What would Karl say? Two ICREA professors engage with Marx

David Block (ICREA/UdL)

Santiago Zabala (ICREA/UPF)

Marx is coming back?

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=I6dIhHQAAAAJ&hl=eses)

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)

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)

Multiple disciplines drawing on Marx

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

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 behinddiscourse 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)

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).

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

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)

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

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)

Un desahucio/desnonament (home eviction)

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 acumulandoun 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

Un escrache

Talking about escraches 1

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

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/

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 matonismode los seguidores de ETA

• 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).

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

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

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

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.

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