Herbert Marcuse

Erich Fromm

• Like Wilhelm Reich, Fromm was a social psychologist of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.

• His book Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, is an ideological companion to Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

• Fromm asserted that early capitalism created a social order that resulted in Calvin’s Theory of Predestination, which reflected the principle of the basic inequality of men which was revived in Nazi ideology.

• He asserted the authoritarian character experiences only domination or submission and “differences, whether sex or race, to him are necessarily of superiority or inferiority.”

• He asserted that “Positive Freedom” implies the principle that there is no higher power than the unique individual self; that man is the center and purpose of life; that the growth and realisation of man’s individuality is an end that can be subordinated to purposes which are supposed to have a greater dignity.

• Fromm made the real meaning of this “Positive Freedom” clear in another of his many books – The Dogma of Christ - wherein he describes a revolutionary character such as himself as the man who has emancipated himself from the ties of blood and soil, from his mother and father, and from special loyalties to state, race, party or religion.

• Fromm makes his revolutionary intent very clear in The Dogma of Christ...”We might define revolution in a psychological sense, saying that a revolution is a political movement led by people with revolutionary characters, and attracting people with revolutionary characters.”

• Like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, Marcuse was an intellectual of the Frankfurt School who came to America in the 1930s.

• He has often been described as a Marxist philosopher, but he was in fact a full-blooded social revolutionary who contemplated the disintegration of Western European and American society just as Karl Marx and Georg Lukacs contemplated the disintegration of German society: “One can rightfully speak of a cultural revolution, since the protest is directed toward the whole cultural establishment, including the morality of existing society…there is one thing we can say with complete assurance: the traditional idea of revolution and the traditional strategy of revolution has ended. These ideas are old-fashioned…What we must undertake is a type of diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the system.”

• Marcuse published Eros and Civilisation in 1955, which became the founding document of the 1960s counterculture and brought the Frankfurt School into the colleges and universities of Western Europe and America.

• He asserted that the only way to escape the one-dimensionality of modern industrial society was to liberate the erotic side of man, the sensuous instinct, in rebellion against “technological rationality.”

• This erotic liberation was to take the form of the “Great Refusal,” a total rejection of the capitalist monster and its entire works, including technological reason and ritual-authoritarian language.

• He provided the needed intellectual justifications for adolescent sexual rebellion and the slogan “Make Love, Not War.”

• His theory included the belief that the Women’s Liberation Movement was to be the most important component of the opposition, and potentially the most radical.

• His revolutionary efforts would blossom into a full-scale war by revolutionary Marxism against the European white male in the schools and colleges.

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