ICREA Research Professor David Block argues that a Marxist framing of issues related to language in society can lead to understandings of how the use of language and other semiotic modes is embedded in ongoing political, economic, social and cultural processes, showing how class struggle and class warfare are both materially and discursively constructed.

1. What would Karl say? Two ICREA
professors engage with Marx
David Block (ICREA/UdL)
Santiago Zabala (ICREA/UPF)

2. Marx is coming back?

3. An interesting life
Died broke, stateless and relatively unknown.
9-11 people present at his funeral
On the 14th of March [1883], at a quarter to
three in the afternoon, the greatest living
thinker ceased to think. …His name will
endure through the ages, and so also will his
work!“ (Engel’s eulogy at Marx’s funeral, 22
March 1883)
BUT, would he have made a good ICREA?
(see:
http://scholar.google.es/citations?user=I6dIhH
QAAAAJ&hl=eses)

4. Lasting words
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts
into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind. (Marx & Engels, 1948 [1848]: 12)
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great historical facts and
personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the
first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (Marx, 1972 [1852]: 436)
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e.,
the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same
time the ruling intellectual force. (Marx & Engels, 1998 [1846]: 67)

5. The camera obscura – the world upside
down
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside
down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as
much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects
on the retina does from their physical life-process."
Marx & Engels, 1998 [1845]: 42)

6. Multiple disciplines drawing on Marx

7. Sociolinguistics
What is a sociolinguist?
Sociolinguists study the relationship between language
and society. They are interested in explaining why we
speak differently in different social contexts, and they are
concerned with identifying the social functions of
language and the ways it is used to convey social meaning.
(Holmes, 2008: 1)
Disciplinarity:
Linguistics dominant?
Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Social Theory …
Political Economy
Semiotics/Multimodality → communicative resources

8. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
The focus is thus not exclusively on discourse as language,
but on semiosis, the processes through which multiple
semiotic modes are deployed or simply emerge in ‘the
inter-subjective making of meaning’ (Fairclough et al, 2010:
220).
A radical view of CDA … emphasises the power behind
discourse rather than just the power in discourse (how
people with power shape the ‘order of discourse’ as well as
the social order in general, versus how people with power
control what happens in specific interactions such as
interviews). (Fairclough, 2015: 3)

9. Class struggle and class warfare
Class struggle as ‘conflicts between the practices of
individuals and collectives in pursuit of opposing class
interests … from the strategies of individual workers
within the labour process to reduce their level of toil, to
conflicts between highly organized collectives of workers
and capitalists over the distribution of rights and powers
within production’ (Wright, 2005: 20–21).
Class warfare: … neoliberal policies from late 1970s
onwards have constituted not only a point of conflict and
struggle but an actual attack on the well-being and
survival of the popular classes’ (Block, 2017).

10. Warren Buffet’s famous line (in
an interview with journalist Lou
Dobbs, CNN, 25/05/16)
BUFFETT: Yeah. The rich people are doing so well in this
country. I mean, we never had it so good.
DOBBS: What a radical idea.
BUFFETT: It's class warfare, my class is winning, but
they shouldn't be.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/05/10/buffett/index.html

11. Inequality (private property as
original sin)
The first man who after enclosing a piece of ground,
took it into his head to say, "This is mine," and found
people simple enough to believe him, was the true
founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many
wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and
horrors, would that man have saved the human species,
who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditch should
have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this
impostor; you are lost, if you forget that that the fruits
of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself
to nobody! (Rousseau, 1754 [2004]: 27)

12. Göran Therborn’s (2006) three
types of inequality
vital inequality - basic life and death chances and
individuals and collectives’ relative exposure to life-
threatening natural phenomena, self-inflicted human
conditions and larger human-made disasters.
existential inequality - systems of oppression denying
individuals and collectives their basic human rights, e.g.
patriarchy, slavery, caste systems, racism, religious
persecution, homophobia …
resource inequality - the variable access that individuals
and collectives have to material and symbolic resources

13. Accumulations
Primitive accumulation: ‘historical process of divorcing
the producer from the means of production’ (Marx 1990
[1867]: 875)
Accumulation by dispossession: Activity by governments
and financial institutions which transfers wealth from the
less well-off to the wealthy. Examples:
• the privatisation of state owned and operated
industries and services
• the sale of state-owned assets to private investors
• financial activities such as Ponzi schemes
• massive defaults on mortgages and subsequent home
evictions executed by banks (Harvey, 2010, 2014)

14. Un desahucio/desnonament
(home eviction)

15. La PAH (La Plataforma de Afectados por la
Hipoteca)
Los motivos que sustentan la campaña son sencillos:
nos roban las viviendas y nos condenan a seguir
pagándolas. Nos dejan en la calle y sin alternativa
habitacional. Los bancos, incluso los rescatados, siguen
con su actitud antisocial desahuciando y acumulando
un gigantesco parque de viviendas vacías, vulnerando la
función social de la vivienda. El Gobierno lo ampara: ni
lo detiene ni ofrece soluciones como, por ejemplo, el
alquiler social, paralización de los desahucios, dación en
pago.
http://afectadosporlahipoteca.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/MANUAL-OBRA-SOCIAL-WEB-ALTA.pdf

16. Un escrache

17. Talking about escraches 1

18. María Dolores de Cospedal (13/04/13)
los acosos/la violencia física y verbal/los ataques a las personas/a
sus viviendas/a sus familias (3) eso no refleja más que un espíritu
totalitario y sectario/ y eso es lo más contrario que hay a la
democracia/ [applause] … tenemos en el recuerdo/y se ha ilustrado
mucho afortunadamente/ como en los años 30 se iba a señalar a las
casas de ciertas personas/por su pertenencia a ciertos grupos
políticos/ étnicos/ culturales/ o religiosos/y decían/están ahí/ y por
tanto tenéis que ir a atacar/pero qué es esto de tratar de violentar
el voto? (1) esto es nazismo puro (1.5) ya sé que esto me lo van a
criticar (1.5) [sonriendo] pero esto es nazismo puro … y este partido
sostiene un gobierno/el gobierno del partido popular de Mariano
Rajoy/que está tramitando una reforma en los cortes
generales/para ayudar de verdad a los que no pueden pagar su
vivienda hoy/porque tienen una situación/que es hoy mala/ o que
lleva siendo mala hace más de cinco años/cuando empezaron los
desahucios.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfWN6QPvEso

19. Esperanza Aguirre (14/04/13)
La sociedad española, sus legítimos representantes políticos y, por
supuesto, la Justicia y las Fuerzas de Seguridad del Estado tienen
que reaccionar y plantar cara a la desfachatez, a la chulería y a la
impunidad con que unos émulos de los peores totalitarismos de la
Historia han decidido acosar, insultar y amedrentar a los políticos
del Partido Popular, que han sido elegidos por sus conciudadanos.
Nadie, con un mínimo de sentido democrático, puede ni debe
mostrar la menor complacencia ante el espectáculo, que se está
convirtiendo en habitual, de unos energúmenos que, con total
impunidad, irrumpen en la intimidad familiar o doméstica de
algunos políticos del Partido Popular. Estos violentos acosadores se
creen el paradigma de los buenos sentimientos pero sólo son
simples epígonos de las tácticas de los peores totalitarismos del
siglo pasado: el acoso con que las juventudes hitlerianas o las
patrullas castristas en Cuba trataban y tratan de amedrentar a los
que no se someten a sus designios. Y también son imitadores del
matonismo de los seguidores de ETA en el País Vasco, ese
matonismo que no ha dejado vivir en libertad a los ciudadanos de
esa parte de España. …
http://esperanza.ppmadrid.es/el-acoso-a-politicos-del-partido-popular/

20. CDA elements at work
• Semiosis, or the making of meaning via the use of semiotic resources
(speech, written script, visuals, body movement, gaze and so on) as
a way of understanding how power relationship are symbolically
established and reproduced in society (Fairclough, 2006)
• Thematic shifts (flipping the script): e.g. home evictions → rights of
PP politicians
• Emotive keywords:
behaviour: desfachatez, chulería, impunidad
actions: acosar, insultar y amedrentar
people: energúmenos, violentos acosadores, epígonos de las
tácticas de los peores totalitarismos, imitadores del matonismo
de los seguidores de ETA

21. • Intertextuality: bringing forward into the present genres, voices
and other elements from texts produced in the past.
• Topos of history as teacher (Wodak et al, 1999): Nazi Germany
invoked.
• Anything goes: ‘discursive and rhetorical strategies which combine
incompatible phenomena [home evictees victimising the
powerful], make false claims sound innocent [that PAH members
‘are merely followers of the worst totalitarian tactics of the last
century’] … [and] ‘say the ‘unsayable’ and transcend the limits of
the permissible’ [likening PP members to the persecuted Jews of
Nazi Germany]’ (Wodak, 2013: 32-33).

22. Escrache of Javier Barbero (Ahora Madrid),
Madrid’s Concejal de Seguridad, by municipal
police officers, 16/02/16.

23. Talking about escraches 2:
Jorge Fernandez Diaz,
17/02/16
La gente tiene el suficiente sentido común como para darse cuenta
de que probar el sabor de la propia medicina te hace dar cuenta
hasta qué punto lo que estabas haciendo tú no era precisamente
algo susceptible de ser considerado como libertad de expresión.
Hasta no hace mucho tiempo esos hechos calificados como
escraches los padecíamos otras personas fundamentalmente y en
su mayor proporción sin ningún género de dudas cargos públicos
del Partido Popular. Y quienes los protagonizaban decían que era
libertad de expresión. Lo que no podemos aceptar es que cuando tú
los haces lo son y que cuando tú los padeces son conductas
odiosas o delictivas.
http://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20160217/302231727480/f-diaz-dice-que-el-edil-de-madrid-
increpado-ha-probado-su-propia-medicina.html

24. So what? What would Karl say?
‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch
the ruling ideas. …’
The material and the discursive
CDA= Corrupt(ed) Discourse Analysis?
Discourses of the corrupt/the corruption of
discourses

25. Relevant publications
Block, D. (2017). Political economy and sociolinguistics:
Redistribution and recognition. London: Bloomsbury.
Block, D. (2017). The materiality and semiosis of inequality and class
struggle and warfare: the case of home evictions in Spain. In R.
Wodak & B. Forchtner (eds) Routledge handbook of language and
politics. London: Routledge.
Block, D. (2016). Political economy in applied linguistics research.
Language Teaching, 49.
Block, D. (2016). Critical discourse analysis and class. In J.
Flowerdew & J. Richardson (eds) Routledge handbook of critical
discourse analysis. London: Routledge.
Block, D. (2014). Social class and applied linguistics. London:
Routledge.
Block, D. , Gray, & Holborow, M. (2012). Neoliberalism and applied
linguistics. London: Routledge.

26. Gràcies/Thank you.
David Block
ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics
Universitat de Lleida
dblock@dal.udl.cat
http://www.icrea.cat/Web/ScientificForm.aspx?key=549
http://www.cla.udl.cat/fitxa.php?id=64
https://independent.academia.edu/DBlock