Parker, I. (1999) ‘Psychology and Marxism: Dialectical Opposites?’, In W. Maiers , B. Bayer,
B. Duarte Esgalhado, R. Jorna, and E. Schraube (eds) Challenges to Theoretical Psychology
(isbn: 1-896691-75-7), Toronto: Captus University Publications, pp. 477-484
PSYCHOLOGY AND MARXISM: DIALECTICAL OPPOSITES?
Ian Parker
SUMMARY: If we are doing critical psychology must we necessarily be Marxist? Marxism
is a scientific theoretical research programme and political movement. However, the attempt
to construct a ‘Marxist psychology’ has so often come to grief, for two reasons: (i) Marxist
psychologists are caught in the paradox of trying to produce an account of the way the kind of
subject that we are now works as a self-regulating individual (with the kind of second nature
that binds it to capitalism) while trying to imagine a time when even the Marxist theory they
use will be outmoded; (ii) Marxism’s attempt to escape, or to work askew or in diametric
opposition to this kind of subject is doomed to failure, for those attempts will still be mapping
themselves into one of the fantasy spaces that bourgeois culture constructs as the ‘other’ to
itself. We may not be able to combine scientific psychology and scientific Marxism, but we
do need a Marxist account to understand why that is so and to construct a practice able to
negotiate the terms of the debate.
Introduction
A space has opened up in recent years for the development of what we might call ‘critical
psychology’ (eg, Fox and Prilleltensky, 1997; Ibañez and Iñiguez, 1997). This broad umbrella
term includes feminist critiques of malestream accounts of experience, post-structuralist
deconstruction of the rational unified subject and, of course, the strand of work elaborating a
Marxist account called Kritische Psychologie (Tolman, 1994; Tolman and Maiers, 1991). The
mass of people who think of themselves as ‘critical psychologists’ in the broadest sense of the
term do not think of themselves as Marxists. Some of us do, but the activity of critical
psychology is a disparate contradictory exercise which often cuts against what some would
hope for as a future ‘Marxist Psychology’ as well as against the existing discipline of
scientific psychology.
Critical Psychology and Marxism
This critical psychology runs in two parallel tracks. One track is where we undo scientific
psychology. That may involve internal critique of theoretical frameworks to reveal the way
their objects are socially constructed rather than being scientific truths, or action research with
the subjects of psychological knowledge to expose the oppressive practices which make
theories become true. Examples here would be the interrogation of lesbian-feminist therapy to
show how it still reproduces hetero-normative views of sexuality (Kitzinger and Perkins,
1993), or research with people who hear voices so that they might stop psychiatry
pathologising non-normative experience (Parker et al., 1995).
The other track is where we do unscientific psychology. That may involve developing
theoretical frameworks from postmodernism or Wittgenstein which deconstruct and disrupt
the conceptual architecture of the discipline, or playfully working up varieties of activity and
experience that cannot be contained by any psychology which tries to know and regulate its
domain. Examples here would be discussions of the ‘end of knowing’ in post-epistemological
therapeutic-performative practice (Newman and Holzman, 1997), or the elaboration of
cyberpsychology in electronic-virtual environments (Gordo-López and Parker, in press).
Although some critical psychologists would like to be merely curious about how theories
work and remain cautious about action against them, critical psychology often entails some
direct engagement with practice and involvement with groups which link psychologists with
those they usually practice upon, groups such as Psychology Politics Resistance.
So where does Marxism, as a practice which is usually thought of by its adherents as a
scientific theoretical research programme and political movement, fit in this picture?
Marxism is a theoretical research programme and political movement devoted simultaneously
to comprehending the historical development and dynamics of society through an attention to
underlying structures of economic exploitation and to revolutionising social relations through
the praxis of the oppressed and their allies. While the central category is that of class,
capitalist society in the over-industrialised world, the bureaucratic remnants of the Stalinist
states in some countries, and the colonised Third World, are also locked into place by
structures of patriarchal and racist domination (cf. Bhavnani and Phoenix, 1994; Walkerdine,
1996). The theoretical framework of Marxism for radical psychologists includes, as
interconnected sets of analysis, an account of commodification (the transformation of human
powers into the powers of objects in the marketplace), alienation (the enforced separation of
human potential from work which must create things as the property of others) and
individualisation (the simultaneous sense of responsibility and powerlessness for the person
experiencing themselves as the owner or the dispossessed of things instead of as a participant
in social relations).
This means that there is some stake in the activity of understanding the world through
some kind of practical rational systematic method. This also means that much of the activity
of seriously undoing science or playfully doing unscientific things would seem to be
anathema to Marxists. So, how might Marxism and the broader project of critical psychology
come together? There seems to be an enormous gulf between what Marxism might look like
in psychology as a pretender to the most radical practical-theoretical position and what
critical psychology is already doing as an array of radical unruly theoretical practices.
There are other problems standing in the way of an alliance between psychology and
Marxism. Our critical work is structured by a split between Marxism as a tradition of political
practice and research and psychology as a discipline embedded in the practices of class
society committed to research goals set by those with economic power. Furthermore, the very
conditions which made the many varieties of critical psychology possible are conditions of
crisis, crises which have thrown Marxism into disarray as much as psychology.
Let us take psychology first. We do need to locate the crisis in psychology in the
context of the fragmentation and re-articulation of the capitalist economy and in manicdepressive swings between grandiose claims about the final triumph of liberalism and the end
of history on the one hand and despair at the proliferation of rebellions and inchoate or
fundamentalist refusals of imperialism on the other. Psychology here simply will not work as
part of a grand narrative of self-identity, liberal collectivity and historical progress. Although
some still adhere to the hope that it is possible to unify psychology, research is splintered into
mutually incompatible areas of study, methods and paradigms. That disarray makes
discussions of theoretical psychology interesting, but most of the time it is just a confusing
warring mess.
There is also a deep crisis in Marxism. It is not only burnt-out libertarian ex-Marxists
telling us that we live in a postmodern condition (Lyotard, 1979) or apparatchiks from the US
State Department telling us that history is over (Fukuyama, 1992) that are responsible for the
collapse of Marxist politics. The new world disorder unleashed by the collapse of the soviet
bloc regimes has also provoked a series of disparate desperate moves by the old left which
include a delirious embrace of the so-called free market, red-brown nationalist alliances or
searches for spirituality, public recanting of any adherence to any grand narrative or private
confession of their lost hopes in therapy.
Here we find a bizarre connection between some of those struggling to make sense of
the crisis in psychology and some of those looking for an alternative to crisis-ridden
Marxism, and even some crossing of paths. The double-crisis in psychology and Marxism
leads some critical psychologists to connect their theoretical disagreements with psychology
with practice, a practice that may eventually connect with Marxism, and it leads some
Marxists to look for personal solutions to political problems and to eventually end up inside
psychology. When I refer to psychology here I mean the web of theories and practices in the
psy-complex, inside and outside the classroom and the clinic (Ingleby, 1985; Rose, 1985).
Marxism and psychology are discursive-practical regimes of truth, separate forms of
knowledge and activity that could, in some way, be seen as opposites. It is in these times of
crisis that they start to operate as dialectical opposites, but I would want to argue that their
very dialectical interrelationship is a symptom of crisis rather than of a potentially fruitful
engagement. It would be a mistake to look for rapprochement or sublation in this dialectical
entanglement, but rather to be wary of recuperation and sublimation.
Psychology and Society
The project of putting together a book with Russell Spears at the end of the 1980s called
Psychology and Marxism was with the aim of focusing on the intersection between those two
sets of crises. The process of doing the book highlighted some crucial issues. I will mention
five issues.
First, from a lengthy questionnaire which was sent out to anyone who had worked
with Marxist theories in psychology, we discovered that there was a big difference between
what might be called ‘marxian’ psychologists and Marxists. We had a direct simple reply
from many respondents that No, they were not nor ever had been Marxists. There are, of
course, many sociologists and political theorists who draw upon Marxism without ever
wanting to make a political leap into practice, and so it should not be much of a surprise to
find that there are psychologists who are happy to use Marxism only to interpret the world.
Secondly, we uncovered an extraordinary range of dual theoretical commitments and
attempts to synthesise them, and these ranged from the familiar juggling of Vygotsky and
Marx to the various attempts to join Marx and Freud, and then to then to Gibsonian Marxists,
Wittgensteinian Marxists and a small group of Marxist-Leninist Skinnerians. In many cases,
such as in the traditions of participant action research in Latin America, the activity of these
writers would not be recognisable to many psychologists as being part of the discipline at all,
and it was clear that the connection with practice entailed some radical redefinitions of what
subjectivity and action are or could be.
Thirdly, we encountered a series of institutional practices that made this process of
connection extremely difficult. We were not, after all, working on the premise that
psychology and Marxism were potentially the same, and we did not look forward to a
dialectical synthesis of the two as mutually interweaving opposite systems of thought (though
many of our contributors did). We could publish a volume about our correspondence with
various publishers, much of it revolving around themes of balance. Why not, we were told,
include chapters by non-Marxists or anti-Marxists to even out the debate. The fact that nonMarxists or anti-Marxists write most psychology was clearly not an issue here, and it was
clearly not only down to individual editors who were choosing to be difficult.
We eventually found a Marxist publisher, Pluto Press, to take on the book, but we
were told after the copy-edited manuscript was ready for setting that the word ‘Marxism’
must be removed from the title if booksellers were to stock the book, and so the terrible title
Psychology and Society: Radical Theory and Practice (Parker and Spears, 1996) was born.
The book does include an incredible range of theoretical positions from within psychology
and Marxism, and this leads me to highlight a fourth issue, which is that we became more
aware as the book took shape, and even more aware now as it finds its readers, that this
activity is located at a particular historical conjuncture. By that I mean not only that
capitalism is taking new gasps of breath from the east european markets and that the very
theoretical practice which is able to comprehend how that is happening is in deep crisis, but
also that an era of activism seems to be closing. Ed Reed wrote the Gibsonian contribution to
the book (Reed, 1996), and we must record with great sadness his death recently and his
commitment to changing the world as well as interpreting it.
One of the contributions focused on Kritische Psychologie and in particular on the
contribution of Klaus Holzkamp (Maiers and Tolman, 1996), and we should recall here his
work and note the loss to critical psychology with his death. And Ernest Mandel -- a scholar,
activist and analyst of late capitalism (Mandel, 1972a), who combined working class struggle
with the battle of ideas (Mandel, 1972b) -- who had until a late point been scheduled to write
a concluding chapter died.
This brings me to the fifth issue, which is that the relationship between psychology
and Marxism comprises an array of unfinished questions rather than conclusions, and it
should be marked by openness rather than closure. Six questions were prepared for a review
at the end of the book, and we can now only speculate how Mandel would have responded to
these questions. I suspect that together they constitute the impossibility and undesirability of
the project of a Marxist psychology, and I pose them to you now in that spirit.
i) The autonomy of the psychological. Psychology routinely forgets that the human being is
an ensemble of social relations, and it locates social processes inside the individual, but does
that mean that there is nothing that can be said about the psychological side of the equation,
of such experiences as alienation in capitalist society, for example?
ii) Popular psychology and therapy. Attempts to link the personal and the political within
feminism, and work on ‘consciousness-raising’ in therapy generally, encourage people to look
to individual solutions to social problems, but is there a role for psychological and therapeutic
notions in Marxist practice?
iii) Relativism and science. Some radical psychologists have turned to so-called ‘postmodern’
ideas, and to relativist notions of the impossibility of truth, and but does that mean that
Marxists too should abandon all certainties, and what role might science play now in
determining how we could understand human psychology?
iv) The role of scientific method. Stalinism made the mistake of trying to develop a
dialectical-materialist ‘proletarian science’ in all spheres of intellectual work, but is it
conceivable within revolutionary Marxism that there may be correct scientific methods or
properly materialist models of human psychology?
v) Historical progress and psychology. Many alternative psychologies have argued for a
notion of stages of development, something that would seem to be implied in all versions of
Marxism, so how might Marxists respond to the charge that all notions of historical
progression contain within them evaluations of what is ‘primitive’ and what is ‘civilized’?
vi) Theory and emancipation. Marxism links theory with practice, but does this mean that all
research into human psychology should be conducted with a view to immediate
‘empowerment’, or is there a theoretical knowledge of social processes and individual
processes that is necessary before intervention?
Varieties of Marxism
There are other reasons to be wary of thinking we can definitively answer these questions,
and I want to emphasise problems in the linkage ‘psychology-Marxism’ by drawing attention
to four ‘varieties’ of Marxism.
Marxist psychologists are caught in the paradox of trying to produce an account of the
way the kind of subject that we are now works as a self-regulating individual (with the kind
of second nature that binds it to capitalism) while trying to imagine a time when even the
Marxist theory they use will be outmoded. There are implications for how we relate to
psychology that flow from each of these four varieties of Marxism, and each should serve as a
dire warning for those who are trying to produce a final closed account of the subject which
they think is properly Marxist.
Voluntarist Marxism. One danger is that of taking the activism of Marxism as the touchstone,
so that it becomes a voluntarist movement. This current would place emphasis on the activity
of the human subject individually or, more often, collectively, and attempt to understand
historical changes as flowing from the exercise, or failure to exercise, this power. This trend
has been characterised by Callinicos (1990) as ‘political Marxism’, and the reason for
adopting it may be (politically) the very best of reasons. However, we have to be clear that all
the power of wish-fulfillment in the world will not overcome structural constraints on change.
There are objective circumstances that we cannot wish away. Our best rhetorical skills cannot
shift the economic structures that bear down upon activists and academics. Subjectivity is
constituted in a particular way in capitalist culture, and must always be bound into the
contours of the economy. Although we could guess what a different type of psychology might
look like, it does seem that we cannot now have the foundations for anything that could
realistically be called a ‘Marxist-psychology’.
Reductionist Marxism. The impetus toward ‘political Marxism’ is often speeded up when
adherents have been rushing away from ‘reductionist Marxism’, from the assumption that it is
only possible to bring about change by changing the economic infrastructure, or rather, that
this is the only thing worth bothering with (cf. Mandel, 1979). The flight into therapy, and the
moral that is drawn by those burnt out in traditional left politics that ‘things are more
complicated’ or that there really is ‘something wrong with human nature’ expresses a genuine
dissatisfaction with economic reductionism. In this respect, even the attempt to grapple with
questions of subjectivity, of individuality is something that breaks from reductionist
tendencies within Marxism. The problem is that when escape from economic reductionism is
posed as the key problem, any old psychology will look like the solution. Psychology does
then become an alternative to Marxism, its opposite.
Bureaucratic Marxism. A third variety of ‘Marxism’, a third dead-end, can either take the first
or second form as adjuncts. This third variety is ‘bureaucratic Marxism’ in which the activity
of politics is subordinated to the needs of a social layer with particular conservative interests
(cf. Mandel, 1992). This bureaucracy may appeal to the economy as paramount, to protect, for
example, the economic foundations of the ‘workers’ state’. Bureaucratic ‘Marxist’
movements routinely appeal either to the need to prioritise one sector of the population whom
it claims to represent, the workers or peasants or ‘the people’. Whenever ‘radical’ or ‘critical’
psychologists get power in the apparatuses of the psy-complex and then argue that we should
moderate our position in order that we do not jeopardise what we have gained, we see such a
stalinist mode of thought reborn. To insist that there should be an intervention in psychology
that explicitly identifies itself as Marxist and which is critically deconstructive rather than
faithfully reconstructive is always an embarrassment to this bureaucratic tendency.
Religious Marxism. Marx did not intend his work to become a worldview. The process by
which it did become a worldview was one in which supporters developed the critique of
political economy into a political programme and then a philosophy for the workers’
movement, and it was from this point that it became ripe for development into an ideology to
support the workers’ states (cf. Mandel, 1978). In ‘religious Marxism’ the assertion that we
should ‘doubt everything’ is replaced by an appeal to Marxism as a new form of
transcendental truth. In its most grotesque forms this appears in the codification of dialectical
materialism as a ‘diamat’ which can and must be applied to everything. The slogan, a
caricature and reversal of Marxism, becomes, in this fourth strand, ‘doubt nothing’. The
development of a new form of Marxist psychology would risk replacing existing false forms
of knowledge about what the human being is and what it could be with new forms.
Marxism’s attempt to escape, or to work askew or in diametric opposition to the kind of
subject presupposed by bourgeois psychology is doomed to failure, for those attempts will
still be mapping themselves into one of the fantasy spaces that bourgeois culture constructs as
the ‘other’ to itself. Each of these four varieties of Marxism fills one of those fantasy spaces,
with equally unpleasant results.
Conclusion
It is almost obligatory in this kind of paper to incant Marx’s comment from his theses on
Feuerbach that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point
is to change it.’ (Marx, 1845, Thesis 11). The connections that have been made between
psychology and Marxism have, in many cases, been designed as interventions into the theory
and practice of the psy-complex. The two-fold problem thesis 11 draws attention to is, first,
the nature of the individual subject as understood by psychology (‘interpreting’ the world, as
if that were an optional preliminary to changing things), and, secondly, the nature of the
psychologists as they understand themselves (interpreting the activities of the interpreting
individual, as if they were separate from changing what they have studied). In both aspects of
this problem there is often a mistaken belief that there are activities other than those that
change the world. Marxism, on the contrary, conceives of activity as ‘always-already’
transforming or reproducing the world.
We may not be able to combine scientific psychology and scientific Marxism, but we
do need a Marxist account to understand why that is so and to construct a practice that is able
to negotiate the terms of the debate. In that sense, Marxists in psychology would be better
able to work in and against the discipline and develop a Marxist practice if they did not try to
construct a Marxist psychology, neither as a loyal opposition nor as a dialectical opposite.
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