ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a provocative reinterpretation of Vygotsky’s relationship to Marx and the Marxist tradition through a critical reading of Vygotsky’s own reading of Marx and Engels in support of his psychological theory. While Vygotsky’s psychology is clearly influenced by Marxian thinking in general terms, his interpretations of Marx in connection with theoretical specifics are questionable at best or, at worst, implausible. What, in Marx, is a historical process in which communities come to critically confront and collectively exert control over their own practices and social relations becomes, in Vygotsky, a psychological process in which individual behaviour is subject to social control via the power of symbols. This conceptual swerve away from Marx towards the symbolic ultimately licences all the fundamental principles of cultural-historical psychology at all stages of its evolution. The chapter ends with a reflection on Vygotsky’s hugely positive contribution to our understanding of human-ness and human potential in the context of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.
