Sergey Mareev on the labour nature of consciousness

The cultural-historical theory of consciousness, having created by Soviet psychologists of L.S. Vygotsky school, attained its further development in the works of S. N. Mareev. It was Mareev’s teacher, an outstanding Soviet philosopher E. V. Ilyenkov, who first began to elaborate the philosophical principles of this theory. Its central postulate states that the subject of consciousness is society. Consciousness arises as a form of social labour, it is a reflection of the process of material life production in human psyche. The object of consciousness is not nature as such, but the nature transformed by human activity, viz. by labour. This article investigates S. N. Mareev’s contribution into the development of the Soviet philosophy of consciousness and his definition of the specificity of human consciousness in the comparison with the psychical activity of animals.