I myself do not really view “What is to be Done?” as a great beginner work for Marxists, since it mentions a lot of obscure philosophers or groups that a modern audience (with their cursory knowledge of Russian history being from the lips of liberals, or worse, conservatives) would hardly know the context of, and I am reading a version that has notes on these people!
That is not to say that it is not an influential or essential work of Lenin (I think it might be up there with “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “The State and Revolution” in terms of either factor), but one has to be willing to trudge through Russian names that you will likely never hear again.
Just for one example of why this conclusion doesn’t make sense:
Psychology is not an unbiased, purely neutral field of scientific observation. Bourgeoisie psychology (which tends to be very individualist) is not the same as explicitly working class psychology, for example (which will more so promote the collective). Dialectics helps us look past the pretense of neutrality toward the constant interplay of differing class and caste interests (depending on how / what way a society may be stratified). Without it, class analysis is hamstrung in bougie points of view that pretend to be neutral.
That said, I do think the material out there for understanding dialectical and historical materialism can be painfully hard to follow. A large part of that in English material is probably due to the fact that there hasn’t been a successful proletarian revolution in the English-as-first-language parts of the world (unless I’m forgetting one). That plus the academic watering down of Marxism in the west to make it more acceptable to the ruling classes, can make it feel a bit “ancient text written on scrolls” trying to engage with what it is and how to put it into practice. The main practitioners of it in history are people who also had to test it against reality, harshly, or their revolution might fail and their people could literally die. It was sink and swim; learn to use the scientific tool or be unequipped to meet the moment. By comparison, the theoretical vacuum academic view of it can make it seem almost quaint, like an odd little hobby of a view that you pick up to clarify a few things.
I do think it’s worthwhile examining psychology closely. I don’t doubt at all that psychology has been used to crack open social divisions. We could call this bourgeois psychology. Conversely, we could seek to fix these social divisions with something we call proletarian psychology.
However, bourgeois and proletarian are historically determined categories. They exist today because capitalism exists today. And yet humans have existed before capitalism (and hopefully after capitalism). It was before capitalism that we developed our pre-frontal cortex and our verbal capacity.
We have studied our own pre-frontal cortex and our verbal capacities. And we have consistently found some things to be true about them.
For example:
Again, these mechanisms are not dependent on capitalism. They are not bourgeois psychology. They are not proletarian psychology. They are dependent on our biological equipment, including our recently-evolved cognitive capacities.
Am I pretending these mechanisms are value-free? Not necessarily. These mechanisms determine the playing field. They determine the constraints we have to work with. It’s up to us what we make of them. We could choose to use these mechanisms and our understanding of them to legitimize and bolster class divisions or to critically examine and dismantle them.
Although I’m sure we can isolate some elements of psychology that are more of a universal observation than they are a sociopolitical lens, I would still emphasize that 1) most of psychology is not that degree of truism/universality and 2) dialectical and historical materialism is itself based on scientific observation. Prole and bougie is not what diamat is fundamentally; it’s one historical manifestation of class struggle.
Rejecting diamat doesn’t make scientific sense. Rejecting universally consistent facets of psychology doesn’t make scientific sense either. But, great care must be taken with thinking surrounding truisms and universality. For example, take a thing like “working memory limits”. This is not something that’s been consistently studied throughout history, so data on it is going to be limited. That already means that universality of it across history is difficult to back up. It is nevertheless useful to understanding what they are from the data we do have and whether they can fluctuate and why, but this is not the same as them being static across time and history.
I would also point out, though it’s a bit of a pedantic point, that neuroscience is not necessarily the same as psychology in the meaning of diagnosing reported feelings and thought patterns, and neuroscience can struggle to find the intersection between what it observes and what is going on inside, because of how dependent psychology research is on self-reporting.
So to reiterate, I’m not trying to say we should “throw out the entirety of the current society’s psychology because it is tainted” but rather that it’s rarely as straightforward as naming something as a truism and moving on. And that one of the benefits of diamat is explicitly naming the jockeying behind the scenes that diverts research toward one narrative purpose or another.