Building Bridges between Vygotsky and Marx
From Promiscuity to Polyamory
In the early 1970s I joined a community organization called Radical Psychiatry in Berkeley, California. The purpose of the group was to help people in the community who were suffering with moderate to severe mental problems so they did not have to go to a traditional psychiatrist or use drugs. As I recall, these community meetings were once or twice a week for a couple of hours for each meeting. The staff was organized as a collective and this collective had its own weekly meetings to discuss how the public meetings were going. Pretty much all the members of the collective were committed to socialism.
However, an added dimension to the collective was the members’ commitment to “polyamory”. This meant any romantic relationships that were formed had to be open. Both men and women could have more than one sexual relationship at a time while attempting to maintain a loving relationship with each partner. As socialists, we wanted to “smash monogamy” as a form of bourgeois property relations. I first attended the Radical Psychiatry meetings as a member of the community and came, in part to work on my own problems but also because I found what they were doing interesting. Since there was no formal training necessary to be a member of a collective, any member of the community could be asked to join the collective, after the collective had deliberated about it. After a couple of months of attending 10-15 community meetings, I was asked to join. I was flattered and also hot to trot with some of the women in the collective so I easily accepted.
Later on in this article I will tell you how the use of the word “polyamory” instead of “promiscuous” was used to define what we were doing and helped me to participate in the collective’s sexual relations in a more meaningful way. The change in the word meaning to promote both individual and group development will also be a key to understanding how Vygotsky attempted to create parallels between his own psychological theory and Marx’s theory of political economy. I will analyze this story further on in this piece once the tracks of Vygotsky’s theory are laid down.
Orientation
Goodbye to cutting and pasting
When the Russian Marxian, Lev Vygotsky first started out in psychology, he said he didn’t want to contribute to the field by cutting and pasting quotes from the theories of his Marxian masters. He wanted to use Marx’s method to write his own version of Capital for psychology. My article is an attempt report how his efforts turned out. To do this I will rely on three books. Vygotsky and Marx edited by Carl Ratner and Daniele Nunes-Henrique Silva; An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity by Andy Blunden and Vygotsky’s own Thought and Language. Following the lead of these authors, I claim that there is a parallel between Marx’s attempt to understand capitalism through the “cell” of the commodity and Vygotsky’s attempt to understand psychology through the cell of new word meanings.
I What is Marxist psychology?
Capitalist categories
How would we know a real Marxian psychology when we saw it? For one thing, it would include the major categories in Marx’s work and draw out their psychological implications for individual and social psychology. Marx’s categories for capitalism include at least the following:
- impact of crises of capitalism
- impact of finance capital
- alienation
- reification
- the class structure and relations
- private property
- wage labor
- impact of commodity production
- Llfe under socialism
Psychological categories
The categories above would be applied to the typical topics within psychology:
- Darwinian evolutionary psychology
- how the brain works
- personality theory
- development throughout the life span
- sensation and perception
- emotions
- thinking processes
- states of consciousness
- what motivates people
- how people learn
- how people remember
- social psychology
- cross-cultural psychology
- psychopathology
- therapy
Let us take an example of a controversy within psychology: how does the brain function? Carl Ratner points out the issue is whether the brain is localized in prefigured brain centers (modules) with unique neurophysiological properties or whether the cortex is a general flexible unspecified processing apparatus on which psychological function can be processed from any location. General information processing of psychological features are cultural in nature, origin, formation and function. Evidence is on the side of general processing which would be consistent with Marxism.
How Does the Brain Function?
| Localized brain center with unique neurophysiological processes | What does the brain do? | Cortex is generalized unspecified processed apparatus |
| Biological | Theoretical orientation | Sociocultural |
What is Cooperative learning?
Vygotsky argued that the leading edge of learning did not happen inside people’s heads. It begins in the social relationship between people in cooperative learning. The sites can be at work, at play or in school The cooperative activity must be meaningful, recursive, with a specified goal and a division of labor. Vygotsky called this first stage the zone of proximal development. In the second stage the cooperative learning becomes internalized and available for the individual to act on independently in terms of specific projects and goals. Ratner writes that the intellectual process of internalization enables the logical operations of reasoning to operate like analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization and abstraction. The third stage learning is when the individual applies it again to the social world but on a more global scale than they did in stage one. This includes more extended relations across space and time as well as to think more complexly. This will be illustrated in the example below. I call these stages “local interpersonal”, “internalization” and global interpersonal.
An example of the three stages of cooperative learning
Here is an example. A father, Antonio, teaches his son Jules how to bag cookies. In the beginning the father takes the hardest part of the baking process like breaking and mixing the eggs whereas his son might get out all the ingredients and pour milk into a measuring cup. Gradually over the next two or three weeks the father will cede the more difficult parts to his son. This beginning process is called the zone of proximal development. Now let’s say Antonio plays a learning trick on his son. He tells Jules he has to run to the store to get some food for dinner. He tells his son to proceed and they will finish when he gets back. But Antonio stays out longer in the hopes his son will finish the job. It turns out that Jules does finish. Since his son has gone through the whole process of baking the cookie himself, he has now internalized the skill of baking cookies. He can make cookies by himself if he wants to.
Now Antonio tells Jules that the neighborhood he lives on is having a garage sale in a couple of weeks. He wants his son to make cookies for the sale. Baking cookies for a garage sale involves social skills on a higher order than just baking cookies for his domestic household. Now he has to:
- calculate how large a volume of cookies needs to be made
- bake many more cookies
- bake a larger variety of cookies
- develop the rhetorical skills necessary to convince garage sale browsers to buy the cookies
Later on in this article I will show how Jules’ learning meaning of the new words “neighborhood” “probability” and “perspective” assisted him in completing Vygotsky’s third stage of learning.
The legacy of Soviet psychology
Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev developed what they called “socio-historical psychology” for many years in what was then the Soviet Union. Their work has been passed on to the next generation which included Ilyenkov, Mikhailov, Lektorsky, Galperin and Davydov. Socio-historical psychology is the most developed expression of Communist psychology in the world. For political reasons coming from both inside and outside the Soviet Union, Western radicals did not build on this tradition. Instead, they tried to build a Marxian psychology from scratch. But as Ratner tells us it is impossible to engage with Marxist psychology while disregarding this 65-year-old social-historical tradition.
Beyond eclecticism
The Frankfurt School, other so-called Western Marxists and radical feminists saw fit to initiate building a Marxist psychology from scratch either because of ignorance of Vygotsky and his comrades or because they considered that the Soviet Union wasn’t really Marxist. Instead, they eclectically cobbled together a hodge-podge of psychoanalysis, radical gender theory, constructionism and postmodernism and then added selectively from the young Marx without understanding the limits of their eclecticism.
Eclecticism juxtaposes various approaches together including multiple contradictory principles or assumptions. Eclectics attempt to combine the parts of two or more systems that are heterogeneous and diverse. As a Vygotsky follower, Carl Ratner says, the tail of one system is placed against the head of another and the space between them is filled with the trunk of a third. Eclecticism papers over antagonistic elements, as it throws together different systems.
Eclecticists violate a principle of science which is logical coherence and the law of parsimony. The logic of sciences holds that a wide variety of empirical and theoretical issues should be commonly explained by a few core, self-consistent principles. Instead of eclectically combining incompatible systems together we must first tease out the essential incompatibility of systems such as Freudianism, constructivism and radical gender theory with each other first before comparing them to Marxism. Also, Vygotsky’s non-Marxist followers have been eclectic in using Vygotsky’s concepts. These eclectics have ignored, denied and distorted the Marxist system of Vygotsky’s concepts. See my article Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology Part II
II Marx’s Method For Analyzing Capitalism
Philosophy of internal relations
Marx had a special way of understanding socio-history that he learned from Hegel which Bertell Ollman described as the “philosophy of internal relations”. According to Ollman, the philosophy of external relations (in his The Dance of the Dialectic) reality is conceived of as being essentially static and change is only attended to when things bump into each other or into us with sufficient force to have an impact. What externalists take to be things, are from the internalist viewpoint, processes and relations. For externalists, while the whole may be comprised of parts, it is nothing more than the sum of their parts. Internalist contend that:
- reality is change and stasis is derivative (processes rather than things)
- not only are the wholes more than the sum of their parts
- whole is found in the parts
Marx’s internalist orientation allowed him to uncover the details of the multiple internal relations between capital, labor, value, credit, interest, rent, money and wages as part of a web of dialectical relations.
Marx’s methodology
According to Ollman, Marx’s methodology encompasses six components
- a commitment to a materialist ontology
- an epistemology comprised of several subcomponents
- perception (sensory output, mental and emotional activity)
- abstraction
- conceptualization of what is abstracted into new or redefined concepts (surplus value, labor power, commodity, credit)
- an orientation that socio-historical context must be part of all explanations
- the laws of dialectics operating in capitalist society via the concepts uncovered as a result of abstraction and analyzed through the study of history both backwards and forwards
- the intellectual reconstruction of what is uncovered through inquiry, where the results of the analysis are unified for the understanding of the researcher in notebooks (as found in Marx’s Grundrisse)
- the exposition of the results of the analysis for others to comprehend ( in Marx’s Capital)
- praxis, which unites theory to political practice, which feed backs to a political theory for understanding reality more deeply
When Marx turns to psychology, his starting point for understanding consciousness is the world itself. Humans engage this reality through human species activity, labor and verbal language which is socially created. Consciousness is a product of social labor on one hand and verbal language on the other. Consciousness can exist before and without labor and verbal language.
Marx’s use of the germ cell
Ratner informs us It wasn’t until microscopes became powerful enough to reveal the microstructure of organisms that Schleiden and Schwann were able to formulate a cell theory of biology in 1839. According to Andy Blunden, Goethe sought to utilize this idea in his study of botany. He insisted on proceeding from the whole (the cell) to the parts. Just as every part is connected to a whole, the whole is in every part of the cell. As Goethe proposed, the foundation for the understanding of a complex whole such as an organism is the discovery of its’ cell form. Furthermore, this whole is a concrete unity. Principals are not something behind appearances but are contained within appearances. This is different from an abstract unity built from a common ancestor, built into a general category. For Hegel the earthly figure of Napoleon was a concrete unity of the spirit of history. For Marx the concrete unity of the commodity is the cell of capitalism
Commodities for Marx is the cell of a capitalist society
Marx searches for the cell of capitalist society when he writes Capital. He found it in the production of commodities. These commodities produce a conflict between use value and exchange value. He then unfolds from an analysis of these contradictions within this single cell the entire process of capitalist society from its private property to its evolution, from industrial to finance capital, its concentration of capital to its globalization process to its terminal crisis.
III Vygotsky’s Method
Vygotsky wants to write his own Capital
Vygotsky thought it was fundamental to submit the founding categories of traditional psychology to the same methodological processes Marx used in the study of the category of political economy. Regarding this movement in relation to psychology, Vygotsky says he wants to write its own Capital. What does this mean? For Vygotsky psychology must aim to study the complex unit of a cell, like Marx. We must not begin by searching for the most fundamental atomic building blocks like sensations, perceptions, impressions like the empiricists do. Vygotsky called these “elements”. Instead, he wanted to find the cell for psychology.
So what is the cell for a Vygotskyan psychology that is equivalent to the relationship between commodity capitalism in economics? There are three levels down we have to go to discover that:
- in the most macro psychology we have verbal language
- at the mesocosm in the dialectic between thinking and speaking
- a microcosm in new word meaning
Dualism between mechanists and holists
Before Vygotsky, there had been a split in psychology between physiologists who approached the field as if psychology were a branch of the natural sciences and those who saw psychology as a branch of the human sciences having little to do with the body. In the 2oth century this split in psychology was demonstrated between behaviorists who denied the existence of consciousness and saw psychology in terms only of reflexes and conditioned responses. On the other hand, empirical psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt studied the mind by means of introspection. There were other holists like the Gestaltists who studied perceptual wholes with no roots in evolutionary biology. But the physiologists, behaviorists, the introspectionists and Gestaltists all had one thing in common. They accepted the separation between the subjective and the objective worlds. Vygotsky argued that the subject matter of psychology should be consciousness (or the mind). But the link between the human subject and social object in consciousness was through human practical activity theory in laboring.
Consciousness, tools, and signs
According to Vygotsky, reality cannot be grasped by human consciousness passively. It is by using the socio-cultural tools and signs given to us by previous generations in history that problems are solved. It is through solving these problems in collaboration with others that people become self-reflectively conscious. The root meaning of consciousness is, after all, “together knowledge”. To master and capture reality requires a system of mental processes which grow when humans are engaged in work. It is human work which acts as a mediator between human beings and nature. However, in order to work we have to talk each other. One of the great benefits of verbal language is that we can talk about the past and future. So in work we can pool our experience that we learned in our past practice and we can debate the future about how, what and where we work next. The most essential function of language is to enable us to work together. Charles Sanders Pierce further classified signs according to how they are connected to their object by index, icon or symbol.
Speaking and thinking
Vygotsky pointed out that speech develops in two directions:
- in its communication use
- in its self-reflective function
Vygotsky claimed that if he could understand the relation between thinking and speaking he could create a paradigm for all domains of psychology. He writes that thought and speech had different roots. There is pre-intellectual speech (babbling) and pre-verbal thought (utterances). Only with the mastery of verbal language does speech become cultural and thought become verbal. The mastering of verbal language creates an active dialectic between what you have to say and what you think.
An Example of the dialectic between thinking and speaking
When I was first teaching an Introduction to Psychology class I tried to think logically about how to present the order of the topics to my students. First, I think about the history of the field, then the difference in theoretical schools of psychology and lastly about research methods (how we know what we know). However, I learned that when I teach the subject (the speaking part) I would lose about one-third of the class if I taught the subjects in this order. I have to speak in teaching rhetorically. I start with what people I know students are spontaneously interested in. First, psychopathology, then personality theory. “Why are people crazy, especially my cousin Phyllis?” For personality theory, “how can I understand my fights with my boyfriend? We seem to have different personalities.” Only later on when people have their curiosity satisfied they might become interested in the history of the field, the theoretical schools and even research methods. As a result of teaching, I reorganized how I thought about teaching.
Word meaning as the unity between speech and thinking
In 1934 Vygotsky came to the conclusion that the central cultural artifact through which people appropriated the culture of the community was not just through tools, as Marx emphasized, but through the verbal language that was mastered. From him spoken word and its meaning was the cell of a unity of speech and thinking. However, we cannot talk about the meaning of the word taken separately. Word meaning is linked up to a sign system that involves the whole of verbal language.
Where is the word meaning? For Voloshinov, a Marxian philosopher of language, meaning does not reside in word, nor the psyche of the speaker nor in the psyche of the listener. Meaning occurs as the result of interaction between speaker and listener as they cooperate in working and planning. But this word meaning is relative not only in working, but cooperative learning at school and in playing. Below is a summary.
An example of a revolutionary changes in word meaning:
The cookie sale
Let’s return to our example of a father teaching his son how to bake cookies. In Vygotsky’s third stage of social learning we said that the dad needed to teach his son to think on a larger scale in order to prepare for the cookie sale during the block garage sale. Up to now, the son, Jules, only learned to bake cookies for his domestic household. In order to prepare for the cookie sale in the neighborhood the boy has to learn what a neighborhood means. Neighborhood is not an easy word to define. When the boy asks, the father may tell him the name of the neighborhood or he might show him a map of the major cross-streets of the neighborhood. Jules also has to consider that many more people may come by his cookie stand who he has not dealt with before. How many? “Well”, Antonio says “it depends on many things – weather conditions, like if it’s cold or warm, how well the garage sale is advertised and the quality of the stuff offered at the sale. The best we can do is think in terms of probability.” Since Jules is too young to understand the practical application of probability, Antonio will have to do the figuring.
The third issue involved Jules’ capacity to take perspective into account. Jules may have to learn what perspective means. He has to move beyond his egocentric preferences for his favorite cookies. Then Antonio may ask Jules how many other kinds of cookies there are besides the chocolate ones he likes that exist. Antonio encourages his son to make 4 other kinds of cookies besides chocolate. Jules will learn that even though he does not like those cookies, making cookies he doesn’t like will make him some money. He learns “perspective”. So “neighborhood”, “probability’ and “perspective” are new word meanings that are critical to expanding his cooperative learning skills.
An example of a revolutionary changes in word meaning:
The term rhetoric in teaching my classes
As I said earlier In my learning process as a teacher, I learned over the years what students liked and didn’t like in terms of subject matter through trial and error and I made my chronological adjustments accordingly. Little did I know that the secrets of how to persuade students to learn was a part of a much larger field that was 2000 years old. If someone would have told me there was a field called rhetoric, I would have shrugged my shoulders. The word meant nothing to me. In fact all my associations with rhetoric were negative. Rhetoric was:
- form without content
- bombast of a demagogue
- talk without action
But when I discovered the field of rhetoric through teaching a critical thinking class I discovered the deeper meaning of rhetoric. This new word, rhetoric, made me consciously apply principles that I was only groping for before. This one word was a key to understanding 2000 years of theorists from the Sophists to Aristotle, to Quintilian, Cicero, Sheridan, Campbell, Whately, Perelman, Toulmin, Burke, and Walton. This one word, rhetoric, when deeply understood opened up a new meaning for me as a teacher and improved my work. Keep in mind my learning of this new word was not just to satisfy a curiosity of mine. It not only deepened my thought process, but I discussed it in my critical thinking classes. I also used it in the practical critical activity of teaching in all my classes.
An example of a revolutionary change in word meaning:
The term “polyamorous” in radical psychiatry
When I first heard the world polyamorous discussed in Radical Psychiatry, I really didn’t understand it. I thought their rules about being non-monogamous as a kind of “socialist promiscuity” might be justified through anthropology by some Marxists. But as I got involved with a couple of women at the same time, I came up against both the facts of how liberating it was to satisfy lusts and how difficult it was to overcome jealousy. What the community was doing was the first stage of Vygotsky’s cooperative learning. The whole concept of Radical Psychiatry was in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. We were all struggling and some of us were doing better than others.
Our collective meetings also became therapy sessions for some members needing to process sexual engagement with unresolved conflicts while others offered support. It was a very deep experience to attempt to love someone even though I knew they were also dating someone else. I loved those women in a way that I loved no other woman I have dated with a monogamous agreement. However, the relationships were very unstable and it took a lot of emotional work and processing to keep them afloat. Nevertheless, the meaning of the new word polyamory used in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development took me and many others to new dialectical heights for however a short time it lasted.
I stuck with polyamory for about three months. I stopped because the time it was taking to process feelings of jealously became more work that I wanted to do. I didn’t drop out of the collective, but I stopped trying to have sexual relationships with the women in the collective. What I have since come to see is that sexual jealousy has deep roots in evolutionary psychology and those predispositions are not going away any time soon. What we were doing in Radical Psychiatry was a great experiment, but in order to overcome evolutionary psychology would take at least a generation of socialist support at regional or even national levels. It can’t easily be done successfully on a local level in a few months or even years. A new generation must be taught polyamory early in life in order for it to gain a foothold.
The relationship between Vygotsky’s three stages of learning and new word meanings
Earlier I said that there are three phases of cooperative learning: local interpersonal, internalization and global interpersonal. How do new word meanings fit within each of the stages as given in my three examples? In the example of the learning situation of cooking-making between Antonio or Jules, there was no new word meaning in the local interpersonal. That is because Antonio understood all the new word meanings of neighborhood, probability and perspective. The new word meaning was internalized by Jules through the process of making cookies at a larger scale for the garage sale. We don’t know how well he mastered the higher level social situation because I never addressed the results of the cookie sale.
In the case of my teaching, there was no new word meaning in the local interpersonal stage because I was just learning how to teach and unconsciously figuring it out by trial and error. However, as part of preparing for a course in critical thinking I internalized a new word “rhetoric” and its history. I didn’t really have a global interpersonal stage with the term rhetoric because I just applied what I had learned to deepen how I taught my existing classes. An example of global interpersonal would have been to have used my knowledge of rhetoric to give lectures at the Seattle Atheist church which I have done recently.
Lastly, in the case of Radical Psychiatry the new word meaning, polyamory, was present in the local interpersonal stage of learning because the entire community was attempting to develop new sexual relationships. The whole community was in the first stage of the zone of proximal development. As for internalization it was not realistic to expect anyone to have internalized the word polyamory so that they could practice it gracefully. There were too many Darwinian sexual selection habits to overcome. The same is true for moving polyamorous practices to larger scale communities. It will be the task of socialist societies in the 21st and 22nd centuries to address whether this is a visionary way to conduct socialist romances.
Conclusion
I began my article by discussing what a Marxist psychology looks like. First, I named the typical categories Marx used in his criticisms of capitalism and then I identified various subheadings of the field of psychology. I applied Vygotsky’s theory to areas of learning, social psychology, and sexuality. Specifically, my examples included cooperative learning in cookie-making, the use of rhetoric in teaching and my attempts to engage in polyamory as a member of a community of Radical Psychiatry in the early 1970s.
A big part of my article centers on the comparisons and parallels between Marx and Vygotsky’s methodology. An important key in investigating Marx’s method is to avoid eclecticism. Marxist psychology began in the Soviet Union with Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev and any attempt to improve it by the Western psychology must start with them, and not throw together an eclectic hodge-podge of psychoanalysis, the radical gender theory, constructionism or postmodernism. The second methodological starting point for Marx was to analyze capitalism by using a “cell” concept, which for Marx was the commodity. Vygotsky followed Marx, but wanted to find the “cell” for psychology which was rooted in:
- macro psychology in verbal language
- at the mesocosm in the dialectic between thinking and speaking
- a microcosm in word meaning
For Vygotsky:
- the word-meaning is a unit of analysis for the relation of thinking and intelligent speech
- thinking and speech together with work, play and school is the microcosm of consciousness
Lastly, I built a bridge between how these new word meanings interacted with Vygotsky’s three stages of learning: local interpersonal, internalization and global interpersonal. I applied how word meanings played out in my examples of cookie-making, teaching techniques and building a polyamorous community in Radical Psychiatry.
What’s missing within Russian Marxist psychology?
In his great book, Problems in the Development of Mind Vygotsky’s comrade Leontiev gave a wonderful example of how a Marxist theory of the mind’s relationship to reality would work in a hunting and gathering society. However, none of the Russian theorists painted a full-fledged picture of how Marxian psychology would apply to all psychological topics listed at the beginning of my article. Secondly, the theory did not contrast how it would work generally with individuals living in a capitalist society and generally how it would work on people living in a socialist society. In the case of the latter it is understandable given the political tensions existing in Russia with Stalin wanting to control the field of psychology. Can you imagine the reception of the state if any of these psychologists tried to make a dialectical critique of the Soviet Union as a socialist society? Lastly, socio-historical psychology must integrate its findings with evolutionary psychology. Socialists can no longer run screaming away from evolutionary psychology by claiming it is biological reductionism in order to continue to be scientifically relevant.
