About the Work
Marx’s Concept of Man is a philosophical and interpretive study by Erich Fromm that seeks to correct widespread misunderstandings of Karl Marx’s thought, particularly in the twentieth century. The book combines Fromm’s own analytical essays with substantial primary source material: it includes a lengthy interpretive introduction by Fromm, followed by a translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, along with selections from The German Ideology and other works. The volume was produced in the mid-twentieth century, a period when Marx’s early writings had only recently become widely available in translation and when the Cold War context had heavily shaped—and distorted—public perception of Marx’s ideas.
The book is structured as both a scholarly argument and an anthology. Fromm’s opening essays lay out his thesis that Marx was fundamentally a humanist thinker concerned with human self-realization, alienation, and freedom, rather than a crude economic determinist or an advocate of state tyranny. The translated texts that follow provide the evidence for this reading, allowing readers to encounter Marx’s own words on alienation, labor, species-being, private property, and communism. The translation and editorial notes are provided by T. B. Bottomore, who also contributes a translator’s note explaining the textual history and translation choices.
The work is notable for its polemical edge: Fromm explicitly positions his interpretation against both Soviet Communism and Western anti-Communist readings of Marx. He argues that both camps have misrepresented Marx, albeit for different reasons, and that a return to Marx’s actual texts reveals a thinker whose concerns were ethical, anthropological, and spiritual as much as economic. The book thus functions as both a work of intellectual history and a contribution to mid-century debates about the meaning of socialism and the nature of human freedom.
Context
Fromm wrote Marx’s Concept of Man during the Cold War, a period when Marx’s name was associated in the West primarily with Soviet totalitarianism, Stalinist terror, and the suppression of individual freedom. The book responds directly to this political context. Fromm observes that the Russian Communists had appropriated Marx’s theory and convinced much of the world that their practice followed from his ideas, when in fact the opposite was true. The West, he argues, largely accepted these propagandist claims, treating Soviet Communism as the legitimate heir of Marx’s thought.
Fromm identifies several reasons for this widespread misinterpretation. First, there were irrational factors: Soviet Russia was viewed as “the incarnation of all evil,” and her ideas were consequently demonized. Fromm notes the historical pattern of projecting absolute evil onto enemy nations—as with the Kaiser and the “Huns” in 1917—and suggests that the moral indignation directed at Soviet terror was not entirely sincere, since similar acts by Western-aligned dictatorships (the French in Algiers, Trujillo in Santo Domingo, Franco in Spain) provoked no comparable outrage. He wonders whether the real source of Western hostility was moral feeling or a deeper anxiety about any system without private property.
Beyond these irrational factors, Fromm identifies a more intellectual source of distortion: both anti-Communist and reformist socialist interpreters read Marx through the categories of contemporary capitalism. Marx’s adherents, he argues, were so imbued with the spirit of capitalism that they interpreted his thought in economistic and materialistic terms. Soviet Communists and reformist socialists, though believing themselves enemies of capitalism, conceived of socialism in capitalism’s spirit—not as a society humanly different, but as capitalism with the working class achieving higher status. Fromm quotes Engels’ ironic remark that socialism was being reduced to “the present-day society without its defects.”
The book also emerges from a specific moment in the reception of Marx’s early writings. The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were not published until 1932, and The German Ideology was not fully published until the same year. Fromm notes that earlier classic Marxist interpreters, working before these texts were available, were influenced by positivistic and mechanistic ideas that shaped their reading of Marx. The revival of interest in Marx’s humanism, to which Fromm’s book contributes, was itself a response to the dehumanization witnessed under Stalinist and Hitler regimes, indiscriminate wartime killing, and the rise of the “gadget-minded consumer” and “organization man” in Western societies. Fromm situates his work within a broader movement: Yugoslav Communists emphasizing individual concern against state machinery, Polish and Hungarian opposition movements allying political resistance with humanist socialism, German Protestant theologians publishing on Marx, and French Catholic and Marxist scholars engaging with his thought. In the English-speaking world, the revival was slower because the Manuscripts remained untranslated until recently, but Fromm cites the work of Herbert Marcuse and Raya Dunayevskaya as American contributions to this humanist reading.
Structure of the Book
The book opens with Fromm’s extended interpretive essay, which occupies the first half of the volume. This essay is organized thematically rather than chronologically, building a cumulative case for Fromm’s humanist reading of Marx. It begins with the problem of misinterpretation, examining how Russian Communism and Western anti-Communism have both distorted Marx’s legacy. Fromm then turns to Marx’s actual method and concepts: historical materialism, the nature of consciousness, the concept of human nature, the role of labor, and the meaning of alienation. He addresses specific objections and misunderstandings, including the claim that Marx abandoned his early humanism in his later work, and he offers a character sketch of Marx as a person to counter the image of him as authoritarian or cold.
The second half of the book consists of primary texts. The centerpiece is the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, translated by T. B. Bottomore. These manuscripts, written in Paris between April and August 1844, comprise four separate manuscripts of varying length and completeness. The first manuscript, the longest, begins with three columns on wages, profit of capital, and rent of land, then shifts to the famous discussion of alienated labor. The second manuscript is fragmentary, beginning mid-sentence. The third manuscript contains sections on private property and labor, private property and communism, a critique of Hegel’s philosophy, a preface, and a section on money. The fourth manuscript, sewn into the third, paraphrases the final chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The manuscripts are followed by excerpts from The German Ideology, which Marx and Engels wrote in 1845-46, presenting their materialist conception of history and their critique of German idealist philosophy.
The structure thus moves from interpretation to evidence: Fromm’s essays frame the reading, and the primary texts allow readers to verify and deepen that reading. The book does not follow a narrative arc in the conventional sense but rather builds an argument through analysis and documentation. It concludes with the primary texts rather than with Fromm’s own final statement, though his interpretive framework has been established in the opening essays.
Detailed Section-by-Section Summary
Russian Misinterpretation of Marx
Fromm begins by addressing the widespread but fundamentally flawed claim that Soviet Communism faithfully implemented Marx’s theories. He argues that the Russian Communists appropriated Marx’s thought and, through propaganda, convinced much of the world that their practice was a direct outgrowth of his ideas, when in fact the opposite is true. The West, he contends, largely accepted these propagandist claims without critical examination. However, Fromm is careful to note that the Russians are not alone in their misinterpretation. While their specific “brutal contempt for individual dignity” is unique to them, the broader misreading of Marx as a proponent of “economistic-hedonistic materialism” was shared by both anti-Communist and reformist socialists. Marx’s own adherents, so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of capitalism, interpreted his thought through the economistic and materialistic categories prevalent in contemporary society. Thus, both Soviet Communists and reformist socialists, despite believing themselves enemies of capitalism, conceived of socialism in capitalism’s own spirit—not as a society that is humanly different, but as capitalism where the working class achieved a higher status. Fromm quotes Engels’ ironic remark that this vision of socialism was merely “the present-day society without its defects.”
Irrational Reasons for Distortion
Fromm identifies irrational factors that fuel this distortion. Soviet Russia is viewed as “the incarnation of all evil,” which gives her ideas “the quality of the devilish.” He draws a parallel to 1917, when the Kaiser and the “Huns” were seen as evil incarnate, to the point where even Bach’s music was considered devil’s territory. Now, the Communists occupy that same place in the Western psyche. The stated reason for this intense hatred is Stalinist terror, but Fromm doubts the sincerity of this explanation. He points out that similar acts committed by the French in Algiers, Trujillo in Santo Domingo, and Franco in Spain provoke no similar moral indignation. Furthermore, the change from Stalin’s unbridled terror to Khrushchev’s “reactionary police state” received insufficient attention, despite being a great improvement. Fromm wonders whether the indignation against Russia stems from genuine moral feelings or from the fact that a system without private property is considered inherently “inhuman and threatening.”
Marx’s Historical Materialism
Fromm clarifies that Marx’s materialism has nothing to do with the notion that man’s primary motivation is “ever-increasing material gain and comfort.” On the contrary, Marx fought against mechanical, “bourgeois” materialism—what he called “the abstract materialism of natural science, which excludes history.” Instead, Marx postulated a “naturalism or humanism” that is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, constituting their “unifying truth.” Fromm notes that Marx never used the terms “historical materialism” or “dialectic materialism”; he spoke of his “dialectical method” in contrast to Hegel’s and of the “materialistic basis,” by which he meant the fundamental conditions of human existence. Marx’s method studies real economic and social life and its influence on thinking, as he stated: “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.”
Theses on Feuerbach
Fromm explains Marx’s critique of Feuerbach and all previous materialism: its chief defect is that the object is understood as contemplation, not as “sensuous human activity,” not subjectively. While Hegel developed the active side, he did so abstractly. Marx, like Hegel, sees objects in movement and becoming, not as static objects with physical “causes.” But unlike Hegel, Marx studies man and history by beginning with real man and his economic and material conditions, not primarily with ideas.
Popular View Refuted
The popular view that man’s strongest motive is money and material comfort is erroneous. Marx’s “materialist” interpretation means that real living individuals, not their ideas, are the subject matter of history. Fromm calls this an “anthropological interpretation of history,” where men are “the authors and actors of their own history.” Marx differentiated between “fixed” drives, which exist under all circumstances (like sex and hunger), and “relative” drives, which owe their origin to a specific social organization. He never considered the maximal economic gain to be a constant drive. Indeed, Marx’s criticism of capitalism is precisely that it made money-interest the main motive, and socialism would end this dominance.
1859 Formulation
Fromm presents Marx’s classic formulation from 1859: in social production, men enter into definite relations that are independent of their will and correspond to the development of material productive forces. The economic structure is the real foundation upon which a legal and political superstructure rises, with corresponding forms of social consciousness. The key statement is: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” When productive forces conflict with existing relations, they turn from forms of development into “fetters,” and a social revolution begins. Mankind always sets itself only solvable tasks. The bourgeois relations are the last antagonistic form, and with them, the prehistory of human society closes.
Consciousness and Ideology
Fromm elaborates on Marx’s crucial statement that social being determines consciousness. In the German Ideology, Marx writes that consciousness is “at first directly interwoven with material activity and the material intercourse of men” and that “consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence.” Fromm compares Marx’s concept of “false consciousness” to Freud’s unconscious: the true mainsprings of action are unconscious. For Freud, these are libidinal; for Marx, they are rooted in social organization. This theory does not deny the potency of ideas, only that awareness matters. False consciousness must become true consciousness for man to know his real human needs. Marx never forgot that circumstances change men, but men also change circumstances—this is “revolutionary practice.”
On Force and Revolution
Fromm discusses Marx’s view of force, noting that while the idea of political revolution by force has dominated Western society for three hundred years—from the English and French revolutions to the Russian revolution of 1917—Marx did not believe in the creative power of force. Every government, even democratic ones, is based on force and permits its use against minorities when necessary. However, Fromm argues that pacifist indignation against force, while authentic, is absolutely wrong because, aside from immediate defense, force’s use never leads to the better. Marx saw that political force cannot produce anything for which there is no preparation in the historical process; force can only serve as “the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” Force had at most a transitory significance for Marx, never a permanent role in social transformation.
The Concept of Human Nature
Marx rejected the blank-slate view of human nature held by contemporary sociologists and psychologists. He believed that man qua man is a recognizable entity, definable biologically, anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically. Against Bentham, Marx argued that one must study dog nature to know what is useful for a dog—nature cannot be deduced from utility. Marx distinguished two types of drives: constant or fixed ones (like hunger and sex) that are integral to human nature, and relative ones that owe their origin to specific social structures. He cited the need for money as created by capitalist society, calling it “the real need created by the modern economy.”
Self-Activity and Hegel’s Influence
Marx’s concept of man is rooted in Hegel’s thinking. Hegel began with the insight that appearance and essence do not coincide; the dialectical thinker must distinguish the essential from the apparent process of reality. The world is estranged until man destroys its fixed, alien form. Fromm cites Goethe’s Faust as expressing human productivity—man is fulfilled through productive activity, not possession, power, or sensuous satisfaction. For Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, and Marx, man is alive only insofar as he is productive, grasping the world through expressing his specific human powers.
Subject-Object Relationship
Marx’s concept of activity requires understanding the subject-object relationship. Man’s senses relate to things for the sake of the thing itself; the thing is an objective human relation to itself and to man. Need and enjoyment lose their egoistic character when nature’s utilization becomes human utilization. Fromm notes this resembles Zen Buddhist thinking and Goethe—man overcomes the subject-object split while remaining two with the object.
Communism and Self-Realization
For Marx, communism is “the positive abolition of private property” and human self-alienation—the return of man as a social, truly human being. Fromm clarifies that Marx’s “private property” refers to capitalist class property, not personal possessions. Marx’s concept of the wealthy man is the poor man in need of others. The fully developed society produces “man in all the plenitude of his being.”
Having versus Being
Private property has made us “so stupid and partial” that objects are ours only when we have them. All senses have been replaced by “the sense of having.” Capitalist economics is a moral science of renunciation: the less you eat, drink, think, love, the more you save. Money can do everything for you but only desires to create itself. Marx opposed consumption as a supreme end, favoring the conquest of poverty instead.
Independence and Freedom
A being is independent only when owing existence to himself. Man affirms his individuality as a total man through all organs—seeing, hearing, loving, willing. Marx’s aim of socialism was emancipation through productive relatedness with man and nature, not Soviet-style “crude communism,” which extends the worker role to all and treats marriage as exclusive private property.
On Crude Communism
Fromm discusses Marx’s critique of “crude communism,” which advocates the community of women, making them communal property. Marx calls this the “open secret” of unreflective communism. This communism negates man’s personality and is merely the logical expression of private property. Universal envy disguised as power is camouflaged cupidity. Crude communism represents envy and levelling-down based on a preconceived minimum. It fails as genuine appropriation, showing abstract negation of culture and regression to unnatural simplicity. The community becomes only a community of work with equal wages, with the community as “universal capitalist.”
Labor and Capital as Anthropological Categories
For Marx, labor and capital were not merely economic but anthropological categories with value judgments. Capital represents the past (accumulated); free labor expresses life.
The Heritage of Socialism and the Continuity of Marx’s Thought
Fromm establishes that while liberalism protected the material interests of capital owners and enabled the exploitation of labor, it also insisted on individual freedom from secular interference. However, liberalism’s fatal flaw was its insistence that the state and society must not attempt to realize “freedom to”—it demanded a separation of State and Church while denying the state any function in helping to realize spiritual and moral values, leaving these entirely to the individual. This created a vacuum that socialism sought to fill.
Socialism, Fromm argues, is the heir of a rich spiritual tradition: prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance humanism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment. It opposed the restriction of the mind and the separation of society and Church, and it opposed Stalinism and Krushchevism. Its aim was the reconstruction of society so that man could return to himself, without alienating authoritarian forces restricting and impoverishing the mind. Fromm quotes Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to define socialism as the resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species—the “solution of the riddle of history.” Socialism permits man’s return to himself, achieving an identity between existence and essence, overcoming subject-object separateness, and humanizing nature so that man is no longer a stranger among strangers but at home.
Fromm then argues forcefully against those who claim the “young Marx” of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was abandoned by the older Marx. He insists that Marx’s basic ideas on man did not undergo any fundamental change. The primary proponents of this split are the Russian Communists, whose system contradicts Marx’s humanism—in their system, man serves the state and production rather than being the supreme aim. Soviet materialism, Fromm contends, is closer to the nineteenth-century mechanistic materialism Marx fought against than to his historical materialism. He cites the Soviet party’s forced “confession” from G. Lukacs in 1934, the Communist attacks on Ernst Bloch, and Daniel Bell’s claim that Marx’s humanism “is not the historical Marx.”
Fromm explains why classic interpreters missed this humanism: the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts remained unpublished until 1932, and the German Ideology was not fully published until the same year. More significantly, philosophical thinking from Marx’s death to the 1920s was dominated by positivistic-mechanistic ideas that influenced Lenin and Bucharin. Classic Marxists were allergic to terms smacking of idealism and religion, even though Marx himself lived in a spiritual, nontheistic tradition stretching from Spinoza and Goethe to Hegel, back to Prophetic Messianism. The revival of humanism came in response to the dehumanization under Stalinist and Hitler regimes, indiscriminate wartime killing, and the rise of the gadget-minded consumer. The protest against alienation by Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche raised its voice again, finding expression among Yugoslav Communists, in Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, and in German and French literature.
Fromm refutes the Russian position by noting that while Marx and Engels dropped the terms “species” and “human essence” in the German Ideology, saying they “settled accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience,” that work continues the Manuscripts’ main trend, especially the alienation concept. Alienation results from the division of labor and the “contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest.” “Man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.” Fourteen years later, Marx used the same arguments against Adam Smith, and in Capital’s third volume he speaks of the “true realm of freedom” flourishing upon the realm of necessity, with the shortening of the working day as its fundamental premise. Capital also speaks of “fully developed human beings” and the “full development of the human race.”
Refuting Bell, Fromm argues that Marx never repudiated alienation in its human sense, but claimed it cannot be divorced from the alienated individual’s concrete life process. Bell accepts the conventional cliché that Marx’s only social reality is economic classes, but Marx criticized capitalism precisely because it destroys individual personality. Bell misquotes the sixth thesis on Feuerbach; Marx actually said: “the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble (aggregate) of social relations.”
A Portrait of Marx the Man
Fromm offers a character sketch of Marx as a humanist, noting that he read Aeschylus and Shakespeare annually in their original languages and, during his wife’s illness, studied calculus. Marx’s favorite Hegel quotation was: “even the criminal thought of a malefactor has more grandeur and nobility than the wonders of heaven.” From answers to a questionnaire made by his daughter Laura, Marx’s idea of misery was submission, the vice he detested most was servility, and his favorite maxims were “nothing human is alien to me” and “one must doubt of everything.”
Fromm argues that Marx was not arrogant or authoritarian. Misunderstanding arose from his sarcastic and aggressive style, and more importantly, from his complete inability to tolerate sham and deception, and his utter seriousness about human existence. People who prefer fictions to realities regard Marx as arrogant or cold, but this judgment says more about them than Marx. Fromm predicts that if the world returns to humanism, it will see Marx as representing the flowering of Western humanity—with an uncompromising sense of truth, courage, integrity, and concern for man, unselfish and without vanity or lust for power. Marx represented the West’s faith in reason and progress, embodying the concept of man central to his thinking: the man who has much and needs his fellow man.
The Translator’s Note and Marx’s Preface
T. B. Bottomore’s translator’s note explains that the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts comprise four manuscripts written April–August 1844, held by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. First published by D. Riazanov in the MEGA (Berlin, 1932), the first manuscript has three columns titled “Wages,” “Profit of Capital,” and “Rent of Land,” with a section titled “Alienated Labor” added by editors. The second manuscript begins mid-sentence, and the third has faulty pagination with sections on “Private Property and Labor,” “Private Property and Communism,” a critique of Hegel’s philosophy, a “Preface,” and a section titled “Money.” The fourth manuscript paraphrases the final chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bottomore notes the translation challenges of Wesen and aufheben, and that both Entausserung and Entfremdung are translated as “alienation.”
Marx’s own Preface announces a critique of jurisprudence and political science as a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right, planned as independent brochures. He states his conclusions derive from empirical analysis, and he credits Feuerbach with beginning positive, humanistic, naturalistic criticism. He considers a critical exposition of the Hegelian dialectic essential, criticizing “critical theologians” who remain theologians.
Alienated Labor and the Species-Being
Marx begins the first manuscript from political economy’s presuppositions—private property, separation of labor/capital/land, wages/profit/rent, division of labor, competition, and exchange value—but notes that political economy does not explain private property, assuming what should be explained. He rejects explanations from a “legendary primordial condition” as theology explains evil by the fall of man. He begins from a contemporary fact: the worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces. The product of labor stands opposed to the worker as an alien being. This objectification appears as vitiation, loss, and servitude. The worker is related to his product as to an alien object, like religion—the more man attributes to God, the less he has. The worker becomes a slave of the object. Political economy conceals alienation by not examining the direct relationship between the worker and production.
Alienation appears not only in the result but also in the process of production. Work is external to the worker, forced labor, not voluntary; the worker feels at home only during leisure. Man feels freely active only in animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating—becoming reduced to an animal. From the two aspects of alienation—relationship to the product as an alien object and relationship to the act of production as self-alienation—a third characteristic is inferred: man is a species-being, treating himself as a universal and consequently free being.
Species-life for man has its physical basis in living from inorganic nature. Because man is more universal than animals, the range of inorganic nature from which he lives is more universal. Plants, animals, minerals, air, and light constitute, from the theoretical aspect, part of human consciousness as objects of natural science and art—man’s spiritual inorganic nature. From the practical aspect, they form part of human life and activity. The universality of man appears in practice in making the whole of nature into his inorganic body: as a direct means of life, and as the material object and instrument of his life activity. Nature is the inorganic body of man, excluding the human body itself, and man must remain in continuous interchange with nature to avoid death.
Alienated labor alienates nature from man and alienates man from himself, his active function, his life activity—thus alienating him from the species. It makes species-life into a means of individual life. Labor, life activity, productive life now appear only as means for satisfying the need to maintain physical existence. Free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings. The animal is one with its life activity, but man makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness. Conscious life activity distinguishes man from animals. Alienated labor reverses this: man makes his life activity, his being, only a means for his existence.
The practical construction of an objective world confirms man as a conscious species-being. Animals produce only what is strictly necessary for themselves or their young, only in a single direction, and only under compulsion of direct physical need. Man produces universally, produces when free from physical need, reproduces the whole of nature, and is free in face of his product.
The Two Forms of Communism and the Social Character of Activity
The text first addresses the distinction between an “undeveloped” and a developed form of communism. The undeveloped form seeks historical justification by citing existing forms opposed to private property, such as the ideas of Cabet and Villegardelle, who tear isolated elements from their context to prove a historical pedigree. This approach is self-contradictory, as the general course of historical development refutes its pretensions. In contrast, the revolutionary movement necessarily finds its basis in the development of private property itself, particularly within the economic system. Private property is described as the “material and sensuous expression of alienated human life,” and its movement—production and consumption—manifests all previous production. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, and art are all particular forms of production under its general law. The positive supersession of private property means appropriating human life and ending all alienation. While religious alienation occurs only in consciousness, economic alienation affects real life. Communism begins where atheism begins, but atheism is initially an abstraction, not communism itself.
The discussion then turns to the social character of activity. Social activity and mind exist beyond directly communal forms; even solitary scientific work is social because language and materials are social products. The individual is “the social being,” and individual life and species-life are not different things. Species-consciousness confirms real social life, while species-life confirms itself in thought. Although death appears to contradict this unity, the particular individual is mortal as a determinate species-being.
Appropriation, the Senses, and the Role of Industry
Private property makes humans “stupid and partial,” so that objects are only “ours” when possessed or utilized, replacing all senses with “the sense of having.” The supersession of private property emancipates all human qualities and senses. The eye becomes human when its object becomes human and social, and senses become “theoreticians in practice.” Human musical sense is awakened only by music; the non-musical ear cannot appreciate beautiful music. For a starving man, food’s human form does not exist, only its abstract character. The needy man cannot appreciate beauty, and the mineral dealer sees only commercial value. The cultivation of the senses is “the work of all previous history.”
Industry is described as “an open book of the human faculties” that psychology has failed to apprehend. Natural science has penetrated human life through industry, transforming life while accentuating dehumanization. Science must be based on sense experience, and natural science and the science of man will become “a single science.” The passage also refutes creation theory through geogeny and spontaneous generation. The question of who created the first man is called “a product of abstraction”—if one thinks of man and nature as non-existent, one must think of oneself as non-existent too. For socialist man, world history is “the creation of man by human labor,” and atheism becomes meaningless as negation; socialism is positive human self-consciousness.
Division of Labor and the Alienated Expression of Human Activity
The text moves to a discussion of the division of labor as “the economic expression of the character of labor within alienation,” described as “nothing but the alienated establishment of human activity as a real species-activity.” Marx quotes Adam Smith extensively from The Wealth of Nations, who argues that division of labor originates not from human wisdom but from “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange,” a propensity common to all men and found in no other animals. Smith asserts we address others “not to their humanity but to their self-love,” and that the difference of natural talents is more the effect than the cause of division of labor. A philosopher differs from a street-porter less than a mastiff differs from a greyhound, yet animals cannot exchange and thus derive no benefit from their varied talents. Division of labor is limited by “the extent of the market,” and in advanced society, every man lives by exchanging, making society a commercial one.
Marx then reviews Say, who regards exchange as fortuitous though indispensable, and Skarbek, who distinguishes individual innate powers from society-derived powers like exchange and division of labor, noting private property is the precondition of exchange. James Mill treats trade as a consequence of division of labor, reducing human activity to “simple motion.” Marx concludes that economists are “confused and self-contradictory” about division of labor, which, along with exchange, is “the alienated expression of human activity,” with private property as its basis meaning labor is the essence of private property.
Money as the Alienated Power of Humanity
The passage then examines money through quotes from Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, describing gold’s power to invert all qualities. Money is “the visible deity” and “the universal whore,” transforming all qualities into opposites. What I can buy determines what I am; money annuls ugliness, lameness, and stupidity. It is “the alienated power of humanity” and the “general inversion of individualities.” If man relates humanly, “love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust.” The section closes by introducing a critique of Hegel’s dialectic, noting that German criticism remained entangled in Hegelian logic despite claims of a critical method.
Criticism of the Hegelian Dialectic
Marx criticizes the “Critical School” (Young Hegelians) for their lack of awareness regarding their relation to Hegel’s dialectic. He states that Feuerbach is the only one with a serious and critical relation to it. Feuerbach’s achievements include proving philosophy is a form of human alienation, founding genuine materialism by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of theory, and opposing the negation of the negation with a self-subsistent positive founded on itself. Marx explains Feuerbach’s view of Hegel’s dialectic: Hegel begins with the alienation of substance, supersedes the infinite to posit the real, then supersedes this to re-establish the abstraction. Feuerbach sees the negation of the negation as a contradiction within philosophy itself.
Marx analyzes Hegel’s Phenomenology, arguing Hegel commits a double error: first, conceiving wealth and state power only in their thought form, making the whole movement end in absolute knowledge; second, Hegel’s appropriation of man’s objectified essence appears as a recognition of sensuousness only as mental phenomena. The “outstanding achievement” of the Phenomenology is that Hegel grasps the creation of man as a process, objectification as alienation, and conceives objective man as the result of his own labor. However, Hegel’s standpoint is that of modern political economy: he conceives labor as the self-confirming essence of man but observes only its positive side, understanding labor as abstract mental labor. Marx argues that Hegel equates man with self-consciousness, which is false, as self-consciousness is a quality of human nature, not the reverse. A self-consciousness can only establish an abstract thing, not a real one. Marx concludes that man is a natural, embodied being with objective powers; a being without an object outside itself is a non-being. To be sensuous is to suffer, and passion is man’s faculties striving toward their object. Man is a species-being with a conscious process of genesis—history.
Hegel’s False Positivism and the Transition to Nature
The text continues examining how consciousness relates to objects, where knowing is its only objective relation. Consciousness knows the nullity of the object, recognizing it as its own self-alienation. Hegel maintains that consciousness supersedes and re-absorbs this alienation, becoming “at home in its other being as such,” which Marx identifies as where “all the illusions of speculation” are assembled. Substituting man’s self-consciousness for Hegel’s abstract self-consciousness reveals that consciousness claims to be directly the other of itself—the sensuous world—and that self-conscious man, having recognized and superseded the spiritual world, confirms it again in alienated form. This is “the root of Hegel’s false positivism, or of his merely apparent criticism.” For Hegel, the negation of the negation is not confirmation of true being through negation of illusory being, but confirmation of illusory being in its denial. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, private right superseded equals morality, morality superseded equals the family, and so on up to world history, yet all these remain in actuality as “moments” of man’s existence.
The positive moment of Hegel’s dialectic is that supersession as objective movement re-absorbing alienation is “the alienated insight into the real objectification of man.” Atheism as annulment of God is the emergence of theoretical humanism; communism as annulment of private property is the vindication of real human life—practical humanism. Hegel’s achievement is conceiving labor as man’s act of self-creation, but his conception is merely formal and abstract, treating human nature as abstract thinking nature. The annulment of alienation becomes a confirmation of alienation. The text then traces the movement of the Logic: being superseded is essence, essence superseded is the concept, and the concept superseded is the absolute idea, which must supersede itself to arrive at nature. “The whole Logic is, therefore, a demonstration that abstract thought is nothing for itself… that only nature is something.” The transition from logic to the philosophy of nature is “simply the transition from abstract thinking to intuiting,” driven by “ennui, the longing for a content.” Nature as nature, sensuously distinguished from abstractions, “is nothing… devoid of sense,” and its purpose is “the confirmation of abstraction.”
The Materialist Conception of History
The excerpt from The German Ideology begins by establishing the materialist method: definite individuals, productively active in definite ways, enter into definite social and political relations. The social structure and State evolve from the life-process of definite individuals—not as imagined, but as they really are, active under material limits independent of their will. The production of ideas is directly interwoven with material activity and intercourse. “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence,” and if ideology appears upside down “as in a camera obscura,” this arises from the historical life-process. In contrast to German philosophy descending from heaven to earth, this approach ascends from earth to heaven—from real, active men. Morality, religion, and metaphysics “have no history, no development”; men altering their material production alter their thinking. “
The Family and the Materialist Conception of History
Marx identifies a third circumstance in historical development: once men begin to remake their own lives, they also begin to make other men, propagating their kind through the family. This relation between man and wife, and parents and children, is initially the only social relationship, but it becomes subordinate as increased needs create new social relations and a larger population creates new needs. This family structure must be analyzed according to empirical data, not according to “the concept of the family” as was the custom in German philosophy. These three aspects of social activity are not three distinct stages but three “moments” that have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history. The production of life—one’s own in labor and fresh life in procreation—appears as a double relationship: natural and social. The social aspect means the cooperation of several individuals, and a certain mode of production is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation, which is itself a “productive force.” The multitude of productive forces determines the nature of society, so the history of humanity must be studied in relation to the history of industry and exchange. A materialistic connection between men, determined by their needs and mode of production, exists as a “history” independent of political or religious nonsense.
Consciousness and the Division of Labor
After considering these fundamental historical relationships, Marx turns to consciousness, which is not “pure consciousness” but is burdened with matter, appearing as agitated layers of air, sounds, and language. Language is practical consciousness, existing for other men, and consciousness is from the beginning a social product. It is first a consciousness of the immediate sensuous environment and of nature as an alien, all-powerful force—a purely animal consciousness of nature, or natural religion. Man is only distinguished from sheep by consciousness taking the place of instinct. This tribal consciousness develops through increased productivity, needs, and population, leading to the division of labor. The division of labor becomes truly such when a division of material and mental labor appears, and from that moment consciousness can emancipate itself from the world and form “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, and ethics. The division of labor implies the possibility that intellectual and material activity, enjoyment and labor, production and consumption devolve on different individuals. It is based on the natural division of labor in the family, giving rise to the unequal distribution of labor and its products—property. The first property is in the family, where wife and children are slaves of the husband. The division of labor and private property are identical expressions.
The State and the Illusion of Community
The division of labor implies a contradiction between the interest of the individual and the communal interest. This contradiction takes an independent form as the State, an illusory communal life based on real ties of flesh and blood, language, and the division of labor, and on classes. Struggles within the State—democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, franchise—are merely illusory forms of real struggles between classes. A class struggling for mastery must first conquer political power to represent its interest as the general interest. The social power arising from cooperation appears to individuals as an alien force outside them, which they cannot control. This estrangement can only be abolished given two practical premises: it must have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless” and produced a contradiction with an existing world of wealth and culture, presupposing a great increase in productive power. This development is necessary to avoid generalizing want and to establish universal intercourse between men, creating world-historical individuals instead of local ones. Without this, communism could only exist as a local event. Communism is not a stable state or an ideal, but the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The form of intercourse determined by existing productive forces is civil society, whose basis is the family and the tribe. Civil society is the true source of all history, transcending the State and nation, though asserting itself as nationality and organizing as State. History is the succession of separate generations, each exploiting materials and productive forces handed down by preceding ones. History becomes world-history as separate nationalities’ isolation is destroyed—an English machine invention depriving workers in India or China of bread is a world-historical fact.
The Ruling Ideas and the Illusion of Philosophy
The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas. The class with the means of material production controls the means of mental production, and the ruling ideas are the ideal expression of dominant material relationships. In the ruling class, division of labor appears as division of mental and material labor, with one part as thinkers and ideologists. Each new class, to achieve its aims, must represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society, giving its ideas the form of universality and representing them as the only rational, universally valid ones. A class making a revolution appears not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society. The example is the French bourgeoisie, whose overthrow of the aristocracy made it possible for many proletarians to become bourgeois. Once ruling ideas are separated from ruling individuals, it is easy to abstract “the idea” as the dominant force in history, as speculative philosophers do. Hegel confessed at the end of The Philosophy of History that he considered “the progress of the concept only” and represented “the true theodicy.” The trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history involves three tricks: separating the ideas of rulers from the actual rulers; bringing an order into this rule of ideas by understanding them as “self-determination of the concept”; and changing the “self-determining concept” into a person—the “thinkers,” “philosophers,” “ideologists”—as the “manufacturers of history.”
The Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
Marx states that his investigations concluded that legal relations and forms of State are rooted in the material conditions of life, the aggregate of which Hegel grouped under the name “civil society.” The general conclusion: men enter into definite, necessary productive relationships independent of their will, corresponding to a stage of development of their material productive forces. The aggregate of these relationships constitutes the economic structure, the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage, material productive forces come into contradiction with existing productive relationships, transforming from forms of development into fetters, opening an epoch of social revolution. A social system never perishes before all productive forces have developed for which it is wide enough, and mankind only sets itself such problems as it can solve. Bourgeois productive relationships are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production, but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of this antagonism. With this system, the pre-history of human society comes to a close.
The Critique of Religion and the Radical Imperative
The critique of religion plucks the imaginary flowers from the chain so man throws off the desolate chain and plucks the living flower. Religion is an illusory sun which moves around man as long as he does not move around himself. The weapons of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons; material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory becomes a material force once it gets hold of men. To be radical is to grasp something at its roots; for man, the root is man himself. The critique of religion ends with the idea that man is a supreme being for man, hence the categorical imperative to change all circumstances in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, contemptuous being.
Reminiscences of Marx by Paul Lafargue
Lafargue met Marx in February 1865, having gone to London from Paris to give news of the First International, founded September 1864 at Saint Martin’s Hall. Marx was working on the first book of Capital (published 1867) and feared he would not finish it, saying “I must train men to continue communist propaganda after me.” Marx was a rare man who could be a leader in science and public life simultaneously. He held that science must be pursued for itself, but a scientist debased himself by holding aloof from political struggle. He was a citizen of the world.
Jenny Marx’s Letter to Weydemeyer
Jenny Marx describes her husband’s overwhelming struggles with daily life worries. Karl Marx invested thousands into a newspaper, becoming proprietor at the urging of “worthy Democrats” who would otherwise have faced debts themselves. He sacrificed his printing-press and all income, borrowing 300 thalers to pay rent and editors’ salaries before leaving. Jenny went to Frankfurt to pawn her silver and sold furniture in Cologne fearing sequestration of belongings. During the counter-revolution, Marx went to Paris; Jenny followed with three children. He was expelled from Paris, and Jenny and children were refused residence. She followed him “across the sea,” and a month later their fourth child was born. Their resources were exhausted when the Revue was published; contrary to agreement, they were not paid. Jenny describes one day in detail: she nursed her child despite pains, but the baby suffered convulsions and sucked so hard her breast cracked and bled. Their housekeeper denied an agreement about payment, and two bailiffs sequestrated possessions—linen, beds, clothes, the child’s cradle, daughters’ toys. Friend Schramm went for help but his cab horses bolted; he returned bleeding. They had to leave, and no one would take them with four children. A friend helped; they sold beds to pay the chemist, baker, butcher, and milkman. After sunset, the landlord brought constables claiming belongings might be among their things; a crowd gathered—”the whole Chelsea mob.” They moved to the German Hotel, paying £5 weekly. Jenny asks Weydemeyer not to mention her letter, asserting her husband deserved more energy and support for his Revue from those he helped.
Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s Reminiscences
Eleanor counters myths about Marx: he was not the “Jupiter Tonans” figure but “the cheeriest, gayest soul.” She describes his kindness, patience, and humor. A refugee of the Commune, “a most unmitigated old bore,” kept Marx three hours and said “Mon cher Marx, je vous excuse.” Marx was charming with children. Eleanor recalls being carried on his shoulder at about age three in Grafton Terrace. He was called “Mohr” (Moor) by family and intimate friends. He told stories measured by miles on walks—”Tell us another mile.”
Main Arguments
Fromm’s central argument is that Marx was a humanist thinker whose primary concern was the full realization of human potential, not economic determinism or material accumulation. He argues that Marx’s materialism has been fundamentally misunderstood: it has nothing to do with the claim that man’s strongest motive is the pursuit of material gain and comfort. On the contrary, Marx explicitly fought against mechanical, “bourgeois” materialism—what he called “the abstract materialism of natural science, which excludes history”—and instead postulated a “naturalism or humanism” that constitutes the unifying truth of both idealism and materialism.
Fromm clarifies that Marx never used the terms “historical materialism” or “dialectic materialism”; he spoke instead of his “dialectical method” as distinct from Hegel’s, and of the “materialistic basis” of human existence, meaning the fundamental conditions of real, living individuals. Marx’s method, Fromm argues, studies real economic and social life and its influence on thinking: “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven.” This is what Marx meant by the claim that social being determines consciousness—not that ideas are mere epiphenomena, but that consciousness is always consciousness of a real, material existence.
A related argument concerns Marx’s concept of human nature. Fromm contends that Marx rejected the blank-slate view of human nature held by contemporary sociologists and psychologists. Marx believed that man qua man is a recognizable entity, definable biologically, anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically. Against Bentham, Marx argued that one must study dog nature to know what is useful for a dog—nature cannot be deduced from utility. Marx distinguished between constant or fixed drives, which exist under all circumstances (such as hunger and sex), and relative drives, which owe their origin to specific social structures. He never considered maximal economic gain a constant drive; on the contrary, his criticism of capitalism is precisely that it made money-interest the main motive, and socialism would end this dominance.
Fromm’s most important argument concerns alienation. He contends that alienation was not a passing concern of the young Marx but remained central to his thought from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts through Capital. Fromm quotes parallel passages from different periods of Marx’s work to demonstrate this continuity. He argues against those who claim the “young Marx” was abandoned by the older Marx, showing that the basic ideas on man did not undergo fundamental change. The claim of a split, Fromm argues, comes mainly from Russian Communists, whose system contradicts Marx’s humanism, and from Western critics like Daniel Bell who accept the conventional cliché that Marx’s only social reality is economic classes.
Fromm also argues that Marx’s concept of socialism has been radically distorted. Socialism, for Marx, was not a society of regimented automatized individuals, nor a society where the individual is subordinated to the state, machine, or bureaucracy. Even if the state as an “abstract capitalist” were the employer, this would not be socialism. Fromm quotes Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: “communism as such is not the aim of human development.” The aim of socialism is man—to create a form of production and organization of society in which man can overcome alienation and return to himself. Socialism is not the fulfillment of life but the condition for such fulfillment.
A further argument concerns Marx’s view of freedom. Fromm contends that Marx’s aim was freedom in a more radical sense than existing democracy conceives—freedom based on man standing on his own feet. Marx said: “Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents realize it… No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others.” Fromm argues that Marx could be regarded as an enemy of freedom only through the “fantastic fraud” of Stalin presuming to talk in Marx’s name, combined with “fantastic ignorance” about Marx in the Western world.
Key Concepts
Alienation is the central concept in Fromm’s reading of Marx. Marx defines alienation as the condition in which man does not experience himself as an acting agent but as a passive, receptive subject separated from the objects he has created, which stand above him even though he made them. Fromm traces the concept to its roots: the Old Testament concept of idolatry first expressed alienation, since idols are man’s own handiwork, and man worships what he has created, transforming himself into a thing. Hegel coined the philosophical concept, and for him the history of man was the history of man’s alienation. For Marx, alienation is based on the distinction between existence and essence—man is not what he potentially is.
Alienation manifests in several dimensions. In work, the worker’s product stands opposed to him as an alien being; the worker denies himself in work, feels miserable, is homeless at work and at home only during leisure. The worker exists for production, not production for the worker. Alienation from the product of labor, from the act of production, and from circumstances is inseparably connected with alienation from oneself, from one’s fellow man, and from nature. A direct consequence is that man is alienated from other men and from his “species-being”—the essence of humanity in both natural and spiritual qualities. This leads to what Marx calls existential egotism: man’s human essence becomes “a means for his individual existence.” Fromm notes that this touches the Kantian principle that man must always be an end in himself, never a means to an end—but Marx goes further, stating that humanity in man must not even become a means to his individual existence, much less a means for the state, the class, or the nation.
Species-being is a term Marx adopted from Feuerbach, used to distinguish consciousness in man and animals. Man is conscious not merely of himself as an individual but of the human species or “human essence.” Free, conscious activity is the species-character of human beings. The animal is one with its life activity; it does not distinguish the activity from itself. But man makes his life activity an object of his will and consciousness. Conscious life activity distinguishes man from animals. Through work upon the objective world, man proves himself a species-being: he reproduces himself actively and really, seeing his reflection in a world he has constructed. Alienated labor takes away the object of production, man’s species-life, and his real objectivity as a species-being, changing his advantage over animals into a disadvantage as his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.
Labor is another key concept. For Marx, labor was not merely an economic category but an anthropological one with value judgments attached. Labor is activity, not a commodity. Marx follows Hegel, who understood labor as “man’s self-creation.” Labor is a process where man participates with nature, regulating material reactions; man opposes himself to nature as one of her forces, changing nature and himself. The worst architect differs from the best bee because the architect raises the structure in imagination before building it. Labor is self-expression of man’s physical and mental powers; through genuine activity man develops himself. Work is enjoyable, not merely a means to an end. Marx’s criticism of capitalism concerns not the distribution of wealth but the transformation of meaningful labor into what he calls a “crippled monstrosity.” From the German Ideology, Fromm quotes Marx’s vision of communist society: nobody has one exclusive sphere; one can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.
Private property is understood by Marx not primarily as personal possessions but as capitalist class property. Private property is the product of alienated labor, the “material and sensuous expression of alienated human life.” Its movement—production and consumption—manifests all previous production. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, and art are particular forms of production under its general law. The positive supersession of private property means appropriating human life and ending all alienation. Fromm clarifies that Marx’s concept of the wealthy man is the poor man in need of others; the fully developed society produces “man in all the plenitude of his being.”
Having versus being is a distinction Fromm draws from Marx’s discussion of private property. Private property has made us “so stupid and partial” that objects are ours only when we have them. All senses have been replaced by “the sense of having.” Capitalist economics is a moral science of renunciation: the less you eat, drink, think, love, the more you save. Money can do everything for you but only desires to create itself. Marx opposed consumption as a supreme end, favoring conquest of poverty instead.
Idolatry is the concept Fromm uses to connect Marx’s analysis with the prophetic tradition. Idolatry includes the worship of state, church, person, and possessions. The more man transfers powers to idols, the poorer he becomes. Alienation in language is exemplified by saying “I love you” as a substitute for living experience. Fromm quotes Paul Tillich’s description of socialism as “a resistance movement against the destruction of love in social reality.”
Crude communism is Marx’s term for a false or inadequate form of communism that merely generalizes private property. This communism advocates community of women, making them communal property—what Marx calls the “open secret” of unreflective communism. It negates man’s personality and is merely the logical expression of private property. Universal envy disguised as power is camouflaged cupidity. Crude communism represents envy and levelling-down based on a preconceived minimum. It fails as genuine appropriation, showing abstract negation of culture and regression to unnatural simplicity. The community becomes only a community of work with equal wages, with the community as “universal capitalist.”
The realm of freedom is Marx’s concept from the third volume of Capital. The realm of freedom commences only where labor under compulsion of necessity ends, lying beyond the sphere of material production. Socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bringing it under common control instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power. But this always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins the development of human power which is its own end—the true realm of freedom. The shortening of the working day is the fundamental premise.
Themes
A recurring theme in the book is the relationship between Marx and the Western humanist tradition. Fromm situates Marx within a lineage that includes Spinoza, Goethe, Hegel, and the prophetic Messianism of the Old Testament. Marx lived in a spiritual, nontheistic tradition that Fromm traces from Spinoza and Goethe to Hegel, back to prophetic Messianism, alive in Saint-Simon and Moses Hess, and in socialist thinking through Jean Jaures. Fromm’s Marx is not a break with this tradition but its culmination: he represents the flowering of Western humanity, with an uncompromising sense of truth, courage, integrity, and concern for man. Marx read Aeschylus and Shakespeare annually in their original languages; his favorite maxims were “nothing human is alien to me” and “one must doubt of everything.” Fromm argues that if the world returns to humanism, it will see Marx as embodying the West’s faith in reason and progress.
Another theme is the critique of both Soviet Communism and Western capitalism as forms of alienation. Fromm argues that Soviet Communism, despite its claims to be Marxist, is actually a betrayal of Marx’s humanism. Soviet materialism is closer to nineteenth-century mechanistic materialism, which Marx fought, than to his historical materialism. The Soviet system makes man serve the state and production rather than being the supreme aim. At the same time, Fromm argues that Western capitalism is also a form of alienation, though of a different kind. History has made one correction in Marx’s concept: Marx believed the working class was the most alienated class, but he did not foresee alienation becoming the fate of the vast majority, especially the growing segment that manipulates symbols and men rather than machines. The salesman and executive are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The symbol manipulators are hired for personality qualities that make them “attractive personality packages”; they are the true “organization men,” their idol being the corporation.
The theme of religion and its relationship to socialism runs through the book. Marx fought against religion because it is an alienated form of humanity and does not satisfy man’s true needs. But Fromm argues that Marx’s socialism is itself heir to the prophetic Messianic tradition. Marxist and other socialisms are heirs of prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance humanism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment. Socialism’s aim is the reconstruction of society so that man returns to himself, without alienating authoritarian forces restricting and impoverishing the mind. Fromm quotes Marx on socialism as the resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species—the “solution of the riddle of history.” Socialism permits man’s return to himself, identity between existence and essence, overcoming subject-object separateness, humanization of nature; man is no longer a stranger among strangers but at home.
A further theme is the relationship between freedom and necessity in human life. Fromm emphasizes Marx’s distinction between true needs rooted in man’s nature and synthetic, artificially produced needs. Man’s true needs are those whose fulfillment is necessary for the realization of his essence. Purely subjectively, false needs are experienced as urgent and real as true needs. Fromm suggests modern terminology might differentiate between neurotic and rational (healthy) needs. The task of the analyst of society is to make man aware of the reality of his true needs. This theme connects to Fromm’s broader argument that Marx’s socialism is not about material abundance but about human self-realization. Marx, who read all works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare yearly, would never have dreamt socialism meant the well-fed “welfare” state. Marx’s vision is based on faith in man’s inherent potentialities.
The theme of the continuity of Marx’s thought is also prominent. Fromm argues against the claim that the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was abandoned by the older Marx. He shows that the concept of alienation remained central from the Manuscripts through Capital, quoting parallel passages on objectification and servitude. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels dropped the terms “species” and “human essence,” saying they “settled accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience.” But Fromm argues that The German Ideology continues the Manuscripts’ main trend, especially the alienation concept. Alienation results from division of labor, from the “contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest.” “Man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him.” Fourteen years later, in 1857-58, Marx used the same arguments against Adam Smith: work need not restrict freedom if not alienated. Capital speaks of “fully developed human beings,” “full development of the human race,” “man’s necessity to develop himself,” and “fragment of a man” as alienation’s result.
The Author’s Conclusions
Fromm concludes that Marx’s thought has been systematically distorted by both his enemies and his self-proclaimed followers, and that a return to Marx’s actual texts reveals a thinker whose central concern was human self-realization and freedom. The misinterpretation of Marx as a proponent of “economistic-hedonistic materialism” was shared by anti-Communist and reformist socialists, who were so imbued with the spirit of capitalism that they interpreted his thought in the economistic and materialistic categories prevalent in contemporary capitalism. Soviet Communists and reformist socialists, though believing themselves enemies of capitalism, conceived of communism and socialism in capitalism’s spirit—not as a society humanly different, but as capitalism where the working class achieved higher status.
Fromm’s Marx is a humanist in the deepest sense. The aim of socialism is man—to create a form of production and organization of society in which man can overcome alienation and return to himself. Socialism means man produces in an associated, not competitive way; it means realization of political and industrial democracy. Socialism was never the fulfillment of life but the condition for such fulfillment. The true realm of freedom lies beyond the sphere of material production; it is the development of human power which is its own end.
Fromm also concludes that Marx’s concept of man is rooted in a specific philosophical tradition. Marx’s concept of activity requires understanding the subject-object relationship: man’s senses relate to things for the sake of the thing itself; the thing is an objective human relation to itself and to man. Need and enjoyment lose their egoistic character when nature’s utilization becomes human utilization. Fromm notes this resembles Zen Buddhist thinking and Goethe—man overcomes the subject-object split while remaining two with the object.
The book ends with the primary texts rather than with Fromm’s own final words. The final excerpt from The German Ideology develops the materialist conception of history: definite individuals, productively active in definite ways, enter into definite social and political relations. The social structure and state evolve from the life-process of definite individuals—not as imagined, but as they really are, active under material limits independent of their will. Consciousness is from the beginning a social product. The division of labor implies the possibility that intellectual and material activity, enjoyment and labor, production and consumption devolve on different individuals. It is based on the natural division of labor in the family, giving rise to the unequal distribution of labor and its products—property. The first property is in the family, where wife and children are slaves of the husband. Division of labor and private property are identical expressions.
Significance
The significance of Marx’s Concept of Man lies in its intervention in a crucial intellectual and political debate at the height of the Cold War. Fromm’s book was among the first works in English to present Marx’s early writings as central to understanding his mature thought, and to argue that Marx was fundamentally a humanist rather than an economic determinist.
