TO HAVE THE PLANET OR TO BE HUMANITY (Erich Fromm: 1900-1980-2020)

Abstract

Erich Fromm is a thinker (philosopher/anthropologist/psychoanalyst) who reflects and criticizes in his famous book Having or Being, the value system that has been effective in the last 200 years of global capitalist modernization and several phases of (post)industrial development, and which system has managed to penetrate in all spheres and pores of human life, and to cause not only positive, but even more negative, paradoxical and dangerous, self-destructive, pathological effects on human civilization and culture on a global level. (Marx, Lukács, Habermas, Honneth) Of course, it is about highly developed capitalist system in a highly developed industrial societies/states, and about the necessary and definite/urgent need to overcome it at all levels on which it has managed to penetrate, including the most intimate and deepest, "private" layers/spheres of human psychosomatics and human individual spirit in the social/collective conditions of, in Fromm's opinion, "sick society". At first glance, this society manifests itself as normal, but in essence it is a "pathology of normalcy", which is most manifested through the phenomenon of fetishism and alienation, term that was once developed by Hegel, then accepted by Feuerbach, and finally by Marx. Profit, as the basic motive and spiritus movens of capitalist production, which permeates all spheres and pores of human life, is a general quantification and abstraction that turns specific individual characteristics/ potentials into goods for the market (labor and capital), and finally results in a universal/total phenomenon such as alienation and the ubiquity of its mass pathological manifestation.(Honneth) As a great historical alternative to such a society From sees in the reactualization of the idea of ​​socialism. (Honneth).