| Summary: | Valentin Voloshinov’s “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” (1929) stands out as one of the highest expressions of the vivid intellectual life of the early years of post-revolutionary Russia. Starting with a discussion regarding the epistemological foundations of the work, this paper aims to bring to light Voloshinov’s seminal contributions to a Marxist social semiotics, studying ideological signs as fields of struggle between social accentuations carried out by various social groups and classes. Underlining the strong elective affinities with both Vygotky’s (1896-1934) cultural-historical psychology and Gramsci’s (1891-1937) political thought, we argue that Voloshinov’s (1895-1936) sociological method in the science of language provides the ground for quite a fruitful socio-ethnographic approach of the ideological dimension of social relations. By so doing, it casts a dynamic light on the political side of concrete language interactions, as an original contribution to the expansion of the Marxist research program.
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