The Frankfurt School has a special place in history. It’s an object of hatred for both ends of the political spectrum. Leftists, especially Marxists, hate them for diluting revolutionary thought and creating a version of the Left that is “compatible” with the capitalist ruling class. Rightists hate them for giving birth to identity politics and political correctness. However, it’s a mistake to think of the Frankfurt School as a single harmonious entity. While it’s true that the school consisted of thinkers on the left side of the spectrum, their thoughts were diverse and not always compatible with each other. Nevertheless, they shared an ethos of human emancipation and mostly had the same view on why it kept failing to happen: “The revolutionary promise of the 19th century has failed and the reason is the culture.”

Erich Fromm was one of the youngest members of the Frankfurt School. Fromm, a German Jew, fled the Nazis and settled in the United States in 1934. He was a psychoanalyst, a democratic socialist, and a radical humanist. He died in 1980. To Have or to Be?, published in 1976, might have been his last book before he passed away.

I was not aware of this book until I read Manuel’s announcement for the IndieWeb Book Club. It’s one of those titles that immediately tells you the stance of the author. Without reading a single page, you know that Fromm will argue for “to have is wrong and to be is right”. Therefore I started reading the book with a positive bias, thinking that I’d agree with Fromm along the way. Not that I disagreed with Fromm, especially about his thoughts on the superiority of the being mode. But I didn’t enjoy how he presented his ideas, how far his analysis went, and his conclusions.

I said that the Frankfurt School’s ethos was human emancipation. To Have or to Be? is Fromm’s last attempt to incite a societal change to realize this ethos. However, the book kinda reverses the classical Marxist doctrine that human nature is a totality of societal relations and that to change human nature you need to change societal relations. I’m saying kinda because Fromm is not wholly consistent with this notion. At the beginning he says “that ‘religious’ impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, and hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one” [emphasis mine]. Towards the end he claims “… I do not believe anything lasting can be achieved by persons who suffer from a general ill-being and for whom a change in character is necessary, unless they change their practice of life in accordance with the change in character they want to achieve. For instance, one can analyze the dependency of individuals until doomsday, but all the insights gained will accomplish nothing while they stay in the same practical situations they were living in before arriving at these insights.” The new society requires a new subject to emerge. But this new subject can’t really emerge unless the daily practices of the subject change first. Changing the daily practices requires a new society. You see where it goes, right?

I think at some level Fromm was aware of the vicious cycle he got caught in. He doesn’t really offer a praxis to the new subject who is supposed to change the society. As if he doesn’t expect the society to change in response to the actions of the new man. The new society will emerge naturally once everyone—or at least the majority—changes. Also, sadly, he’s aware of the impotence of his weapon: “One cannot construct submarines by reading Jules Verne; one cannot construct a humanist society by reading the prophets.”

I believe Fromm has his heart in the right place. He believes that people can’t really be subjects in the struggle for emancipation until they have a change of heart. But the capitalist society molds people into the having mode. The features of the man who’s stuck in having mode—greed, selfishness, egotism—prevent him from genuinely loving others and participating in the common struggle. Someone needs to convince people to change. And what better example does history provide us to mediate the relations in a society than religion itself? or so Fromm’s reasoning seems to go.

Yes, To Have or to Be? is a deeply religious book. Fromm spends 2/3 of the book drawing religious examples to prove the superiority of the being mode. He references Buddha, Jesus, and Meister Eckhart abundantly. Although he leans on classical religious sources, for him religion “does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” The new society needs a religion of being and Fromm unapologetically preaches that. His preaching turns the problem of having vs. being into a moral problem. Rather than a structural analysis of society, Fromm makes the individual responsible for their mode of living. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School, also criticized Fromm on this point, saying that while Fromm’s early work is indeed radical, his later psychology is essentially conformist in character.

I was not satisfied with Fromm’s analysis mostly because there’s nothing of substance that tries to explain how the having mode became the dominant mode of our society. Sure, there are fragments here and there that accuse capitalism of cultivating a society of having, but it feels incomplete without also analyzing how the being mode also exists in the very same society. Should I believe that the being mode is thinkable thanks to the buddhists and christians of the 20th century who had a deeper insight into the mode of being? Is that even plausible when Fromm himself doesn’t count the christianity actually practiced by most of the world as real christianity? This dichotomy of having vs. being felt too binary and antagonistic to me; I couldn’t find a real dialectical movement in it.

This doesn’t mean the book is without substance though. There are plenty of insights in it. Fromm’s analysis of the newly emerging “marketing character” that describes how the living being becomes a commodity in the “personality market” is impressive foresight into the times we live in right now. His criticism of the “cybernetic religion” where men “have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine” feels eerie when you think about it in light of today’s AI mania.

Another thing I appreciate in the book is that Fromm provides a concrete list of features the new man and the new society ought to have. This level of concreteness is not something I see often. However, I think it’s not unfair to say his expectations are naive. He has a long list of items including things like “people should take personal responsibility for societal problems” and “rich countries need to be responsible for the prosperity of poor countries”. Reading those, and the book in general, I couldn’t help but think of the old Tumblr meme:

Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.