Oliver James and Capitalism

I won't go down the road of saying that there are two types of capitalism , selfish and unselfish , but Oliver James does have some interesting points to make as a clinical psychologist about mental health .

He says


Selfish Capitalism stokes up relative materialism: unrealistic aspirations and the expectation that they can be fulfilled. It does so to stimulate consumerism in order to increase profits and promote short-term economic growth. Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people make greedy consumers and can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.

The real wage of the average English-speaking person has remained the same - or, in the case of the US, decreased - since the 1970s.The top 1% of British earners have doubled their share of the national income since 1982, from 6.5% to 13%, FTSE 100 chief executives now earning 133 times more than the average wage (against 20 times in 1980); and under Brown's chancellorship the richest 0.3% nobbled over half of all liquid assets (cash, instantly accessible income), increasing their share by 79% during the last five years.
Mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s as reported by World Health Organisation and nationally representative studies in the United States, Britain and Australia, reveal that it almost doubled between the early 80s and the turn of the century.

What does the damage is the combination of inequality with the widespread relative materialism of Affluenza - placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances and fame when you already have enough income to meet your fundamental psychological needs. With overstimulated aspirations and expectations, the entrepreneurial fantasy society fosters the delusion that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s.
A Briton turning 20 in 1978 was more likely than one doing so in 1990 to achieve upward mobility through education. Nonetheless, in the Big Brother/ It Could Be You society, great swaths of the population believe they can become rich and famous, and that it is highly desirable. This is most damaging of all - the ideology that material affluence is the key to fulfilment and open to anyone willing to work hard enough. If you don't succeed, there is only one person to blame - never mind that it couldn't be clearer that it's the system's fault, not yours.

Depressed or anxious, you work ever harder. Or maybe you collapse and join the sickness benefit queue, leaving it to people shipped in to do the low-paid jobs that society has taught you are too demeaning - let alone the unpaid ones, like looking after children or elderly parents, which are beneath contempt in the Nouveau Labour liturgy.

Unfortunately , Oliver James doesn't quite grasp that it is Capitalism per se that is at fault and his comparisons between "selfish" and "unselfish" capitalism is just a debate about degree and perhaps particular historic social developments of capitalism in various parts of the world .

His hope of " a passionate, charismatic, probably female leader who advocates the Unselfish Capitalism " that will reduce consumerism and inequality and create a sustainable ecologically sound world is a forlorn doomed hope . He still has a lot to learn about Capitalism . There is no nice or bad capitalism .

The basic theme of Fromm’s The Sane Society is that capitalism, because it encourages competition between individuals, pitting them against each other in a rat race for power, privilege and prestige, is a society that is incompatible with human nature. It is an “insane society”, a “sick society”. Only a society based on co-operation and community is a sane society as one which properly meets the psychological needs of human beings for a sense of belonging; not just a sense of belonging but a state of actually belonging to a real community. Only socialism can offer that . Although capitalism continually seeks to reduce us to isolated social atoms who only collide in the marketplace as buyers and sellers, the basic human need for community still expresses itself even if in distorted and perverted forms - racism, nationalism and religion. Capitalism can try to suppress the human need for co-operation and community but will never be able to succeed.

A New web-site

Socialists For Free Access Just an exercise in web design but some of the articles may be of interest and some have been posted here or elsewhere so no real surprises but good to have them all on one site for easy reference

Erich Fromm

Another posting of an early Socialist Standard ( January 1995 ) article that has yet to be put on the net upon the fathers of psycho-analysis

To Have or to Be

The title of this article is taken from the book of the same name by the psychologist , Erich Fromm. It is probably true to state that many Socialist Party members view psychology with some suspicion because of its tendency to see “abnormal” human behaviour in isolation; but Fromm is in no doubt that it is our sick society that leads to such behaviour , and not the reverse . Thus , his ideas are worthy of study by socialists .

Fromm commences To Have Or To Be by stating that the failure of capitalism , aside from its economic contradictions lies in its two main premises :

“The first is ‘that the aim of life is happiness , defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel ( radical hedonism )”;

The second is ‘that egotism. Selfishness, and greed , as the system needs to generate them in order to function, leads to harmony and peace’”

With regard to the first premise , Fromm distinguishes between subjectively felt needs (desires) whose satisfaction leads to monetary pleasure , and objectively valid needs that are rooted in human nature , and whose realisation is conductive to human growth which produces “well-being”

Fromm notes the contradiction between the concept of unlimited pleasure and the ideal of disciplined work , and between obsessional work ethic and the ideal of complete laziness. “Both contradictory attitudes” , we are told , “correspond to an economic necessity ; twentieth-century capitalism is based on the maximum consumption of the goods and services as well on routinised teamwork”

Fromm sums up the first section by stating that “…[the] pursuit of happiness does not produce well-being”. We are a society of notoriously unhappy people lonely , anxious , depressed , destructive , dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save!

The second psychological premise of capitalism , that the pursuit of individual egoism leads to harmony and peace , is equally rejected by Fromm .To be an egoist means:

“I want everything to myself, that possessing , not sharing , gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having , I am more the more I have .
I can never be satisfied , because there is no end to my wishes : I must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less.”

Fromm is in no doubt that the passion for having must lead to never - ending class war and , in global terms, international war. He states that “Greed and peace preclude each other” . He is also in no doubt that the development of an economic system as an autonomous entity , independent of human needs and human will , is a recent development . The question , therefore , is no longer “What is good for the system?” - and the assumption is that the latter is good for the former.

And this assumption is bolstered by the further assumption:

“That the very qualities that the system required of human nature - egotism, selfishness and greed - were innate in human nature ; hence, not only the system but human nature itself fostered them”

Societies in which egotism , selfishness and greed did not exist , were supposed to be “primitive” and their inhabitants “childlike” . People refused to recognise that their traits were not natural drives that caused industrial society to exist , but that they were the products of social circumstances .

Fromm reinforces his assertion with the little-known , but surprising , fact that the majority of the world’s languages have no word for “to have” . Such languages express possession in the form “it is to me” , whilst others have only developed the construction “I have” at a much later date . “This fact”, argues Fromm, “suggests that the word for “to have” develops in connection with the development of private property , while it is absent in societies with predominantly functional property ; that is , possession for use” And “While private property is supposed to be natural and a universal category , it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history”

Thus , for Fromm , the difference between “being” and “having” is between a society centred around persons and one centred around things such as property , profit and power . The distinction is between “I have knowledge” and “I know” - where “knowing” means to “see reality in all its nakedness”.

Fromm therefore concludes that the character traits engendered by or socio-economic system are pathogenic , and produce sick people and a sick society . Given that fact , we are headed for an economic catastrophe unless we change our social system . The physical survival of the human race depends on it .
Richard Layton

And Fromm Where…

Born in Frankfurt , Germany , in 1900 ,Erich Fromm was one of the first to attempt a synthesis of Marx and Freud ( Reuben Osborn had previously made such an attempt , in his Freud and Marx, in 1937 , from a Stalinist viewpoint ), and to develop a Marxian social psychology . Fromm was trained in psychoanalysis , and worked with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 1930 to 1933 , when he fled from Nazi Germany . He then went to America .
In his early essays , Fromm combined the dialectical and materialist elements in both Marx and Freud ; and applied Marxian social psychology to interpret such phenomena as religion and the sado-masochistic roots of the authoritarian personality .

In 1941 Fromm wrote probably his best known work , Escape From Freedom , published in Britain in 1942 under the title The Fear of Freedom . In it he asks if freedom is a psychological problem ;and discusses in detail authoritarianism , destructiveness and conformity . He also deals with the psychology of Nazism . His conclusion is that “changing social conditions result in changes of the social character ; that is , in new needs and anxieties …social conditions influence ideological phenomena through the medium of character ; character , on the other hand , is not the result of passive adaptation to social conditions , but of a dynamic adaptation on the basis of elements that either are biologically inherent in human nature or have become inherent as a result of human evolution”

Fromm’s old friend , Herbert Marcuse , engaged in polemics with him during the 1950s , beginning with his Eros and Civilisation. Marcuse accused Fromm of being a “Neo-Freudian revisionist” and Fromm retaliated by calling Marcuse a “nihilist” Fromm , however argued , that people must free themselves , whilst Marcuse , particularly in his One-Dimensional Man , looks largely to the “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders , the exploited and the persecuted of other races and other colours , the unemployed and the unemployable “ , when “they get together and go out onto the streets , without arms” to lead the fight against “domination”

In 1955 Fromm wrote The Sane Society in which he deals with the concept of alienation in some depth , as well as so-called education in capitalist society and what he calls the “roads to Sanity” , a sane socialist society . In 1949 he had already written Man For Himself : An Enquiry into the Psychology of Ethics , and in 1957 hew wrote The Art of Loving - not a sex instruction manual , I might add . In 1965 , Fromm published a collection of essays based on a symposium of various academics such as the Polish writer , Adam Schaff , Maximilien Rubel , T.B Bottomore and others , titled Socialist Humanism .

Erich Fromm actively opposed the Vietnam war , and all other wars in which the United States became involved . He died in 1980 Of all his works , I have found his Fear of Freedom and The Sane Society the most useful , although all are worth reading .
Peter E . Newell

Further reading:

Freud and Marx: Do they mix ?

Letters here and here

Freud's new clothes

Marcuse: professor behind 1960s rebellion

The Sexual Politics of Wilhelm Reich