(2) Fromm decries the “anonymity of the social forces . . . inherent in the structure of the capitalistic mode of production.”19 The laws of the market, of supply and demand, of economic cause and effect, are ominously impersonal: no single individual’s wishes control them. Is it the worker who determines how much he is to be paid? No. It is not even the employer. It is that faceless monster, the market. // determines the wage level in some manner beyond the worker’s power to grasp. As for the capitalist, his position is scarcely better: he, too, is helpless. “The individual capitalist expands his enterprise not primarily because he wants to, but because he has to, because . . . postponement of further expansion would mean regression.”20 If he attempts to stagnate, he will go out of business. Under such a system, asks Fromm, how can man not feel alienated?
Consider what Fromm is denouncing. Under capitalism, the wages paid to a man for his work are determined objectively—by the law of supply and demand. The market— reflecting the voluntary judgments of all those who participate in it, all those who buy and sell, produce and consume, offer or seek employment—establishes the general price level of goods and services. This is the context which men are obliged to consider in setting the prices they will ask for their work or offer for the work of others; if a man demands more than the market value of his work, he will remain unemployed; if a particular employer offers him less than the market value of his work, the man will seek—and find—employment elsewhere. The same principle applies to the capitalist who offers his goods for sale. If the prices and quality of his goods are comparable or preferable to those of other men in the same field of production, he will be able to compete; if others can do better than he can, if they can offer superior goods and/or lower prices, he will be obliged to improve, to grow, to equal their achievement, or else he will lose his customers.
The standard determining a producer’s success or failure is the objective value of his product—as judged, within the context of the market (and of their knowledge), by those to whom he offers his product. This is the only rational and just principle of exchange. But this is what Fromm considers evil.
What he rebels against is objectivity. How—he demands— can a man not feel alienated in a system where his wishes are not omnipotent, where the unearned is not to be had, where growth is rewarded and stagnation is penalized?
It is clear from the foregoing that Fromm’s basic quarrel is with reality—since nature confronts man with the identical conditions, which a free economy merely reflects: nature, too, holds man to the law of cause and effect; nature, too, makes constant growth a condition of successful life.
There are writers on alienation who recognize this and do not bother to center their attacks on capitalism: they damn nature outright. They declare that man’s life is intrinsically and inescapably tragic—since reality is “tyrannical,” since contradictory desires cannot be satisfied, since objectivity is a “prison,** since time is a “net” that no one can elude, etc. Existentialists, in particular, specialize in this sort of pronouncement.
(3) As consumer in a capitalist economy, Fromm contends, man is subject to further alienating pressures. He is overwhelmed with innumerable products among which he must choose. He is bewildered and brainwashed by the blandishments of advertisers, forever urging him to buy their wares. This staggering multiplicity of possible choices is threatening to his sanity. Moreover, he is “conditioned” to consume for the sake of consuming—to long for an ever-higher standard of living—merely in order to keep the “system” going. With automatic washing machines, automatic cameras, and automatic can openers, modern man’s relationship to nature becomes more and more remote. He is increasingly condemned to the nightmare of an artificial world.
No such problem confronted the feudal serf.
This much is true: sleeping on an earthen floor, the medieval serf—to say nothing of the caveman—was much closer to nature, in one uncomfortable and unhygienic sense of the word.
The above criticism of capitalism has become very fashionable among social commentators. What is remarkable is that almost invariably, as in the case of Fromm, the criticism is made by the same writers who are loudest in crying that man needs more leisure. Yet the purpose of the “gadgets” they condemn is, specifically, to liberate man’s time. Thus they wish to provide man with more leisure, while damning the material means that make leisure possible.
As for the charge—equally popular—that the multiplicity of choices offered to man in capitalistic society is threatening to his mental equilibrium, it should be remembered that fear of choices and decisions is a basic symptom of mental illness. To whose mentality, then, do these critics of capitalism demand that society be adjusted?
(4) The development of a complex, highly industrialized
society requires an extreme degree of quantification and ab
straction in men’s method of thinking, observes Fromm—and
this, in still another way, estranges man from the world
around him: he loses the ability to relate to things in “their
concreteness and uniqueness.”21
One can agree with Fromm in part: an industrial technological society demands the fullest development and exercise of man’s conceptual faculty, i.e., of his distinctively human form of cognition. The sensory-perceptual level of consciousness— the level of an animal’s cognition—will not do.
Those who assert that the conceptual level of consciousness alienates man from the real world, merely confess that their concepts bear no relation to reality—or that they do not understand the relation of concepts to reality. But it should be remembered that the capacity to abstract and conceptualize offers man—to the extent that he is rational—a means of “relating” to the world around him immeasurably superior to that enjoyed by any other species. It does not “alienate” man from nature, it makes him nature’s master: an animal obeys nature blindly; man obeys her intelligently—and thereby acquires the power to command her.
(5) Finally, most alienating of all, perhaps, are the sort of
relationships that exist among men under capitalism, says
Fromm.
What is the modern man’s relationship to his fellow man? It is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other. The employer uses the ones whom he employs; the salesman uses his customers. … There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference. . .. The alienation between man and man results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other precapitalist societies.32
Fromm is claiming that there existed, in pre-capitalist societies, a mutual good will among men, an attitude of respect and benevolent solidarity, a regard for the value of the human person, that vanished with the rise of a free-market society. This is worse than false. The claim is absurd historically and disgraceful morally.
It is notorious that, in the Middle Ages, human relationships were characterized by mutual suspiciousness, hostility, and cruelty: everyone regarded his neighbor as a potential threat, and nothing was held more cheaply than human life. Such invariably is the case in any society where men are ruled by brute force. In putting an end to slavery and serfdom, capitalism introduced a social benevolence that would have been impossible under earlier systems. Capitalism valued a man’s life as it had never been valued before. Capitalism is the politico-economic expression of the principle that a man’s life, freedom, and happiness are his by moral right.
There is a passage in The Fountainhead that bears on this issue. “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
Under capitalism, men are free to choose their “social bonds”—meaning: to choose whom they will associate with. Men are not trapped within the prison of their family, tribe, caste, class, or neighborhood. They choose whom they will value, whom they will befriend, whom they will deal with, what kind of relationships they will enter. This implies and entails man’s responsibility to form independent value-judgments. It implies and entails, also, that a man must earn the social relationships he desires. But this, clearly, is anathema to Fromm.
“Love,” he has told us, “is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence”—but, he asserts, love and capitalism are inimical. “The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible.”28 The principle of capitalism, says Fromm, is that of “fairness ethics,” of trade, of the exchange of values, without recourse to force or fraud; individuals deal with one another only on the premise of mutual self-interest; they engage only in those transactions from which they expect a profit, reward, or gain. “It may even be said that the development of fairness ethics is the particular ethical contribution of capitalist society.”2*