Couple years ago I scanned/compiled some of Eric Fromm's work on Market economy, including pseudo socialist market economies...I think it is useful to this discussion...
The most important fact for understanding both the character and the secret religion of contemporary human society is the change in the social character from the earlier era of capitalism to the second part of the twentieth century. The authoritarian-obsessive-hoarding character that had begun to develop in the sixteenth century, and continued to be the dominant character structure at least in the middle classes until the end of the nineteenth century, was slowly blended with or replaced by the marketing character. I have called this phenomenon the "marketing character" because it is based on experiencing oneself as a commodity, and one's value not as "use value" but as "ex-change value. "
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What is the meaning of all this in psychological terms? What happens on the market is that all things appear as commodities. What is the difference between a thing and a commodity? This glass of water here is a thing that at the moment I can use to hold water and so on. It is very useful to me. It is not particularly pretty, but it is what it is. However, as a commodity it is something I can buy, which has a certain price, and I perceive of it not only as this thing, as something that has a certain use value as they say, but as a commodity that has a certain exchange value. It appears as a commodity in the market, and its function as a commodity is in the sense that I can describe it as a fifty-cent or twenty-five-cent thing. That is, so to say, I can express this thing in terms of money, or in terms of an abstraction. In fact, if you take your own attitude toward things and if you analyze it a little, you will find that you relate yourself to things to a large extent, not as concrete things, but as commodities. You perceive already of a thing in terms of its abstract money value, in terms of its exchange value.
The Pathology of Normalcy, pp. 61-62.
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In German, "love" has the same root as "praise," but also as "joy" and "freedom." These words express an experience, a complex of experiences. There is no love in which there
no joy, freedom, and praise. There is an old French folk song that says "L'amour est l'enfant de la liberte" (Love is the child of freedom). Love and freedom are brought to- gether in this folk song. Today, this inner, most profound connection between love and freedom is hardly experienced in this way. Quite the contrary. Most people are afraid that they will lose their freedom when they love, and they can- not believe that love at the same time indicates the greatest development of freedom. "The Unthinkable," p. 24.
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The nature of the having mode of existence follows from the nature of private property. In this mode of existence all that matters is my acquisition of property and my unlimited right to keep what I have acquired. The having mode ex- cludes others; it does not require any further effort on my part to keep my property or to make productive use of it. The Buddha has described this mode of behavior as craving, the Jewish and Christian religions as coveting; it transforms everybody and everything into something dead and subject to another's power. To Have Or to Be?, pp. 76-77.
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In the so-called socialist countries, private property has not at all been abolished. It does not matter for the worker whether the factories have been taken over by the state or belong to a large company. In a factory that has been taken over by the state, the worker has just as little to say as in a western factory, even less. Furthermore, state socialism's big appeal is directed toward the instinct to possess. Having a car is much more the anticipation of a Russian than of an American. The Russians are awaiting the happiness of an era when everyone owns a car.
No new society is created by the abolition of so-called private property as such-the sense of property remains. The real question is whether the emphasis is changed from having to being, as can be encountered in many primitive societies or even to a certain degree in medieval society. It depends on one's attitude toward life, on joy of being, on genuine activity. And this depends to a crucial extent on the structure of a society.
The pat formula of the abolition of private property or of the socialization of the means of production has essentially proven to be a fiction. As we have already said, it is basically the same whether a factory belongs to an owner or to the state. All that matters is whether, and to what extent, a person's inner attitude shifts from having to being. When having is no longer important, then it does not matter whether one person has a little more than another. On the contrary: precisely the people who say that everyone must have exactly the same amount are very often just covert proxies of a possessive attitude. Envy motivates them. They are so obsessed with the importance of having that they can conceive of justice only under the condition that nobody has a little more than anybody else. These are basi- cally envious people who live altogether in an orientation toward having but who rationalize their envy as "justice."
-Interview with Reif 1977, pp. 30-32.
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To give another example: there is a horse race among the American Pueblo Indians. But when two horses cross the finish line at about the same time, then they are both win- ners. The Pueblos are not interested in whether one is better than the other; and, indeed, this is also much more realistic, since there is no difference if one or the other is ahead by a millimeter. Practically speaking, both ran equally quickly. Of course, this is only possible if the concept of success does not exist, since, from the standpoint of success, the person who was ahead by one millimeter has won and was successful.
By this, I want to say that concepts such as "success," which appear to us to be natural in our language, are purely sociologically conditioned concepts that exist just as infre- quently in many other societies as the concept of "exploitation." They have grown out of the activity of a society and will also vanish in another society and activity. Every society has the greatest skill for the words that are particularly important for its social structure.
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Consciously, then, these people are not bored. At this point, one must indeed ask analytically whether it is possi- ble that these people are perhaps unconsciously empty, bored, and alienated and whether it is possible that they are passive people unconsciously-the eternal infant who does not only wait for his bottle, but for whom everything is a bottle and who never develops an activity by his own powers.
In fact, the anxious, bored, alienated person compensates for his anxiety by a compulsive consumption that, as a gen- eral illness-or, more precisely, as a symptom of the "pathology of normalcyw-no one thinks is an illness. Indeed, one thinks of the idea of "illness" only when someone is sicker than other people. When, however everyone suffers from the same illness, the idea of illness does not at all arise in people's minds. Thus, this inner void, this inner anxiety is symbolically cured by compulsive consumption. Compulsive eating disorder is the paradigm of this mechanism. If one looks into why certain people suffer from compulsive eating disorders, then one indeed finds that, behind this disorder, which is acknowledged as such, there is some- thing unconscious, namely, depression or anxiety. A person feels empty, and in order simultaneously to fill this void symbolically, he fills himself up with other things, with things that come from the outside, in order to overcome the feeling of inner emptiness and inner weakness. Many people notice in themselves that, when they are anxious or feel depressed, they have a certain tendency to buy some- thing or to go to the refrigerator or to eat a little more than usual and that they then feel somewhat less depressed and somewhat less anxious.
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In reality, we are dealing with a circulus vitiosus: the per- son who becomes anxious in this system consumes. But also the person who is lured to consumption becomes anx- ious, because he becomes a passive person, because he al- ways only takes things in, because he does not actively experience anything in the world. The more anxious he becomes, the more he must consume, and the more he consumes, the more anxious he becomes.
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Man is governed by a peculiar dichotomy. He is afraid of losing the former state, which is one of certainty, and yet he wants to arrive at a new state that gives rise to the possibility of using his proper forces more freely and more completely. Man is always torn between the wish to regress to the womb and the wish to be fully born. Every act of birth requires the courage to let go of something, to let go of the womb, to let go of the breast, to let go of the lap, to let go of the hand, to let go eventually of all certainties, and to rely upon one thing only: one's own powers to be aware and to respond; that is, one's own creativity.
