Alienation

Since its birth, capitalism has been made the scapegoat responsible for almost every real or imagined evil denounced by every man.

(1) Like Marx, Fromm decries the humiliating predicaments of the worker who has to sell his services. Capitalism condemns the worker to experience himself, not as a man, but as a commodity, as a thing to be traded. Further more, since he is only a tiny part of a vast production process, since, for example, he does not build an entire automobile himself, but builds only a small part of it, the worker feels alienated from the product of his own labor and feels alienated from his own labor as such--unlike  the artisan of the Middle ages, whose labor could express the "full richness" of his personality.

IN Fromm's opinion, to offer men a chance to enjoy an unprecedented material well-being is to sentence them to alienation.

(2) He thinks that the capitalism is highly impersonal. But what he objects to is actually objectivity.

(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.

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.

The capacity to abstract and conceptualize offers man a means to "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.

It is notorious that, in the Middle Age, 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.


Under capitalism, men are free to choose their "social bonds"-- to choose whom they will associate with. This implies and entails man's responsibility to form independent value-judgments.

What is the problem of alienation? What's personal identity? Why should so many people experience the task of achieving as a dreaded burden? And what is the significance of the attacks on capitalism in connection with this issue?

Man's sense of himself is the cumulative product of the choices he makes.

A strong sense of personal identity is the product of two things---a policy of independent thinking and, as a consequence, the possession of an integrated set of values.

The problem of alienation is psycho-epistemological: it pertains to how man chooses to use his own consciousness. It is the product of man's revolt against thinking--which means: against reality.