Escape From Freedom, by Erich Fromm
Victor Serge
This book begins with some extremely dubieus statements.
When Fromm writes "The familiar picture of man in the last century was one
of a rational being" and "One feIt confident that the achievements of
modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces," he forgets th at up
to now civilization has been confined to a few Islands in a vast ocean of barbarism,
ignorance and corruption. Even in the more advanced nations the
"enlightened citizen" of the 19th nuncentury has always been in a minority;
and we now realize that ovworthy citizen was tremendously his over-confident,
largely because of is unconsciousness of the terrible insecurity of his
historical position. Today the problems posed by the relations of white and
colored races in the East and by the changes going on inside backward countries
require of us a more critical, that is to say a more revolutionary, attitude
toward the struggle for freedom.
In general. however, Escape From Freedom [1]is a valuable contribution
to what might be called our "intellectual rearmament". Past concepts
of freedom have by now lost much of their validity. There was always a good
deal of hypocrisy about bourgeois democracy, which corresponded too naively
with the interests of arising capitalist class; and the old socialist and
anarchist doctrines were themselves too much colored by the 'society in which
they were born. A revision of our knowledge and our ideals is indicated - or
perhaps rather a clarification. This is what Fromm undertakes, in some ways
most successfully.
"Nazism is an economie and political problem, but the
hold it has over a whole people has to be understood on psychological grounds".
The key is furnished by the distinction between "freedom from" and
"freedom to." The individual, as the shattering of feudal forms by
rising capitalism makes him increasingly independent of the social group, feels
himself increasingly helplees in the midst of an organized chaos which
threatens to shatter him as a human being. The alienation of man, to use Marx's
well-known expression, leads him to give up this terrifying negative
"freedom from," which is quite different from that positive
"freedom to" which expresses itself in spontaneity, creative work,
human solidarity and intelligence. The autoritarian regimes at once invite and
require the individual to reject his humanity, exploiting his despair and feeling
of insecurity. This humanity, as Fromm well shows, is an embarrassment anyway
under capitalist democracy, which debauches the individual and leaves him only
the illusion of thinking. His ideological and spiritual nourishment is forced on
him by the same kind of high-powered advertising methods as are used to promote
a new tooth-paste.
Fromm's analysis brings out the dangerous kinship of the
sick democracies and the total dictatorships of our time. The social conformism
of the former, induced by the capitalists' control of the press, the radio, the
movies, and the educational system, and the state-imposed uniformity of the
latter-these are shown to differ quantitatively rather than qualitatively.
Fromm explains the psychology of the masses who accept fascism by the need to
escape from a "freedom" that has become intolerable because of the
insecurity, both economie and spiritual, which accompanies it under capitalism.
This is, of course, quite true; and his analysis of the origin of fascism is
extremely valuable. But the totalitarian experience continues, and we can now
see it developing a new kind of insecurity even worse than the one that it
remedied: the German and Russian masses no longer live simply under the rule of
an all-powerful central authority, which has its psychological attractions, but
rather in an atmosphere of permanent catastrophe. Will this not force the
subjugated human being once more to reassert himself and take his destiny into
his own hands? Many years of experience in a totalitarian society with socialist
tendencies have taught me, furthermore, that a collective economy requires the
initiative and the freely-expressed criticism of the masses of producers, that
is to say, freedom of thought based on feeling of human solidarity and on the
development of the individual. The suppression of this freedom causes an
enormous waste, which seems to me to be one of the chief weaknesses of
authoritarian regimes. Here may be found the economic basis for a new liberty
in the collective economies of tomorrow.
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