This workshop seeks to interject historical materialism into the field of Psychology. It seeks to explain how historical-materialism can inform Psychological theory (Psychology with a large P) to generate important insights about cultural and political aspects about psychological phenomena (psychology with a small p). Conversely, we apply psychological phenomena to refine historical materialism in ways that advance its sensitivity to them and its conceptualization of them.
We shall utilize the work of Soviet Marxist psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) to pursue this dual refinement.
We shall then apply this Psychology to analyzing contemporary psychological phenomena to elucidate its value.
Our workshop will be organized into 3 sections, lasting 2 weeks each:
Section One: Historical Materialism
Section Two: Vygotsky’s Cultural-Historical Psychology
Section Three: Applying this Historical-Materialist Psychology to analyzing
1) Racism, 2) Hook-up Sex
Historical-materialist Psychology is the only psychological perspective that advances the historical-materialist, political analysis of capitalism. We take the historical-materialist political theory and apply it to psychology and Psychology, to reveal their social features, and to reveal society through psychological forms. No other Psychological theory is capable of this “bridging function.” No other Psychological theory is capable of addressing the question of socialist society and socialist consciousness/psychology.
We shall briefly discuss social analyses of psychology which do not employ a historical-materialist psychological approach, in order to expose deficiencies in their social-psychological analyses.
This workshop seeks to solve the riddle which Marx posed in his first thesis on Feuerbach: “in contradistinction to materialism, the active side [i.e., the subjective side of human behavior] was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.” Marx is calling for a materialist theory of subjectivity which knows sensuous activity, rooted in material conditions. This workshop/reading group will answer Marx’s call. This theory has not been worked out. There is no standard textbook that articulates it. There are many useful observations about it, but nothing more. We must therefore engage in theory building in order to develop a materialist theory of activity/subjectivity. We will not re-invent the wheel; we will invent the wheel.
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, “Marx developed an understanding of political economy as the distinctive mode through which we build … divisions of labor and organizations of ownership, … wealth,… ways of life, institutions, social forms, subjects, and subjectivities,… families, and race and gender orders; 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 and viable approach to historical-materialist Psychology has been developed by the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), who formulated “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 shall examine contemporary psychological examples of historical-materialist Psychology. We shall study hook-up sex and also racism.
Historical-Materialist Psychology is a challenging undertaking. It requires a huge change in conceptualizing psychology as based in political economy. It also requires modifying the conventional conception of political economy so that it is compatible with psychology. Say we wish to relate political economy to the psychology of romantic love. Romantic love involves deep passion for lover, often dizzy, lots of physiological activity, feeling of oneness w. partner, an unbreakable bond, deep love for all kinds of idiosyncratic traits, desire to do anything to help partner; feel destitute if lose partner. How do these relate to political economy? How do they relate to capital exploiting the wage laborer? Or the practices of private equity and financialization? When political-economy is presented in these terms, there is no relation to romantic love. That is why most Marxists turn to psychoanalysis. They abandon political economy as explanatory. Look for non-pol-eco explanation of love, in libido.
Establishing a relationship with political economy requires modifying political economy to provide contact points with romantic love and modifying romantic love to provide contact points with political economy. These contact points are “hybrid” in the sense that they comprise political-economic elements which are also psychological, and psychological elements which are also political-economic. Each reaches into the other. So, romantic love does not only “relate to” political economy; it actually consists of (contains) elements which are political-economic, are forms of political economy, are emergents of political economy. Reciprocally, political economy consists of (contains) elements which are found in romantic love, are forms of romantic love. We say the two are internally related. This is not a matter of juxtaposing political-economic forms in proximity with psychological forms, and elucidating their complementarity. It is a matter of transforming or transcribing psychological forms into political-economic forms and vice versa. Each form must be elucidated as internal to the other, as being a variant of the other, an emergent from the other that embodies the other and extends it into the other. This requires elements of each existing within the other, so that they are internally related. This requires reconceptualizing each in terms of its other. This is synthesizing the two. It means reconceptualizing personal, romantic, private, aspects of romantic love as existing within private property that is personally held and exclusively controlled by an individual for his/her satisfaction. This is the hybridization of love and property. This is a new way of conceptualizing love and property. Love contains features of property; and property is an object of love that contains features of love. It is loved for its richness, power, ownership, and freedom.
I believe that Marxist Psychology is an internal critique (self-critique) of Historical-Materialism. It examines the extent to which historical-materialism successfully explains, describes, and predicts psychological phenomena. It suggests modifications in historical-materialism that expand it to explain and describe and improve psychological phenomena in ways that are congruent with the science and politics of historical-materialism while adding to them.
To do so, we turn to the field of cultural psychology (which is my specialty) to explain how cultural forms stimulate and organize human psychology. We focus on the work of the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), who formulated a “cultural-historical psychological theory.” Vygotsky was a dedicated Marxist who was active in the revolutionary period to develop socialist cultural institutions and social sciences. (He served on certain committees with Lenin’s wife.) 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 read one of his short books (“Studies of The History of Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child”) to learn his comprehensive Marxist approach to psychological science. He is one of the very few scholars who was trained in psychology and was a serious Marxist. He was uniquely qualified to develop a historical-materialist, comprehensive, coherent psychological theory that spoke the language of both. His theory encompasses the breadth of mainstream psychological topics, such as child development, emotions, socialization, consciousness, psychopathology (defectology), thought and speech, and brain localization of psychological functions. (Vygotsky’s closest colleague and friend, Luria — both Jewish — established an intellectual and personal friendship with Jean Piaget after the two had met in a conference in 1929. They met again in Moscow in 1955 and 1966. Piaget facilitated the spread of Vygotsky’s ideas by writing an introduction to the translation of his main work.) Vygotsky advanced the disciplines of Psychology and Marxism.
Vygotsky worked in Psychology during the revolutionary early period of the Russian Revolution when Marxism was a vibrant, influential intellectual current in the country. He was the leading Marxist within the rubric of Russian/Soviet Psychology, as well as being the leading psychologist in his country. Since nobody else has ever possessed that auspicious package of qualifications, he qualifies as the most important spokesperson for historical-materialist Psychology in the history of Psychology and the history of Marxism. Vygotsky stated the essential principle of historical-materialist Psychology as follows: “Once we acknowledge the historical character of verbal thought, we must consider it subject to all the premises of historical materialism, which are valid for any historical phenomenon in human society. It is only to be expected that on this level the development of behavior will be governed essentially by the general laws of the historical development of human society.” “In order to create [historical-materialist Psychology] we must reveal the essence of the given area of [psychological] phenomena, the laws of their change, their qualitative and quantitative characteristics, their causality; we must create categories and concepts appropriate to it, in short, we must create our own Das Kapital … its own concepts of class, basis, value, etc. — in which it might express, describe, and study its object.” Here, Vygotsky urges creating a distinctive, fine-grained, apparatus/infrastructure/architecture of Marxist psychology that is analogous to Marx’s concepts of class, value, etc., but possesses its own constructs and categories.
Vygotsky’s cultural-historical Psychology draws upon sub-disciplines in social science that are known as Cultural Psychology, Psychological Anthropology, Sociology of Emotions, History of Emotions, and Social Medicine. All of these fields have developed empirical studies and theories of mind which elucidate cultural features of psychological phenomena. They are radical advances over biological theories of psychology. They are avenues for linking psychological phenomena to Marxism. They have contributed a granular analysis of psychology’s cultural elements and processes and organization. These insights are readily subsumed within historical-materialist culture theory, which contributes a concrete historical-political context to them that enriches their psychological details. The resulting integration is Marxist Psychology.
Vygotsky had a masterful grasp of the academic field of Psychology (which few Marxists possess), as well as Marxism (which few psychologists have) that was enriched by the experience of participating in the Marxist-oriented Russian Revolution. This experience enabled Vygotsky to produce highly original work on the historical-materialist composition of psychological phenomena. This has never been duplicated, and requires a vibrant, Marxist, social-political-intellectual movement.
We shall supplement Vygotsky’s achievements with contributions from other Marxists — such as Lukacs and Marcuse. These were not comprehensive theories, but they were insightful and creative Marxist observations on psychology.
The Frankfurt School of Critical Philosophy espoused Historical-Materialist Psychology. Indeed, one of its goals was to formulate a Marxist social psychology. Eric Fromm was in charge of this. We shall read Marcuse’s deep analysis of historical-materialist psychology, entitled “Contributions to A Phenomenology of Historical-Materialism” (1928).
Max Horkheimer (the leader of the Frankfurt School after 1930), studied psychology at Frankfurt University in 1919. He and Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Eric Fromm developed the historical-materialist conception of social concepts that we shall include in our methodology for Historical-Materialist Psychology. I have enumerated some of Horkheimer’s comments at the end of this introduction to the workshop.
We shall construct a theory of Psychology from the principles and concepts of historical-materialism. This is a radical “Copernican shift” in understanding human psychology. It is as radical as Marx’s critique of political economy was, and as difficult to produce and use.
This conceptual and perceptual transformation in a field of knowledge was explained by Foucault in The Birth of The Clinic — interestingly subtitled An Archaeology of Medical Perception. He said that a physician in the nineteenth century would not perceive the same object as his eighteenth-century counterpart when viewing the same corpse. The intervening epistemic break had rendered the previous one invisible and made a new one visible. This displacement was partly fueled by linguistic changes which link the perceptible and thinkable with the “sayable” (le dicible). Historical-materialist Psychology engages in this same process to describe and perceive human psychology anew.
Our workshop shall explain how cultural aspects of historical-materialism bridge political-economics and psychology. We shall review Marx’s concept of “social forms” which include cultural — and psychological — properties of social systems.
We will also examine examples of attempts by Marxists to engage with psychology and subjectivity by utilizing conventional psychological constructs rather than Vygotskyian constructs. These include psychoanalysis (broadly speaking) and mainstream, academic notions. We will briefly discuss the differences and inadequacies of these compared to historical-materialist Psychology and cultural-historical Psychology.
We will then utilize our refined, historical-materialist understanding of human psychology to examine contemporary cultural-psychological issues. These include racism and hook-up sex.
Our workshop shall include a discussion of Forms of Consciousness. We will utilize Historical-materialist Psychology to understand the unconscious, false consciousness, and class consciousness. We shall address the issue of human psychology that appears to contradict social conditions — e.g., people voting against their true interests, or following political or religious doctrines which contradict social reality. We shall see that there are historical-materialist reasons for these. One of them is the presence of social-political ideologies which are actively cultivated by social leaders. Another is the mystified character of social life itself in class societies. Marx explained how the individualism of private property tends to obscure complex social processes that underlie individual choices. He explained that commodities are mystified and fetishized.
Historical-materialist Psychology helps social movements to address psychological aspects of political, economic, health, educational, familial, racial, and gender issues in ways that promote Marxian philosophical and political solutions. Many political mistakes are generated by misunderstanding the reasons for these psychological aspects. We shall explain this with regard to psychological racism and also hook-up ses.
Throughout this workshop I will try to highlight the sense, the meaning, the spirit (Geist) of historical-materialist Psychology; what it is all about; and how it culminates in Vygotsky’s statement in an article “The Socialist Alteration of Man:” “Revolutionary transformation of society is necessary to change material conditions (production, standard of living, economic opportunities), social relations, educational opportunities, and cognitive and other psychological capabilities.”
Carl Ratner’s biography
Carl 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. He has written extensively on Vygotsky and authored the Preface to vol. 5 of his Collected Works. He was one of the few followers of Vygotsky who emphasized his Marxist orientation and developed it. Carl combined Vygotsky’s work with cultural psychology from anthropology, history, and sociology to develop a Marxist approach which he calls Macro Cultural Psychology. He authored “Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind,” Oxford, 2012. His most recent book is “Cultural Psychology, Racism, and Social Justice” Springer, 2022. Carl was 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. (The prohibition was very effective: At that time there were 8 Chinese psychologists with PhDs in the entire country. Carl is quite possibly the only person who has personally known every single psychologist in an entire country.) Carl has also received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach as a visiting scholar in Nehru University, New Delhi, and the University of North London.
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Horkheimer’s Metatheory/Methodology for Formulating Proper Historical-materialist Concepts/Constructs Which We Shall Utilize In Formulating a Historical-Materialist Psychological Theory
In Bronner, S., and Kellner, D. (1989). Critical theory and society: A reader. N.Y.: Routledge.
(Notes on Institute Activities, 1941, pp. 264-266)
Concepts are historically formed. The categories we intend to use are not generalizations to be attained by a process of abstraction that yields the genus as the common name for various individuals and species, nor are they axiomatic definitions and postulates as in the trends of mathematics and physical science. The process of forming these categories must take account of the historical character of the subject matter to which they pertain, and in such a way that the categories are made to include the actual genesis of that subject matter. This unique character of the relation of the concept to its “material” does not allow of such abstract concepts as “social change,” “association,” “collective behavior,” “masses,” unless these are used as mere formalistic classifications of phenomena common to all forms of society. The proper meaning of “masses,” for example, cannot be derived through an essentially quantitative analysis or from certain isolated types of “collective behavior,” even though such analysis may be an integral part of any attempt at a theoretical interpretation of the term. Proper methodological usage must recognize that the masses are basically different at the different stages of the socio-historical process and that their function in society is essentially determined by that of other social strata as well as by the peculiar social and economic mechanisms that produce and perpetuate the masses. The category is thus led, by the very nature of its concrete content, to take in other, different sectors of the given social configuration and to follow out the genesis and import of its content within the social totality.
The general concept is thus not dissolved into a multitude of empirical facts but is concretized in a theoretical analysis of a given social configuration and related to the whole of the historical process of which it is an indissoluble part. Such analysis is essentially critical in character.
Society is a “system” in the material sense that every single social field or relation contains and reflects, in various ways, the whole itself. Consequently, an intensive analysis of a single relation or institution that is particularly representative of the prevailing pattern of reality may be far better able to develop and grasp the nature of the pattern than would an extensive compilation and description of assorted facts. The “pervasive” character of our society, the fact that it makes its peculiar relations felt in every nook and cranny of the social whole, calls for a methodological conception that will take account of this fact.
Categories have to be formed through a process of induction that is the reverse of the traditional inductive method which verified its hypotheses by collecting individual experiences until they attained the weight of universal laws. Induction in social theory, per contra, should seek the universal within the particular, and should delve deeper and deeper into the particular and discover the universal law therein.
The concept “youth” takes in the entire social and historical process that influences the mentality and orientation of youth and that constantly transforms these. Consequently, our concept of youth will [vary] with the changing composition, function, and attitudes of youth within the shifting social pattern. The concept is to be formed under the aspect of the historical totality to which it pertains.
(History and Psychology, 1932).
Historical transformations are drenched with the mental and intellectual…and history thus needs psychology. The systems of culture, commerce, law, religion, art, and scholarship, and the outer organization of society in family, community, church, and state originated from the living context of the human mind and, ultimately, can only be understood through it.
Detailed psychological work for historical research is important because [otherwise] a primitive psychology may play an uncontrolled role in historical writing.
The subjective element in human beings that must be understood is in their capacities, their upbringing, their labor — in short their own history — which must be grasped in connection with the history of society. Human beings are bound up in historical formations with dynamics of their own. In methodological terms, Marx here follows Hegel.
Historie (historicity) offers the philosophy of history — beyond mere knowledge of actual events — basic organizing principles such as the original conditions, the periods, the division of historically acting human beings into races, tribes, and nations.
The economic situation affects the most minute aspects of human inner life. The strength as well as the content of the eruptions of the psychic apparatus are economically conditioned. The conscious reaction and difficulties and the mechanism of repression must be grasped by psychology; the condition of existence of these phenomena, however, is economic.
If history is divided according to the various modes in which the life process of human society takes place, then economic rather than psychological categories are historically fundamental. Rather than a foundational science, psychology becomes instead an indispensible auxiliary science for history. Its content is influenced by this transformation of function. In the context of this theory, its object loses its unitary quality. Psychology no longer has to do with human beings as such (per se). Rather, it must differentiate within each epoch the total spiritual powers available within individuals…
To Dilthey we owe the honor of having made the relation between psychology and history the object of philosophical discussion. He demanded a new Psychology that would accommodate the needs of the human sciences…
Max Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” (1931)
For Hegel, the structure of objective Spirit, which realizes in history the cultural substance of absolute Spirit – that is, art, religion, philosophy – no longer derives from the critical analysis of the subject, but rather from universal dialectical logic. Its course and its works originate not from the free decisions of the subject, but from the spirit of the dominant nations as they succeed each other in the struggles of history. The destiny of the particular is fulfilled in the fate of the universal; the essence or substantive form of the individual manifests itself not in its personal acts, but in the life of the whole to which it belongs. In its essential aspects, idealism thus became social philosophy with Hegel: the philosophical understanding of the collective whole in which we live – and, which constitutes the foundation for the creations of absolute culture – is now also the insight into the meaning of our own existence according to its true value and content.
Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972)
“The facts which our senses present to us are socially preformed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived, and through the historical character of the perceiving organ” (p. 200, 1937). [The observer’s psychology (perception, cognition, imagination) is as historical-materialist as the character of objects s/he perceives.]
What we inherit from Marx is therefore not only a critique of political economy, but a materialist critique of the historically specific structures of appearance proper to bourgeois society, resulting from its peculiar way of organising people and things – or people through things – and characterised by socially objective forms of inversion and mystification (Ramas San Miguel, C. Inverted World: Fetish and Mystification in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Leiden: Brill.
Historiography is the process of historical formation. It emphasizes history is a formative process that structures social and psychological phenomena; history is not simply a cumulative process that collects events as they occur. The latter would leave historical formation up to some other process and then simply collect and categorize the results of this process. Historiography is important because it forms the character of phenomena. It does so according to historical materialism. Historiography is the historical materialist movement of social, political, cultural phenomena; it is the historical materialist implantation of form and content of social, political, cultural phenomena. It is not simply the accumulation of phenomena which develop according to other processes/dynamics. It is the producing of phenomena in historical-materialist form and content. It is the grounding of history in historical materialism, or as historical-materialism. History is not an empty, neutral post-hoc process of collecting diverse activities over time. History is a concrete process that generates concrete form and content to activities over time. This is “historiography.”
See also: Beverley Best, The automatic fetish: The law of value in Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2024) for Marx and my figure 1, base superstructure. (Kindle)
Marx-Engels, The German Ideology (1846)
Ideology:
[W]e do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms [fog formations Nebelbildungen] formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
This [materialist] conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; and to show it in its action as State, to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. and trace their origins and growth from that basis; by which means, of course, the whole thing can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice.
Accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions,” “spectres,” “fancies,” etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory. It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit,” but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.
This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real [material] basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man.”
In his introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.”
“But there is also another important aspect for the critique of ideology expressed more clearly in Engels’ letter to Marx. ‘This egoism is simply the essence of present society and present man brought to consciousness’ (Engels, 1844). Here we find the idea that wrong ideas can be right in the sense that they are the adequate reflection of ‘false’ social relations. In capitalist society people not only think they are individually isolated, capital-ism treats them as isolated individuals. Therefore, the idea that critique has to start with the individual is adequate to the world of social isolation. The debate with Stirner is a good example to understand that all ideas and therefore also the ideology of Stirner has to be explained by social circumstances. Or, as Marx puts it in regard to Feuerbach ‘The fog formations [Nebelbildungen] created in the human brain are also, necessarily, sub-limates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.’” Herzog, B. (2018). Marx’s critique of ideology for discourse analysis: from analysis of ideologies to social critique. Critical Discourse Studies, 15(4), 402–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2018.1457549
Stuart Hall statement on racism and materialism.