Erich Fromm's Exposition of Marx

I was recently reading Eric Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man, in which he discusses Marx's concept of alienation. I thought it was particularly relevant to my recent rant against Cox and Alm regarding their idea of measuring consumption as a more accurate reflection of wealth. Fromm quotes Marx:

The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theater or to balls, or to the public house, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither will moth nor rust will corrupt -- your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have … everything which the economist takes away from you in life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth … the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

Fromm warns that we "must not confuse the aim of overcoming the abysmal poverty which interferes with dignified life, with the aim of an ever-increasing consumption, which has been the supreme value for both Capitalism and Krushchevism. Marx's position was quite clearly on the side of the conquest of poverty, and equally against consumption as a supreme end." It is not the consumption of things which makes one wealthy, but the ability of one to be one's own master and to participate in the creative work that, as such, makes one human. Again, Fromm:

Independence and freedom, for Marx, are based on the act of self-creation. 'A being does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by another person's favor when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life, but also its creation; when he is its source. My life has necessarily such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation'…For Marx the aim of socialism was the emancipation of man, and the emancipation of man was the same as his self-realization in the process of productive relatedness and oneness with man and nature. The aim of socialism was the development of the individual personality.

According to Fromm, Marx would have criticized Communist Russia as "crude communism." Because Communist Russia was more concerned about universalizing consumption and in doing so maintained the division of labor, it was merely another form of capitalism. Fromm says that in crude communism

[T]he role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. The relation of private property [which Fromm interprets as capital as opposed to merely objects of use] remains the relation of the community to the world of things…. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, by the community as universal capitalist. The two sides of the relation are raised to a supposed universality; labor as a condition in which everyone is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

Finally, Fromm states that Marx claimed that the revolution would begin with the emancipation of workers, because working class was the most alienated. However, now, what we see is that many in middle-management are more alienated from their labor than those who work in factories. For the middle-management worker must also "sell his 'personality,'" whereas the skilled laborer at least retains possession of this. The alienation that occurs is one in which the "what" of production means more than the producer. The producer worships the products of his labor instead of his own humanity. This is the fundamental problem of consumption of a measure of wealth -- it perverts the nature of man into something whose highest aim is to have rather than to be. Our own existence is defined by the objects of our production; we live for them and their acquisition.

From concludes his exposition of alienation brilliantly:

To what extent things and circumstance of our own making have become our masters, Marx could hardly have foreseen; yet nothing could prove his prophecy more drastically than the fact that the whole human race is today the prisoner of the nuclear weapons it has created, and of the political institutions which are equally of its own making. A frightened mankind waits anxiously to see whether it will be saved from the power of the things it has created, from the blind action of the bureaucracies it has appointed.