Excerpts from W. Reich's "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" (tldr)

[LMNO]

Excerpts from The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich (1 of 2)

"Fascism" is the only politically organized expression of the average human character structure... In this characterological sense, "fascism" is the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society, with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life.

Today it has become absolutely clear that fascism is not the deed of a Hitler of Mussolini, but the expression of the irrational structure of the mass individual.

Hitlerism is not confined to Germany; it permeates workers' organizations and all kinds of liberal and democratic circles.  Fascism is not a political party but a specific Weltanschauung and a specific attitude toward people, toward love and work.

...the excesses of the capitalist era of the past three hundred years (predatory imperialism, exploitation of workers, racial suppression, etc) would not have been possible at all without that typical structure of the masses which is expressed in their longing for authority, their mysticism and their incapacity for freedom.

Man is influenced by the conditions of his existence in a twofold manner: directly by the immediate influence of his economic and social position, and indirectly by the ideological structure of his society.

[when] one does not enjoy the economic position of the upper middle classes but at the same time identifies oneself ideologically with them, the sexual moral ideologies must make up for the economic deprivations.

The more helpless the individual was made by his upbringing, the more strongly does he identify himself with the Fuhrer, the more does the infantile helplessness take the form of the feeling-one-with-the-Fuhrer.

The revolutionary movement also underestimated the significance of the seemingly unimportant small habits of everyday living; more than that, it made the wrong use of it.  The middle-class bedroom which the "proletarian" acquires at the first opportunity even though he may be Communist; the suppression of the woman that goes with it; "decent" clothes on Sunday; stilted forms of dancing; these and thousands of other little things, in their everyday repetition, have incomparably more powerful reactionary influence than can be counteracted by thousands of revolutionary meetings and pamphlets.  The impact of a narrow reactionary life is continuous and fills every cranny of everyday living; the factory work and the pamphlet have an effect only for hours.

It was a mistake, then, to try to win the [masses] by attacking his leaders.  As he was identified with them, such attacks would only repulse him.

The reactionary advocates heroism, self-sacrifice and renunciation in an absolute, eternal way; in doing so, he advocates the interests of imperialism, whether he wants to or not (cf. Japan).

In other words, what compels humans not only to accept these religious ideas, not to feel them as a burden, but, on the contrary, to uphold and fervently defend them, at the sacrifice of their most primitive life interests?  ...For if the religious ideas are not forced upon the humans but – contrary to their life interests – are absorbed and retained by them, then we are dealing with a structural alteration of the humans themselves.

One should have no illusions: Children and adolescents will march as readily to the sound of a fascist band tomorrow as readily as they march today to the sound of a democratic band.

The more unpolitical an individual belonging to the great masses of working people is, the more accessible he is to the ideology of political reaction [as opposed to political revolution]...  This is not because the fascist program impresses him more than that revolutionary program, but because his surrender to the Fuhrer and his ideology provides a momentary release from his chronic inner tension; because he can unconsciously give a new form to his conflict and thereby seemingly solve it; because he may even look upon the Fascist as a revolutionary, consider Hitler the German Lenin.

In sound science, one does not develop any new theories as long as one can operate well with the old ones.  When, however, the old theories have proven inadequate or erroneous, one tries to find the errors in them and develops new concepts on the basis of new facts.  Such a natural procedure is alien to politicians.  No matter how many new facts are added to the old, no matter how many errors have become obvious, the old theories continue to exist in the form of slogans and new facts are obfuscated in an illusory way... The democratic politicians fail to go back to the starting points of the democratic principles, to correct them according to the radical changes that have taken place in social living, and to make them practically fruitful.

One cannot graft legally guaranteed freedoms upon a sick social organism.

It is of the essence of any party to gain its orientation not from truths but from illusions which usually correspond to the irrational mass structure.  Scientific truths only interfered with the habit of the party politicians of avoiding difficulties with the aid of illusions.

In 1945, the Vienna sociologist Willi Schlamm wrote the following: "In reality, the epoch is past during which it seemed as if masses of people were to rise of their own strength, guided by reason and insight into their own position.  In reality, there is no longer any society-forming function left for the masses.  They have shown themselves to be completely malleable, unconsciousness, capable of adapting to any kind of power or infamy.  In the 20th century, the century of the tank and the radio, the masses have been excluded from the processes which forms society."

The task of a true democratic-revolutionary movement is that of guiding (not of "leading") the masses who, as a result of thousands of years of suppression of living functioning, have become weak-minded, incapable of criticism, biopathic and submissive, in such a way that they immediately become aware of any suppression and learn to shake it off in time, irrevocably and enduringly.

In the Soviet Union, the mixture of longing for freedom and structural fear of responsible self-government created a form of state which corresponded less and less to the original program of the Communists and which finally assumed authoritarian, totalitarian and dictatorial forms.

Nothing is more impressive than the fact that a world population of two billion people is not capable of removing a handful of oppressors and biopathic war murderers.

Hatred against the state alone will not achieve anything.

Catholicism creates structural helplessness in the masses of people so that, when in need, they appeal to God instead of their own strength and self-confidence.  It makes people structurally afraid of pleasure and incapable of pleasure.  This is the root of a good deal of human sadism.

The essence of work democracy, in contradistinction to the authoritarian order of the state, is social self-regulation.  It goes without saying that a society which is to consist of "free people," which is to form "free community" and which is to govern itself, that is, to be "self-regulatory," cannot suddenly be created by decrees, but must be made to develop in an organic manner.

"90% participation" [of voter participation in elections] was no proof of the increasing social self-regulation for no other reason than that it conveys nothing concerning the content of the activity of the masses.

The "introduction of universal suffrage" in 1935 meant nothing but a shifting of the political emphasis to the mass of peasants and the reintroduction of formal democracy, of parliamentary sham rights granted by and increasingly powerful bureaucratic state apparatus to the masses who were unable to destroy this apparatus and to learn to govern themselves.

It is senseless and fruitless to fight an irrational social institution without asking oneself how it is possible that this institution, in spite of its irrationalism, manages to continue its existence, and even to appear necessary.

It was one of the greatest errors in evaluating dictatorship to say that the dictator forces himself on society against its own will.  In reality, every dictator in history was nothing but the accentuation of already existing state ideas which he had only to exaggerate in order to gain power.

We can gain an orientation in the social chaos if, in evaluating any given state function, we ask ourselves consistently: What in it corresponds to its original function of executing the demands of society, and what to the later acquired function of suppressing the freedom of the members of society?

Russia had replaced the private capitalist by the unlimited power of the state.  No matter what terms were applied, it was clear that in the correct sociological terms of Marx, state capitalism had taken the place of private capitalism.  The concept of capitalism is not determined by the existence of individual capitalists but by the existence of market economy and wage labor.

We have learned to ascribe to processes which are based on illusions an equal if not greater efficacy than to hard reality. One only has to think of the effect of the church hierarchy for thousands of years.  Even though not one single actual problem of social living was solved, the illusory unification of state gave the impression of an achievement.

The state must not only further the strongest longings for freedom in the working masses, it has also the task of adding to it the capacity for freedom.  If it fails to do so, if it suppresses the longing for freedom or even misuses it and obstructs the tendency towards self-government, it proves its fascist character.

Seen in social terms, work in the 20th century is governed entirely by duty and the necessity of making a living.  The work done by hundreds of millions of workers in the world provides neither pleasure nor biological gratification.  It is of the type of compulsive work and at variance with the biological need for pleasure.  It is done out of duty or conscience, in order not to starve, and is, as a rule, done for others.  The worker has no interest in the product of his work, consequently the work is devoid of pleasure and is a burden.  Any work based on compulsion instead of pleasure is not only uneconomical biologically, but also relatively unproductive economically.

If there is a way out of this chaos, two things must be established in time: the duty of the working individuals in all vital occupations to take an active part in the social process; and rational organizations for the mastery of the social chaos.  We cannot assume that any of the old political parties or any new ones which may be formed will be capable of bringing about a factual and rational new social order.  It is necessary, therefore, that, as soon as circumstances permit, the outstanding and politically independent representatives of all vital branches of work gather in national and international conferences.

[LMNO]

Excerpts from The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich (2 of 2)

The dictatorial regime can only suppress the natural life functions or exploit them for its own purposes; it can never further them without digging its own grave.

Politics is in itself and of necessity unscientific: it is an expression of human helplessness, impoverishment, and suppression.

For some reason, the masses of the people do not want to get to the bottom of the secret of what makes wars, they are afraid of the truths which might bring the cure.

As a result of thousands of years of social and educational warping, the masses of the people have become biologically rigid and incapable of freedom.

Fascism, in the form of irresponsibility, is present in the masses of all countries, nations and races.  Fascism is the result of thousands of years of warping of the human structure.

The fascist dictators declare the masses to be biologically inferior and craving authority, that is, slaves by nature; thus, they say, any other than an authoritarian dictatorial regime is out of the question for them... The leaders of formal democracy, on the other hand, believed, in an illusory way, in the masses' capacity for freedom; thus, they relinquished any possibility of ever bringing about the capacity for freedom and self-responsibility in the masses, as long as they were in power... Our answer to the problem is scientifically rational.  It is based on the recognition of people's incapacity for freedom.  This fact, however, is not conceived of as absolute, as biologically, naturally determined as it is in the mysticism of the race theory, but as the result of old social conditions, and therefore as alterable.

Truths without the power of putting them into practice are of no avail.  They remain academic.  Power without a basis in truth, whatever kind of power it may be, is dictatorship.  It may so more or less, in this way or that, but it always is dictatorship, because it is based on the human fear of social responsibility and of the personal burden which "freedom" imposes on one.  Dictatorial power and truth do not go together.  They are mutually exclusive.  It is a historical fact that truth died every time its advocates attained social power.

Jesus advocated a truth which at his time was tremendous.  It died in the Christian world as soon as his place was taken by the popes.

There are, in social life, degrees of power and degrees of lying. The more truthful the masses, the less despotism; conversely, the fuller the masses of irrational illusions, the more comprehensive and the more brutal is the despotism of groups of individuals.

To try to win the masses with the contention that it is they themselves and not individual psychopaths who are to be blamed for the social misery; that they themselves, and not some self-declared or elected leader or leaders, carry the responsibility for their own lives; that they themselves and nobody else are responsible for all that goes on in the world—that would be a different thing.  It is so much at variance with all that the masses have heard and have made part of themselves that it would be inane to try to obtain power by way of such truths.

We should not have any illusions about it: There is at work, in the masses, a reactionary, murderous, development-inhibiting force which brings to ruin again and again all the efforts made by the fighters for freedom.  This reactionary force in the masses expresses itself in a general fear of responsibility and fear of freedom.

If one tries to beat the automatons with their own weapons one will, in the process of murdering still more scientifically, oneself will become an automaton and will oneself perpetuate what the enemy set in motion.

The machines are, in fact, an enormous expansion of his biological organization.  They enable him to master nature to a far higher degree than he could with his hands alone.  They give him mastery of time and space.  Thus, the machine has become a part of man himself, a beloved and highly esteemed part.  He has the perennial dream that the machines will make life easier for him and will give him an increased enjoyment of life.  And in reality? In reality, the machine has become man's worst enemy.  It will remain his worst enemy unless he differentiates himself from the machine.  The progress of civilization, as made possible by the development of the machine, was accompanied by a disastrous misinterpretation of human biological organization.

The machine has in turn influenced mans own conception of himself in the sense of making it machine-like, mechanistic, unalive and rigid.

How can he fail to see that the existing human misery cannot possibly be done away with until man again fully acknowledges his being-an-animal?  He must learn to see that what distinguishes him from other animals is nothing but a higher degree of security in life; he must give up the irrational denial of his true nature. "Away from the animal! Away from sexuality!" is the leitmotif of all human ideology.  No matter whether the Fascist puts it in terms of the racially pure "Ubermensch", the Communist in terms of proletarian class consciousness, the Christian in terms of the "spiritual-moral nature" of man, or the liberal in terms of the "higher human values".  All these ideologies have one and the same basis: "I am not an animal; I have invented the machines, not the animal.  I am not a sexual being, like the animal."

If I have the idea of being a benevolent saint and at the same time would smash my neighbor's head with an axe, I would, rightly, land in a mental institution or in the electric chair.  But this is exactly the nature of man's contradiction between his ideal "values" and his actual behavior.

Character-analytic exploration of average people from every walk of life has shown that the mechanistic concept of life is not merely a "reflection" of the social processes in psychic life, as Marx had assumed, but far more than that: In the course of thousands of years of mechanical development, the mechanistic concept, from generation to generation, has anchored itself deeply in man's biological system.

It is not by accident that the Platonic concept of the state was conceived in a slave society.  Neither is it an accident that it goes on living to this very day: serfdom has simply been replaced by inner slavery.

From the "superiority" over the animal there is a straight line to racial "superiority" over "Negroes, Jews, Frenchmen" or whatnot.  Clearly, man prefers being a "superior being" to being an animal.

The cry for freedom is a sign of suppression.  It will not cease to ring as long as man feels himself captive.

The blame for the war belongs only and alone to the same masses of people who have all the means of preventing wars.  The same masses of people who—partly through indolent passivity, partly through their own active behavior—make possible the catastrophes from which they themselves suffer most horribly.

The incapacity for social freedom is physiologically anchored in the human organism.  It follows that the mastery of the physiological incapacity for freedom is one of the most important prerequisites of any genuine struggle for freedom.

Thus far, the majority of people never have themselves governed the fate of society.  The best they could do thus fare was to put the guidance of their lives in the hands of decent instead of worthless individuals.  The "parliamentary" form of "government" was not equal to the actual happenings, for at the same time, other groups and majorities invested brutal sadists and imperialists with power over their fates.

There is great danger that formal democracy, in fighting authoritarian dictatorship, may itself undergo a change in the direction of dictatorship.

Since the working masses do not themselves determine their lives, factually and practically, the germ of the suppression of freedom is present in the course of events themselves; it does not have to lie in any evil intention of the elected representatives.

To repeat the inescapable conclusions from the forgoing facts: a) The masses of people are incapable of freedom; b) the general capacity for freedom can be acquired only in the daily struggle for a free life; c) it follows that the masses, who are incapable of freedom, must have the social power if they are to become capable of freedom and capable of creating and maintaining freedom.

Socially, it is a matter of finding all the sources of the biological impoverishment of man and of creating laws for the protection of a free development.  General formulations such as the "freedom of the press, of expression, of assembly," etc., are a matter of course, but far from sufficient.  For under these laws, the irrational individual has exactly the same rights as the rational one.  As weeds always grow more easily and rampantly than other plants, the Hitlerist will inevitably win out.

A politician is in a position to mislead millions of people with promises of giving them freedom without really having to do so.  Nobody asks for proof of his competence or of the practicability of his promises.  From one day to the other, he can change his promises into the exact opposite.  Nobody keeps a mystic from instilling in the masses a belief in the hereafter; nobody demands proof for his contention.

It was the discovery of the fact that the ideology of a group of people does not necessarily correspond to their economic position but that there is often a sharp divergency between ideological and economic position which made an understanding of the fascist movement first possible.

In order to comprehend the essence of politics, one only has to remember that it was a Hitler who, for many years, was able to keep the world breathless.  Hitler as a political genius was a magnificent unmasking of the essence of politics in general.  With Hitler, politics reached the peak of its development.  We know what were its fruits and what was the reaction of the world.

[Cain]

Synchronicity?

I just grabbed this off my external HD and put it into my virtual library about five minutes ago.

[LMNO]

MADGJEIYCKQ!

[Cain]

Comments on some of these:

I have to disagree with the first quote.  It reminds me of Hayek, who dismissed Fascism as a reactionary tribalism, mainly because of his weakness in the social sciences.  We know now that nationalism is something that is new, that didn't really exist before Napoleon except in an abstract way.  I think if fascism was an expression of the average person, it would be much more common throughout history, and not a post-industrial phenomenon (which would suggest, to a Marxist at least, that alienation, international capital etc having structural roles).

Also, the excesses of the past 300 years brought about more resistance to authority and domination than at any time before, a fact Reich seems to overlook.

Dead on about repression in everyday life though.  That is certainly overlooked.  More later, maybe.