Hey Charles,
>When you say longstanding Marxist concerns , do you mean like ?
>Karl Marx
>THESES ON FEUERBACH
Yes, definitely this. I think the focus of the Theses would meet up with the "pragmatic" aspects of speech in the approach I was mentioning. (Where its pragmatics that has more phenomenological concreteness, is more related to concrete activity and social context, than semantic aspects of speech.)
It also overlaps with Marx's abiding concern about the gap that so frequently exists between these concrete activities and our fully conscious categories. Sometimes he seems to be describing some inevitable "lag" that always exists between our language (formed by past experience) and the more incipient forms consciousness related to our practical activities in the present (e.g., German Ideology's discussion of the serfs). Other times he's talking more about social relations that actively produce structures of misrecognition (_Capital_, ovbviously). He worries about these things because the point, to paraphrase thesis XI, is not just to describe the proletariat, but also to create it, in language, in consciousness.
Some of the work on pragmatics take up these issues as well.
--M