Anna Stetsenko is a Russian-trained psychologist, Professor of Psychology and Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the most forceful contemporary advocate for reading Vygotsky as the Marxist he actually was. Schooled in the Soviet cultural-historical tradition before moving to the West, she has spent her career arguing that the sociocultural mainstream borrowed Vygotsky's vocabulary while quietly dropping his politics.
Her positive programme is the Transformative Activist Stance (TAS), set out at book length in The Transformative Mind (2017). It pushes Vygotsky's cultural-historical activity theory past a "relational ontology" (mind as constituted by social relations) toward an explicitly activist one: human beings are not merely shaped by their world but come into being by collectively changing it, and learning is a form of taking part in that transformation. On this view mind, agency, and a commitment to equality and justice are not add-ons to the theory but its foundation.
Stetsenko's historical argument is that Western readings "domesticate" Vygotsky by individualising and depoliticising him (see The Americanisation of Vygotsky). Her sharpest case is internalisation: in the standard telling, a learner absorbs social language for private mental use, a lone mind taking in culture. Stetsenko rejects this as a reversal of Vygotsky's intent. Internalisation, she argues, is better understood as turning toward oneself as a collaborative partner in shared, world-changing activity, not a one-way transfer from the social to the individual. Restoring the Marxist orientation, in her account, changes not just the emphasis of the theory but what the theory is for: social transformation rather than efficient instruction. Her 2017 System article "Revisiting Marx and Problematizing Vygotsky" makes this case directly for language and speech, which puts her argument squarely in the path of language educators who invoke SCT.