Beyond the Chains of Illusion by Erich Fromm

Author:Erich Fromm [Fromm, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0210-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-19T17:40:00+00:00

While Marx already used the term “repression (Verdraengung) of the ordinary natural desires” in the German Ideology,57 Rosa Luxemburg, one of the most brilliant Marxists in the pre-1914 period, expressed the Marxist theory of the determining effect of historical process on man in straight psychoanalytic terminology. “The unconscious,” she wrote, “comes before the conscious. The logic of the historic process comes before the subjective logic of the human beings who participate in the historic process.”58 This formulation expresses the Marxian thought in full clarity. Man’s consciousness, that is, his “subjective process,” is determined by “the logic of the historic process,” which R. Luxemburg equates with the “unconscious.”

At this point the Freudian and the Marxian “unconscious” may seem not to denote more than a common word. Only if we pursue Marx’s ideas on this problem further shall we discover that there is more common ground in their respective theories, even though they are by no means identical.

Marx has given a good deal of thought to the role of consciousness in the life of the individual in a passage, which precedes the one just quoted where he uses the word “repression.” He speaks about the fact that it is nonsense if one believes

“that one could satisfy one passion, separate it from all the others, without satisfying oneself, the whole living individual. If this passion assumes an abstract, separate character, hence if the satisfaction of the individual occurs as the satisfaction of a single passion… the reason is not to be found in consciousness, but in being; not in thinking, but in living; it is to be found in the empirical development and self-expression of the individual, which, in turn, depends on the conditions of the world in which he lives. (die wiederum von der Weltverhältnissen abhängt.)”59

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