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Freedom in the Work Situation

Erich Fromm
1959f-e

First published to introduce the book Labor in a Free Society (edited by Michael Harrington
and Paul Jacobs and with a Foreword by Clark Kerr, Berkeley and Los Angeles (University of
California Press) 1959, pp. 1-16. – Reprint in the Yearbook of the International Erich Fromm
Society, Vol. 3: Arbeit – Entfremdung – Charakter, Münster: LIT-Verlag, 1994, pp. 238-250.
Copyright © 1959 by Erich Fromm; Copyright © 1994 and 2011 by The Literary Estate of E-
rich Fromm, c/o Dr. Rainer Funk, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen / Germany. – Fax:
+49-(0)7071-600049; E-Mail: fromm-estate[at-symbol]fromm-online.com.

Freedom means many things to many people. Do we mean by freedom, a freedom

from – freedom from drudgery, from monotony, from the stupidity of manual work,
freedom from the irrational authority of a boss or foreman, freedom from exploitation?
Or, on the other hand, do we mean a freedom to – freedom participate actively in the
work process or freedom to enjoy work? Actually our concept of freedom today is es-
sentially a negative one: It is freedom from and not freedom to, because we are mostly
concerned with what we are against and not what we are for – against whom we
should defend ourselves rather than what we are living for.
The word freedom shares this ambiguous quality with some other words that we
frequently use. For instance, we use the word democracy and mean by it – more or less
unconsciously – „consent manipulated without force.“ Or we use the word equality and
mean by it sameness, rather than what equality meant originally that no man must be
the means toward the end of another man. Or we speak of happiness and really mean
unrestricted consumption.
In discussing that ambiguous term, freedom, I will try to say something about the
psychological problem of modern man in general, and the worker specifically.
Little needs to be said about the basic economic facts of twentieth-century capital-
ism as distinguished from the nineteenth century – just this much: Today we live in an
era of mass production, both in the sense of production of great quantity of commodi-
ties and in the sense of masses of people working together in a well-organized, smooth
way without friction. Consumption is to some extent predictable by market research; it
is managed by advertising – by creating needs synthetically. Mass man is confronted
with the four great bureaucracies: the bureaucracy of industry, of labor, of government,
and of the armed forces. These bureaucracies work together and form a network which
interacts with the mass man, who is quite willing to be managed by them provided he
has the illusion that his decisions are free and that he is „really“ the one who tells them
what to do.
I should like to say a word about bureaucracy from a psychological standpoint be-
cause this has a bearing on what I have to say later. Bureaucracy is not simply admini-

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stration. In any differentiated society we need administration of things, and we need

even a certain amount of regulation of people. What I mean by bureaucracy is the ad-
ministration of men as if they were things, or, to quote Marx, to relate to men as ob-
jects. This attitude is inherent in every bureaucracy. The problem of bureaucracy, in the
sense I have in mind, is not the question of cruel versus human treatment of people.
When we think of the Russians, we always emphasize that they treat the people cruelly.
This is not the point here. Furthermore, the problem is not only one of bureaucracy – as
if bureaucracy took over and the unwilling people were forced to submit to it. Bureauc-
racy is a relationship between the bureaucrat and his objects, the people. The bureaucrat
treats people as things, and people agree to be treated as things as long as they don't
know it, as long as they have their initials on their sportshirts or handbags, as long as
they have the illusion of individuality and freedom.
Modern capitalism, then, needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large num-
bers, who want to consume ever more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be
easily influenced and anticipated; men who feel free and independent – not subject to
any authority or principle or conscience – yet willing to be commanded to do what is
expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; to be guided without
force, led without leader, prompted without aim – except the one to make good – to
be on the move, to function, go ahead.
The paradox in the relationship between the bureaucrats and their followers is that
the bureaucrats have no aim and the followers have no aim, but each group thinks that
the other one has an aim. That is to say, the followers think the bureaucrats know what
they are doing and where they are going; and the bureaucrats, in a vague sense, think
that their followers have told them where to go. Actually the two are like the two blind
men who walk on the street each thinking the other sees.
We are concerned with instrumentalities – with how we are doing things; we are
no longer concerned with why we are doing things. We build machines that act like
men and we want to produce men who act like machines. Our danger today is not that
of becoming slaves, but of becoming automatons.
Indeed, means have become ends. Material production once was supposed to be a
means for a more dignified, happier life, and the aim was clearly the fuller, more digni-
fied, more human life. Today production and consumption have become ends in them-
selves. Nobody asks any longer, why or what for? We are happy discovering how we
can produce more. In fact, our economic system is based on ever-increasing consump-
tion and production. But why we want to produce more, why we want this, that, and
the other – this is a question which is not asked.
Let us take another example. We are all eager to save time. But what do we do
with the time we have saved? We are embarrassed and we try to kill it. Anyone who
knows the presentday situation realizes what would happen to the United States if we
had a general 20-hour work week today. We would have thousands more psychiatrists
to take care of the nervous breakdowns which would occur if people would have that
much more free time on their hands without knowing what to do with it.
Our consumption also is an end in itself. You might say that modern man's concept
of heaven is a tremendous department store with new things every day, and with

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enough money to buy everything he pleases. We are the eternal sucklings, drinking in
cigarettes and lectures and movies and television. Many people speak of love as one
talks of milk. „The child didn't get enough love, it didn't get enough affection.“ You
drink it in. That is exactly the picture described in the Brave New World by Huxley.
„Why postpone a satisfaction until tomorrow when you can have it today?“
If I may add a footnote: It has been said that the change in sex mores which hap-
pened after 1914 is due to Freud. I think this is erroneous. Freud above all was a Puritan
and nothing was further from his thoughts then the advocacy of uninhibited sexual ac-
tivity. Freud was only used for the purposes of our consumption craziness. We want to
satisfy every need immediately – the need for sex, a car, television.
To speak from another standpoint, man, being preoccupied with the production of
things, has unconsciously transformed himself into a thing. Consciously we talk about
our dignity and all the things which are based on a tradition of hundreds and even thou-
sands of years. But actually, most people unconsciously speak of themselves as things
and treat each other as things. A person might come to a psychoanalyst – a person he
has never seen before – and tell his tragic life story as if he complained to a garage me-
chanic that the car has stalled. This problem is related to a central issue – to the phe-
nomenon of alienation. The term comes from Hegel; it was a central issue with Marx;
and all existentialist philosophy is a reaction to alienation – from Kierkegaard to Sartre
and in the most significant existentialist philosopher, Marx.
It is one of the peculiar phenomena of our present-day culture that, aside from the
Old Testament, there is hardly any book which is so much talked about as Marx and so
little known. The Russians have claimed that they represent Marx's ideas, yet they repre-
sent exactly the opposite. They are the most reactionary regime in Europe. I am not
speaking of the terror but of their school system, their social relations; they are about
where Europe was in 1830, in a period of fast accumulation of capital. But certainly they
have nothing whatever to do with the aims of Marx, and we do them a tremendous
service by confirming to the world their own claim that they represent the aims of
Marx.
To talk about alienation we might start with a concept which is clear to anyone
who knows the Old Testament – the concept of idolatry. The prophets had as their
main object the fight against idolatry. This is often understood to mean that they be-
lieved in one god and the others in many gods and that this numerical difference is the
point of monotheism. But this is not so at all. The concept of idolatry is clearly defined
in the Old Testament as man bowing down and worshiping the work of his own hands.
As one of the prophets expressed it so beautifully: Here you have a piece of wood; one
half you take and make a fire and warm yourself, or boil your meat; with the other half
you make a statue, and this statue you worship as your god. Or as one of the psalms
said: „They have ears and they do not hear; they have eyes and they do not see; they
have hands and they do not touch.“ That is to say, man disowns his own creative
power, transfers it to an object and then worships his own power in an alienated form,
by worshiping the idol. He does not experience himself any more as a creator, as a sub-
ject of these powers; he is in touch with himself only by the indirect and alienated way
of being in touch with that which his own power has created. A quotation from Marx
shows how closely related this definition is to the concept of idolatry in the Old Testa-

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ment. Marx said, „Man's own act becomes to him an alien power, standing over and
against him instead of being ruled by him.“ And he goes on to say that all history is also
the history of man's alienation from himself and from his own human power; that his-
tory is the consolidation of our own product to an objective power above us – out-
growing our control, defeating our expectations, alienating our calculations; that man
has been the object of circumstances; and that he must become the subject so that man
becomes the highest theme for man.
The history of the Christian Church provides another example of idolatry. What
was Luther protesting against when he separated from the Catholic Church? There were
many issues, but one of them was that in the Church man faced God only through the
bureaucracy of the Church, through the priests. In other words, man was alienated from
God; he did not face God directly but was instead in touch with a priest through whom
he was put in touch with God. So Luther protests, insisting that each man is an individ-
ual who should and can be in direct touch with God.
This Lutheran tradition is one of the bases of our modern concept of freedom and
individuality. And yet what do we see today? We see exactly the same situation that Lu-
ther fought. Church membership and participation in services is, relatively, the highest in
a hundred years. And what is the result? Ours is a very unreligious culture. Here we see
the fact of alienation. By belonging to a church, by attending a service on Sunday, the
individual has the conscious feeling of being in touch with God – with his own spiritual
powers. But in reality it is idolatry and alienation because he does not have a religious
experience. He only has a quasi-religious experience by being in touch with those pow-
ers to whom the religious experience is delegated.
The same happens in our social situation. The American citizen today is concerned
almost exclusively with private problems. By „concerned,“ I mean enough interested in
a problem to lose one's sleep sometimes, not merely just to talk about it. He loses his
sleep about health, money, and family problems. He does not lose his sleep about prob-
lems of society, because he has cut himself off from the experiences of social concern,
from the relatedness to others as part of his life. He is a private individual with only pri-
vate interests, separated from a general interest in the whole, and has projected his so-
cial relatedness to government, to the specialist. If he goes to the polls, which 40 per
cent to 50 per cent never do, then he does about the same as going to church on Sun-
day. He is under the illusion that by being in touch with those who represent him as a
social being, he himself experiences his social relatedness. He does not.
We as a nation are being ruled by things and circumstances, and there was never an
age in which the fact was demonstrated in such a terrifying way as today. Because to-
day, indeed, we are ruled by the bomb. The bomb is something of our making. The cir-
cumstances, the various governments are things of our making; and yet we have become
almost helpless prisoners of circumstances which might lead any day to the destruction
of everything alive and everything we value. We know this fact, yet we do not experi-
ence the affect of fear, horror, and protest that a normal person would experience. This
split between thought and affect, a mechanism characteristic for schizophrenia, is charac-
teristic for modern man. Yet, because we all suffer from it, we do not consider it patho-
logical.

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The result of this alienated schizoid life is something for which the French had a
word one hundred and fifty years ago. They called it la malaise du siècle – the illness of
the century, or ennui. Today we call it neurotic. We are indoctrinated not to feel un-
happy, because if you feel unhappy you are not a success. But you are permitted to feel
neurotic. So you go to the doctor, and you say you suffer from insomnia or you „have a
problem.“ You have a car, you have a wife, you have kids, you have a house – you
have a problem. Our way of thinking and feeling is that all the emphasis is not on „to
Be“ but on „to Have“. We have much – but we are little. This attitude leads to defeat-
ism, although it may be unconscious.
I believe, for instance, that although we all pretend to believe in democracy, many
people believe in democracy only in the sense, as I said before, of „consent manipulated
without force,“ and not in democracy as the voluntary, active, productive participation
of responsible citizens. We all repeat formulas in which we have, at best, a half-hearted
belief. As a result of this, we are insecure, we lack the sense of identity based on our
convictions and our faith, and we get a sense of identity only by conformity; that is, I
know that I am I – not because I have a conviction, not because I feel intensity, but be-
cause I am like everybody else. And if I am three feet away from the herd, that makes
me very insecure because then I don't know any more who I am.

I would like to discuss now specifically the problem of work and the worker in the
United States. This is difficult, because the working class in this country is not a sharply
limited class today as it was in Europe and in the United States a hundred years ago. In
many ways, psychologically speaking, the working class today belongs to the middle
class just as everybody else psychologically belongs or tries to belong to the middle class.
What are some of the differences between the situation of the worker in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries? The worker in the nineteenth century was exploited and
excluded from humanity. The average nineteenth-century capitalist had no feeling of
identity with the worker, just as he had none with people of other races. Actually he
could exploit the worker to the extent that he did only if he did not identify himself
with the worker; and the capitalist had to exploit the worker for the purpose of the ac-
cumulation of capital.
The worker in the nineteenth century did not work as the middle class did, on the
basis of a Protestant-Puritan „drive for work“; he did not like his work – he worked be-
cause he had to. Work was essentially forced labor, and work was stupid. As a reaction
to this inhuman situation of the worker, there arose the movement which was, in my
opinion, one of the few genuinely religious movements in the nineteenth century, al-
though it was not perceived in such terms. With the introduction of labor unions the
worker began to experience his own sense of human dignity and solidarity, his sense of
self, his own human powers. He had a vision of a non-alienated, humanistic society. The
movement of labor unions had as its aim, of course, higher wages and a better standard
of living, but by no means was this the only goal, and maybe not even the main one.
This movement, like socialism, was originally a humanistic, a spiritual movement of hu-
man liberation and solidarity.
The situation of the worker today is different. The worker today is also the con-

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sumer – and I mean the consumer in the psychological sense. Of course, he was always a
consumer because be had to eat and drink. But he is now a consumer with the same
craving for consuming that the members of all other classes have. The worker is not only
part of the great consumers mass whose tastes and desires are manipulated by industry;
he is also manipulated by the industrial bureaucracy in his work situation, by the union
bureaucracy through his membership in the union, by the government bureaucracy be-
cause he is a citizen, and, if he gets drafted or otherwise comes in contact with the
armed forces, he is manipulated by that bureaucracy too.
The worker has the same private and alienated concern for himself. The worker to-
day does not dream so much of becoming president of General Motors or anything of
that sort. But the new car, the new house, the new television set, the larger refrigerator
– these are his dreams. These are his convictions, these are his hopes. He is caught in the
net of bureaucracies; he is the alienated mass man, headed in the same direction of hu-
man automation as the whole society.
What is the meaning of work today? The generally accepted aim of our social effort
is held to be increase of production and consumption. There is an axiom: What is good
for production is good for the worker. And in the past few years the belief has gained
ground that what is good for the worker is good for production. This new axiom has
furthered efforts in the study of what is called „human relations,“ „industrial psychol-
ogy,“ „human engineering,“ and all that kind of thing. One discovers that if the worker
is happier he produces more effectively, and, since the aim is to produce more effec-
tively, the conclusion is by all means – let him be happy. Then the question arises – what
can we do to make him happy? The assumption is, axiomatically, that all the things
which correspond to our ideology – participation, democracy in the work situation –
make also for greater efficiency and productivity of work. There are many studies which
prove this, but there are some studies which prove that sometimes it is not so – for in-
stance, that a greater participation in work may not make for greater productivity.
Here we come to a basic problem of value. It is all very nice if the happy, democ-
ratic, participating worker also produces more. Such preordained harmony between the
aims of production and the aims of man is wonderful. But what if it is not so? Are we in
favor of participation in work as a democratic process even though it might lead to
somewhat less production? This question is simply not raised, and most of our psy-
chologists try to ignore it. We have the same problem today with regard to political
democracy. You find many people who say democracy of course is very good. But what
should happen if we find out that we are less efficient than the Russians? Should we still
use our democratic system? Or should we say it is just a myth and we have to have a
managed society instead of one based on the active, responsible participation of each
citizen? We talk all the time about our ideas, our principles, and yet in reality we shy
away from making value judgments which will commit us. Those judgments can be
made only if one confronts the possibility that one may not combine the best of both
worlds – God's and Caesar's – and there the problem begins. As long as one assumes that
there cannot be a conflict between democratic procedure and maximum efficiency, one
does not truly judge.
I am reminded of the title of Elton Mayo's famous book, The Human Problem of
an Industrial Society. The title tells the whole story (although Mayo had his heart on the

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side of man). Industry is a subject and it has a human problem. The question is whether
we talk about the human problem of industry or whether we talk about the industrial
problem of humanity. In the latter case, humanity is the subject which has an industrial
problem. Between these two formulations lies the difference between two opposite phi-
losophical, spiritual value judgments.
We come now to the crucial question: What are the conditions to make the worker
happy? There are two main answers. One is that the worker can be happy within the
work situation. Many suggestions are made to achieve this aim, such as profit-sharing –
an appeal to the worker's interest in increased profit and often a concealed antiunion at-
titude; or making the worker feel that he participates – but the feeling that one partici-
pates is not necessarily the same as the fact of participating. Much of what is recom-
mended as participation is fiction. The most important field in which one tries to make
the worker happier today is called human relations, largely promoted by psychologists.
Here a strange process is going on: In the name of the ideas of Spinoza and Freud, and
particularly in the name of Socrates' idea that man should know himself in order to be
himself, the very opposite is done. Man is manipulated and smoothed out to such an ex-
tend that nothing of his individuality is left. These so-called human relations are to a
large extent based on an alienated concept of life that man is a thing and that there's a
specialist to deal with this thing. If you belong to the middle or upper class you talk with
a Freudian on a couch and with a non-Freudian in a comfortable chair, and you might
have the idea that if you have talked long enough you will end up as the well-rounded
happy person who has no problems. But if you are a worker, this is not possible. It is
much too expensive to talk for years, for one thing. Instead, the talking is done for a
few hours. That is in itself very nice in a culture in which nobody listens anyway. We are
all polite to each other, like each other quite generally, and are not hostile. That is one
of the good traits of our present-day American society. But we are essentially indifferent
to each other and we do not want to listen. Hence one can speak to somebody who is
paid to listen for one or two or five hours and perhaps sometimes even listens with in-
terest that is in itself a pleasant or quieting experience. It helps to bear the drudgery of
life for another year and then one may go back to the man and talk again. I do not
mean to imply that all industrial psychology is of this alienated type. But I do want to
point to the danger that psychology is often used for the purpose of further alienation
and manipulation and that human relations in industry become the most inhuman rela-
tions one could imagine – inhuman not in the sense of cruelty but in the sense of alien-
ation, of the „re-ification“ of man – the treatment of man as a thing.
The other answer to the problem of the worker's happiness is exactly the opposite.
Since the worker can never be happy in work, this answer says, there is only one solu-
tion as little work as possible, as mechanized work as possible and he will be happy in
his free time. This answer is accepted by many people, and in many ways it is a very
plausible answer, considering the fact that the working week has changed from more
than 70 hours in 1850 to 40 hours in 1950, that we are coming closer to a 35-hours
week, and that it is not at all fantastic to of a 20-hour week in the future. All this, from
the standpoint of the nineteenth century, would have seemed the most alluring Utopia.
But I cannot see that leisure as the answer to the worker's happiness is satisfactory.
Leisure today means essentially consumption and passivity. A man who works 20 hours

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a week would turn into the complete consumer; he would be exactly like the man in
Huxley's Brave New World ; he would lack the inner creativity or productivity which is
the condition of genuine happiness. Work is not only an economical problem but a pro-
foundly human problem.
My own ideas about the satisfaction and happiness of the worker are presented in
my book The Sane Society. I have attempted to show there that the goal for the worker
as well as for all other members of society must be to overcome the alienation and re-
ification which pervades society. Man must cease to be the consumer and become a pro-
ductive human being who is aware of and responds to his world creatively. This means,
applied to the worker, that be must become a responsible and active participant in the
whole process of work. There are many possibilities for more active interest and partici-
pation in the work process itself. (Georges Friedmann in his works has given important
suggestions in this direction. Cf. G. Friedmann, 1950.) Increased technical knowledge
could make even routine work more interesting. Furthermore, the factory is more than
a combination of machines – it is an economic and social entity. Even if the work itself is
boring, each worker can participate actively in the economic planning and the consid-
erations preceding it, and in the organization and administration of the factory as a so-
cial unit where man spends the larger part of his life.
All this requires active participation of the worker in the management of the fac-
tory. How this can be achieved legally and socially is a question which transcends this
discussion. Ways and means can be found, provided one recognizes the importance of
the aim. One specific point, however, I wish to make. I wish to emphasize the error of
popular Socialist thinking – misunderstanding the essential idea of socialism – that the
most important point is the change from private to public ownership of the means of
production. This idea was based on the overestimation of legal ownership characteristic
for the nineteenth century. Today we can differentiate between legal ownership of a big
enterprise (the stockholders) and social ownership (the management, which controls the
enterprise without legally owning it). The problem of the future is to restore to man his
initiative and activity. Applied to the worker, that means that work in the factory, tech-
nically, economically, and socially, becomes meaningful to him because he becomes an
active participant in managing the life of the factory. Only then can he make use also of
his leisure time in a productive way rather than as a passive consumer.
The worker can be the leader in the movement to overcome alienation and to
bring the reintegration of man, because, in some ways, he is less caught than those who
deal with symbols – figures or men. The manual worker sells his energy and his skill but
not his „personality.“ This makes a great difference. His efficiency, his work, do not de-
pend on whether he is a nice „personality package.“ The respect of his co-workers does
not depend on that. It depends on how reliable he is; how well he performs his func-
tions. In some ways, therefore, I would say there are possibilities for the worker to be
less alienated than for the average person. I would say there is another possibility, the
union movement, provided it could, instead of being a bureaucracy manipulating alien-
ated men, become again a movement in which general and unalienated solidarity is ex-
pressed among men who share the same basic experience – their work. That, of course,
would require the workers and the union leaders to have a different picture of what the
function of a union should be. But I believe the union could perform an important func-

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tion in helping to change our history from the dangerous course of ever-increasing alien-
ation to a direction in which man counts again, and in which he is not the object of cir-
cumstances that he has created but their master.
I believe it is necessary to realize that changes must be made in all spheres of culture
simultaneously. It was a mistake of religion to think that one can make a change in the
spiritual sphere alone and leave out the other sections of life. It was a mistake when
those who misunderstood Marx proclaimed in his name that one can make a change in
the economic sphere alone and everything good will follow. It was a mistake of political
democracy to think that one can make a change in the political sphere alone. Effective
changes can be made only if they are made in all spheres together, because man is not
compartmentalized. One step in an integrated way is more important than twenty steps
in one sphere to the exclusion of the others.
Our only alternative to the danger of robotism is humanistic communitarianism.
The problem is not primarily the legal problem of property ownership, nor that of shar-
ing profits; it is that of sharing work, sharing experience. Changes in ownership must be
made to the extent necessary to create a community of work, and to prevent the profit
motive from directing production into socially harmful directions. Income must be
equalized to the extent of giving everybody the material basis for a dignified life and
thus preventing economic differences from creating a fundamentally different experience
of life among various social classes. Man must be reinstituted in his supreme place in so-
ciety – never a means, never a thing to be used by others or by himself. Man's use by
man must end, and economy must become the servant for the development of man.
Capital must serve labor; things must serve life. Instead of the exploitative and hoarding
orientation dominant in the nineteenth century, and the receptive and marketing orien-
tation dominant today, the productive orientation must be the end that all social ar-
rangements serve. Freedom in the work situation is not freedom from work (in order to
have leisure), it is not freedom from exploitation; it is the freedom to spend one's en-
ergy in a meaningful, productive way, by being an active, responsible, unalienated par-
ticipant in the total work situation. The unions, by starting to introduce such participa-
tion within their own organization can make a first step in the direction of freedom at
the work bench.

Bibliography:
Friedmann, G., 1950: Où va le travail humain?, Paris 1950, Gallimard.
Fromm, E., 1955a: The Sane Society, New York (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) 1955.
Huxley, A., 1952: Brave New World, London (The Vanguard Library) 1952.
Mayo, E., 1933: The Human Problem of an Industrial Society, New York (The Macmillan Company)
1933.

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