ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book aims to stimulate and guide cultivation of a Marxist psychology-that is, a psychological discipline based upon Marx's social philosophy and politics. There are different estimations of Lev Vygotsky's Marxism. Although as did all the citizens of USSR, Vygotsky had to obey the totalitarian government, his relations with Marxism were only polite: he liked Karl Marx as well as his friend, the great poet, Heinrich Heine, for their ironic judgments of the bourgeois society, but his quotations from the other official texts were made mostly for tactical reasons. Elena Grigorenko, a Russian Vygotskyian psychologist, acknowledges that Vygotsky was a disciple of Marx; yet she construes Vygotsky's Marxism as consisting of transformative collaborative practices. The book focuses on the way in which Vygotsky and his colleagues utilized specific Marxist concepts in their psychological work.