Fromm’s writing on alienation is at its strongest when he resists savior impulses and stays with explication of Marx, as in his Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), an exegesis of Marx’s The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. A major value of Fromm’s effort is in his linkages between The Manuscripts and Capital, that is, his linkages between workers as subjects and the objective economy. Fromm observes:
Marx’s concept of the alienated product of 1abor is expressed in one of the most fundamental points developed in Capital, in what he calls the “fetishism of commodities.” Capitalist production transforms the relations of individuals into qµalities of things themselves and this transformation constitutes the nature of the commodity in capitalist production. {p. 50)
Though Fromm (1961) also makes linkages between Marx and religious existentialism which are unrelated to this dissertation’s ends, he does give useful attention to updating Marx’s nineteenth century concepts of “worker” and to unlinking Marx from responsibility for Soviet totalitarianism in the name of socialism (pp. 24ff and 69ff). In sum, Fromm’s usefulness to this dissertation is very truncated, as his intellectual penetration of alienation was rather compromised by his salvational urgings.
Herbert Marcuse
The Marx-Freud theorizing of Herbert Marcuse differed significantly {and very publicly) with Fromm’s in its insistence on the primacy of a Freudian-derived death instinct, which Fromm {like Reich) had relegated to the status of historical aberration. In his 1955 Eros and Civilization, Marcuse reinvigorated the Freudian death instinct by redefining it as not necessarily an all-powerful destructive urge, but as humans’ seeking an end of bodily and social tensions in a wished-for return to an inorganic state:
The death instinct operates under the Nirvana principle: it tends toward that state of “constant gratification” where no tension is felt–a state without want. Tb.is trend of the instinct implies that its destructive manifestations would be minimized as it approached such a state. (p. 234)
Marcuse (1955) intertwines Marxist and Freudian viewpoints to argue that capitalist society necessarily entails alienated labor, and not rewarding work, because excessive instinctual repression compels people to oversublimate repressed material into toilful labor. Humankind has “unredeemable guilt” (p. 235) because of so much unnecessary suffering, and so “it takes all the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt” (pp. 235-236).
His alternate model of society (Marcuse 1955) is one in which libido is mobilized in full-body (that is, pre- and extra-genital, or “polymorphous perverse” [p. 49]) sexuality, and in libidinized work. It is a society which transcends capitalism’s “paternal domination” and the “performance principle”, that is, capitalism’s particular, compulsive form of the Freudian reality principle (pp. 49 ff).
A central influence of Marcuse’s thought herein is in his interlinking regressive wishes and social structures. But, Marcuse was a philosopher rather than, say, a clinician, making his work subject to the same overly-philosophical methodological critique as that of Horkheimer and Adorno. Also, all three of them wrote during what might be characterized as the adolescence of Freudian theory, when thinking about pre-oedipal development was new, and was mostly limited to clinical circles. Their access to these clinical-theoretical developments was therefore restricted.
