Mass Psychology of Fascism is authored by German
psychologist Wilhelm Reich. The preface bears the date 1942 beside Reich’s
name. However, it seems that the book had partly been written in 1930s because
he repeats in the book was smuggled from other countries into Germany in 1937,
but he sometimes points to the end of the World War II, which shows the book
has been completed after 1945.
The book can be divided into two parts: first, Reich
analysis of fascism, and then his ideas about how to fight human plagues whose
pinnacle was Fascism and its atrocities but not limited to it.
Reich starts with critiquing the failure of communists and
socialists in predicting, explaining and fighting fascism in 1930s. He reproached
them for having a mechanistic interpretation of fascism by describing man as a
mere “subjective factor” yielding to the dictation of material conditions.
He asks if man’s consciousness is a mere reflection of its
material conditions why the German workers were stupefied and misled by the
Nazi party.
To grasp a correct understanding of fascism, Reich tries to
delve into the psychology of German masses, as a soil where the seeds of fascism
could grow.
Reich tries to bridge between the genuine Marxian outlook
and Freudian analysis of man’s psyche.
The author does not provide
a historical narration, and mostly overlooks the social and economic process
that led to emergence of fascism. Though he does not explicitly argue against
communists’ early analysis which defined Nazi party as a puppet of the German
finance capital he stresses that fascism was a movement with broad support by
petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry, junior employees of state departments and some
layers of the working class.
What was the glue that
sticks these classes to the Nazi party? This is the question that Reich tries
to answer.
The book’s title might be
a bit misleading because the reader firstly might expect the writer to speak
about the subconscious of the German masses and search for the embryo of
fascism in the dark side of mind, but what you will see is completely
different. In fact, what Reich refers to as the psyche is nothing but the
accumulation of history, and his psychology is mostly the incorporation of
historical phenomena such as patriarchy and the suppression of sexual desires
of children and women in the patriarchal family.
We can set the starting
point in Reich’s thought the patriarchal family. The patriarchal family, Reich
believes, is the hotbed of authoritarian ideology and mysticism, which provide
grounds for fascism through distorting human structure through suppression of
man’s natural sexual behaviour.
Reich’s mass psychology
is not a summation of the psyche of individuals, nor something hidden in the
organism of people. This mass psychology is the historical trends formed in
thousands of years of man’s life. In other words, his criticism of “vulgar”
Marxists’ inadequate perception of fascism is that they forget to involve the
role of history in their analysis, and thereafter they failed to shape a
movement to counter fascism.
Reich believes that all
totalitarian states rely on mysticism in masses. He believes that even Soviet
Union after Lenin turned into a suppressive force and destroyed the
self-governance of masses which the October Revolution introduced.
The first argument of Reich
on roots of fascism was novel and illuminating and can be valid even today,
because the role of sex politics in the rise of new versions of fascism,
fundamentalism and ultra-rightism cannot be ignored.
The second part of the
book is a complete repetitive rhetoric about sex economy and work democracy.
Reich correctly discern the alienation of man from manmade products such as
state, whose maximum alienation and brutality is manifested in fascism, but he
totally fails to present a solution.
He rejects politics and
political organisation to fight fascism and present his vague organisation of
people to promote work democracy. He argues that work democracy – or the
tendency that people have for work, love and knowledge – is a natural tendency
in all human beings, so this natural tendency needn’t to be created but to be
invigorated and revived.
Although the book seems to
be obsolete but because fascism still needs elucidation Reich’s analysis can be
noteworthy.
