In this six-week series, 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.
To bridge political economy and psychology, we will employ the mediating concept of culture (i.e., cultural systems). Culture is central to historical materialism (as in “social forms of production,” “social forms of labor,” “social forms of property”) and to psychology (as elucidated by cultural psychologists). As emphasized by Wendy Brown in her Foreword to the Reitter-North translation of Capital I, “Marx developed an understanding of political economy as the distinctive mode through which we build entire worlds through our singular cooperative powers—transforming nature, elaborating divisions of labor and organizations of ownership, producing wealth, creating ways of life, institutions, social forms, subjects, and subjectivities”—as well as families, race and gender orders, and relations with “nature.” We shall ground human psychology in this conception of (political-economic) culture in order to explicate its historical-materialist character.
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. Vygotsky was a dedicated academic Marxist who was active in efforts during the revolutionary period to develop socialist cultural institutions and social sciences. Vygotsky said, “We must learn from Marx’s whole method how to build a science, how to approach the investigation of the mind.”
We will explore how cultural-historical-political formations stimulate and organize human psychology. This makes psychology a window into culture and politics, and an element in reforming them.
We shall examine contemporary psychological examples of this dynamic. We shall study hook-up sex and also racism.
We shall also discuss analyses of psychology which do not employ a historical-materialist psychological approach, in order to expose deficiencies in these psychological analyses.