From Having to Being: Reading Erich Fromm with Class

A psychoanalyst asked German workers 271 questions and saw fascism coming. The same study went unpublished for fifty years. Today that man stands on the self-help shelf.

Between 1929 and 1931, at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a young psychoanalyst distributed a 271-item questionnaire to German workers and salaried employees. The questions did not ask directly "which party do you vote for"; they asked about everyday habits, the view of authority, the style of raising children, tastes. The answers were interpreted in order to measure not what the workers said, but what they were. The result was this: of the workers who voted for the left parties, only about a quarter had the character equipment that would actually resist fascism. About a fifth, despite voting left, had an authoritarian character structure. The Institute's director, Max Horkheimer, did not have the study published — according to one account because he found it "too Marxist" and feared it would damage the Institute's standing in America. The research first appeared in German in 1980, half a century after it was written and forty-seven years after Nazism came to power. The man who prepared the questionnaire was Erich Fromm.

Dear Young Comrades,

This piece has a direct occasion: the Marmaris Philosophy Circle (MARFET) is holding a session on Friday 18 September at 18.00 at the Marmaris Municipality House of Culture and Arts, with a talk by Ahmet Nohut titled "Understanding Erich Fromm — The Art of Living with Love: From Having to Being." On the occasion of the same circle's Nietzsche talk on 4 September we had written a piece; this is the continuation of that series. A Fromm talk by a local philosophy circle in a district municipality hall is an event worth two words — every situation in which culture is produced in its own place, not "brought down" from the centre to the provinces, is our field of interest. Moreover this geography is not a geography foreign to philosophy: as we wrote when tracing materialist philosophy on the Aegean shores and when going to the ancient city of Amos, immediately beside Marmaris, these shores are the places where thought was first established together with the relations of labour and trade.

But there is an important difference between our Nietzsche piece and this one. We had read Nietzsche as an enemy: there were things he saw rightly, but he bound what he saw to an aristocratic programme. For Fromm the case is otherwise. Fromm is someone who speaks from inside our tradition. It was he who carried Marx's 1844 manuscripts to America; he counted himself a socialist to the end of his life; he wrote a programme for the Socialist Party of the United States; he organised against nuclear armament; he opposed the Vietnam War. That is, our account with Fromm is not an account of enmity, it is an account of comradeship — and an account of comradeship is harder, because it requires holding praise and criticism in the same sentence.

Let us state the thesis of this piece at the outset, because it will be a long piece:

Fromm showed how capitalism produces the human being's character; that is a great contribution. But when he came to the question of how the conditions that produce character are to be changed, he lost sight of the subject that would change them — the organised working class. The passage "from having to being" is not an individual decision; it is a problem of the change of property relations. To read Fromm is to be able to hold these two sentences together.

The piece has ten parts. First the life, then the suppressed study, then the concepts, then the two great books (The Art of Loving and To Have or To Be?), then his reading of Marx, then the Marxist criticisms directed at him, then today — and at the very end the concrete tasks.

I. Why Fromm, why now?

In Turkey Fromm stands on the bookshops' strangest shelves. Of the Say Yayınları edition of The Art of Loving a single online seller has sold 14,647 copies; the book has more than twenty-six separate printings in Turkish. That is an enormous figure on the scale of Turkey. But the same book stands in most places in the "relationship advice" section, beside the books of "self-help."

This placement is not innocent. In the last chapter of The Art of Loving there is this sentence:

"The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible."

To put the book that wrote this sentence on the self-help shelf is to sell a knife as an ornament. And that is exactly what has happened: Fromm's diagnosis has been taken, his programme thrown away. What remains is an admonition summarised as "try to be more, focus on having less" — that is, a life-coaching in the place of a class analysis. This is exactly the operation we described when exposing the neoliberal opiates: the turning of a social problem into a problem of individual attitude, and the marketing of the turning as "wisdom."

Our job is to take the knife down from the shelf.

There is a second reason. Fromm's central question — "why do people consent to an order that is openly contrary to their own interests, and even why do they love it?" — is the question that needs to be asked today in Turkey and in the world. A society that is being impoverished supporting the one who impoverishes it; the precarious worker defending precarity as "freedom"; the worker taking pride in the boss's success: these are facts that need to be explained. "Ignorance" or "stupidity" is not an explanation; an insult is not a method. Fromm sought an empirical answer to this question and produced a concept: social character. We are obliged to give this concept its due — and then to show its limit.

And a third reason: as we said when discussing why we do philosophy in the digital age, philosophy is not an ornament, it is a line of defence. Fromm is this line's door opening onto psychology — and when that door is left open the self-help industry comes in from inside.

II. A life: 1900–1980

Fromm's life is a map of the twentieth century: he was born in Weimar, fled Nazism, resisted the Cold War in America, worked with peasants in Mexico, died in Switzerland.

1900. Born on 23 March in Frankfurt am Main. The only child of an Orthodox Jewish family; his father a wine merchant, rabbis in the lineage. This origin matters: throughout Fromm's work there is a tone of "it could be otherwise" that comes from the language of the prophets.

1918–1922. He studied law in Frankfurt, then sociology in Heidelberg. He took his doctorate in 1922, under the supervision of Max Weber's brother Alfred Weber, with the title Jewish Law: A Contribution to the Sociology of Diaspora Jewry. The question he asked in his very first work is the question he would ask all his life: how does a legal system perform the social-psychological function that keeps a community standing?

1924–1930. Training in psychoanalysis. His first analyst is Frieda Reichmann; he marries her in 1926 (the de facto separation 1931). Didactic analysis with Hanns Sachs at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1929 he is among the founders of the South German Institute of Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt.

1930. He joins the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt; he is the person responsible for psychoanalysis and social psychology. That is, the actual executor of the Frankfurt School's programme of "uniting psychoanalysis with Marxism" is Fromm. This is a fact skipped in most philosophy courses today; we shall see in a moment why it is skipped.

1934. He flees Nazism to the United States. He is the first member to negotiate the Institute's move to Columbia University and to move with it.

1939. He leaves the Institute — or rather is forced to leave. The theoretical break (Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse oppose his reformulation of Freud's drive theory) and the institutional purge are intertwined. In 1937 Horkheimer, Marcuse and Löwenthal refuse to publish an article of his in the Institute's journal. In the spring of 1939 Friedrich Pollock removes him from his staffed post.

1941. Escape from Freedom. This book, written after he had been cut from the Institute, makes him a world-famous writer; it is said to have sold more than five million copies to this day.

1950. He moves to Mexico (because of the health of his wife Henny Gurland). He founds the department of psychoanalysis at UNAM and in 1963 becomes the first director of the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis. Together with Michael Maccoby he conducts a field study lasting years in the village of Chiconcuac in the state of Morelos; the result is published in 1970 as Social Character in a Mexican Village. The finding is this: the peasants' character structure is systematically connected with the property relation they have with the land — whether they are landless wage-workers, ejido partners, or small proprietors. This is Fromm's most "materialist" study and the least known.

1955–1961. The Sane Society (1955), The Art of Loving (1956), Marx's Concept of Man (1961). In the same years he is politically active as well: the name of the anti-nuclear SANE, founded in 1957, comes directly from his book The Sane Society, and he is in its founding core. In 1960 he writes the pamphlet Let Man Prevail: A Socialist Manifesto and Program for the Socialist Party of the United States.

1968. He publishes The Revolution of Hope, works on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. After Nixon's victory he withdraws from political activism; he has been a heart patient since 1966.

1976. To Have or To Be? This book, written at seventy-six, is the summary and the programme of his whole work.

1980. On 18 March, five days before his eightieth birthday, he dies in Muralto, Switzerland, in his fourth heart attack. The same year the Weimar workers' questionnaire he had done fifty years earlier is at last published. Whether this is a coincidence or a censorship that lifts only after the death of those who censored is a question left to your judgement.

III. The suppressed questionnaire: why did the German worker not resist?

Fromm's most important study is the study published last. We want to tell this to young comrades first; because here there is a method, there is data, and there is a lesson that still holds today.

The question. In 1929 the workers' movement in Germany was on paper the strongest in Europe. The social-democratic party (SPD) and the communist party (KPD) together took millions of votes, ran giant unions, sports clubs, choirs, cooperatives. If class consciousness had been measured from the ballot box and the membership card, Germany would have been the country most resistant to fascism. Four years later Hitler was in power and this enormous organisation was dispersed almost without resistance.

The method. Fromm and Hilde Weiss prepared a 271-item "interpretive questionnaire." This is a new technique for Germany in that period: the questions are open-ended, they probe everyday attitudes rather than direct political opinion, and the answers are interpreted psychoanalytically — that is, in order to read the tendency behind what is said. About 3,300 questionnaires were distributed; by the end of 1931 around 1,100 came back. During the Institute's emigration about half of these were lost; 584 questionnaires remained in hand, 474 were actually evaluated.

The finding. Among workers who voted for the left parties the distribution of character was roughly as follows:

Character structure	Share	Meaning
Consistent democratic/revolutionary character	15 percent	Equipped actually to resist fascism
Politically active but without deep commitment	25 percent	Variable according to conditions
Indifferent, neutral, conciliatory	40 percent	The majority that will not determine the result
Authoritarian character despite voting left	20 percent	Can pass to the other side under suitable conditions

That is: between a worker's voting left and how that worker will behave in the face of authority there was a deep gulf. The worker was ideologically "left," in character surrendered to authority. In Fromm's phrase, opinion and character are not the same thing; and in the moment of crisis what is decisive is not opinion but character.

From this finding the concept of "authoritarian character" came out — this is the conceptual ancestor of Adorno's famous 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality, and this source is most of the time not mentioned.

The suppression. Although the study had been promised, it was not published in the Institute's journal. According to Wolfgang Bonß, Horkheimer found it "too Marxist" and shrank from the damage it might do to the Institute's position in the United States. Fromm's own account is harsher; he speaks of Horkheimer's "fear of being stamped a leftist" and even counts the Frankfurt School's term "critical theory" as an evasion:

"Horkheimer was afraid… He used Aesopian language in order not to say 'Marxist theory.'"

The German of the text appeared only in 1980, the English in 1984 (The Working Class in Weimar Germany, Harvard University Press).

The lesson. There are three things here, all three valid for today:

The vote and membership do not measure consciousness. The strength of a movement is measured not by its number on paper but by its members' behaviour in the moment of crisis. The counterpart, at the moment of going on strike, of a political view that gathers likes on social media today is a separate question.
The production of knowledge is classed as well. The doing of a study and its publication are not the same thing. When discussing unemployment figures we had said "the absence of data is also a datum"; here there is one step more: the suppression of data is also a datum. TÜİK's not counting working children since 2019 and Horkheimer's not publishing the questionnaire are the same operation at different scales — the pushing of an inconvenient finding out of the debate.
Institutions also purge the person who produces the finding that disturbs them. Fromm was removed from the Institute in 1939. That his name is most of the time not mentioned when the Frankfurt School is told today is what the sociologist Neil McLaughlin called "origin myths": every school writes its own founding story afterwards, in the language of the winners.

IV. The conceptual kit: social character, escape from freedom, the marketing character

Fromm's concepts answer a single problem: how is the connection between economic structure and the individual's psychic structure established?

In Marx, social being determines consciousness. But how does it determine? By what mechanism does the transfer take place between the order of the factory and a human being's dream, anger, love? A crude Marxism waves this question aside by saying "reflection." Fromm places a concept of mediation in this gap.

1. Social character

Social character is the character-core that people in a given society carry in common; it transforms the members of the society into human beings who want to do what that society needs done. Its function is exactly this: to turn outer necessity into inner desire.

An example: early capitalism wants accumulation; a society that wants accumulation produces a "hoarding character" that has internalised saving, industriousness, thrift, order. The age of mass consumption wants the opposite: a character that spends, borrows, constantly wants the new. People do not live this as a command; they live it as their own desires. Force is not required; the human being becomes his own watchman.

You see the kinship of this with Gramsci's concept of hegemony. The difference is this: Gramsci shows where consent is produced (school, press, church, association); Fromm tries to tell how consent settles inside the human being. The two are not rivals, they are complementary. What we discussed under the heading of cognitive capitalism in the political economy of perception is the present intersection of these two concepts: attention itself becoming a field of production.

2. Escape from freedom

The thesis of Escape from Freedom (1941) is this: modern man became "free" by breaking from the traditional bonds that encircled him — the village, the guild, the religious community, the feudal hierarchy. But this freedom was freedom from; it was getting free of something. The means of self-realisation, that is freedom to, were not given to the majority, because of property relations. What emerged was a human being unmoored from his bonds but unable to form a new bond, lonely, precarious and anxious.

This anxiety is unbearable. The human being flees it in three ways: by taking refuge in authority (surrendering to a leader, a herd, a "great one"), by destructiveness (finding the source of the anxiety outside and attacking it) and by automaton conformity (being like everyone and not being noticed; what one takes to be one's own thought being in fact the given patterns).

This triad is useful when discussing the rise of reaction in Turkey and in Europe today. As we showed when writing the election in which the AfD took 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt: in a region deindustrialised, made precarious, its collective institutions dispersed, people have been "set free" but left unprotected. The authoritarian movement offers them both the explanation of the anxiety and the shelter. But attend: this is not a psychological explanation, it is the psychological moment of the explanation. If there had been no dispossession there would have been no anxiety. We had shown that fascism is not a state of mind but a class alliance when writing the line from Nuremberg to NATO's trenches; Fromm tells us how the mass base of that alliance is prepared, not the alliance itself.

The everyday counterpart of automaton conformity and the mental self-defence against it we had taken up separately in The Dialectic of Everyday Life; Fromm's three mechanisms of escape may be counted as the conceptual background of that piece.

3. The marketing character

This is Fromm's sharpest concept, and it is formulated in Man for Himself (1947). In capitalism labour-power is a commodity; but in developed capitalism the human being sells not only his labour-power but his own personality. Personality becomes a product; the human being becomes both the seller and the goods of his own product. The question he asks of himself is no longer "what am I, what can I do" but "what am I worth on the market."

The feature of this character is that it has no fixed core: whichever personality the market demands, it assumes that personality. Self-respect comes not from one's own powers but from the acceptance of others. And because acceptance fluctuates, self-respect fluctuates constantly as well.

When you read this concept, written in 1947, today, you see that personal brand, profile optimisation, follower count, the LinkedIn CV, phrases like "marketing yourself well" all come out at the same place. We shall return here in the ninth part.

The counterpart of this concept in Marx is commodity fetishism: the appearing of the relation among human beings as a relation among things. We had previously discussed that fetishism is not an illusion but an objective appearance; Fromm's contribution is to show how this objective appearance settles into the human being's character. The marketing character is the residue of commodity fetishism at the level of personality.

4. The pathology of normality

Fromm's fourth contribution is a reversal. Psychiatry evaluates the individual through his adaptation to society: if adapted, healthy; if unadapted, ill. Fromm asks: what if society itself is ill? Then adaptation ceases to be a criterion of health. This is the central concept of The Sane Society (1955): the pathology of normality. Millions of people sharing the same defect does not make that defect a virtue; it only makes it invisible.

This is the point the debates on "burnout at work" miss today. When a worker is crushed under a twelve-hour shift the remedy is not to "increase his resilience"; it is to shorten the shift. Every approach that treats the individual and thereby sustains the social pathology is exactly what Fromm criticised — and his own followers would later fall into this as well.

V. The Art of Loving: loving in the middle of the market

The phrase "the art of living with love" appears in MARFET's title. Then let us give this book its due — and show why taking it for a romantic handbook is a misreading.

The Art of Loving (1956) is not a eulogy of love, it is a critique of capitalism. The construction of the book is this: love is not a feeling but an activity; because it is an activity it is learned; like everything learned it wants discipline, patience and concentration. The basic sentence of the second chapter:

"Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a 'standing in,' not a 'falling for.' In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving."

The opposition Fromm constructs in English is a word-play hard to translate: falling in love versus standing in love. Falling is passive, it happens to you; standing is an act that is sustained.

What matters most is the book's third chapter: "Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society." Here Fromm shows that the modern love relation has taken the form of the market. Two people fall in love when they become convinced they have found in each other "the best object available on the market"; marriage is increasingly set up as the ideal of "a team that functions well"; the parties remain strangers to each other for a lifetime but behave with courtesy and try to make each other feel good. Fromm gives this a sharp name: "egoism à deux" — a two-person alliance of selfishness set up against the world, taken for love and intimacy.

And he shows the form in which capitalist ethics seeps into love: the morality of "fairness." The rule of commodity exchange — "I take from you as much as I give you" — is carried into the field of feelings. Love turns into an exchange, a contract in which both sides look to their own share. The concluding sentence of the last chapter is the one we cited at the start: the principle of capitalist society and the principle of love are incompatible.

That is why The Art of Loving is not a relationship book. Its thesis is this: love is systematically made impossible under capitalism — because the things love requires (time, security, concentration, being able to give without return, not competing) are exactly the things the market takes from the human being. The "capacity to love" of a person who works twelve hours, thinks of next month's rent, and has to market himself at every moment is not a moral problem, it is a material problem.

A note — and a comradely warning. In giving this book its due we must also say its fault; that is the principle of the blog, and we did the same when writing on Yılmaz Güney. The Art of Loving carries the gender understanding of 1956. As Douglas Kellner has shown, Fromm defines femininity and masculinity in an essentialist way and repeats the period's heteronormative judgements on homosexuality. Fromm is one of the first critical theorists to open, in his early writings, the discussion of matriarchy through Bachofen and to criticise patriarchy — but in this book the analysis of gender is weak and, by today's criteria, reactionary. To defend a text is not to defend every sentence of it.

VI. To Have or To Be?: plucking the flower

Now we have come to the main title of the talk.

To Have or To Be? (1976) is Fromm's last great book and it offers not an existential dilemma but a diagnosis of a civilisation. The book opens with the bankruptcy of the "Great Promise" — the promise of unlimited progress, unlimited mastery over nature, material abundance, unlimited personal happiness. The promise has not been kept; and not having been kept, it has consumed the planet as well.

Three poets, one flower

In the first chapter of the book Fromm tells the distinction through three poems. This is an example as beautiful as it is instructive; if you are going to the talk, keep it in mind.

Tennyson sees a flower in a cranny of a wall and plucks it with its roots into his hand; "if I could understand you wholly, with your root, I should know what God and man is," he says. Fromm's note is clear: "the flower itself is killed as a result of his interest in it."

Bashō, in a haiku, notices the nazuna plant at the foot of a hedge, looks carefully and leaves it as it is. Fromm: "He does not want to pluck it; he does not even touch it."

Goethe, in the poem "Gefunden," takes the flower with its roots but plants it in his garden, so that it may go on living.

The source in the history of philosophy of what Fromm calls the "being mode" is clear, and Fromm does not hide it: Spinoza. The distinction between activity and passivity, the idea that the human being exists to the extent that he expresses his own power, comes from Spinoza's Ethics. The core we discussed when writing on Spinoza — freedom established by the knowledge of necessity — is the philosophical ancestor of what Fromm calls "being." To know this kinship is the best tool in your hand against those who read the book as "Far Eastern wisdom."

Fromm's conclusion:

"Tennyson's relationship to the flower is in the mode of having, or possession—not material possession but the possession of knowledge."

And the sentence that comes immediately after rejects from the start all the book's "Eastern wisdom" readings:

"The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West."

That is, this is not a cultural opposition, it is a problem of social structure. Keep this in mind; it will serve us in the eighth part.

Two modes

Fromm applies the duality to every field of everyday life. We drew the table from these distinctions:

Field	Having mode	Being mode
Learning	Accumulating notes, storing knowledge like property; giving it back in the exam	Being shaken by questions, changing as one learns
Memory	Holding knowledge mechanically, possessing the source	Forming a living bond, reproducing remembering
Speaking	Counting the argument a property to be won, defending one's position	Thinking together with the one opposite, not counting being persuaded a defeat
Reading	"Having read" the book, adding it to the list	Wrestling with the text, allowing the text to change you
Authority	Authority that comes from possessing the office, the title, the rank	Accountable authority born of competence and trust
Knowledge	"I have knowledge"	"I know that I do not know"; critical reason
Faith	Possessing a doctrine to cling to, suppressing doubt	An orientation that proceeds by evidence, open to being tested
Love	Appropriating, controlling, saying "mine"	Giving, caring, taking responsibility, knowing

It is worth lingering a little over the table's rows for "knowledge" and "learning"; because they intersect directly with what this blog has written on the theory of knowledge and the relation of science and philosophy. Knowledge's turning into a thing "had" is not only an individual attitude: the patent, copyright, the paywall, the paid database — there are institutional instruments for putting knowledge into the form of property. The blog's name is not "Knowledge Commons" for nothing; knowledge's remaining in the being mode is possible only if it remains common.

This table can be read like a moral lesson. Our objection begins exactly at this point — but first let us see Fromm's own programme; because to reduce him to moralism is also an injustice.

The book's programme — the part that does not fit on the self-help shelf

The last chapter of To Have or To Be? ("The Features of the New Society") is a political programme. Most of the proposals in this chapter were formulated earlier in The Revolution of Hope (1968); they are systematised in 1976:

A guaranteed yearly income — the direct precursor of today's debate on an unconditional basic income. Fromm defends this not as a benefit but as the material precondition of participatory democracy: a human being who cannot say "no" because of economic necessity is not free.
Participatory democracy based on face-to-face groups — small units at the scale of the neighbourhood and the workplace, in which being informed and taking decisions walk together.
The directing of production according to rational consumption instead of profit, organised consumer movements.
The limiting of advertising, the prohibition of hypnotic methods of suggestion.
The decentralisation of the economy and of politics.
A Supreme Cultural Council — an organ that would independentise the media and the production of knowledge from the criteria of profit and military usability.
The closing of the gulf between rich and poor nations, nuclear disarmament.

When you read this list two things are seen at once. First: Fromm's "being" is not an individual lifestyle proposal; it is bound to a programme of institutional transformation. Those who take Fromm for a self-help writer have not read the last chapter of the book. Second: this programme is far too light for the weight of the illness it describes — and this is the beginning of our criticism. First let us see Fromm's Marx.

VII. Fromm's Marx

Fromm's most concrete contribution to the Marxist tradition is a book: Marx's Concept of Man (1961). What the book did was to bring Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — in T. B. Bottomore's translation — to a wide readership in the United States.

The historical meaning of this must be grasped. In the America of 1961, immediately after the McCarthy period, Marx was spoken of as "the father of totalitarianism." In this climate Fromm brought Marx's youthful work, the concept of alienation and the conception of the human being into discussion. A generation of American and European readers first met the young Marx in this way.

The passage Fromm leans on, from the third notebook of the 1844 Manuscripts, is these lines, which are the whole axis of the piece:

"The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being."

Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, "Human Needs and the Division of Labour under the Rule of Private Property"

Fromm puts this passage as the epigraph at the head of To Have or To Be? That is, the book's main idea is not Fromm's discovery; it is the expansion of a sentence Marx wrote in 1844. It is important to know this: "to have or to be" is not an Eastern wisdom or a philosophy of life, it is an extension of the theory of alienation. As we said when writing what Marx means for us: Marx is not a dogma but a living method — and Fromm is a reader who uses the branch of that method that comes from the young Marx, but who does not sufficiently use the mature Marx's analysis of value and surplus-value.

Fromm's second contribution is his editorship. The Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium he published in 1965, with thirty-five contributions, is an international cross-section of the humanist Marxism of the period: from the Praxis circle in Yugoslavia, Mihailo Marković, Gajo Petrović, Predrag Vranicki, Rudi Supek; from Czechoslovakia, Karel Kosík and Ivan Sviták; from Poland, Adam Schaff; and also Ernst Bloch, Lucien Goldmann, Maximilien Rubel, Raya Dunayevskaya, Léopold Senghor — and, despite all they had argued over, Herbert Marcuse. Fromm's definition in this volume summarises his understanding of socialism: the human being is "rich not because he had much but because he was much."

Fromm's third stance concerns the Soviet Union. In May Man Prevail? (1961) he reads the USSR not as a socialist society but as a bureaucratic order run by a conservative ruling class; he argues that it shares the same logic of alienation as the West's "managerial industrial society." Instead of choosing one of the two blocs in the Cold War he seeks a third position: disarmament, peaceful coexistence, the criticism of the bureaucratic apparatus on both sides. We had established the present counterpart of this stance on this blog in the distillation debate: we are not obliged to choose one of two blocs of capital.

VIII. A comrade, but incomplete: the Marxist criticism of Fromm

Now the settling of accounts. The criticisms directed at Fromm come from two separate sources, and the two must not be mixed.

1. The criticism from the Frankfurt School: Marcuse and Adorno

In 1955 Herbert Marcuse published in Dissent an essay titled "The Social Implications of Freudian 'Revisionism'" (vol. 2, no. 3, Summer 1955, pp. 221–240); this essay is the last chapter of Eros and Civilization, which came out the same year. Fromm replied in the autumn issue, Marcuse answered in the winter of 1956, Fromm wrote a short rejoinder in the same issue. The debate is one of the hardest inner debates of Western Marxism.

Marcuse's claim is this: Fromm and the other "revisionists," by abandoning Freud's drive theory, have destroyed the material ground of criticism. Identifying mental health with success in adapting to society turns criticism into therapy. And the truly striking sentences are these:

"The 'personality' and its creative potentialities are resurrected in the face of a reality which has all but eliminated the conditions for the personality and its fulfillment."

"Fromm revives all the time-honored values of idealistic ethics as if nobody had ever demonstrated their conformist and repressive features."

According to Marcuse, when the human being's longings are internalised into a "higher self," the social problem turns into a spiritual problem. This is the criticism we too shall underline.

Fromm's reply is this: Freud's drive theory is not "radical" but the product of nineteenth-century bourgeois materialism and of a patriarchal world-view; character is born not from stages of sexual development but from social-economic adaptation; and Marcuse's vision of "unlimited instinctual satisfaction" is not political but utopian-aesthetic, and it is regressive. Fromm's most accurate sentence is the answer he gave to the charge of reformism:

"The person who is not concerned with the steps between today and the future, radical or not, is not engaged in politics."

This is a just point against Marcuse and should be written to Fromm's account. In Marcuse's position there really is an air of "revolution or nothing," and this air leads to the belittling of all the positional struggles in between. As John Rickert's 1986 study revisiting this debate showed, Marcuse often judged theories only by their political implications and did not discuss their empirical grounds.

Adorno's stance is more personal. In a 1936 letter to Horkheimer he describes an article of Fromm's as "sentimental and false from the start, a mixture of social democracy and anarchism" and says that "the concept of dialectic is seriously missing." Horkheimer writes to Löwenthal that "a psychology without libido is in a sense not a psychology." Fromm counts Adorno "a puffed-up word-juggler with no conviction." It is hard to gauge how far a hostility at this level shaped the theoretical debate — but these letters are enough to see that the erasure of a name from a school is not always for purely theoretical reasons.

2. The criticism from the class front: Mattick and after

From our point of view this is the real criticism, and its clearest expression is found in 1956, in the council communist Paul Mattick's review of The Sane Society:

"The abolition of exploitation can be actualized only by the exploited; the emphasis must be on class, not on man."

Mattick has three objections, and all three are in place:

"We" language covers class. Fromm speaks of "modern man," "contemporary society," "we." Whereas the ruling ideology and character are the ideology and character of the ruling class; the responsibility for capitalist barbarism cannot be distributed this equally. The sentence "we are all captives of consumer society" equalises, in the same sentence, the one who produces the consumer goods and the one who profits from them.
There is no subject of transformation. From where is Fromm's "new man" to come? If character is the product of social conditions and the conditions do not change, who will change the character? The Marxist answer is clear: the practice that changes the conditions changes the human being as well while it changes the conditions; the name of this practice is class struggle. We had detailed this link when writing how the revolutionary subject is constructed from the first axe to today; what is missing in Fromm is exactly this link.
The proposed solutions do not threaten the system. Small-scale communes and decentralisation, so long as they are left to the mercy of the capitalist market, feed the illusion that the system has been "humanised."

The same criticism is repeated in a contemporary form by Iain Ferguson (International Socialism, 2016):

"in Fromm's writings class scarcely figures, other than as a sociological category, and class struggle even less so."

Ferguson also draws attention to the conciliatoriness in Fromm's description of socialism: Fromm could write that socialism "does not threaten to take anyone's property" and that the high salaries of top managers need not be reduced. This is no longer a difference of emphasis, it is a difference of class position.

3. Our assessment

Now let us put the two columns side by side:

What Fromm saw	What Fromm did not see
The bond between economic structure and psychic structure can be made concrete with the concept of "social character"	That the historical subject that will change that character is the organised working class
Consent is produced not by force but by the shaping of desire	The role of the concrete apparatuses of property and of the state in the production of consent (Gramsci and Althusser fill this gap)
Fascism is not a "madness" but the product of precarisation at the level of character	That fascism is a choice of the most reactionary fractions of capital (Dimitrov's definition)
Love is systematically made impossible under capitalism	That the solution to this impossibility is not in individual practice but in working time, income and security
The "having" mode is the everyday form of alienation	That the passage to the "being" mode is not a decision but a problem to do with the property of the means of production
That the Soviet order was not socialism	The political cost of the formula "both are the same patient," putting socialism and capitalism in the same sack

And our last word is this:

Fromm asked the right question, found the right mechanism, addressed the wrong subject. He wrote his book as an invitation to the human being whose character has been produced; whereas the conditions that produce that character change not by the good will of single persons but despite the resistance of those who have an interest in those conditions. When "from having to being" is presented as a moral preference, it turns into a call that costs those who have the most nothing. Because to say "have less" to a person living on the minimum wage is to say nothing to him.

That is why the question to be asked when reading Fromm's book is this: Who is having? When you reread the "having mode" in Fromm's language as a property relation, the book suddenly becomes much sharper. A worker's buying a telephone on instalments and a holding company's buying three banks are not the same "having mode." The first is a form of alienation; the second is a class relation. Because Fromm gathered these two under the same concept, his work becomes open to class blindness — and it is through exactly this opening that the self-help industry comes in.

IX. Today: the digitalisation of the marketing character

Fromm died in 1980. If he is still read today, the reason is not that the character he described has disappeared, but that it has been industrialised.

1. The profile is the institutionalisation of the marketing character. When Fromm wrote in 1947 that the human being lived himself as a commodity, he was describing this as a tendency. Today the infrastructure of that tendency has been built: everyone has a profile, a follower count, an engagement rate, a "personal brand." What Fromm called "the binding of self-respect to the acceptance of others" is no longer a feeling, it is a magnitude that is measured, ranked and sold. Moreover this measurement is done by the device in the person's own pocket, with his own consent. The most efficient side of what we have called the digital panopticon is this: the one surveilled himself carrying the apparatus of surveillance.

And the ideological cover of this measurement is ready: technology is narrated as if it had not been born of anyone's labour, as a power developing by itself. As we showed in the piece in which we dismantled the illusion of ownerlessness and in the piece in which we treated the myth of the singularity as a "modern opiate", every technology narrative whose subject has been erased erases the property question with it.

2. The "being" mode itself has been turned into a commodity. Fromm's antidote — attention, concentration, presence, slowness — is today a market segment. Mindfulness apps, "digital detox" holidays, meditation subscriptions, the aesthetic of minimalism. Capital sells the antidote of the illness it itself produced; this is capitalism's most talented move. To buy the "being mode" as an app subscriber is, by definition, the having mode.

3. Precarity is reshaping character. As we showed in our gig-economy dossier, the platform worker has to market his own labour every day again: his score, his acceptance rate, the customer review. This is the purest form of Fromm's marketing character — and it is no longer a personality tendency, it is the condition of the work regime. The courier does not choose to be "smiling"; the algorithm forces him to be smiling. Let us repeat here what we said when writing the single worker at the till: feeling too is a labour item and it is taken unpaid.

4. Artificial intelligence is the largest-scale application yet of the "having" mode. This was the thesis of the paper we presented at Karaburun: the large models are distilled from humanity's common accumulation — from every text written, every picture drawn, every line of code written — and sold back as a company's property. In Fromm's language, this is the passing of the general intellect into the having mode. Like Tennyson's flower: knowledge is plucked because of the interest felt in it, torn up by the root and turned into a property. Whoever wants to know must now rent. Let us repeat here the duality we stated in Digital Shackles and Cybernetic Horizons: the same technology, when the property relation changes, can cease to be a shackle and become a horizon. The problem is not in the tool, it is in whose hand the tool is in.

5. And "escape from freedom" is still working today. We saw the same pattern on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 11 September, on the forty-sixth anniversary of 12 September and in the rise of the AfD in Germany: to the mass being made precarious an enemy is offered as the explanation of its anxiety and an authority as a shelter. What Fromm measured in 1929 is being produced today with entirely different instruments. The difference is this: the tendencies measured with questionnaire paper in Weimar are today both measured by the platforms and intensified at the moment they are measured.

X. To young comrades: what is to be done?

When you close Fromm's book the thing to be done is not to correct your lifestyle. A diagnosis is not a programme; let us be concrete.

1. Take the book off its shelf. When you read To Have or To Be? do not skip the last chapter — "The Features of the New Society." To take Fromm's diagnosis and throw away his programme is the greatest injustice that can be done to this book. And as you read, write your own question beside every "having" sentence: who is having?

2. Do your own questionnaire. Fromm's method of 1929 can still be applied today. In your own workplace, school, neighbourhood, ask questions that measure not what people believe but what they will do in the moment of crisis: "If a friend were sacked without cause, what would you do?", "What do you do when the manager is scolding a woman employee?" The gap between what is said and what is done is an organiser's most valuable knowledge.

3. Discuss not "personality" but the condition. If a friend of yours is burnt out, the issue is not to propose "resilience" to him but to talk about the shift, the wage and security. The proposal of an individual solution is most of the time the politest form of making the social problem invisible.

4. Defend love together with its material conditions. "The art of loving" wants time. Time means working time. The eight-hour day, paid leave, the right to stop, the crèche, the works bus — all of these are at the same time demands of love. When you look at a union demand list, see there the time people can give to one another.

5. Set collective identity against the marketing character. Organisation instead of "personal brand"; comradeship instead of "networking"; member instead of follower. This is not a preference of style, it is a matter of endurance: the human being whose self-respect fluctuates when the like fluctuates cannot endure the long times of the struggle.

6. Put the property of the means of production on the table of discussion. This is the place Fromm left empty; filling it falls to us. If in a discussion "consumer frenzy" is being talked, bring the question one step down: who decides what will be produced?

7. Defend the commons. Fromm's proposal of a "Supreme Cultural Council" is, in today's language, this: knowledge must be produced independently of the criterion of profit and military use. Open data, open source, the public library, public research. As we wrote in the distillation debate: the problem is not who learned from whom, it is whose property the product of the learning is.

8. Go to local philosophy circles — and talk class there. Circles like MARFET are among the rare public spaces of thought still standing in Turkey's districts. To sit in a hall of this kind and ask a question is organising work at least as much as distributing a leaflet. The question to be asked at the Fromm talk is ready: "Will the passage from having to being happen with the consent of those who have?"

9. Look for the suppressed texts of your own tradition. Fromm's questionnaire waited fifty years. In Turkey too there are such texts, such testimonies, such oral histories. Let us make here the call we made in our 12 September dossier: every experience not recorded is a lesson lost for the next generation.

10. And organise. Behind every item on this list this item stands. Fromm's "new man" is not a decision, it is the product of a practice; the name of that practice is organised struggle. The human being changes while changing the world — not otherwise.

Dear Young Comrades,

Erich Fromm's real greatness is not that he told us "have less." His real greatness is that in 1929 he asked the German worker 271 questions and took the answers seriously: to try to measure the difference between a class's opinion of itself and its own behaviour is not a loving admonition, it is a cold-blooded revolutionary responsibility. We do not know what would have changed if that questionnaire had been published. But the difference between a movement's having an instrument with which to know its own base and its not having one is, in history, sometimes everything.

Fromm's lack is also seen from exactly here. He measured the class's character, but he did not write sufficiently that what would change that character is again that class's own action. He constructed the passage "from having to being" as a matter of culture; whereas this is, first of all, a matter of who has what.

Then if you go to the Marmaris Municipality House of Culture and Arts on Friday evening 18 September, hold Fromm with both hands at once: in one hand the diagnosis, in the other the lack. To learn to look without plucking the flower is a beautiful thing. But without asking in whose name the title deed over the nazuna plant at the foot of the hedge stands, looking is not enough either.

Comradely.

Knowledge belongs to everyone.

Event

Understanding Erich Fromm — The Art of Living with Love: "From Having to Being"
Talk: Ahmet Nohut
Friday 18 September, 18.00
Marmaris Municipality House of Culture and Arts
Organised by: Marmaris Philosophy Circle (MARFET)

Related pieces

This piece is a link in the series under the blog's #philosophy tag. Related titles:

Portraits of philosophers — the "Understanding …" series

The Man Who Wept for the Commune — on the occasion of MARFET's 4 September talk; the axis of "what the enemy got right"
Spinoza and the Roots of Materialist Dialectics — God, necessity and freedom for young comrades; the philosophical ancestor of Fromm's "being mode"
From the Garden to the Barricades: The Epistemology of Comradeship from Epicurus to Marx
The Science Mask of Bourgeois Ideology: A Critique of Karl Popper
Rebuilding the World with the Contemporary Antigone, Ioanna Kuçuradi
Asım Bezirci: The Undying Fire of Criticism and Class Struggle

Method, knowledge and the commons

Why Philosophy in the Digital Age? — a guide to dialectical thought in the age of algorithms
Not Dogma but a Living Method: What Does Marx Mean for Us?
Grasping Science and Philosophy by the Dialectical Method
Objective Reality in the Theory of Knowledge and the Power to Transform the World
From the First Axe to Revolutionary Practice — the problem of the subject of transformation
Facing Material Reality on the Anniversary of Friedrich Engels's Death

Character, everyday life and ideology

The Dialectic of Everyday Life and a Guide to Survival — mental self-defence; against automaton conformity
Sending Intentions to the Universe, or Changing the World? — neoliberal opiates and the self-help industry
The Political Economy of Perception — epistemological resistance in the age of cognitive capitalism
An Open Letter to Evrim Ağacı: Fetishism and a Dialectical Intervention — the root in Marx of the marketing character
From Futurism to Techno-Fascism — the second piece of the philosophy series

Artificial intelligence and digital capitalism

Karaburun at Twenty — the expropriation of the general intellect, mental Taylorism and the digital panopticon
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and the Illusion of Ownerlessness
On Artificial Intelligence and the Technological Singularity — the "singularity" myth as a modern opiate
Digital Shackles and Cybernetic Horizons
Gig Economy Dossier — algorithmic management and the marketing character today
The Panopticon's Doorkeeper — on the apparatus of surveillance
Whose Distillation? — whose property is the product of learning?

Class, reaction and history

After Saxony-Anhalt: The Origins of Reaction — the present ground of authoritarian character
From the Nuremberg Stage to NATO's Trenches — capital's global fascist alliance
12 September: The History of a Class Coup
From the Ugly King to Yol: Reading Yılmaz Güney Through Class — on the principle of "neither saint nor villain"

The Aegean and local philosophy

From Mythos to Praxis: Materialist Philosophy on the Aegean Shores
Human Action on the Sheer Slopes of Caria: A Materialist Journey to Amos — the ancient city immediately beside Marmaris
Albatros Computing Cooperative and Software Cooperativism 101 — an attempt at an organisation of production in the "being mode"

Sources

Fromm's texts

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, Farrar & Rinehart, 1941. Turkish: Özgürlükten Kaçış, trans. Şemsa Yeğin, Payel, 1972.
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, Rinehart, 1947. Turkish: Erdem ve Mutluluk, trans. Ayda Yörükan, Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1994; also Kendini Savunan İnsan, Say.
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, Rinehart, 1955. Turkish: Sağlıklı Toplum, trans. Zeynep Tanrısever – Yurdanur Salman, Payel, 1996.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, Harper & Brothers, 1956. Turkish: Sevme Sanatı, trans. Yurdanur Salman, Payel, 1995; trans. Işıtan Gündüz, Say, 2020.
Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, Ungar, 1961 (with T. B. Bottomore's translation of the 1844 Manuscripts). Turkish: Marx'ın İnsan Anlayışı, trans. Kaan H. Ökten, Arıtan, 1997; Say, 2014.
Erich Fromm, May Man Prevail?, Doubleday, 1961.
Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium, Doubleday, 1965 — Fromm's Introduction. Full contents.
Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, Harper & Row, 1968. Turkish: Umut Devrimi, trans. Şemsa Yeğin, Payel, 1995.
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. Turkish: İnsandaki Yıkıcılığın Kökenleri, trans. Şükrü Alpagut, Payel, 2 vols.
Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?, Harper & Row, 1976. Turkish: Sahip Olmak ya da Olmak, trans. Aydın Arıtan, Arıtan, 1990; Say, 2015.
Erich Fromm & Michael Maccoby, Social Character in a Mexican Village, Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Erich Fromm, Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches, 1980 (written 1929–31); English: The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study, ed. Wolfgang Bonß, Harvard University Press, 1984.

Marx

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Third Manuscript: "Human Needs and the Division of Labour under the Rule of Private Property"

Debate and criticisms

Reassessments of Fromm

The Turkish renderings of the English quotations in the original of this piece are ours. The character-distribution shares of the Weimar questionnaire rest on Brunner's account; questionnaire numbers show small differences among the sources (the range 3,000–3,300 is given for questionnaires distributed) and this difference has not been hidden in the text.