Here is a little light reading for the weekend. This book made a strong impression on me as a young man, as everything I have ever read of Fromm's has. I picked it up the other day and either it has aged well or I have... or both. I hung a copy up to share. Here it is:

http://seatonsnet.com/documents/fromm-erich-marxs-concept-of-man-090626163548-phpapp01.pdf

Here is a quote from Erich Fromm's preface:

For Marx's philosophy, which has found its most articulate expression in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the central issue is that of the existence of the real individual man, who is what he does, and whose "nature" unfolds and reveals itself in history. But in contrast to Kierkegaard and others, Marx sees man in his full concreteness as a member of a given society and of a given class, aided in his development by society, and at the same time its captive. The full realization of man's humanity and his emancipation from the social forces that imprison him is bound up, for Marx, with the recognition of these forces, and with social change based on this recognition. Marx's ;philosophy is one of protest; it is a protest imbued with faith in man, in his capacity to liberate himself, and to realize his potentialities. This faith is a trait of Marx's thinking that was characteristic of the Western mood from the late Middle Ages to the  nineteenth century, and which is so rare today. For this very reason, to many readers who are infected with the contemporary spirit of resignation and the revival of the concept of original sin (in Niebuhrian or Freudian terms), Marx's philosophy will sound dated, old fashioned, utopian -and for this reason, if not for others, they will reject the voice of faith in man's possibilities, and of hope in his capacity to become what he potentially is. To others, however, Marx's philosophy will be a source of new insight and hope. I believe that hope and new insight transcending the narrow limits of the positivistic mechanistic thinking of social science today are needed, if the West is to emerge alive from this century of trial. Indeed while Western thought from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century (or, perhaps, to be exact, up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) was one of hope, a hope rooted in Prophetic and Greek-Roman thought, the last forty years have been years of increasing pessimism and hopelessness. The average person runs for shelter; he tries to escape from freedom and he seeks for security in the lap of the big state and the big corporation. If we are not-viable to emerge from this hopelessness, we may still go on for a time on the basis of our material strength, but in the long historical perspective the West will be condemned to physical or spiritual extinction.