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. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. https://signup.live.com/signup.aspx?id=60969 _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis