INTRODUCTORY NOTE: Born in Germany in 1900, Erich Fromm trained as a psychoanalyst in Berlin. In 1934 he emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Yale and Columbia and became well-known as both a psychoanalyst and a social critic. The following passage is adapted from his 1955 book The Sane Society. Although in it Fromm follows the custom of his time by always using the pronoun “he” to replace nouns like “industrial worker,” his observations appt to women as well as men.
WORK IN AN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY
Craftsmanship, especially as it developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, constitutes one of the peaks in the evolution of creative work in Western history. During the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, work was not only a useful activity, but one which carried with it a profound satisfaction. The main features of craftsmanship as it existed before the Industrial Revolution have been very lucidly expressed by C.W. Mills: “There is no ulterior motive in work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation. The details of daily work are meaningful because they are not detached in the worker’s mind from the product of work. The worker is free to control his own working action. The craftsman is thus able to learn from his work; and to use and develop his capacities and skills in its prosecution. There is no split of work and play, or work and culture. The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living.”
By contrast, what happens to the industrial worker today, in 1955? He spends his best energy for seven or eight hours a day in producing “something”. He needs his work in order to make a living, but his role is essentially a passive one. He fulfills a small, isolated function in a complicated and highly organized process of production, and is never confronted with “his” product in a store. He is concerned neither with the whole product in its physical aspects nor with its wider economic and social aspects. He is put in a certain place, has to carry out a certain task, but does not participate in the organization or management of the work. He is not interested in, nor does he know, why he produces the commodity instead of another one-what relation it has to the needs of society as a whole. The shoes, the cars, electric bulbs, are produced by “the enterprise,” using the machines. He is part of the machine, rather than its master as an active agent.
For today’s industrial worker, work is a means of getting money, not in itself a meaningful human activity. P. Drucker, observing workers in automobile industry, expresses this idea very succinctly: “For the great majority of automobile workers, the only meaning of the job is in the pay check, not in anything connected with the work or the product. Work appears as something unnatural, a disagreeable, meaningless, and stultifying condition of getting the pay check, devoid of dignity as well as of importance. No wonder that this puts a premium on slovenly work, on slowdown, and on other tricks to get the same pay check with less work. No wonder that this result in an unhappy and discontented worker-because a pay check is not enough to base one’s self-respect on.”
The alienated and profoundly unsatisfactory character of modern industrial work results in two reactions: one, the ideal of complete laziness; the other, a deep-seated, though often unconscious, hostility toward work and every thing and everybody connected with it.
It is not difficult to recognize the widespread longing for the estate of complete laziness and passivity. Our advertising appeals to it even more than to sex. There are, of course, many useful and labor-saving gadgets. But this usefulness often serves only as a rationalization for their appeal to complete passivity and receptivity. A package of breakfast cereal is advertised as “new-easier to ear.” An electronic toaster is advertised with these words: “…the most distinctly different toaster in the world! Everything is done for you with this new toaster. You need not even bother to lower the breads. Power-action, through a unique electric motor, gently takes the bread right out of your fingers!’ Everybody knows the picture of the elderly couple in the advertisement of a life-insurance company, who have retires at the age of sixty, and spend their life in the complete bliss of having nothing to do except just travel.
But there is far more serious and deep-seated reaction to the meaninglessness and boredom of work. It is a hostility towards work which is much less conscious than our craving for laziness and inactivity. Many a businessman feels himself the prisoner of his business and the commodities he sells; he has a feeling of fraudulency about his product and a secret contempt for it. He hates his customers, who force him to put up a show in order to sell. He hates his competitors because they are a threat; he hates his employees as well as his superiors, because he is in a constant competitive fight with them. Most important of all, he hates himself, because he sees his life passing by, without making any sense beyond the momentary intoxication of success. Of course, this hate and this contempt-for others and for oneself, and for the very things one produces-are mainly unconscious. Only occasionally do these feelings come up to awareness in a fleeting thought, which is sufficiently disturbing to be set aside as quickly as possible.
Copyright 1955 by Erich Fromm
ESSAY TOPIC
According to Fromm, how did industrial workers feel about their work when he was writing in 2955? How accurately do you think his ideas characterize the way people feel about their experiences in the world of work today? Write an essay responding to these two questions. To develop your own position, be sure to discuss specific examples; those examples can be drawn from anything you’ve read, as well as from your observation and experience.