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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-10-07 07:41:28 -0300
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-10-07 07:41:28 -0300
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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. \ No newline at end of file