/similar_quotes/169

Showing 2 similar quotes for quote #169 from To Have or to Be? by Erich Fromm

In My Own Way
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: New World Library (2007)
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Making money just for the sake of making money is a game, like bridge, in which people can find extreme pleasure and which can occupy almost all their waking hours.  But one of the rules of the game is that you must pretend not to enjoy it.  It must most definitely be classified as work; as that which you have to do as a duty to your family and community, and which therefore affords many businessmen the best possible excuse for staying away from home and from their wives.  The nemesis of this attitude is that it flows over into the so-called leisure or nonwork areas of life in such a way that playing with children, giving attention to one's wife, exercising on the golf course, and purchasing certain luxuries (which are largely symbolic) also become duties.  Survival itself becomes a duty and a even a drag, for the pretense of not enjoying the game gets under the skin and tightens the muscles which repress joyous and sensuous emotion.


To Have or to Be?
Author: Erich Fromm
Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)
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Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) that 'free conscious activity' (i.e., human activity) is 'the species character of man.' Labor, for him, represents human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and in the last analysis, the dead (Grundrisse). One cannot fully understand the affective charge which the struggle between capital and labor had for Marx unless one considers that for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom - should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism, for him, represented a society in which life had won over the dead.\r\n \r\nMarx's whole critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism are rooted in the concept that human self-activity is paralyzed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to restore full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.