Is Vygotsky Relevant

Is Vygotsky Relevant? Vygotsky's Marxist Psychology

Author: Martin J. Packer a / a Duquesne University,

Published in: Mind, Culture, and Activity, Volume 15, Issue 1 January 2008 , pages 8 - 31

Abstract

This article explores the connections between Vygotsky's psychology and Marxism, arguing that his was a "Marxist psychology" in its "historical foundation": a specific conception of history. This conception of history is evident in Vygotsky's analysis and diagnosis of the crisis in psychology. The creation of a Marxist, general psychology was the historical task that was defined by this crisis, and his developmental psychology was the historical project of such a psychology. In his practice of the methodology of this general psychology, Vygotsky recounted "child history": the history of the genesis of mind. The conception of history evident in Crisis throws new light on Vygotsky's texts on child development: They tell a history of the objective tendencies of consciousness, of the dialectical processes of sublation, and of self-mastery. As Vygotsky interpreted the higher mental functions, they are manifestations of the child's ability to master himself or herself as a consequence of the "social moment" of consciousness. In fostering these functions, one shaped a human consciousness capable of free and deliberate choice.

Introduction

We had better let others say of our psychology that it is Marxist than call it that ourselves.

Vygotsky (1926-27/2004, p. 340)

When Vygotsky's texts were first translated into English, some psychologists in the United States noted that his work had strong connections to Marx's analysis of capitalism, but since then these connections have often gone unnoticed and "many interpretations of Vygotsky have not attempted to position him within a Marxist framework" (Robbins, 1999, p. vi). Translations of Vygotsky's work have often omitted references to Marx and Engels, or treated these as "a forced concession to official ideology" (Yaroshevsky, 1989, p. 20). Consequently "Vygotsky's debt to Marx runs deeper than is commonly recognized" (Wertsch, 1985, p. 1), and

the political context of his work is virtually ignored by modern scholars concerned to recover it. Vygotsky is portrayed not so much as a Marxist theorist who negotiated a tense political environment and whose work was a victim of Stalin's purges, but as a thinker whose genius "transcend[s] historical, social and cultural barriers." (Bakhurst, 2005, p. 178)

Even when the references to Marx have been acknowledged, there has been little consensus about their significance. Some have assumed that any scientist working in the Soviet Union had to pay lip service to Marx. Others cannot grasp the relevance of an economic critique to psychology.

Important and early exceptions to this tendency to ignore or downplay Vygotsky's debt to Marx include Toulmin (1978) who, in the New York Review of Books article in which he famously dubbed Vygotsky "the Mozart of psychology," wrote that "the general frame provided by 'historical materialist' philosophy gave him the basis he needed for developing an integrated account of the relations between developmental psychology and clinical neurology, cultural anthropology and the psychology of art." A second exception was the introduction to Mind in Society by Cole and Scribner (1978), who wrote that the Marxist theoretical framework was a "valuable scientific resource" for Vygotsky, that he used "the methods and principles of dialectical materialism" and intended "to create one's own Capital." More recently Cole, Levitin, and Luria (2006) proposed that "Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev undertook the wholesale reformulation of psychology along Marxist lines. As a result, cultural-historical psychology as a self-conscious solution to the 'crisis in psychology' was born" (p. 244).

Exploring the Marxist framework to Vygotsky's conception and practice of psychology would appear an important yet neglected task. Now, after the fall of the USSR and the growth, apparently without any opposition or limits, of capitalist economies in Russia, China, and elsewhere, it seems to many that Marx is now irrelevant. Is this so? Does this mean that Vygotsky's Marxist psychology is irrelevant too? What is the relevance of Vygotsky "after" Marx? Is his work relevant to psychology today in the West - a time and culture very different from those in which his work was begun? Today "we still await an adequate analysis of Vygotsky's debt to Marx" (Bakhurst, 1991, p. 87). This article aims to be a step in this direction.

I argue that Marx provided Vygotsky, most importantly, with a conception of history. Yet the literature on Vygotsky and Marx has not noted this, so to make the case I must trace the view of history visible in Vygotsky's analysis of the "crisis in psychology." This analysis identified the "historical task" of creating a "general psychology," a Marxist psychology. This general psychology is Vygotsky's psychology of child development, which is itself centrally a historical analysis, tracing the genesis of mind to recount a "child history." I suggest that the conception of history evident in Crisis throws new light on Vygotsky's account of child development.

THE RELATION BETWEEN MARX AND VYGOTSKY

Efforts have been made to identify what Vygotsky and Marx had in common. Lee (1985) noted four shared fundamental assumptions. First, they both placed emphasis on practical activity. Practical interaction between humans and the environment creates both objects and human subjects. Second, their analyses were "functionalist," "showing what role or effect [an] item has in some system of which it is a part" (p. 68). Third, consciousness was viewed as having a dialectical, developing character, an emergent aspect of practical interaction. Finally, cultural development was distinguished from natural development.

Wertsch (1985) highlighted "three areas in which Vygotsky borrowed from Marx: his method, his claims about the nature of human activity, and his claims about the social origins of psychological processes" (p. 5). The method was one of tracing "the genesis of complete living units of functioning" (p. 5, emphasis removed), just as "Marx analyzes a single living 'cell' of capitalist society" (p. 6, citing Cole & Scribner, 1978, p. 8). Second, Wertsch, like Lee, noted that Vygotsky and Marx placed emphasis on activity. They saw practical, material interaction between humans and the environment as fundamental. Psychological processes and products, including consciousness itself, are constructed on this base. Whereas - as Marx put it in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach - others had given priority to contemplation of the world, both he and Vygotsky considered action in the world to be primary and contemplation to be secondary and derivative.

Third, Vygotsky, like Marx, saw the social as having priority over the individual. Individual psychological functioning has social origins. Whereas Piaget sought to understand how the individual child, egocentric and even autistic, gradually becomes socialized, able to decentrate and communicate, Vygotsky saw the child as initially a social creature who only becomes individuated over time. This closely parallels remarks made by Marx about the inherently social character of human existence and the way only specific forms of society create the seemingly independent individual.

Trying to understand the kind of Marxist psychology Vygotsky sought to create by seeking parallels between the two has its limits, however. For "while such parallels are many and incontrovertible, their existence does not so much solve the problem as pose it more sharply" (Bakhurst, 1991, p. 87). Bakhurst proposed instead that Vygotsky was trying to apply "Marx's dialectical method" to the problems of psychology. But in the USSR in Vygotsky's time there were at least two positions among Soviet thinkers on the nature of Marx's method and its appropriateness to psychology. The Mechanists saw dialectics as a general methodology for natural scientific inquiry. The Deborinites, in contrast, saw the task as being "a materialist reinterpretation of Hegelian dialectics" (p. 32), a philosophical rather than narrowly scientific task. Bakhurst suggested that Vygotsky most likely sided against the Deborinites (and that Vygotsky "would have held [their] use of dialectics in contempt") and concluded that "it thus seems that what Vygotsky appropriated from Marx is best represented as a method, conceived on the model of a skill or technique for following the specific nature of the object of inquiry" (p. 88).1

It is striking that neither Lee nor Wertsch nor Bakhurst noted the emphasis on history shared by Vygotsky and Marx. Yet the central role that history played in Vygotsky's thinking is quite evident. For example, one of Vygotsky's notebook entries (Kozulin, 1986) began with these words:

The word history (historical psychology) for me means two things: (1) a general dialectical approach to things - in this sense, everything has its history; this is what Marx meant: the only science is history; (2) history in the strict sense, i.e. human history . The uniqueness of the human mind lies in the fact that both types of history (evolution + history) are united (synthesis) in it. The same is true in child psychology. (pp. 54-55 )2

The centrality of history was, however, evident to Scribner (1985), who wrote that Vygotsky was "the first to explicate the historical formation of the mind" (p. 121) and suggested that "his work may be read as an attempt to weave three strands of history - general history, child history, and the history of mental functions - into one explanatory account of the formation of specifically human aspects of human nature" (p. 138). She identified Vygotsky's "main conclusion" as "the need to search for specifically human behavior in history rather than biology" (p. 123) and that

human behavior differs from animal behavior in the same qualitative manner as the entire type of adaptability and historical development of man differs from the adaptability and development of animals, because the process of man's mental development is part of the general historical development of mankind. (Vygotsky, 1931/1997b, p. 39, as cited in Scribner, 1985, p. 123)

Yet even Scribner did not articulate the precise character of Vygotsky's conception of history. Vygotsky makes repeated reference to history, but often in broad terms in which the details are not apparent. Writing where and when he did, Vygotsky could presuppose a familiarity with Marx and Marxist-Leninism on the part of his readers, something not the case when translations are read in the United States. But if "it was an early exposure to Marxian historical thinking that enabled Vygotsky himself to tackle the problems of child development in his own original way" (Toulmin, 1978), and if Vygotsky was "weaving the individual's brief life into the great age-long history of social being the macroscale of the life of the people down the ages and the microscale of the individual's routine contacts with his bretheren" (Yaroshevsky, 1989, p. 80), then it is crucial to examine how he conceived of history.

MARXIST PSYCHOLOGY: A REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Let us begin at "probably the best place for scholars to gain insight into what everyone agrees was Vygotsky's main effort: to create a Marxist science of psychology appropriate to the new Soviet society" (Rieber & Robinson, 2004, p. 223). This is the manuscript written in 1926-27 yet was unpublished in Russia until 1982: The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation (Vygotsky, 1926-27/2004). Here Vygotsky recounted a history of psychology and on the basis of a "diagnosis" of its condition proposed a "general psychology" which was the blueprint for his psychology of child development.

The Objective Tendencies of Psychology

Vygotsky's history of psychology traced its "developmental path." This history, he argued, was not merely one of conflicting viewpoints or divergent opinions, and its troubles were not merely the consequence of psychologists' unwillingness or inability to reach agreement. Vygotsky's (1926-27/2004) reading of classic texts "points to an objective necessity underlying the development of the science, to a necessity which we may observe when we approach the facts of science from an equally scientific point of view" (p. 236). This was not merely "a critical investigation of the views of some author" but "the methodological analysis of the problem itself" which was "not entirely indifferent as to views" but "must be able to explain them, to lay bare their objective, their inner logic" (p. 309). As he explained, "We do not investigate thinkers but their fate, i.e., the objective processes that stand behind them and control them" (p. 308).

This "inner logic" had not caused psychology to follow a straightforward path:

We are dialecticians. We do not at all think that the developmental path of science follows a straight line, and if it has had zigzags, returns, and loops we understand their historical significance and consider them to be necessary links in our chain, inevitable stages of our path, just as capitalism is an inevitable stage on the road toward socialism. (p. 336)

Vygotsky (1926-27/2004) described these stages. At first "there is some factual discovery which reforms the ordinary conception of the whole area of phenomena to which it refers" (p. 236). Then "the influence of these ideas spreads to adjacent areas," and it is formulated more abstractly. The "idea accomplishes its campaign of conquest as a scientifically verified, reliable discovery" (p. 236). Next, "the idea controls more or less the whole discipline in which it originally arose in the form of a more or less abstractly formulated principle," and it "is easily transferred to adjacent disciplines" where "it also transforms the areas it penetrates" (p. 236). Then it "spreads to the most remote domains of being, to the whole world - while transforming and being transformed - and is formulated as a universal principle or even as a whole world view" (p. 237).

The idea, now "inflated into a world view like a frog that has swollen to the size of an ox, a philistine amidst the gentry, now enters the fifth and most dangerous stage of development" (p. 237). It meets opposition on every side, and "it finally displays what it is in reality, shows its real face." Now an abstract "philosophical form" rather than a scientific fact, "the idea reveals what it wants, what it is, from which social tendencies it arose, which class interests it serves" (p. 237). As it expands in scope and reach, its content "falls just as impetuously to zero" (p. 240) and it becomes an empty formula. It is now deflated: "It is accepted as a particular discovery but rejected as a world view." Now "as an idea which revolutionizes the science it ceases to exist. It is an idea that has retired and has received the rank of general from its department" (p. 237).

For example, the idea of the conditioned reflex had its origins in the study of salivation in dogs. It was extended throughout animal psychology and then all domains of psychology: "Everything - sleep, thought, work, and creativity - turns out to be a reflex" (Vygotsky, 1926-27/2004, p. 239). It grew into a worldview: "Anna Karenina and kleptomania, the class struggle and a landscape, language and dream are all reflexes" (p. 239). And from there it finally overreached and was put firmly in its place.

Vygotsky (1926-27/2004) added that whereas "external factors" might speed or slow these stages, "to change the sequence of these stages is impossible" (p. 332). That diverse ideas in psychology have traveled this same path demonstrated, in Vygotsky's view, "the objective need for an explanatory principle" (p. 241). The evident lack of a satisfactory general explanatory principle showed the need for an adequate "general psychology," one that would differ from the empirical branches of psychology not quantitatively, but qualitatively (p. 245). Such a general psychology would deal not with abstractions handled logically, but with "concepts of a higher order" in which "reality is represented in another way than in the concepts of an empirical science" (p. 248). It was such a general psychology that Vygotsky intended to define.

The Dualism of Psychology

In Vygotsky's diagnosis, psychology suffered from a fundamental problem. Behind all its manifold positions and camps, "contemporary psychology - this doctrine of a soul without a soul - is intrinsically contradictory, is divided into two parts" (Vygotsky, 1926-27/2004, p. 300). "Two psychologies exist - a natural scientific, materialistic one and a spiritualistic one" (p. 299), and "the two struggling tendencies are deeply and with objective necessity rooted in the development of psychology" (p. 305).

He offered a detailed review of the various ways in which this underlying dualism was manifest. I touch briefly on only two examples: Behaviorism had seemed a profound alternative to introspectionism but in fact had merely inverted its dualistic assumptions. Naturalistic and intentionalist psychologies were merely two sides of the same coin. Dilthey's conception of "two psychologies" was no better: Explanatory psychology and descriptive psychology (Husserl's phenomenology) were merely mirror images.

Driven by Practical Concerns

This contradiction had existed in psychology for a long time, but Vygotsky (1926-27/2004) saw it as having come to a head. Applied psychology - in the shape of "industrial, educational, political, or military" (p. 304) and other fields - was the "driving force" behind "the exacerbation and bifurcation of dualism" into a "crisis" (p. 303). "Let us say right away that the main driving force of the crisis in its final phase is the development of applied psychology as a whole" (p. 303). Academic psychology had been "somewhat disdainful" toward applied psychology, viewing it merely as an inexact science. But applied psychology had taken "the leading role in the development of our science" (p. 304). Vygotsky emphasized that "the importance of the new practical psychology for the whole science cannot be exaggerated. The psychologist might dedicate a hymn to it" (p. 304). It compelled psychology to incorporate practical skills and experience acquired over thousands of years. Psychology now "attempts not so much to explain the mind but to understand and master it" (p. 304). Practice was the "highest test" of theory; it "sets the tasks and serves as the supreme judge of theory, as its truth criterion" (p. 304).

Applied psychology would also be the impetus for resolution of the crisis: "Thus it will be in practice that the contradictions of psychology will be overcome" (Vygotsky, 1926-27/2004, p. 305); it "not only led to the development of the crisis, but continues determining its further course and fate" (p. 308). In particular, practical psychology was advancing the development of methodology: "The most complex contradictions of psychological methodology are transferred to the grounds of practice and only there can they be solved. There the debate stops being fruitless, it comes to an end" (p. 305). The appropriate methodology of psychology, and the way forward for the science, would be established by the practical goals of applied psychology.