Erich Fromm, philosopher and social psychologist, points out that capitalism, in order to work, requires a large population of identical consumers with identical taste. This is opposed to the vision of a human life as individual, unique, and valuable in its uniqueness.
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
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I’ve recently been rereading the German/American psychologist Erich Fromm. He was famous in the 60s and 70s for his application of psychoanalysis to whole societies, diagnosing in a doctor’s terms what was wrong with modern life as it goes on all around us.
One passage that made me think was this:
This is a fascinating thought. When we think of modern industrial society, we always think of it from the perspective of production: we think of factories churning out clothes, assembly lines pushing out endless rows of identical cars, household goods and toys, industrial farming covering vast fields with one uniform crop. All these, the triumph of the modern, Western world order, have led to constantly falling prices for everyday commodities, and have made it possible that we all own a car, TVs, computers, and closets full of cheap clothes.
What we don’t normally think about is that all that mass production also requires a mass consumption — and, consequently, a mass consumer: us.
Producing millions of identical yellow T-shirts would make no commercial sense if there weren’t millions of consumers willing to look the same in their identical yellow T-shirts. And the same goes for cars, mobile phones, and even the most personal expressions of one’s personality and life: social media accounts (or, for that matter, Medium articles), all looking the same, all designed to one template, framed by a Facebook or Instagram layout and published under the same logo, in the same font, and often even using exactly the same pictures, taken from the free image websites, Pixabay or Unsplash.
What is Alienation?
One of his best known concepts of Marxism is the idea of “alienation” that describes how human beings get estranged from their work.
Isn’t this remarkable? We have collectively almost entirely given up our distinctive personalities and tastes. We have, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, allowed ourselves to be pressed into the mould of the industrial mass-consumer so thoroughly, that we now don’t even realise …
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