CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE

LEONTYEV’S ACTIVITY THEORY AND MARX’S POLITICAL ECONOMY

The socialist worker . . . is now working not for exploiters but for himself, for his class, for society. (Leontyev 1947) Without ever having had the opportunity to observe life in the capi- talist world, plenty of opportunity to observe life in the USSR but no opportunity to honestly talk about it, let alone study it scientifically, Leontyev should not be blamed for the quality of his social analysis. But given that Leontyev was addressing real problems in Vygotsky’s theory, we cannot walk away from the problems in his solution. The great strength of the Activity Theory approach is the understanding that the structure of Activity and the structure of the psyche are in essence identical. So the psychological implications of the various broad types of social formation , such as tribal life, feudal society, degenerated workers’ state, late capitalism, etc., do need to be addressed. But this should not and need not be approached by means of mythological tales and utopian speculations. Leontyev’s analysis of capitalism is a selection of quotes from “Capital” inserted into a fairy tale about cultural evolution from ani- mal life through primitive communism and capitalism to socialism. The psychology of the epoch between Arcadian and Utopian commu- nism is that actions lose their real meaning, which is the objective motive of the activity, being supplanted by the personal meaning of the action for the individual. In capitalism, the meaning of his labor for a worker is wages , whilst for the capitalist it is profit. [The worker’s] conditions of life, however, are such that he does not spin to satisfy a social need for yarn, does not weave to meet a social need for cloth, but for wages; that also imparts sense to weaving for him, and to the yarn and cloth produced by him. . . . The foreignness of meanings to the sense behind them also comes out of course at the opposite pole of society. For the capitalist, for instance, the whole sense of spinning and weaving consists in the profit he will make from them, i.e. in a thing devoid both of the properties of the output of production in itself and of its objective meaning. (Leontyev 2009: 226–7) 218 chapter twenty-three whereas under socialism: The socialist worker, just like the worker in a capitalist undertaking, is occupied in weaving, spinning, etc., but for him this work has the sense precisely of weaving, spinning, etc. Its motive and its objective product are not now foreign to each other for him, because he is now working not for exploiters but for himself, for his class, for society. . . . The socialist worker receives wages for his work, so that his work also has the sense of earnings for him, but the pay is only a means for him to realize some of the output of social production for his personal con- sumption. This change in the sense of labor is engendered by its new motives. (Leontyev 2009: 237–8) So the objective meaning of production is providing for the needs of the society, and in Arcadian or Utopian communism, this is present in the mind of the producer and is manifested in the harmonization of sense and meaning, but in capitalism sense and meaning are alien to one another, a contradiction which is manifested in a kind of pathol- ogy. The core idea here makes abundant sense, but its use without a realistic sense of social life in any epoch undermines its value. All that is required here is to detach this key idea from the Stalinist fairy tale. Meaning and sense differ, just as activity and action differ, and may be in contradiction with one another. The contradiction arises from power relations. The social relations through which the actions are controlled means that people can be conscripted into projects for purely external motivations, and even the technical details of their labor can be under the control of another. These are phenomena which can be studied here and now, amongst real individuals, their real activity and the real material conditions under which they live.

The Object of Labor under Capital

Leontyev claims that the objective meaning of labor is the provision for the needs of “society.” Marx did not see it that way, and rejected altogether the idea of “society” as a subject distinct from its ruling elite: “the fiction of the person, Society” (1976: 153). Consider for example this excerpt from “Capital” : Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value . The laborer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That laborer alone