[xmca] Vygotsky, Marx, Hegel and History

Martin,
I at last found time to read
<http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/Pubs/Packer 06 problems.pdf>

Again, great work! Fundamentally, I completely agree with you, and your
paper has given me a number of ideas that will help me in my future
work. Thank you again.

I hate getting into arguments about how much Marx can be blamed for how he
is read and "what Marx really thought". I think we share an affection for
Marx (and Hegel in my case) that dissuades us from explaining history in
terms of theoretical errors by great people in the past. So I will simply
not enter into that discussion.

--------------------------------------

But surely in criticising theorists (and it is Vygotsky's psychology we are
concerned with) we turn principally to the social and cultural conditions
in which they worked (the conditions of the USSR, its ruling culture and so
on) and mediately the theoretical resources they had available through the
reception of earlier writers in those social conditions? So the issue is
the cultural environment which produced a certain kind of Marx and a
certain kind of Hegel and at the same time a certain kind of Vygotsky, so
to speak.

Conversely, for us reading Vygotsky in the US or Australia, in the
post-USSR era, we read a certain kind of Marx ( See http://marxmyths.org ),
a certain kind of Hegel and as you point out, we see Vygotsky in a new
light and we also see the issue of cultural difference and class
differently. Our social and cultural conditions have produced this critical
perspective. How? That is the question. Not just what "blinded" Vygotsky,
where did our insight come from?

So I heartily agree that it was conditions in the USSR in the wake of the
October Revolution and the ruling conceptions of those years that
conditions the view of the world through a lens in which cultural and class
difference was seen as historical progress alone, and therefore basically
ignored. I don't think you can say it 'came from Marx' any more than the
"workers state" or "classless society" 'came from Marx'. These conceptions
had their roots in the entirety of culture and were reflected in a specific
way in Marx as well as Plekhanov, etc.

So I think the standpoint for weighing this problem is primarily conditions
in the USSR as well as the history of the development of Marxism in Russia
up to then, on one side, and ...

On the other side, the social movements that swept through the US, and the
rest of the capitalist world in the 1950s, 60s and 70s completely changed
the psychology of us in the west. The insights we have into
cultural-blindness is the very specific product of these social movement.
These movements did not happen in the USSR, for all intents and purposes.

(Relevant to that I am very interested in the huge fight of Eleanor Marx,
Dora Montefiore and others against Belfort Bax and others over the woman
question amongst Marxists in Britain around the turn of the century. There
were also fights over whether imperialism was a good thing for the
colonies. In the decades of the 2nd International, Marxists were the
leaders of the women's movement, and were up to the Suffragettes. The
parting of ways, so far as I can see, comes after the Soviets became
leaders of the world Communist Movement. Though I stand to be corrected
here, as I have not really researched the question.)

--------------------------------------

A separate question.

I think that because there has been no serious Hegel scholarship by people
with a knowledge of Vygotskyan psychology, Hegel's concept of Subjective
Spirit as opposed to Objective Spirit is usually interpreted in the spirit
of Cartesian dualism, as if what was being referred to was an inner world
of mental states, which was of course, the very thing that Hegel was
working against. If on the contrary we see Subjective Spirit in contrast to
Objective Spirit in terms of those relations in which an individual
participates on a person-to-person basis, mediated by bodies, children,
words, material labour processes, family relations, natural division of
labour and so on (note that language itself is part of Subjective Spirit),
as opposed to the domain of Right, mediated by law, science, politics,
literature, art, religion, philosophy, then we have a very adequate
approach to the psychology of class, cultural difference, gender politics
and so on. I like Bourdieu, and I interpret his notion of habitus in the
same way, but Hegel's original idea is worth looking at because of its
place in our intellectual history.

Andy

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Received on Wed Mar 12 21:17 PDT 2008