Beyond Development and Morality 143system of capitalist relations. The extensive web of entangled historical
collusion, both theoretically and methodologically, between psychology
and the various stages of capitalist development has shaped the field in
many ways. The teleological imperatives of western philosophy that
undergirded the European and U.S. colonial projects are inscribed indelibly
into the epistemological understandings of development within
psychology.
One of the ways that psychology is embedded within Eurocentric
understandings of human behavior is how transcendent and universal
concepts elide the effects of particular historical and geographical
concretions of concepts, modes of production, and living force.
Mainstream psychology and developmental psychology both tend to
understate, if not ignore the role of what Marx and Engels (1846/1970)
called the mode of production as an influence on behavior and cognition.
In classical Marxism, society and social formations, such as subjectivity,
are subordinate to the way that life is produced and sustained in a given
historical period. Who we are as social subjects will be shaped, and in no
small degree pre-consciously determined, by whether our society is
agricultural, industrial, mercantile, and so on. Concomitant with the
process of subjectification is the development of conceptual frameworks of
knowledge that support the values and logic of a given system of
production. Althusser (2014) refers to this as the production and
dissemination of ideology or the proliferation of the logic of the ruling
class.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) point out that the sustenance of such a
system of rule is premised in its capacity to deploy language as a set of
universal signifiers that operate as what they term “order-words.” Order-
words function at two levels: in the first, they order the world by
nominalizing, categorizing, taxonomizing, and producing hierarchical sets
of relations. In the second instance, these systems of signification are
utilized to order the subject by inducting them into understanding
themselves and the world around them according to the universal and
transcendent terms of signification pre-constituted in the language system
into which the subject is born. The power of such a system is in how it