Marxist psychology: back to the future

It is common knowledge that the slogan of Marxist psychology was introduced in this country in the early 1920s by Pavel Blonskii (1884—1941) and Konstanin Kornilov (1879-1957), the students and once allies of Georgii Chelpanov (1862-1936), a pre-Revolutionary proponent of experimental Wundtian psycholog}' as an “objective" and independent (from either philosophy or physiology) scientific discipline, who was the founding director of the Institute of Psychology in the Imperial Moscow Universit}’ (Kozulin, 1985; Radzikhovskii, 1982). During the first post-Revolutionary years Chelpanov strongly resisted the idea of psychology determined by any philosophy whatsoever, but later gradually softened his views and offered his view on a possibility of Marxist psycholog}' although limited by the relatively narrow confines of social psychology only (Chelpanov, 1924). Regardless of true intentions of Chelpanov in his public support of Marxist social psycholog}' and criticism of the possibility of implementation of Marxists principles in all other spheres of psychological theory and research, the first attempts at the establishment of an overarching Marxist psychology by his opponents seem to confirm the rationale of his critical stance. In the works of Kornilov, Blonskii and their associates the findings of the concrete psychological investigations, their goals, methods and experimental data interpretations existed independently of the proclaimed Marxist principles and notions, such as the determination of the social consciousness by social life conditions, reflexive function of the psyche, social nature of human being, etc. In terms of rhetoric and style, the two domains and their discourses existed by themselves. The connection between them was established rhetorically only and through the logically unnecessary conjunction “and”. The philosophical part of these works and their concrete psychological content had very different functions, served different purposes and were formulated with the use of very dissimilar vocabulary. The philosophical and the concrete psychological aspects of analysis remained effectively autonomous.

Yet there was also certain positive effect of the first works of self-proclaimed Soviet Marxist psychologists. These first attempts at implementation of Marxism in psycholog}' brought awareness to the acuteness of the problematic juxtaposition of the two aspects of analysis. This key methodological problem was subsequently addressed in the late 1920s—early 1930s in works of Lev Vygotsky and Sergei

Rubinstein. Both formulated their understanding of this problem and demonstrated the potential impact of Marxism on the future development of Soviet psycholog)'. Unfortunately, their methodological quest did not receive proper development in the subsequent period. Thus, in the mid-1970s, Aleksei N. Leontiev wrote:

It is necessary, however, to acknowledge that in the following years the attention of psychological science to methodological problems weakened somewhat. This, of course, does not mean in any way that theoretical questions became of less concern, or that less was written about them. I have something else in mind: the acknowledged carelessness in methodology of many concrete psychological investigations, including those in applied psychology. . . . They almost leave an impression of dichotomy: On the one hand there is the sphere of philosophical - psychological problematics, and on the other, the sphere of specific psychological, methodological questions arising in the course of concrete investigations (emphasis added, Leontiev, 1975, pp. 2—3). | Furthermore, there appears] an illusion of "demethodologizing” of the sphere of concrete research results, which increases even more the impression of a breaking up of the internal connections between fundamental theoretical Marxist bases for psychological science and its accumulation of facts.

(Leontiev, 1975, p. 4)'

Leontiev’s assessment of the state of the art in Soviet psychology in the mid-1970s, curiously enough, well resonates with Stephen Toulmin’s opinion that he expressed in the mentioned essay “The Mozart of Psychology”. In 1978, Touhnin exclaimed apparently in astonishment, “just as Western psycholog}' is beginning to escape from its earlier positivism, Russian academic psychology is, ironically, beginning to look more like the American experimental psychology of the intervening forty years!” (Touhnin, 1978).