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Vygotsky and Marxism 10 Vygotsky and Marxism Danling Fu There has been great interest in Vygotsky and in how his mathematical formula or recipe which guided him rigidly in views affect the understanding of learning and teaching since his psychological analysis. Instead, he digested it, in his word, the early 80's in the United States. Today, this interest con- "internalized" it and transformed it into his own principle tinues to grow and Vygotsky's views continue to affect the which dominated his way of thinking and directed his study improvement and reform of contemporary education in the of human psychological development. As he said "I don't United States. New interest in his theories has been sparked want to discover the nature of mind by patching together a too in Russia after his work has been decreed as reactionary lot of quotations. I want to find out how science has to be bourgeois pseudoscience for sixty years. Also after Vygotsky built, to approach the study of the mind having learned the has been labeled as an anti-Marxist bourgeois psychologist whole of Marx's method" (Mind in Society, p. 8). Vygotsky's for decades in his country, he is recognized as a devout Marx- thinking and approach are Marxist, as claimed by Wertsch, ist. Russian Vygotskian expert, Toulmin (1981) wrote: "in more subtle but no less fundamental ways," and his debt to Marx "runs deeper than is commonly recognized" (1985, Vygotsky was happy to call himself a Marxist. The historical- p. 5). materialist approach ensured the success of his scientific To cut off Vygotsky from Marx is to look at him frag- investigations; this was the philosophy that armed him, gave mentally and to separate his work from its theoretical basis. him the basis for integrating the sciences of developmental The very act is anti-dialectical materialism, the fundamental psychology, clinical neurology, cultural anthropology, the psychology of art. That is what we, psychologists of the West, principle guiding Vygotsky's research and shaping his must now study seriously, (p. 79) analysis. A discussion of Vygotsky in the context of Marxism will help us reach an understanding of the theoretic frame- However, he is rarely connected with Marxism in the work of Vygotsky's thinking. This understanding will lead us United States, as Benjamin Lee stated, "American research- to a more profound interpretation of Vygotsky's theory and ers have focused on his work on language and thought and approach. Hopefully this discussion will also help readers neglected his Marxist and functionalist side" (1985, p. 66), understand Marxist theory and methodology in some way. In even though his theory on individual consciousness develop- this article, based on two of Vygotsky's most known works ment and his social and cultural constructivist approach are among American educators: Thought and Language and Mind well received by American educators. This neglect may in Society (they are referred as Thought and Mind in the text), reveal a deliberate disconnection of Vygotsky from Marxism I will examine how Vygotsky applied Marxist principles to among American scholars because most people in the United his study of human psychological development and present States associate Marxism either with Communism or the in what way he was a Marxist. In doing so, first of all, we concept of class struggle, a concept rather threatening to many have to review Marxist principles. Americans. Also, on the surface, Vygotsky's work on the development of individual mind was hardly recognized Dialectical Materialism indebted to Marxist theory as, according to Haldane (1969), "Marxism has extremely little positive to say about the The most fundamental doctrine of Marxist philosophy is individual mind. It is concerned mainly with the social dialectical materialism, concerned with "the most general laws relationships of the individual and the general materialistic of change and development in nature, society and thought" point of view" (p. 157). As a result, in his own country, only (Jozef, 1981, p. 147). It is "materialism," because dialectical until recently, Vygotsky had been seen as a target of Soviet materialism postulates that matter or material reality is Marxists. primary and its mental reflection is secondary or derivative. Vygotsky was a Marxist, though the content of his study Marx wrote, in the Preface to the second edition of Capital is remote from the content of Marx' and Engels' studies. The (translated, 1967) that "the ideal is nothing else than the ma- former studied the internal structure of human mind; the terial world reflected by the human mind and translated into latter focused on the external structure of the human society. forms of thought" (p. 253). Marxism, to Vygotsky, was not simply a weapon of ideology, Dialectical materialism sees things in relations, analyzes as it was to many mechanic Marxists, but a theory, or a scien- them and then reintegrates them into total movement. tific approach. He did not treat the Marxist methodology as a Education and Culture Spring, 1997 Vol. XIV No. 1 VYGOTSKY AND MARXISM 11 Bukharin (translation, 1961) states in his discussion on Problems and the Approach" in Thought and Language and dialectical materialism: "Problems of Method" in Mind in Society, Vygotsky clearly revealed himself as a dialectical materialist in his search for The world being in constant motion, we must consider new methods of psycho-experimentation and analysis, which phenomena in their mutual relations, and not as isolated he believed was "one of the most important problems of the cases. All portions of the universe are actually related to entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms each other and exert an influence on each other. The of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simulta- slightest motion, the slightest alteration in one place, neously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of simultaneously changes everything else. The change may the study" {Mind, p. 65). In criticizing the current methods of be great or small—that is another matter—at any rate, stimulus-response, which, he believed, analyze stable and there is a change, (p. 269) fixed objects, he advocated that psychological analysis of objects should be contrasted with the analysis of processes, Dialectical materialism asserts that matter is in a process of which requires a dynamic display of the main points making constant moving and changing, so are its reflected mind, up the processes' history. He believed that "Any psychologi- thought and consciousness. In the first place, the dialectic cal process, whether the development of thought or method of interpretation demands that all phenomena be voluntary behavior, is a process undergoing changes right considered in their indissoluble relations: in the second place, before one's eyes" {Mind, p. 61). Therefore he declared that that they be considered in their state of motion. Dialectical "we need to concentrate not on the product of development materialism as applied to human history is called historical but on the very process by which higher forms are materialism, which is interested in development of the established" {Mind, p. 64) as he thought that the only way to process of BECOMING but not in the object of BEING, and study the highest stages in the development of attention is to especially concerned with the original sources of the devel- understand it in all its idiosyncrasies and differences. In short, opment, as Marx declares in his Capital (translated, 1967) we need to understand its origin. that "The object of our method of inquiry is to take posses- In the end of the chapter "Problems of Method," Vygotsky sion of matter in its detail, to analyze its various forms of summarized his discussion by identifying three kinds of analy- development and to discover its inner law" (p. 56). ses which he believed are materialist dialectical approaches: The materialist dialect is an analysis of the movement of process analysis, analysis that reveals real, causal or dynamic this content, and a reconstruction of the total movement. It is relations, and developmental analysis that returns to the source a method of analysis for each degree and for each concrete and reconstructs all the points in the development of a given totality - for each original historical situation. At the same structure. From these three approaches of analysis, we can time it is a synthetic method that sets itself the task of see he focused his attention on changing and believed that comprehending the total movement. It does not lead to the relationship between elements is the inner law which axioms, constancies or permanencies, or to mere analogies, causes the changing, and was interested in the history of the but to laws of development. development from its source to the possible future. Unlike many of his colleagues, he refused to establish Marxist Vygotsky's Marxist Methodology Of Research psychology. In his discussion about the problems of methods, he declared that "the dialectical method is quite different in biology, history and psychology, and therefore, Vygotsky affirmed that "To study something historically there are no Marxist magic formulas for solving the prob- means to study it in the process of change; that is the dialec- lems of psychology." He emphasized that "[I]mmediate tical method's basic demand"(A/md, p. 65). To understand application of the theory of dialectical materialism to the Vygotsky's analysis, first of all, we have to understand how problems of science, and particularly to biology and psychol- he approached his study. He constantly saw things in ogy, is impossible, as it is impossible to apply it instantly to relationships and showed great interest in the essence of the history and sociology." He strongly opposed "the method of relations and their complex dynamic natures.
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