Is Vygotsky Relevant? Vygotsky's Marxist Psychology

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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Educational Research Association conference in San Francisco, April 2006. I thank Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi and Bruno Jayme for their helpful reviews of an earlier draft.

Notes

¹I do not share Bakhurst's conclusions, as becomes clear. In my reading Vygotsky did not appropriate from Marx a method, let alone a method that amounted to a “skill or technique.” It is true that he wrote “I want to learn from Marx's whole method how to build a science, how to approach the investigation of the mind” (Vygotsky, 1926–27/2004, p. 331), but it is also clear that by “method,” he meant not a technique but a “methodology”: a “philosophy” (p. 304), a “theory of scientific method” (p. 305). (And “a theory of method is, of course, the production of means of production” [p. 248].) We see that he read Capital as a model to learn from, not take from. He sought to develop his own dialectical methodology, an “intermediate science,” a “theory of psychological materialism” (p. 330), which would be “a scientific methodology built on a historical foundation” (p. 236).

²In a deleted passage in The German Ideology Marx wrote, “We know only a single science, the science of history” (this passage appeared before the section heading; Marx & Engels, 1845/1947, p. 4).

³This historical approach was of course further developed by Luria, Leontiev, Holzkamp, and others. My discussion in this article is limited, however, to Vygotsky's formulation of general psychology and not to the way his project was carried on.

⁴Did Vygotsky read Marx and Hegel as believing that there will be an end to history? This is a complex topic, which I address in Packer (2006).

⁵The reference seems to be to Marx and Engels (1845/1947, p. 19). Avineri (1968) considered that this “identification of human consciousness with the practical process of reality as shaped by man is Marx's epistemological and historiosophical achievement” (p. 71). Marx and Engels (1845/1947) insisted that “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process” (p. 14). This, I would argue, is the same “radical realism” that Bakhurst (1991) found in Lenin (1909/1960–1978).

⁶If consciousness is a central component of “child history,” we need to take care with translations of Vygotsky's writing. A translator's note in Thinking & Speech points out, “By the phrase ‘conscious awareness’ we gloss the Russian osaznanie, which Vygotsky carefully and consistently uses and distinguishes from the term soznanie or ‘consciousness.’ Vygotsky clarifies the difference between the two at several points in the text… . [However] the earlier translation of this volume … rendered both terms as ‘consciousness,’ introducing a confusion not to be found in the original Russian text” (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p. 388).