Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology Forty Years Later — Kieran Durkin

Remembering Erich Fromm on the fortieth anniversary of his passing. Most people remember him for his book, The Art of Loving, but he wrote several other important works in sociology.

Fromm’s critique of contemporary capitalism continued a year later in The Art of Loving, perhaps his best-known work. Not the most obviously socialist or Marxist book (in fact, Herbert Marcuse criticized Fromm for supposedly betraying radical thought, and becoming a “sermonistic social worker”) Fromm was nevertheless adamant that “[t]he principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible,” and thus that the criticism of love (which, as he understood it, referred to the antithesis of narcissistic, racist, sexist and other forms of interpersonal relations) was also a criticism of capitalism and the ways in which it mitigated against genuine forms of love that would manifest in a more human society. Fromm believed that we must analyze the conditions for the possibility of realizing love and integrity in the present society and seek to strengthen them.

It is also during the 1950s that Fromm joins American Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation and seeks to rewrite its program. The resulting document, although rejected for this purpose, was published as Let Man Prevail (1958). It marks out Fromm’s distinctive form of Marxism, which he here calls “radical humanism” and characterizes as a democratic, humanist form of socialism. This analysis is deepened in 1960, in May Man Prevail?, an analysis of Soviet Communism that was intended to influence the move to unilateral disarmament during the Cold War.

Fromm’s most significant contribution to U.S. Marxism, however, was Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). Containing the first full English translation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, prefaced by a few short essays by Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man helped to popularize Marx in the U.S., as well as counteract some of the more common misinterpretations of Marx....

In Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm presents Marx as a humanist libertarian, but not an anarchist in the 19th century meaning of the term. Marx agreed with Aristotle that genuine human freedom includes from from constraint and freedom to experience, choose and act as prerequisite for freedom for self-creation as an individual (Mann) and self-actualization as a human person (Mensch). Marx viewed capitalism as necessarily collectivist for most, with only the owners of  capital free and the rest dependent economically on them for their livelihood.

Since humans are social animals, they have social and political requirements; social order requires governance, for example. Thus, community is a requirement for the expression of freedom in human life, also reflecting Aristotle's view, although Marx rejected Aristotle's view of slavery, of course. Marx and Lincoln corresponded, and Lincoln famously asserted the superiority of labor over capital in his first Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861. He is also on record as stating, "Labor is the true standard of value." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume IV, "Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" (February 15, 1861), p. 212. Cited here.

Marx was not so  naïve as to think, however, that all this would happen spontaneously if the workers of the world suddenly lost their chains by rising up, as the finale of the Communist Manifesto suggests. This was the view of 19th  century anarchists that Marx criticized as being unrealistic. It would take time and considerable cultural adaptation to a new means of production. As the superstructure of society began to shift enough, humans would gradually realize the potential for living a genuinely free life, creating themselves as they saw fit in accordance with individual temperament. Wage earners had suffered the psychological ravages of alienation under capitalism and adapting to new material conditions of production would take time. Erich Fromm was psychologist enough to understand this.

Marx was more a philosopher than economist. His doctoral thesis was on ancient Greek materialism. In fact, neither economics nor sociology were academic fields at the time he was writing, and his work shaped both. Erich Fromm argued that Marx is properly viewed as a radical humanist thinker that sought to shape history in the present rather than as a communist collectivist whose work led to the excesses of the Russian and Chinese revolutions and their aftermath, which Marx's work does not presage. He believed that capitalism would mature and be replaced in capitalist countries rather than come to fruition in pre-industrial agricultural ones that were still feudal.

My own views regarding Marx owe a lot to Fromm's work. He is still worth reading and paying attention to.

Marxist Sociology Blog
Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology Forty Years Later
Kieran Durkin | Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at University of York, and Visiting Scholar at University of California Santa Barbara, where he is conducting the first dedicated study of the Humanist Marxist tradition.