Erich Fromm and Left Strategy New Paths Toward Radical Transformation

This book considers the work of Erich Fromm as it can be applied to radical Left political strategy. It aims primarily to demonstrate the relevance of his ideas to contemporary radical Left strategy and to contribute to the revitalization of critical social theory and its relationship to radical praxis. Specifically, the case is made throughout this volume that Fromm’s humanist socialism offers a unique set of critical tools for impugning entrenched assumptions and ossified debates within the contemporary radical Left about what struggles against capitalist exploitation and myriad interconnected social oppressions can and should look like. Four vantage points are identified and explored to this end. The first focuses on the question of what Fromm’s theoretical contributions can teach us about what radical activism and resistance ought to look like across multiple terrains of struggle. The second asks what Fromm’s insights regarding social character can teach us about the forces that stifle productiveness and reproduce domination. In a more utopian vein, it asks what society might look like once domination has been eliminated. The third places Fromm in dialogue with diverse voices on the Left, including prominent psychoanalysts and social and political theorists, with an eye toward lingering tensions and disagreements about radical social change. The fourth asks why the Right has gained ground politically in recent years and what can be done to contain it, and offers psychoanalytically inflected reflections on the pernicious effects of group narcissism on individuals’ political agency.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Escaping Oppression and Embracing Freedom: The Art of Striving for Total Liberation.- Chapter 3: Fromm and Radical Justice.- Chapter 4: Toward a Theory of Ethical Left Leadership.- Chapter 5: How Strategic and Political Was Erich Fromm? Lessons for the Left Today.- Chapter 6: From Fromm to Kohut and Beyond: The Psychopolitics of the Post-Liberal World.- Chapter 7: Consciousness, Character, and Conspiracy.- Chapter 8: Toward a Better Future: Fromm on Being and the Productive Orientation.- Chapter 9: Fromm and Neoliberalism.- Chapter 10: Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: From Form to Content to Social Praxis.- hapter 11: Public Intellectuals and Crisis: Lessons from Erich Fromm and Antonio Gramsci.- Chapter 12: On the Necessity of Reading Historical Time.- Chapter 13: Fromm, Marcuse and Gabel: Counterrevolution, Social Character and Neoliberalism Despotism.- Chapter 14: Pathological Normalcy Revisited: Rereading Fromm in an age of Climate Crisis.- Chapter 15: Group Narcissism, Psychic Regression, and the New Authoritarian Character.- Chapter 16: Erich Fromm’s Theory of Authority and Left-Wing Authoritarianism Today.- Chapter 17: Erich Fromm and Antifascist Strategy.

Joseph Fantauzzi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. His dissertation critically examines the social relations of financialization and its consequences for the working class in Canada. His research interests include critical political economy; alienation; class consciousness; passive revolution; hegemony; ideology and intellectuals; subject/object duality and intersubjectivity; Ontario politics; labour rights and activism; and the neoliberal state.

 

Maor Levitin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto. His main area of research is the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, especially the work of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. His dissertation centers on a critique of horizontalism and attitudes toward power and authority in contemporary political theory, expounding a theory of ethical Left leadership.

 

Terry Maley teaches in the Politics Department and in the Graduate Social and Political Thought program at York University, Toronto, Canada.

He has contributed “What Marcuse Strikes Back Against – and For” to the Marcusean Mind collection, Eduardo A. Santos, Jina Fast, Nicole Mayberry, eds.  (Routledge, 2024). He is co-editor (along with Peter Erwin Jansen, Robert Kirsch and Taylor Hines) of the volume Critical Theory in Dark Times: Marcuse’s Thought in the Neoliberal Era (Palgrave, 2023), as well as co-editor of the collection, Envisioning Democracy: New Essays After Sheldon Wolin’s Political Thought (University of Toronto Press, 2023) with John R. Wallach. His article, “The Relevance of Herbert Marcuse Today: Or the Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy in and Beyond the Neoliberal Era”, was published in the journal Theory Culture and Society in 2022. In 2020 he contributed “The Disintegration of the Neoliberal Order and Challenges for the Left”, to the volume, Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination, Robert Latham, A.T. Kingsmith, Julian Von Bargen and Niko Block, eds. (Fernwood). In 2017 Fernwood published his edited collection, One-Dimensional Man 50 Years On: The Struggle Continues (Fernwood).

Maley’s recent research focuses on political-economy and cultural critiques of social media and the ‘global entertainment/news complex’ under neoliberalism, as well as the social psychology of ‘neoliberal rationality’. Maley’s work examines the affinities between the first-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (particularly Marcuse), and radical democratic theory, and how this theoretical intersection can help understand a new phase of counterrevolutionary neoliberal despotism today.  Maley has worked with the labour movement in Canada, has served as Vice President of one of the most progressive faculty association unions in Canada (YUFA at York University), with social movements, and on the democratic socialist left of the New Democratic Party.