The collective work of engineering losers

According to Vygotsky, personality is the ensemble of real relations that we have lived with others. If personality is the ensemble of societal relations, and if who people are coincides with the material conditions of their productions, then school-based games that produce failure may contribute in non-negligible ways to the production of loser personalities. A case study is used to exhibit the kind of collective work by means of which failures and losers are recognizably produced and are produced for being recognized as such. The study thereby develops a political dimension of Vygotskian theory not frequently encountered.