Is Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism worth reading?

 

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.