Marx, a ‘semiotician’? On the (possible) relevance of a materialistic-semiotic approach to discourse studies

Even if a coherent Marxian theory of language does not exist, it is well known that Marx refers to the concepts of language and sign in several passages of his writings. The Italian scholar Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1921–1985) framed Marx's outlines into a semiotic perspective. This theoretical proposal had two purposes: on the one hand, Rossi-Landi tried to demonstrate how certain analytical instruments developed by the Marxian critique of political economy can contribute to a better understanding of semiotic processes. On the other hand, he attempted to illustrate how a semiotic methodology was present at an early stage in certain fundamental parts of Marxian theory, i.e. in the analysis of ideologies, of the commodity-form, and in the critique of political economy. In this paper, I would like to illustrate how Rossi-Landi's materialistic semiotics shares certain fundamental categories and research fields with Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. argumentation, discourse, ideology), especially in the version structured by Norman Fairclough. Nevertheless, notwithstanding these elements of convergence, I believe that the two approaches present fundamental divergences, deriving–among other things–from a different interpretation of the role of language and discourse in Marx's economic works.