Re: [xmca] Vygotsky, Marx, Hegel and History

Andy,

I can only agree with your comments. This paper is just a draft, and one
sign of this is the use of clumsy expressions about the relationships among
writers. I too want to avoid claims about what Marx or Vygotsky "really
thought," or what Vygotsky "ignored." Put a bit more clearly (perhaps; I
hope) what I am interested in attempting is an interpretation of Vygotsky's
texts for their relevance to our situation here and now. I'm not trying to
figure out his original intentions, or even place his work in its original
context (which I'll never know enough about). The point about class is that
we ought to pay attention to it, and in my view Vygostky's psychology shows
us a way to do so, even if he himself didn't, at least directly.

As for your point about returning to Hegel rather than turning to Bourdieu,
what I started to do in the paper, but haven't yet finished, was suggest
that rather than *adding* something to Vygotsky's analysis (whether that
something is Bernstein, Bahktin or Bourdieu) we should instead explore in
the direction that Vygotsky himself seems to have been moving at the end of
his life: towards a concrete psychology of specific kinds of persons in
specific situations. Would Hegel help in such an exploration? I think very
much so.

Martin

On 3/12/08 11:14 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> 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 Sun Mar 16 10:53 PDT 2008