Psicologia Revolucionária de Lev Davidovich Bronstein

Resumen

Revolutionary psychology is not an academic system of knowledge. It is not a theory or set of theories, and it cannot be formalised, written, transmitted and learnt. Revolutionary analysis and theory, however, as political and economic critique can, of course, be developed and passed on as a corpus of knowledge and practice, and I take Marxism to be a case example of such a corpus. It is still, thankfully, not only an academic system, and when it is locked into the education system it will no longer be revolutionary. Marxism is an accumulating tradition of practical revolutionary knowledge that stretches in time from before Marx to our times. Its object now is the constellation of gendered, racialised forces and relations of production, including in culture the forces and relations of commonsense. Bourgeois psychology, in contrast to this, has as its object the individual abstracted from those forces and relations. Any variety of psychology, whether it be behaviourist or cognitive, psychoanalytic or Vygotskyan, can appear at one moment as a tool for empowerment, and twist at the next into part of the mechanisms of exploitation and oppression that comprise the psy?complex. A revolutionary psychology, then, can only be lived, and as a process of personal engagement, as political action.