialism. The rigidity in the attempts to forge a Marxist linguistics by Marr, Polivanov, Plekhanov, Pavlovich, and Stalin is balanced by a consideration of the work of Volochinov, and Gramsci who were critical of positivism’s construction of objective structures. The Frankfurt school and its main protagonists - Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Habermas – operated by reference to a Kantian critical philosophy and a Marxist dialectic critique of political economy. In one way or another they all see language and community as intertwined.
