Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was intended to introduce “cost accounting” into management of state enterprises, a modification of “command economy” perfectly in line with contemporary capitalist ideas about management. “Command” was thought to be an appropriate means of managing individual capitals, but around the 1980s, the use of market mechanisms within enterprises was becoming fashionable, so the term brought out in especially sharp relief the weaknesses of this type of bureaucratic management. The term came into currency in the 1980s as a description of the economy in the USSR and other Stalinist countries, where the entire economy was run along the same lines as single capitalist enterprises had been run up until that time, before the spread of Toyotism. Even the use of language and tools is collaboration, since in using language and tools people work with the product of each others’ labour.įor constructivist psychology, collaboration is the essential character of human activity and the basis for all learning.Ĭommand economy is the method of managing the economy of a whole country by means of top-down direction. Though division of labour (i.e., cooperation) is fundamental to the development of civilisation, collaboration is fundamental to human life itself. Collaboration therefore, involves both cooperation ( unity) and conflict ( critique). The distinction usually made between collaboration and cooperation is that in cooperation, the workers do separate tasks each contributing to the final product, whereas in collaboration the workers actively engage on the same tasks, correcting one another, swapping ideas, exerting combined force, and so on. The word “collaboration” dates from the 1860s, though cooperation is as old as the English language.
Different understandings of the subject-object relation lead to scepticism - that cognition is impossible, Relativism - that knowledge is possible but has no objective significance dogmatism - that knowledge is not only possible but can be absolute and final Empiricism and Rationalism which emphasise respectively Experience or Reason in Cognition Objectivism and Subjectivism which emphasise the role of the objective world or subjective consciousness in the process of Cognition.įurther Reading: Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks and his annotations on reading Hegel on cognition, on Subject and Object and see The True and The Good.
Even then, only if action is connected with theory can theory be changed and knowledge acquired, for blind, impulsive activity can lead to success or failure but not knowledge.Ĭentral to the problem of cognition is the relation between Subject and Object. Only struggling to change the world can create conditions for acquiring knowledge. While the objective world is the source of knowledge, mere existence as part of the world and sensuous contact with the world does not provide knowledge of the world. The central concept in the Marxist understanding of Cognition is practice, which is the criterion of truth for Marxism. Cognition means acquiring knowledge of the objective world.