The Presence of Marx in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy

The idea of a relation between some aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Marx’s method is based on the network of Marxist contacts which has been created in Wittgenstein’s life since the 1930s. We can suppose a Marxian influence on Wittgenstein’s thought since his return to Cambridge in 1929, above all thanks to the Italian Marxist economist Piero Sraffa with whom Wittgenstein had an intense and fruitful, but also tormented attendance which went on with ups and downs from February of 1929 until the year before the philosopher’s death (De Iaco, 2019). The Maxian network of Wittgenstein’s interlocutors also includes Maurice Dobb, George Thomson, Nicholas Bachtin, and Fania Pascal with his husband Roy. Nevertheless, we could not claim that Wittgenstein was ever a Communist or a Marxist, although it seems that once he defines himself a Communist at heart (Monk, 1990). We will analyse the presence of Marx in Wittgenstein’s philosophy in order to show that Wittgenstein’s new anthropological way to look at philosophical problems after his return to Cambridge involves some analogies with the Marxian approach to phenomena, even though goals and outcomes of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and Marx’s thought remain different.