Thanks everyone for all the help.
cb - I take your point. I ventured somewhere with the Lenin stuff that I did
not want to. I obviously have misunderstood the little I've read...more reading
there remains.
Ralph - thanks for your summary it helped a lot. Am looking forward to those
links.
One question is how you see Fromm as idealist.
At least as far as I understand him he doesn't seem idealist to me - he is
always at pains to identify the determining medium of repression (which
conditions ideology) to the social reality in which humans live. So the roots
for this feedback loop are material. But I know that Marcuse accused him of
being idealist in Eros and Civilization. However, I think that his attack on
Marcuse is more substantial as all the Hegelians certainly appear to have a
weakness when it comes to grounding their dialectics in empirical fact - it
seems to me as if Marcuse earned the accusation of idealism much easier than
Fromm.
Obviously Fromm's Marxism was certainly early period stuff focussing on the
concepts of the Philosophical notebooks era but I still don't see that as
leading inexorably to idealism.
One way in which idealism could creep back is perhaps that by seeing repression
as reflecting inherent perhaps platonic 'human' drives that cannot find
expression in concrete society. But I think he would reply by saying that they
are objective, scientifically verifiable drives having their own roots in
material reality - albeit the reality inherent in the human condition. So at
base both drives and the cause of their repression are material and that these
constitute factors which provide a mechanism for the development of an
ideological superstructure corresponding to any given base.
Perhaps you can shed light on this as this is pretty much the issue I was
wanting some insight on. It's actually a similar question in regard to
Bourdieu's approach.
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