Vygotsky's denial of Dewey (and of Feuerbach)
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In their article on the relation between Dewey's psychology and
Leontiev's Activity Theory, Charles Tolman and Brad Piekkola
(1989, Multidisciplinary Newsletter for AT, No 3/4) showed that
there is a clear break with Dewey in the Soviet Union after 1931.
In 1931 he was still described as "an outstanding American philosopher,
psychologist, sociologist, and pedagogue" (Great Soviet Encyclopedia),
afterwards as a "reactionary bourgeois philosopher and sociologist"
(1952 edition) or even as "henchman of contemporary imperialist
reaction".

Tolman and Piekkola also judged that Dewey's engagement against the
growing Stalinist terror, later his chairmanship of the Trotsky Enquiry
in Mexico in 1938 was one of the most important factors in this change,
a facet of the general rupture in the mutual relations of the American
Left to Soviet Russia in the Thirties.

Thus, Vygotsky's denial of any deeper similarity of his own and Dewey's
use of the term "instrumental" might reflect the ukas of the
Central Committee of the CPSU (B) in January 1931 concerning the
philosopher Deborin (editor of "Pod snamen Marksima") and all "like
him". Among these surely were Dewey and other "foreign ideologists",
but also the Russians Plechanov, and especially Bogdanov whom Lenin had
already put into a ban in 1908 (in "Materialism and Empiriocriticism").

This means, Mike, that Vygotsky might have been writing slave's talk, as
Antonio Gramsci called his own style of writing in disguise so that his
jailors/censors might not suspect the real content or intent.

For those who read German there is a wealth of evidence for this thesis
in Peter Keiler's 1991 article "Gegenstaendlichkeit, Sozialitaet,
Historizitaet -- Attempt at a reconstruction of the Feuerbach-
Vygotsky-line in psychology" (Forum Kritische Psychologie 27, pp
89-168). Even if the special case of the Dewey denial should turn out to
be a genuine distinction that Vygotsky wanted to make, there is the more
general case of denial of Feuerbach which Peter has established by a
painstaking analysis of the temporal sequence of Vygotsky's texts: In
the later texts, especially in "Thinking and Speech", some arguments,
based on Feuerbach in earlier text of the late Twenties, now appear with
references to more acceptable authors and without mentioning Feuerbach
or Bogdanov. This is understandable as a reaction to Bogdanov's ousting
and the subsequent wave of dictatorship in science, oppression of
opponents, and so on in this state-terroristic constricting cycle.

Peter Keiler also shows that Lenin had read Bogdanov (who explicitly
built on Feuerbach like Lenin) not as expanding Feuerbach and Marx
when stressing "the social organisation of knowledge" (might as well
be a phrase of Dewey), but as smuggling "idealist Machist philosophy"
into materialism.

Consider this short piece of Lenin (my translation from German
translation) from the work mentioned above:

Bogdanov believes the talk of social organization of experience to be
"epistemological socialism" (Book III, p xxxiv). This is sheer madness.
If one approaches socialism in this way, then the Jesuits are ardent
followers of "epistemological socialism"; since the starting point of
their epistemology is the Deity as "socially-organized experience".
And doubtless, catholicism is a socially organized experience; only
it is not reflecting objective truth (which is denied by Bogdanov,
and is reflected by science), but reflects the exploitation of the
ignorance of people by certain classes of society (ch. iv, section 5,
LW 14:228)

Shep White has sent a brillant and most interesting note on the links of
Dewey to Hegel. In parallel and partly in response I wrote the following
paragraphs of a book chapter, which might also serve to clear up Mike
Cole's original question:

***************

There is another thread of working with Hegel's ideas, however, that
needs to be explained to an international, mostly anglophile readership.
This is the path of the Left Hegelians in Germany and Russia, where
the most important names for me are those weaved into the following
short story with a sad ending.

Ludwig Feuerbach criticized Religion and explained the idea of God as
the communal essence transferred and distanced in the heavens
("verhimmeltes Gemeinwesen"). The solipsist and anarchistic turn of "Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum" by Max Stirner was countered with great
force of argument by the young duo of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in
their writings from Brussels. They showed that there is a multiplicity
of social minds, held together by common ecological, economical or
political interests. Sociologists have turned most of this into present
day science. But Marx and Engels proceeded to charter the Communist
movement with the 1848 Manifesto, believing that it is humanly possible
to learn from the French Revolution in order to redo it, this time
really for the good of mankind. They thought of and planned for a
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which they saw as one of the most
powerful historical subjects in the making at their times. Socialist
parties sprung up who discussed these and other related ideas. They made
a big impact by strengthening reformist and liberal counterforces with
different institutional results in the industrialized nations. Then
there was Wladimir Ilyitsh Lenin in Switzerland, studying Hegel after
having read through most of the Socialist literature. He invented the
political theory and strategy Q wrongly called Bolshevism, i.e. ideas
of the majority Q of the "democratic centralism of the political
avantgarde party". After the October Revolution the social technology of
feudal and oppressive rulership within Russia at the turn of our
century was subsequentially used in more and more totalitarian ways, in
a sinister competition with Nazism (Dutschke 1977). Today even a
majority of former German Stalinists see clearly how very wrong and
cruel the political practice following these ideas really was.

The Hegelian idea of totality was very hierarchic, a creature or spirit
developing itself through an unending sequence of the triad of Hegel's
dialectics (position, negation, overarching generalization of position,
cf. Kesselring 1984). The Leninist idea of the "party of the new type"
was a very direct and linear transformation of this idea into social
technology, designed for dominance of societal development. Coupled with
centralized planning economies, this type of social science experiment
now is finally proven unable to realize the democratic and welfare
hopes of its inventors -- not in competition with market economies and
liberal democracies.

*****************

I am not sure that this helps with the original question.
But there certainly is a need to understand the respective period in
Vygotsky's life and thinking from as many perspectives as possible.