Historical-Materialist Psychology: Learning From Vygotsky

Carl Ratner presents a new edition of this six-week series, in which we seek to solve the riddle Marx posed in his first thesis on Feuerbach: “in contradistinction to materialism, the active side [the subjective side of human behavior] was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” Exploring a materialist theory of subjectivity which does know sensuous activity, we will see how historical materialism can be extended to reveal how it is compatible with psychology and how human psychology is itself a historical-materialist phenomenon.

The most sophisticated approach to historical-materialist culture was developed by the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), who formulated a “cultural-historical psychological theory.” This was a comprehensive psychological theory that encompassed child development, adolescence, cognition, perception, personality/self. Read more…

Carl Ratner went through college and graduate school in the 1960s. He was a professor of social psychology in the California State University system for 31 years. He adopted Vygotsky’s work when it was first translated in the 1980s, writing extensively on Vygotsky and authoring the Preface to vol. 5 of his Collected Works. Ratner was one of the few followers of Vygotsky who emphasized his Marxist orientation and developed it. Ratner is the author of Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, 2012); his most recent book is Cultural Psychology, Racism, and Social Justice (Springer, 2022). Carl has been active in the cooperative movement and served on the board of directors of California’s largest food coop in the 1970s and 80s. He lived in China from 1981-1983 and taught the first course on social psychology in Peking University since it had been banned after the Revolution.