A Marx One Can Love

...Marxian and socialist thought has rarely been recognized as part of, and indeed deeply embedded in, the strands of a sempiternal human yearning for fulfillment of the human personality...

...Be fore 1848 Marx thought in terms of permanent revolution...

...that the production of the immediate material means of subsistence...

...Historical research meanwhile has discovered saintly heroes of liberty, and Fromm now conjures up the Church Fathers, Lao Tsu and other holy men who said in theistic language what Marx said in sociological language...

...Marx, who always was so meticulous in giving credit to the most obscure writer who had supplied him with a small fact or had first, however obscurely and fumblingly, suggested an idea, never mentions the Danish metaphysician who died thirty years before him...

...MARx'S CONCEPT OF MAN, by Erich Fromm (with a translation from Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by T. B. Bottomore...

...It had lost its revolutionary impact by the very fact that it continued to exist as a system in a period for which it had not been designed...

...Marx never dreamed that Christian or other religious ideologies might one day turn up on his side of the barricade...

...It is omitted in the East German—though not in the Moscow— edition of Marx-Engels' "Works," probably because of its attacks on "crude communism...

...There is no doubt that in this process of concretization it lost some of the humanist freshness and much of its claim to embrace the totality of human existence...

...The two definitely no longer understood each other, as Marx no longer understood the ideas they had in common some years earlier...

...For the English-speaking public (Fromm acknowledges his indebtedness to the German and French Marxicologists of the last thirty years) this is quite new...

...He spent a lifetime trying to elucidate the laws of economic development instead of developing the philosophical critique with which he had started...

...Marx had no inkling of the beautiful chord to which he was supplying the descant...

...he banked on the coming crisis of capitalism instead of pushing the self-knowledge of society to a crisis...

...We now are looking for the structure of the non-conformist mind rather than for specific ideas in which it manifested itself at various moments in the evolution of human society...

...forms the foundation upon which the state .. . art and even ideas have evolved .. . (and) the surplus value...

...thereafter he dealt with a today that was concrete and Ieft the tomorrow in metaphysical suspense...

...The Marx whom Fromm has shown us does not belong to the biographers and philologists whose views I have accepted...

...The young Marx, by contrast, was concerned very much with "programs...

...Unless it was to die it had to meet a new challenge...

...These manuscripts, dating from 1844 when Marx was 26 years old and had not yet been converted to communism are an aphoristic, groping, polemical, and on the whole still very unsure and confused expose of a philosophy which then passed by the name of "German socialism...

...it makes the guy so much more human...

...Though he denied being "a Marxist," no one else bears so much responsi bility for "Marxism" as taught by Kautsky and Plekhanov...

...He also was personally responsible for the degeneration of his critical method into a canon of economic dogma, and of his humanist, revolutionary philosophy into the justification of material progress for the working class...

...He now attributed greater importance rto the one than to the other...

...The nearest thing to Meister Eckhart in modern socialism certainly was Weitling, the tailor woefully berated, humiliated and purged from the Communist League by Marx...

...In a deeper sense, therefore, Fromm is right: philosophically he has restored Marx against himself...

...This is the old Marx who could write: Every step forward in the real (labor) movement is worth more than a dozen programs...

...Neither Fromm nor Bottomore seems to be aware that Marx was a revolutionary, or that "radicalism" for him meant more than "going to the root...

...The man who befriended the children on Hampstead Heath was a dictator...

...So one is pleased to find the 'familiar ideas of Marx exposed by the author of Man for Himself, The Sane Society, and The Art of Loving, in the light of twentieth-century insights...

...his treacherous intrigue against Bakunin in the International...

...After the lost revolution, Marx no longer analyzed the totality of the human condition...

...His refutation of the vulgarizers (both adversaries who built up the strawman of Marx the materialist, and disciples who canonized the collectivist economist Marx) is definitive and devastating...

...Nothing need disconcert us in such a change of front...

...Now without torturing my metaphor, the chord would sound different without Marx's melody...

...He abhorred the "crude communists," the collectivizers and "bourgeois materialists," and with great effort only could he conceal his concern for justice, his humanism and idealism...

...But likewise he had to renew his own system, if only to make it specific, concrete and applicable to the later years of the nineteenth century...

...Thus Marxism became ready for a complete reappraisal and renewal in the twentieth century...

...Today Fromm writes in the language of the existentialist psychoanalyst which is understood in our age...

...Fromm feels that "Marx could be regarded as an enemy of freedom...

...The manuscript itself is an unfinished first draft, rather hastily written, and moreover, what we have of it is incomplete...

...In Marx, too, existence determined consciousness...

...In his funeral oration for Marx, which Fromm reprints, he did not breathe a word of the philosophical socialism which was Marx's concern in 1844, but attributed to him "two great discoveries...

...It is in this sense that we may entertain the ques tion whether, together with its phi losophical substance, Marxism did not lose its uniquely revolutionary mean ing already in the hands of Marx...

...As tribute to the spirit of his age he used the language of the materialists and positivists who dominated it...

...Bernstein did publish another, more developed but also more polemical and tedious manuscript entitled "German Ideology" and dated 1845, which contains much of the same material in the form of a savage attack on Stirner and other radical disciples of Hegel...

...His ultimate aim, certainly, remained the liberation of man...

...Marx had to renew it, if only to make it concrete, specific for his age...

...Fromm thus enriches socialism's orchestration...

...It is quite another thing to say that Marx and Lao Tsu meant the same thing...

...Lenin had drawn the dictatorial and totalitarian conclusions which Lukacs underpinned philosophically in 1921, drawing inspiration precisely from the study of Marx's early works...

...only by the fantastic fraud of Stalin...

...He admired Jacob Boehme, but he had no use for Meister Eckhart or the Church Fathers...

...It is one thing to say that we might not understand what Lao Tsu meant if Marx had not made it clear...

...By taking Marx away from the Marxist squares, Fromm has made him innocuous rather than hip...

...Were it merely for the pleasurable experience of relating these cross-currents of the world's thought with the Marxian anthropology, this exploration would be rewarding in itself...

...Marx could look down on liberal notions such as "justice," which to us now—or again—appear as more revolutionary than the existentialists' search for "authentic" man...

...Fromm uses the very words of the young Marx (and adds 100 pages of a long-forgotten manuscript which has not been accessible to English readers for a long time), but he relates them to the experience of a modern psychologist and philosopher on the one hand and to the tradition of non-conformist thought of the past and of non-Western cultures on the other hand...

...the "Marx von innen" will be eternally right against the historical Marx...

...It's such a nice Marx he presents that I for one relish some little private information which Fromm withholds from his readers—Marx the avid reader of Paul de Kock, etc...

...Such a challenge was provided by ex istentialism and the conditions it stands for...

...Likewise, in Fromm's introduction, Marx's revolutionary beard looks venerable rather than terrible between the existentialist beards from Zeno the Greek to Zen...

...Its principal representatives were Weitling, Lorenz von Stein, Moses Hess and Engels, and it showed more than verbal signs of its Young-Hegelian heritage, baptized in Feuerbach...

...In his early twenties Marx still was able to admire the human protest and was a friend of all rebels...

...he now applied his critical method to the "objective" side of reality and suppressed his original utopianism...

...Yet the real blame for misunderstanding Marx must be laid at the door of the great teachers of Marxism in the beginning of this century, Kautsky, Plekhanov, and earlier even Engels himself...

...In this respect we do find resemblances which were not suspected before and which certainly the persons concerned never supposed to exist...

...In seeming to say this, Fromm does less than justice to Marx, whose major contribution to the sociology of knowledge is precisely his charge that theological language, while it may "reflect" social discord, also obscures its cause and, instead of revealing the alienated state of mind, fixates it...

...Dialectically this was progress...

...He credited Lamennais with nothing but confusionism...

...Like all great men in history Marx loved children, we learn...

...This was an opportunity to break out of the sterility of the sys tem and to test Marxian thought: whether it can produce answers to the questions raised by this new movement...

...Hearing the old Lutheran chorals in a Bach oratorio, one is astonished to have quite a new experience as the richness of different contrapuntal textures unfolds...

...Marx's ruthless purge of Weitling from the Kommunistenbund...

...Decidedly it is not enough for us to prove that Marx, after all, was not so far away from Kierkegaard in his basic concerns...

...He pits quotations, information, insight and wit against the superficial, nineteenthcentury and Soviet interpretations which have made of Marx a mere follower of Holbach turned economist and social thinker...

...To be sure, Marx would have preferred an original application of his method to the best interpretation of his meaning 115 years ago...

...In this sense Marx never meant the same thing as Kierkegaard...

...This contention is manifestly erroneous...

...idealistic philosophies then were mostly apologetics, and the churches still were the prime target for every free thinker...

...With a few famous quotations (which in themselves are appropriate enough but failed to convince this writer and other scholars who earlier had gone over this area), Fromm tries to show that there was no difference between the "young Marx" who wrote the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" constituting 100 pages of this book, and the "old Marx" of Das Kapital...

...Fromm's is a labor of love, an act of piety, and a show of courage in these days when every hack writer takes his digs at Marx...

...Marx's message rather meant to say that such a thing is not possible within the limitation of class society...

...Neither Marx nor Engels, executor of his will, nor Bernstein who was executor of Engels' will, ever thought of publishing it...

...Here I come to the point where, with all admiration for Fromm's intention and achievement, I feel that he has overstated his case...

...Then there are other things, even more embarrassing...

...It would be a mistake to say that Marx forgot the early programs and goals...

...As "negation of the negation" it reveals itself as part of the alienated world and no longer transcends it, as certainly did all the above-named utopians, including young Marx...

...Fromm's claim that Marx did not teach anything different after 1848 does not tell the full story...

...Marx taught now in a different context which forced him to forgo the grandiose project of a five-volume encyclopedia of the human sciences (the three volumes of Das Kapital were to be its first volume) culminating in a new exposition of the dialectics...

...In denying the materialistic, dictatorial, totalitarian, collectivistic conclusions which some have drawn from Marx, Fromm has not done a polishing job, a canonizing whitewash...

...Unless one wants to dress Marx up as a national monument, superhumanly immovable and more omniscient than Hegel's Absolute Spirit, he cannot possibly deny the fundamental difference...

...Engels himself admitted that in the earlier days he and Marx had overemphasized the deterministic aspects of their philosophy...

...but dialectically also such concretization implies alienation— in this case expressed as system fetishism...

...Thus after asserting that Marx was as responsible for the Marxists as Christ was for the Great Inquisitor, we are ready for another turn of the dialectical screw: ;I would like to compare Fromm's achievement in this little volume with the classical essay in which Unamuno took Goethe away from philologists and explicators...

...Their concern was different from his, and only in the perspective of a century later do we appreciate that, rightly understood, their thinking might be related to ours in the same way Marx's is...

...but Marx then had not gone all the way yet...

...That was the reason why Trotsky wrote about literature in the midst of the civil war and opposed "Proletkult...

...He rather is the Marx within, the companion of Zeno, the undogmatic, humanist, radical Marx...

...And, here, as a footnote, I cannot refrain from a little carping...

...Hegel's school then was rapidly disintegrating into individualists and socialists...

...Historical contemplation of past heroes changes their image and significance...

...With Fromm we are far away from the old-school textbook of Dial-Mat with its dry derivations from Hegel's triad, Feuerbachian or Darwinian materialism and classical economics...

...Obviously because his angle of vision had changed...

...When he wrote the canonical book against the much-maligned Eugen Duehring, he remembered the old manuscripts, looked them up and discarded them as unhelpful in explaining "scientific" socialism...

...He was more interested in the next depression than in the depressed state of humanity...

...Written for the centenary of Goethe's death it was entitled: "Um einen Goethe von innen bittend" (Asking for a Goethe from Within...

...Marx shivered before the "grotesque rock architecture" of the frozen Hegelian system which he no longer could learn from the master's mouth...

...This again was the position of Trotsky in the early twenties...

...The Victorian gentleman who diligently excerpted classical economics in the British Museum appears as a human being of that sentimental age...

...The manuscript of 1844, "Marx's main philosophical work," was not published until 1932, a consequence rather than a cause of the Marxists' failure to understand the true meaning of Marx...

...Such great expectations, of course, were justified only by constant projection of the socialist image of man against the existing situation...

...He rather thought he was providing a needed dissonance which urged the chord toward resolution...

...He sees Marx as one in the long series of mystics and existentialists from "prophetic messianism, Christian chiliastic sectarians, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance utopianism and eighteenth-century Enlightenment," to Kierkegaard and Zen Buddhism...

...His critique became fragmentary, concentrated on the cause immediately at hand, and was negative...

...Thus Bottomore consistently translates "Aufhebung des Privateigentums" by "supersession of property," which sounds so much nicer than "abolition...

...But by clearing the deck of misconceptions, by going back to the "young Marx" and discarding some of the systematic dross with which the later Marx burdened his disciples, Fromm has indeed liberated Marx from the Marxists, setting Marx free to answer the challenge for himself...

...But before the revolution of 1848 he saw this goal within reach, as the result of a rapid succession of revolutionary acts, deepening the revolution, broadening it, giving it intellectual and human content, leading it toward abolition of all forms of servitude, and eventually achieving liberation from man's historical curse, the regime of property —in brief, the permanent revolution...

...He has restored an original Marxian thought with all its sparkling reflections from humanist traditions throughout the ages...

...After 1846 he was impatient with anyone who continued to hold these abstract, alienated or ideological conceptions of the revolution...

...The term "humanist," which in his own time deepened his revolutionary thought, now makes it sound shallower...

...his unfair attack on precisely the humanist "faults" of Proudhon and his vile admission, in a letter to Engels on the day of S6dan: A Prussian victory over Napoleon also will bring us the victory of our theory over Proudhon's...

...it means "uprooting," too...