To Have or To Be at Fifty

To Have or To Be? turns fifty in a few days. Written by Erich Fromm, a German social psychologist, it analysed the corrosivity of ‘late capitalism’, an epoch most obviously characterised by consumerism.

Consumerism comes with constituent attitudes. It encourages us, for instance, to value assets based on their saleability. Entrenched in our consciousness, via the unconscious, Fromm argued that many of these attitudes altered our understanding of ourselves, our contemporaries, and, most importantly, our view of the outside world. To reorient our understandings and lead more fulfilling lives, Fromm prescribed a new ethic focused on feeling and being to displace capitalism’s acquisitive ethic.

Born at the beginning of the twentieth century, Fromm began his studies following the conclusion of the First World War, swiftly receiving his PhD and subsequently qualifying as a psychoanalyst by 1930. In the same year, Fromm joined the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, becoming a central figure in the nascent “Frankfurt School.”

Dedicated to the explication of Marxism, the school hosted theorists like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, both of whom, like Fromm, emigrated to the United States after the Nazis had risen to power. Spending much of the rest of his life in the States, Fromm became a prolific author across an array of disciplines, but it is for his contribution to neo-Freudian theory, and his willingness to explore the political dimensions of said theory, that he is remembered.

One of his final works, To Have or To Be is the fullest representation of his philosophy. As aforementioned, it analysed the psychological impact consumerism, and other attachés of late capitalism, had on human beings. Its main observation was that consumerism had led us to treat everything as if it were a possession (something to have) as opposed to an experience (something at which we are exercising our being). Learning, for instance, was increasingly pursued not out of interest but as an exercise through which one could obtain both social and cultural capital. Likewise, events were attended not for the joy or the pleasure they brought, but for the photographs one could take, and the connections one could make.

Drawing on a diverse set of thinkers, from Jesus of Nazareth and Master Eckhart to Karl Marx and R. H. Tawney, Fromm posited that freedom was a mental, rather than a political, status. A theorist of human perfectibility, like many of his influences, he thought the purpose of a political state was to make such a mental state of freedom realisable. Thus, the state was to dismantle structures that made humans consider things with regard to their marketability.

A capitalist system, by placing emphasis on capital accrued from markets, was, of course, Fromm’s enemy. Nonetheless, he rejected soviet communism, believing it a ‘vulgar forgery’ of Marxism, and criticised much of the contemporary left for its bourgeois aspirations.

Musing as to what a mended society would look like in the book’s concluding section – ‘The New Man and the New Society’ – Fromm suggested that, absent acquisitive tendencies, we would start to care for our climate and systematically decentralise power. Governed by reason and with measures such as universal basic income removing external pressures, a new age of ‘participatory democracy’ and human freedom would begin.

Regrettably, this has not come to pass, and, as a result, the book, for all its depth, reads like a politically impractical refrain uttered by a disgruntled leftist.

More than anything else, this is a comment on the endurance of ‘late capitalism’. As Mark Fisher wrote in Capitalist Realism, it is easier, in the twenty-first century, to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. How Fromm’s ethic could be seen as enough to overthrow a system which, already in 1976, had sown widespread financialisation and deindustrialisation, not to mention the tyranny of ambition and the relative abandonment of collective altruism, is beyond me.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Müller-May - Rainer Funk

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