Book review
Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom
by David Giesen

But as a georgist, or as one perusing this newsletter for the first time and curious as to why such a big idea as socializing land rent has all but no part in public debate, Erich Fromm’s 1941 magnum opus, Escape from Freedom holds a large measure of pertinency.

If you’re a georgist, Escape will set your head buzzing with Hera’s Io-bound flies as you attempt to throttle Fromm, already dead, for coming so tantalizingly close --and then wilting-- to coming up with a doctor’s prescription for the malady he addresses. The remedy, need we say in these pages, is “The earth is the people’s, and the fullness thereof. ”

If, on the other hand, you’re intrigued by georgist thought, but not ready to step within the chalk circle, Escape provides a rare opportunity, to read clear, engaging Marxist analysis:

The most important factor in this development is the increasing power of monopolistic capital. The concentration of capital (not of wealth) in certain sectors of our economic system restricted the possibilities for the success of individual initiative, courage, and intelligence. In those sectors in which monopolistic capital has won its victories the economic independence of many has been destroyed. For those who struggle on, especially for a large part of the middle class, the fight assumes the character of a battle against such odds that the feeling of confidence in personal initiative and courage is replaced by a feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness.

The individual’s feeling of powerlessness and aloneness has increased, his “ freedom” from all traditional bonds has become more pronounced, his possibilities for individual economic achievement have narrowed down.

Fromm’s point of departure for asserting that individuals and societies may opt for totalitarian-type cultures rests on this general theme that productive activities are, in a highly capitalized economy, increasingly faceless, dependent less on artisanship and more upon systems familiarity --an ability to use incomprehensible software, automatic machinery, and business encounter technology such as telephones and website pop-up ads.

Yet there is deeper probing than this in Fromm’s work. He labored, after all, as a highly respected psychologist. He trained his sights on historic organized religion and political structures in Europe and drew conclusions.

The breakdown of the medieval system of feudal society had one main significance for all classes of society: the individual was left alone and isolated. He was free. This freedom had a twofold result. Man was deprived of the security he had enjoyed, of the unquestionable feeling of belonging, and he was torn loose from the world which had satisfied his quest for security both economically and spiritually He felt alone and anxious. But he was also free to act and to think independently, to become his own master and do with his life as he could-not as he was told to do.

But having civil freedom to do as you wish often means, Fromm argues, debilitating frustration if one doesn’t experience the psychological confidence to express one’s self. This necessary security is largely an economic one. Here is Fromm speaking of the simultaneous sundering of secure social patterns and the burgeoning of personal liberty as Europe moved away from feudalism towards market capitalism.

However, according to the real life situation of the members of different social classes, these two kinds of freedom were of unequal weight. Only the most successful class of society profited from rising capitalism to an extent which gave them real wealth and power. They could expand, conquer, rule, and amass fortunes as a result of their own activity and rational calculations. This new aristocracy of money, combined with that of birth, was in a position where they could enjoy the fruits of the new freedom and acquire a new feeling of mastery and individual initiative. On the other hand, they had to dominate the masses and to fight against each other, and thus their position, too, was not free from a fundamental insecurity and anxiety.

As the whole cloth of European culture unravels, Fromm points out, undone in snags and tears by concentrations of mobile command of labor, namely money, the established formulae for getting through this life of mystery and hardship evanesce. In short, where money can buy allegiance, connections to specific land and to particular families and to inviolable sacred rites lose their calming potency and cannot keep doubt and fear of the future in abeyance. Money helps. But it alchemizes the “native hue of resolution” into a miserly bent, a hoarding mentality anxious to stave off the potential of what might erupt (culturally speaking) next. To put it bluntly, money trumps super-stition.

Such unsettled times lead desperate men to promulgate astonishing adjurations. And is it any wonder, given the world falling down about its ears? Protestantism discovers itself in such times, Fromm sallies. With The Church racked by venality and cupidity, is it any surprise that men of imagination grew constipated [ed: a symptom of fear] as they reflected on what basis there was for spiritual authority.

Fromm writes persuasively:

Our main interest, however, has been taken up by the reaction of the middle class. Rising capitalism, although it made also for their increased independence and initiative, was greatly a threat. In the beginning of the sixteenth century the individual of the middle class could not yet gain much power and security from the new freedom. Freedom brought isolation and personal insignificance more than strength and confidence. Besides that, he was filled with burning resentment against the luxury and power of the wealthy classes, including the hierarchy of the Roman Church. Protestantism gave expression to the feelings of insignificance and resentment; it destroyed the confidence of man in God’s unconditional love; it aught man to despise and distrust himself and others; it made him a tool instead of an end; it capitulated before secular power and relinquished the principle that secular power is not justified because of its mere existence if it contradicts moral principles; and in doing all this it relinquished the principle elements that had been the foundations of Judaeo-Christian tradition. Its doctrines presented a picture of the individual, God, and the world, in which these feelings were justified by the belief that the insignificance and powerlessness which an individual felt came from the qualities of man as such and that he ought to feel as he felt.

Please read one more bit immediately following the above. We have paused to give you time to reflect.

Thereby the new religious doctrines not only gave expression to what the average member of the middle class felt, but, by rationalizing and systematizing this attitude, they also increased and strengthened it. However, they did more than that; they also showed the individual a way to cope with his anxiety. They taught him that by fully accepting his powerlessness and the evilness of his nature, by considering his whole life an atonement for his sins, by the utmost self-humiliation, and also by unceasing effort, he could overcome his doubt and anxiety; that by complete submission he could be loved by God and could at least hope to belong to those whom God had decided to save.

At last we reach the summit of Fromm’s argument. He has taken time to canvass the approach in an extensive series of intellectual switchbacks which we have only been able, space available, to indicate in previous excerpts. But now read this devastating passage.

The manual laborer sells his physical energy; the businessman, the physician, the clerical employee, sell their “personality.” They have to have a “personality” if they are to sell their products or services. This personality should be pleasing, but besides that its possessor should meet a number of other requirements: he should have energy, initiative,this, that or the other, as his particular position may require. As with any other commodity it is the market which decides the value of these human qualities, yes, even their existence. If there is no use for the qualities a person offers, he has none; just as an unsalable commodity is valueless though it may have its use value.

It is this predicament, where one’s virtue is wholly alienated from love of life, of self, of others, and reposited in the impersonal marketplace, that Fromm sees the origins of the most abject of human psychosis. If the marketplace doesn’t “buy” you, you cease to exist. Under such circumstances freedom merely means the ticker tape moment by moment anxiety of making the right market choice or facing oblivion. God, human relations, hoary institutions are all subject to the “exit poll” of money plunked down. Jim and Tammy Bakker unctuously showed this, Saddam Hussein, U.S. backed in the Iraq-Iran war showed this, and so many major corporations in their accounting practices shenanigans showed this.

Fromm takes the last half of the book to trace the budding fascism of his age --recall, this was published in 1941.

But what has changed beneath the surface of today’s advanced cultural chaos? Despite the beautiful hybridizations of music, art, literature and human flesh and blood which I observe here in San Francisco, and despite the atomization of consumer options enabled by the internet (and by atomization of consumer options I mean the liberation of product sales from big and/or powerful retail outlets), despite all this there continues, nevertheless, a further shrinking down of the individual into merely an identity defined by one’s accessories. With technology and consumer goods so inexpensive, do you exist if you don’t have the iPod with 500 songs (downloaded off the Net), without technology, how do you communicate with others, man? What was the party I attended last night without the techno-boom downloaded off the Net? For that matter, what is war today without being able to download smartbombs onto Baghdad via the Net?

All that seems so inexorably depressing of the individual music maker, party-goer, yea, even of the individual soldier. To be sure, there are plenty of exceptions that perk us up, giving hope that real millennial freedom is just around the corner what with all the blending. . . if we’re all 100% mixed class, race, and culture, after all, where’s the friction?

It lingers on within the individual.

What essential virtue inheres in the person when that person is separated from “essential” technology? Prompted, clicked, goaded, popped up, spammed into definition, what remains when one is not a blip on technology’s screen?

The earth, that’s what. With his Marxist fortitude to guide him, Fromm adequately and eloquently Fromm adequately and eloquently splays the problem on the lectern. But in his juggernaut carom through capitalism he has abandoned planet earth as a biological point of origin, and thencely as an economic necessity, and consequently as a psychological stanchion.

In perceiving that humanity, indeed all phenomena, exists because made up out of the earth’s clay and minerals, one glimmers that all phenomena is existentially on par with all other phenomena. In grasping that sustenance and reproduction are possible only through recourse to earth, one distinguishes the unappealable leverage over others which legal or violent alienation of them from earth procures. And when one, a living being, conscious of both one’s own and other’s individuality, acknowledges coexistence with and because of the earth (in all its fortuitous placement in the solar system), then Unrootedness, which is the basis for Fromm of that psychological fear that chases humanity to totalitarianism is exploded.

Earth is the sacred. It is the irreproducible. It is the gift which cannot be repaid.

The earth’s appropriation as a source of private income diminishes (via land rent) others in the very act of their producing out of the earth their livelihood.

And the privatization of earth is a psychological battering ram crushing the essential intuition that we are equal in our existence.

This last is the most pertinent in connection with Fromm’s book. To take on the role of creator and thus proprietor of earth, having the right to extract life and the produce of the living as the terms for earth’s use, is the very substance of totalitarianism.

At last, here is the reason for reviewing this long-time-in-print text: it advances discussion of the psychological trauma afflicting our times and provides an opportunity for you to engage others in georgist conversation. Q