Neoliberal Micro-Psychology vs Communist Macro-Psychology – Radio Free

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this article I contrasted sixteen ways in which communist macro-psychology differs from liberal micro-psychology as it is practiced in the United States. I described communist psychology in action in the field of eating habits and the impact of advertising on the public’s emotional life. I discussed the reasons why my readers might have a difficult time appreciating what communist psychology has to offer and I used the science fiction book Flatland as an analogy to show that using communist psychological concepts is like living in the third dimension of a two-dimensional world of capitalist micro-psychology.

In Part II of my article, I will describe how even when communist psychology books are translated from Russian into English, they are unconsciously or consciously distorted or censored by those Ratner calls neoliberal psychologists to fit better with the structure and dynamics of capitalism. As an example of macro-cultural psychology in this article I will also use an example of how capitalism is connected to mental illnesses, specifically in schizophrenia and the pressure to be thin.

What is Neoliberal Activity Theory?
As many of you know, neoliberalism in the field of economics and politics hit the United States and England full-force with the election of Reagan and Thatcher. It was characterized by economic policies designed to hollow out of the technological infrastructure, attack unions and the wages of workers. Neoliberalism is also connected to the rise of transnational, financial capitalism. It would appear that these conditions would breed a kind of pessimistic psychology with individuals seen as more or less determined by socio-structural forces. But that did not happen in the field of psychological activity theory in the United States. In fact the opposite happened.

It was in early 1980s that Vygotsky’s work was brought to the United States thanks to the educational psychologist Michael Cole. But Cole’s presentation of Vygotsky’s work played down the fact that Vygotsky was a communist set on building a Marxist psychology. Instead, Vygotsky’s interest in learning, education and his work on “defectology” (social education of blind and deaf children) was emphasized. The main problem is that neoliberal psychologists want to eclectically use Vygotsky’s work in education while either intentionally or unintentionally leaving out the fact that Vygotsky and his colleagues were trying to build a communist psychology. Ratner writes that this is akin to writing about Darwin and holding conferences about his ideas yet never exploring his concept of evolution. As American psychologist Carl Ratner writes:

Eighty years later, under much less social pressure, and with many more resources, contemporary activity theorists have generally regressed from the limited concrete emphasis in Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev’s theories. (Page 240)

In addition, almost as a reaction formation to the hard neoliberal economic times, these psychologists emphasized the active nature of individuals in relation to social structure (with a romantic conception of individuals as free as birds – see image at beginning of article). For example, they selected peer group cooperative learning as opposed to learning through an individual instructor. They emphasized language and conversations in cooperation as opposed to Leontiev’s emphasis on collective tool use. Neoliberal Vygotskians were more interested in the cooperative settings of school and play and less in work settings. Some of them caught the postmodern bug and questioned scientific objectivity as the ultimate aspiration of psychologists.

The Fear of Macro-Cultural Psychology
Ratner points out that in world neoliberal psychology the subjects of consumer capitalism, commodification, alienation, exploitation and ideology are never mentioned in their leading journals on culture. For example, he tells us these subjects are not mentioned in the 17-year history of Michael Cole’s journal Mind, Culture and Activity, supposedly sympathetic to Vygotskyan work. Neither did these subjects ever appear in the Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology over a period of forty years. The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology mentions the word capitalism twice in 850 pages. Ratner explains that the most famous social psychology text ever, The Social Animal, never once mentions social class. There is a neglect of macro social factors involved in mental illness – for example the link between psychological depression and capitalist economic instabilities (to be covered shortly). Why is this? Drug companies want patients to use their products and not question the economic system that might be ultimately the reason these patients have these problems. Ratner says that every one of the authors of DSM manual’s  sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies

Qualifications About Micro Neoliberal Psychology
These journals and books fail to discuss in detail exploitation, alienation, commodification, ideology, mystification, hegemony or social class. Social class is rarely mentioned, yet research proves that it affects mortality, diseases, opportunities, privileges, health care, literacy, vocabulary and working memory. Neoliberal psychology admits that the micro-level reflects effects of these macro events, but it does not reveal the power and depth of macro cultural factors in their full complexity which go beyond the level of face-to-face interaction. Neoliberal psychologists sometimes acknowledge the effect of exploitation – poverty, stress, anxiety, prejudice – but they attribute them to factors other than an exploitive political economy. For example, instead of blaming the political economy of capitalism we hear of the “corruption of individuals”, “rotten apples”, “rogue criminals”, “greedy businessmen” or “disturbed individuals”. These are all vices of individuals. Structures get away scot-free. Lastly, it is not enough that cross-cultural psychologists point out that most Americans have more individualistic self-concept and North Koreans have a collectivist orientation. It is necessary to analyze the political character of the individualistic self-concept.

Macro-Cultural vs Micro-Cultural Activity Theory

Socio-historical activity theory says it is a collectivist, mediated and object-oriented activity system which is the prime unit of analysis. Secondly, the activity system is always a community, not a dyad or triad. Thirdly, contradiction has a central role as sources of change and development. In other words, conflict in real objective systems is the mother of change. Fourthly, these activity systems get transformed over long periods of historical time – centuries.  Lastly, it is collective-creative activity such as new inventions like the printing press, the telescope and the microscope, qualitative changes that drive psychological changes in the individual. An example is the need for merchants to develop insurance policies for their ships that led  to the emergence of formal operational thinking among 17^th century merchants and scientists.

In the case of neoliberal theorists of Vygotsky it is the local group, not the collective  which is the mediated form of activity. The collective institutional framework in which activity takes place – whether the society is feudal, capitalist or socialist – is ignored. Secondly, the places where Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development takes place are usually among peers. If teachers are involved, they are teaching in a permissive way and less in a way wherein the teacher takes the lead. Thirdly, liberal Vygotskians usually don’t pay much attention to the changing historical contexts in which activity takes place. In the macro activity case, Luria conducted studies shortly after the Russian Revolution about how peasant life psychologically changed as peasants were introduced to the industrialization process. He tracked how peasants’ sense of perception, cognition and personality were transformed. Neoliberal activity theorist rarely delve into the history of activity in their own country. Fourthly, in liberal theory contradictions are not usually understood as opportunities for transformation. They are seen as problems that need to be worked out to re-achieve stability. They might also be dismissed as the products of faulty reasoning. Lastly, activity theory is not often presented as having undergone major changes due to the phases of capitalism, the invention of the telescope, microscope or changes in industry. Rather, activity engagements might be contrasted to before or after the internet, Facebook, texting or Twitter.

Micro Cultural Activity Theory reduces the activity process to simple, small, personal, casual, apolitical and spontaneous interactions. But as Ratner says, whole societies are not re-formed on the model of someone helping a neighbor turn off the gas. The telecommunications industry does not operate by individuals broadcasting from their home radios. The macro conditions of the Wall Street 2008 crash and what bankers got away with cannot be understood by a cooperative meeting between an individual client and their financial planner.

Individuals do not spontaneously categorize artifacts with personal meanings. If they did there would be no commonality to individuals’ psychology. Each would imbue artifacts with different idiosyncratic meanings. Terms like “cultural factors” and “cultural context” are lifeless abstractions that exclude the political and economic driving forces that design and maintain these factors in the face of competing intersections for other classes. The term “context” obscures the active way capitalists and their politicians create context and make and structure our behavior in the service of their political interests. Without these macro institutions, Ratner points out that there would be tremendous slippage in micro interactions from the first dyad to the last – as studies of rumor transmission document. Macro-institutions already inform any micro social interactions and hold them together.

Micro-cultural psychologists treat verbal language and symbolic culture as at least equal to the material culture of work. In macro-cultural psychology work is the center of human activity and symbols and language were first used to assist the work process. Language and symbols do not arise spontaneously. Lastly, micro-cultural psychologists do not pay enough attention to the existence of the core, periphery and semi-periphery nations in the world-capitalist system. Countries in each of their zones had unique political economic institutions that produced a unique psychology. Grouping these societies as individualist or collectivist tells us nothing about their political economy. Collectivist societies can be tribal or agricultural and this kind of collectivism is very different from the collectivism of socialist societies. So too, there were some individualist selves in the commercial civilizations of the Minoans, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. But this proto-individualism is a far cry from the individualism of industrial capitalist societies.

Examples of Neoliberal Micro Cultural Psychology in the Workplace
Ratner argues that Barbara Rogoff redefines society in novel, abstract terms such as a list of scattered, abstract “community routines”. There are no exploitation, alienation, market forces, profit motives, commodification, bureaucracy or ideology at all here. Here “culture” is a surface mix of bedtime stories, trips to school, and show-and-tell narratives. Rather than mention social class she called them depoliticized terms like “participation status”. So the only difference between the president from Exxon Mobil and a migrant peasant are positions in a conversation. Life imprisonment, coal mining, working in a slaughterhouse, and the obliteration of one’s country by an invading army is a no more than a “format”.

Jann Valsiner engaged in a conceptual watering down of social reality by re-naming “cultural factors” to “social suggestions”. So being terminated from your job, having your country invaded, being imprisoned, having your pension cancelled are “social suggestions”. Ratner adds we cannot remake the Federal Reserve Bank by altering a few words. Neither can the institution of slavery be abolished by changing a word such as calling it “racism”. There need to be workers’ self-organization and strikes to have a chance for a deep change. Valsiner and Litvinovich claim that individuals continuously changed culture through the simple act of dialoguing. It takes a lot more than conversations to do that.

Another problem for these neoliberal micro-psychologists is that subjectivity and psychology are treated as dichotomous to culture rather than dialectically related with macro culture as the leading edge. Culture is treated as a tool that an individual decides how and when to use. The current purposes of the participants always seem to trump established macro cultural structures. Micro-cultural psychologists define social life in whatever area seems to be within our personal control as individuals. Ratner says this is like looking for a lost key under wherever the streetlight is. Micro-cultural psychologists “zoom in” on individuals so much that they lose sight of mega social conditions that inform them.  Consequently, the individual appears to be acting on his or her own because these larger conditions have been cut out of the picture.

For example, in the case of Abu Ghraib the torturers seem to be acting on their own and the state of military elites are only too happy to blame working class soldiers. However, Ratner tells us, when we zoom out we see that entire chain of command encouraged the guards. Six hundred military and Blackwater personal were on hand to abuse 460 Iraqi detainees. This was a spontaneous eruption by the personal decision of 600 six hundred soldiers. The neoliberal micro-psychologists theory would seem to think so.

Lastly,  any attempt at objectivity is looked upon skeptically by many micro-cultural psychologists who insist on glorifying their subject’s subjective experience as the subject matter of psychology. Any objective interpretation that superseded theirs and critically evaluates subjective experience as possibly being due to illusions, short-sightedness or narcissism is condemned as elitist and coercive because it does not emanate from the individuals themselves. Ironically, a denial of objectivity traps people more because it tells them that nothing outside of them is really going on.

See the table at the end of the article below to view the contrasts between macro-cultural activity theory and micro-cultural liberal theory.

Example of Macro-Cultural Psychology Regarding Mental Illness
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia has been defined as the disorganization of thinking processes, emotional states and the inability to plan and carry out actions. But for macro-cultural psychology this state is not separate from the conditions of modern life. Ratner quotes T.S. Eliot as saying that in modern life there is also a separation between thought, emotion and sensation and a failure to reach what he calls a “unity of sensibility”. The symptoms of schizophrenia – withdrawal, highly idiosyncratic and abstract patterns of thinking and behaving and a preoccupation with hidden meanings – bare an unmistakable congruence with the broad social relations and concepts of capitalism (individualism, privacy and privatized meaning).

Ratner points out that catatonia was not described until after 1850. Even more telling is the absence of schizophrenia, at least of the chronic, autistic form, either in medical books or general literature prior to the 19^th century. Detachment, being naïve, cynicism, subjectivism and other psychological mechanisms of mental illness were not spontaneously constructed by mental patients. Psychological constructs emerge from macro-level forces that are widely known in a population. They were reported on by novelists and in painting styles of the time.

Ratner says that the experience of the individual feeling worthless is also historically recent. It used to be in the past that under Christianity an individual felt guilty from a sense of sinfulness. But with the relative decline of religion in the 19^thcentury, personal inadequacies were less hinged to religion and more simply a personal problem, a self divided against itself.

But this “divided self” emerged only in the late 19^th century in conjunction with the increased number of roles the individual was expected to play. In earlier times individuals might be conflicted between the soul and the body, but the individual was still pulled in only two directions. The 19^th century marked a new conception of different selves or personalities within one individual. The extreme case of this is  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), but there were also reports of multiple personalities within a single individual.  Psychological processes generally have followed changes in the history of capitalism. In the activist 1960s the psychic disorders were linked to social factors like poverty and migration. In the lean and mean times of neoliberalism these social factors disappear and the social environment shrinks to the nuclear or extended family, which is blamed for almost everything.

Tyranny of bodily slenderness
In the worst case scenario it appears that disorders like anorexia or bulimia are simply sudden eruptions of pathology that don’t have any social rhyme or reason. More socially oriented psychologists might say these disorders have something to do with advertising or movies that want women to be thin. Evolutionary psychologists will point out that a desire to be thin goes against evolutionary psychology principles and tell us that convincing adult women to be thin will sell a lot more products than showing voluptuous women on the cover of magazines. This is because after a couple of children, most woman naturally become voluptuous and there are more limits on the products that advertisers can sell them. Evolutionary psychologists call the intervention of advertising into Darwinian sexual selection “evolutionary mismatches”. All these points have some merit but they still ignore capitalism.

Here is what Ratner has to say about this:

Slenderness is represented in sleek thin light consumer products such as cell phones, flat panel televisions and thin, lightweight laptop computers. It is reflected in architecture that emphasizes sleek lines and sharp angles… Slenderness symbolized as agility and the ability to move and change directions quickly, free of encumbrances, independently. These attributes are important to modern capitalist society.

What kind of capitalism is this? Why, it’s finance capitalism, liquid capital. Ratner continues:

The investor is nimble in shifting his capital to maximized profit. The employer is nimble in anticipating production demands and increasing or decreasing his or her labor supply to prepare. The manager is nimble in shifting work to low wage areas and shifting suppliers to lower costs.

Sleekness and slimness represent nimble capital. They represent finance capital on a psychological plane. Anorexia or bulimia is like a crisis in finance capital visited upon psychological disorders. On the other hand, overweight or even voluptuousness is antithetical to these sleek qualities. Ratner says it is slow, ponderous, inertial, regulated and weighted down. Hence it is looked down upon. There certainly are Darwinian reasons for rejecting corpulence, but that is not the end of the story. What does full body or voluptuousness represent in the field of capitalism – industrial capitalism – in which capitalists invest in infrastructure, repair, goods and services? It is heavy capitalism.
So:

Sleekness = finance capital

Voluptuousness or chubbiness = industrial capital

Since we are living in the heyday of neoliberal finance capital it would make complete sense that being overweight is looked down upon just as investing in industry is something neoliberal capitalists in Yankeedom don’t want to do.

Ratner concludes:

Sleekness does not require waiting, preparing, thinking or training. It is always moving to a new location, getting away, diversifying, expanding horizons and novelty… The tyranny of slenderness that defines the female body is an element of the general lightness of being…This is the cultural root of eating disorders.

On the other hand:

In collectivist society life is slower, more integrated, more committed more encumbering with considerations for a large community. One sticks around, consults with others, sacrifices for others, accedes to others, supports others over the long hall.

This is why in collectivist societies there is little in the way of eating disorders except for perhaps within the upper middle classes. On the other hand, a hunter-gatherer may look at an anorexic person in the United States and wonder, “has there been a famine”?

Historical Underpinnings of Macro-Cultural Psychology

In reviewing the history of macro-cultural psychology Ratner says the first theorist was Abu Al-Biruni, a Muslim scholar who conducted an extensive ethnology of Indian psychology and mentality in 1017. In the west tenets of macro-cultural psychology originated in the cultural movement in Germany in the 1770s. They considered the texts of Moses, Homer and Plato not to be the wisdom of an individual sage but the expression of a nation’s achievement at a particular stage in its cultural development. They wanted to understand the collective development of the human mind in society, a process these scholars came to describe as culture. Herder and Vico were interested in this.

The term Völkerpsychologie was coined by Wilhelm Humboldt at the turn of the 19^th century. Its use was continued by Wilhelm Wundt in his cross-cultural psychology writing. Another cornerstone was the historical school known as Annales. It arose in France in the 1920s under the leadership of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Febvre was interested in how the impact of the printing press affected sense ratios. Henri Corbin studied the history of smell (The Fowl and the Fragrant), hearing (Village Bells) and the impact of the sea on perception (The Lure of the Sea). Philippe Aries, as many of you know, studied the history of childhood.

Macro-cultural psychology has a promising history, but it was taken to new heights by communist psychologists in Russia in the 1920s and 1930. Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev left us a rich legacy. It is up to us to keep Vygotskyan psychology communist and not let it become watered down and truncated by neoliberal micro-cultural psychologists, however well-intentioned they may be.

Macro-Cultural Communist Activity Theory vs Micro-Cultural Neoliberal Activity Theory

The post Neoliberal Micro-Psychology vs Communist Macro-Psychology first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.