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+[[!meta title="The Mass Psychology of Fascism"]]
+
+### Excerpts
+
+    Revolutionary activity in every area of human existence will come about by itself
+    when the contradictions in every new process are comprehended; it will consist of
+    identification with those forces that are moving in the direction of genuine progress. To
+    be radical, according to Karl Marx, means’ getting to the root of things’. If one gets to the
+    root of things, if one grasps their contradictory operations, then the overcoming of
+    political reaction is assured. If one does not get to the root of things, one ends, whether
+    one wants to or not, in mechanism, in economism or even in metaphysics, and inevitably
+    loses one’s footing. Hence, a critique can only be significant and have a practical value if
+    it can show where the contradictions of social reality were overlooked. What was
+    revolutionary about Marx was not that he wrote this or that proclamation or pointed out
+    revolutionary goals; his major revolutionary contribution is that he recognized the
+    industrial productive forces as the progressive force of society and that he depicted the
+    contradictions of capitalist economy as they relate to real life. The failure of the workers’
+    movement must mean that our knowledge of those forces that retard social progress is
+    very limited, indeed, that some major factors are still altogether unknown.
+
+    [...]
+
+    It was this very vulgar Marxism that maintained that the economic crisis of 1929-33
+    was of such a magnitude that it would of necessity lead to an ideological Leftist
+    orientation among the stricken masses. While there was still talk of a ‘revolutionary
+    revival’ in Germany, even after the defeat of January 1933, the reality of the situation
+    showed that the economic crisis, which, according to expectations, was supposed to entail
+    a development to the Left in the ideology of the masses, had led to an extreme
+    development to the Right in the ideology of the proletarian strata of the population. The
+    result was a cleavage between the economic basis, which developed to the Left, and the
+    ideology of broad layers of society, which developed to the Right. This cleavage was
+    overlooked; consequently, no one gave a thought to asking how broad masses living in
+    utter poverty could become nationalistic. Explanations such as ‘chauvinism’, ‘psychosis’,
+    ‘the consequences of Versailles’, are not of much use, for they do not enable us to cope
+    with the tendency of a distressed middle class to become radical Rightist; such
+    explanations do not really comprehend the processes at work in this tendency. In fact, it
+    was not only the middle class that turned to the Right, but broad and not always the worst
+    elements of the proletariat. One failed to see that the middle classes, put on their guard by
+    the success of the Russian Revolution, resorted to new and seemingly strange
+    preventative measures (such as Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’), which were not understood at
+    that time and which the workers’ movement neglected to analyse. One also failed to see
+    that, at the outset and during the initial stages of its development to a mass movement,
+    fascism was directed against the upper middle class and hence could not be disposed of
+    ‘merely as a bulwark of big finance’, if only because it was a mass movement. Where
+    was the problem?
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Marxist thesis to the effect that originally ‘that which is materialistic’ (existence)
+    is converted into ‘that which is ideological’ (in consciousness), and not vice versa, leaves
+    two questions open: (i) how this takes place, what happens in man’s brain in this process;
+    and (2) how the ‘consciousness’ (we will refer to it as psychic structure from now on)
+    that is formed in this way reacts upon the economic process. Character-analytic
+    psychology fills this gap by revealing the process in man’s psychic life, which is
+    determined by the conditions of existence. By so doing, it puts its finger on the
+    ‘subjective factor’, which the vulgar Marxist had failed to comprehend. Hence, political
+    psychology has a sharply delineated task. It cannot, for instance, explain the genesis of
+    class society or the capitalist mode of production (whenever it attempts this, the result is
+    always reactionary nonsense - for instance, that capitalism is a symptom of man’s greed).
+    Nonetheless, it is political psychology - and not social economy -that is in a position to
+    investigate the structure of man’s character in a given epoch, to investigate how he thinks
+    and acts, how the contradictions of his existence work themselves out, how he tries to
+    cope with this existence, etc. To be sure, it examines individual men and women only. If,
+    however, it specializes in the investigation of typical psychic processes common to one
+    category, class, professional group, etc., and excludes individual differences, then it
+
+    [...]
+
+    Hence, we are not saying anything new, and we are not revising Marx, as is so often
+    maintained: ‘All human conditions ‘, that is, not only the conditions that are a part of the
+    work process, but also the most private and most personal and highest accomplishments
+    of human instinct and thought; also, in other words, the sexual life of women and
+    adolescents and children, the level of the sociological investigation of these conditions
+    and its application to new social questions. With a certain kind of these ‘human
+    conditions’, Hitler was able to bring about a historical situation that is not to be ridiculed
+    out of existence. Marx was not able to develop sociology of sex, because at that time
+    sexology did not exist. Hence, it now becomes a question of incorporating both the purely
+    economic and sex-economic conditions into the framework of sociology, of destroying
+    the hegemony of the mystics and metaphysicians in this domain.
+
+
+    [...]
+
+    The ideology of every social formation has the function not only of reflecting the
+    economic process of this society, but also and more significantly of embedding this
+    economic process in the psychic structures of the people who make up the society. Man is
+    subject to the conditions of his existence in a twofold way: directly through the
+    immediate influence of his economic and social position, and indirectly by means of the
+    ideological structure of the society. His psychic structure, in other words, is forced to
+    develop a contradiction corresponding to the contradiction between the influence
+    exercised by his material position and the influence exercised by the ideological structure
+    of society. The worker, for instance, is subject to the situation of his work as well as to
+    the general ideology of the society. Since man, however, regardless of class, is not only
+    the object of these influences but also reproduces them in his activities, his thinking and
+    acting must be just as contradictory as the society from which they derive. But, inasmuch
+    as a social ideology changes man’s psychic structure, it has not only reproduced itself in
+    man but, what is more significant, has become an active force, a material power in man,
+    who in turn has become concretely changed, and, as a consequence thereof, acts in a
+    different and contradictory fashion. It is in this way and only in this way that the
+
+
+    [...]
+
+    Thus, the statement that the ‘ideology’ changes at a slower pace than the economic basis
+    is invested with a definite cogency. The basic traits of the character structures
+    corresponding to a definite historical situation are formed in early childhood, and are far
+    more conservative than the forces of technical production. It results from this that, as
+    time goes on, the psychic structures lag behind the rapid changes of the social conditions
+    from which they derived, and later tome into conflict with new forms of life. This is the
+    basic trait of the nature of so-called tradition, i.e., of the contradiction between the old
+
+
+    [...]
+
+    result. Social psychology sees the problem in an entirely different light: what has to be
+    explained is not the fact that the man who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who is
+    exploited strikes, but why the majority of those who are hungry don’t steal and why the
+    majority of those who are exploited don’t strike. Thus, social economy can give a
+    complete explanation of a social fact that serves a rational end, i.e., when it satisfies an
+    immediate need and reflects and magnifies the economic situation. The social economic
+    explanation does not hold up, on the other hand, when a man’s thought and action are
+    inconsistent with the economic situation, are irrational, in other words. The vulgar
+    Marxist and the narrow-minded economist, who do not acknowledge psychology, are
+
+    [...]
+
+    thinking. Both assertions, because they failed to see the complexities of the issue, were
+    rigidly mechanistic. A realistic appraisal would have had to point out that the average
+    worker bears a contradiction in himself; that he, in other words, is neither a clear-cut
+    revolutionary nor a clear-cut conservative, but stands divided. His psychic structure
+    derives on the one hand from the social situation (which prepares the ground for
+    revolutionary attitudes) and on the other hand from the entire atmosphere of authoritarian
+    society - the two being at odds with one another.
+
+    [...]
+
+    concrete results solely through the activities of the masses subjected to them.
+    To be sure, the freedom movements of Germany knew of the so-called ‘subjective
+    factor of history’ (contrary to mechanistic materialism, Marx conceived of man as the
+    subject of history, and it was precisely this side of Marxism that Lenin built upon); what
+    was lacking was a comprehension of irrational, seemingly purposeless actions or, to put
+    it another way, of the cleavage between economy and ideology. We have to be able to
+    explain how it was possible for mysticism to have triumphed over scientific sociology.
+    This task can be accomplished only if our line of questioning is such that a new mode of
+    action results spontaneously from our explanation. If the working man is neither a clear-
+    cut reactionary nor a clear-cut revolutionary, but is caught in a contradiction between
+    reactionary and revolutionary tendencies, then if we succeed in putting our finger on this
+
+    [...]
+
+    contradiction, the result must be a mode of action that offsets the conservative psychic
+    forces with revolutionary forces. Every form of mysticism is reactionary, and the
+    reactionary man is mystical. To ridicule mysticism, to try to pass it off as ‘befogging’ or
+    as ‘psychosis’, does not lead to a programme against mysticism. If mysticism is correctly
+    comprehended, however, an antidote must of necessity result. But to accomplish this task,
+    the relations between social situation and structural formation, especially the irrational
+    ideas that are not to be explained on a purely socio-economic basis, have to be
+    comprehended as completely as our means of cognition allow.
+
+    [...]
+
+    a number of new insights. It proceeds from the following presuppositions:
+    Marx found social life to be governed by the conditions of economic production and
+    by the class conflict that resulted from these conditions at a definite point of history. It is
+    only seldom that brute force is resorted to in the domination of the oppressed classes by
+    the owners of the social means of production; its main weapon is its ideological power
+    over the oppressed, for it is this ideology that is the mainstay of the state apparatus. We
+    have already mentioned that for Marx it is the living, productive man, with his psychic
+    and physical disposition, who is the first presupposition of history and of politics. The
+    character structure of active man, the so-called ‘subjective factor of history’ in Marx’s
+    sense, remained uninvestigated because Marx was a sociologist and not a psychologist,
+    and because at that time scientific psychology did not exist. Why man had allowed
+
+    [...]
+
+    himself to be exploited and morally humiliated, why, in short, he had submitted to
+    slavery for thousands of years, remained unanswered; what had been ascertained were
+    only the economic process of society and the mechanism of economic exploitation.
+    Just about half a century later, using a special method he called psychoanalysis, Freud
+    discovered the process that governs psychic life. His most important discoveries, which
+    had a devastating and revolutionary effect upon a large number of existing ideas (a fact
+    that garnered him the hate of the world in the beginning), are as follows:
+    Consciousness is only a small part of the psychic life; it itself is governed by psychic
+    processes that take place unconsciously and are therefore not accessible to conscious
+    control. Every psychic experience (no matter how meaningless it appears to be), such as a
+    dream, a useless performance, the absurd utterances of the psychically sick and mentally
+    deranged, etc., has a function and a ‘meaning’ and can be completely understood if one
+    can succeed in tracing its etiology. Thus psychology, which had been steadily
+    deteriorating into a kind of physics of the brain (‘brain mythology’) or into a theory of a
+    mysterious objective Geist, entered the domain of natural science.
+    Freud’s second great discovery was that even the small child develops a lively
+
+    [...]
+
+    given in the way of progressive and revolutionary impetus. This is not the place to prove
+    this. Psychoanalytic sociology tried to analyse society as it would analyse an individual,
+    set up an absolute antithesis between the process of civilization and sexual gratification,
+    conceived of destructive instincts as primary biological facts governing human destiny
+    immutably, denied the existence of a matriarchal primeval period, and ended in a
+    crippling scepticism, because it recoiled from the consequences of its own discoveries. Its
+    hostility towards efforts proceeding on the basis of these discoveries goes back many
+    years, and its representatives are unswerving in their opposition to such efforts. All of this
+    has not the slightest effect on our determination to defend Freud’s great discoveries
+    against every attack, regardless of origin or source.
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