The question as to ‘how’ a new social order is to be implemented wholly coincides with the question as to the character structure of the broad masses, the non-political, irrationally influenced working segment of the population. Thus, at the bottom of the failure to achieve a genuine social revolution lies the failure of the masses of people: They reproduce the ideology and forms of life of political reaction in their own structures
and thereby in every new generation, despite the fact that they sometimes succeed in shattering this ideology and these forms within the social framework. At that time the question ‘How do the broad masses of the non-political segment of the population think, feel and react?’’ was neither raised nor understood. Hence, there was little possibility of mastering it in a practical way. A great deal of confusion existed. On the occasion of the plebiscite held in the Saar in 1935, the Vienna sociologist Willi Schlamm wrote the following:
In truth, the epoch is gone in which we had the impression that the masses of society could be guided by reason and by insights into their situation of life to achieve social improvement with their own strength. In truth, the days are gone in which the masses have a function in shaping society. It has been shown that the masses can be completely moulded that they are unconscious and capable of adapting themselves to any kind of power or infamy. They have no historical mission. In the 2oth century, in the century of tanks and radios, they have no mission - the masses have been excluded from the process of social formation.
Schlamm was right, but in a sterile way. He failed to ask how such an attitude on the part of the masses could arise, whether it was innate or capable of being changed. If I have understood him correctly, he had no hope, not even as a general principle.
It has to be clearly understood that such observations were not only unpopular but often mortally dangerous, because the Social Democratic and Liberal parties in the countries that were still not fascist lived precisely in the illusion that the masses as such, just as they are, were capable of freedom and liberalism, and that paradise on earth would be assured if only those wicked Hitler’s were not around. As was shown again and again in both personal and public discussions, the democratic politicians and, quite particularly, the Social Democratic and Communist politicians had not the least understanding of the simple fact that the masses - owing to their century-long suppression - could not be other than incapable of freedom. They were not only unwilling to admit this fact, but often reacted in a restless and threatening way when it was mentioned. In reality, however, everything that had taken place in the sphere of international politics since the Russian Revolution of 1917 confirmed the correctness of the assertion that the masses were incapable of freedom. Without this insight it was altogether impossible to understand the fascist deluge.
In the years between 1930 and 1933 my perception of the true state of affairs became more and more crystalled, and I found myself involved in serious conflicts with well-disposed liberal, socialist and Communist politicians. Nonetheless, the time seemed right for publication, so in 1933 I wrote the first edition of the present volume. In a pamphlet entitled Was ist Klassenbewusstsein?, Ernst Parell showed the implications of my insights for socialist politics.
Actually, my diagnosis could easily have led to a state of hopelessness, for if all social events are dependent upon the structure and behaviour of the masses, and if it is true that the masses are incapable of freedom, and then the victory of the fascist dictatorship would have to be definitive. But this diagnosis was not absolute and not without implications. It is fundamentally altered by two additional considerations:
The incapacity for freedom on the part of masses of people is not innate. People were not always incapable of freedom. ‘Hence, fundamentally speaking, they can become capable of freedom.
As was thoroughly demonstrated by sex-economic sociology, with the help of clinical experience, the mechanism that makes masses of people incapable of freedom is the social suppression of genital sexuality in small children, adolescents and adults. This social suppression is not part of the natural order of things. It developed as a part of patriarchy and, therefore, is capable of being eliminated, fundamentally speaking. If, however, social suppression of natural sexuality in the masses is capable of being eliminated, and if it is the central mechanism of a character structure incapable of freedom, then - and this is the conclusion - it is not hopeless. The road is clear for-society to master all the social conditions we call the ‘emotional plague’.
Schlamm’s error, and the error of many other sociologists as well, was that while he confirmed the fact of the incapacity for freedom on the part of masses of people, he failed to draw the practical consequences from sex-economic sociology, with which he was well familiar, and to advocate them. More than any of the others, it was Erich Fromm who later managed to disregard completely the sexual problem of masses of people and its relationship to the fear of freedom and craving for authority. I was never able to understand this, for I had no reason to doubt the basic honesty of Fromm’s position. But sexual negation in both social and personal life plays many a trick that is inaccessible to rational understanding.
The reader will have noticed just how much the emphasis has shifted from sociological investigations of political and economic factors to the investigation of factors pertaining to mass psychology, sex-economy and character structure. The diagnosis that the masses of people are incapable of freedom that the suppression of natural sexuality is the chief mechanism that is used to produce the imprisonment of the character and, above all, the shifting of the responsibility from individual organizations or politicians to the freedom-incapacitated masses themselves were enormous readjustments in thinking and, consequently, also in the practical handling of social problems. One was in a better position to understand the ceaseless complaints of the various political parties that ‘one still had not succeeded in reaching the working masses’. One understood why the masses ‘can be completely moulded, that they are unconscious and capable of adapting themselves to any kind of power or infamy’. Above all, one understood the fascist intoxication of the masses with racism. One understood the helplessness and powerlessness of those sociologists and politicians, whose orientation was purely economic, understood their helplessness in the face of the catastrophic events of the first half of the twentieth century. Now it was possible to trace back every form of political reaction to the emotional plague, which had become more and more anchored in the structures of the masses of people since the incursion of authoritarian patriarchy.
Now the genuine democratic revolutionary movement can have no other task than to guide (not ‘lead’ from the top!) the human masses that have become apathetic, incapable of discrimination, biopathic and slavish as the result of the suppression of their vital life over thousands of years; to guide them in such a way that they sense every suppression immediately and learn to shake it off promptly, finally and irrevocably. It is easier to prevent a neurosis than it is to cure it. It is easier to keep an organism healthy than it is to
rid it of an infirmity. It is also easier to keep a social organism free of dictatorial institutions than it is to eliminate such institutions. It is the task of genuine democratic guidance to make the masses leap over themselves, as it were. But a mass of people can surpass itself only when it develops in its own ranks social organizations that do not compete with diplomats in political algebra, but think out and articulate for the masses of people that which they cannot think out and articulate for themselves, owing to their distress, lack of training, bondage to the fuhrer idea and the plague of irrationalism. In short, we hold the masses of people responsible for every social process. We demand that they be responsible and we fight against their irresponsibility.
We impute the fault to them, but we do not accuse them as one would accuse a criminal.
There is more to a new and genuine social order than the elimination of dictatorial-authoritarian social institutions. There is also more to it than the establishment of new institutions, for these new institutions will also inevitably degenerate into a dictatorial-authoritarian form if the authoritarian absolutism anchored in the character structures of the masses of the people is not also eliminated through education and social hygiene. It is not as if we had revolutionary angels on the one side and reactionary devils on the other side, avaricious capitalists as opposed to generous workers. If sociology and mass psychology are to have a practical function as genuine sciences, then every effort must be made to free them of the political way of seeing everything as either black or white. They have to go to the core of the contradictory nature of the man raised in an authoritarian manner and help to search out, articulate and remove political reaction in the behaviour and in the structure of the working masses of people. It should not have to be particularly stressed that these genuine sociologists and mass psychologists must not exclude themselves from this process. By now it will have become clear that a nationalisation or socialisation of production cannot by itself effect the slightest change in human slavery. The piece of ground one buys to build a house in which to live and work is only a precondition of life and work; it is not this life and work itself. To regard the economic process of a society as the essence of the bio-social process of the human animal’s society is the same as equating the piece of ground and the house with the rearing of children, or of equating hygiene and work with dancing and music. But it was precisely this purely economic view of life (a view that Lenin had strongly opposed even in his time) that forced the Soviet Union to regress to an authoritarian form.
The economic process introduced by the Soviets was also supposed to change the people - that was the expectation around 1920. The elimination of illiteracy and the transformation of an agrarian country into an industrial country are, to be sure, tremendous achievements, but they cannot be passed off as specifically socialistic achievements, for they had been attained in the same way and often more extensively by ultra-capitalistic governments.
Since 1917 the basic question of mass psychology has been: Will the culture that originated from the social upheaval in Russia in 1917 develop a human community that is fundamentally and essentially different from the overthrown tsarist-authoritarian social order? Will the new socio-economic order of the Russian society reproduce itself in man’s character structure, and how will it reproduce itself? Would the new ‘Soviet man’ be free, no authoritarian, rational, self-governing, and would he transmit these capacities
to his children? Would the freedom developed in such a way in the human structure make every form of authoritarian social leadership unnecessary, indeed impossible? The existence or non-existence of authoritarian dictatorial institutions in the Soviet Union would have to become clear-cut standards for the nature of the development of the Soviet man.
It is understandable that the entire world followed the Soviet Union’s development with tense expectation - in some parts of the world, apprehensively; in other parts, elatedly. But the attitude towards the Soviet Union was none too rational on the whole. Some defended the Soviet system just as uncritically as others attacked it. There were groups of intellectuals who took the position that ‘the Soviet Union had a thing or two to boast of, too’. This sounded just like the Hitlerite who said that ‘there are also decent Jews’. Such emotional judgements were both senseless and valueless. In a word, they were sterile. And the leaders of the Soviet Union rightfully complained that people did not really do anything in a practical way for the Russian society, but merely cavilled about it.
The struggle continued between the rational and progressive forces of social development on the one hand and the reactionary forces of obstruction and regression on the other hand. Thanks to Marx, Engels and Lenin, the economic conditions of forward development were appreciably better understood than those forces that acted as a brake. No one thought to raise the question of the irrationalism of the masses. Hence, the development towards freedom, which was so promising in the beginning, came to a standstill and then regressed to an authoritarian form.
It was more fruitful to understand the mechanism of this regression than to deny it, as was done by the European Communist parties. By piously, religiously and fanatically defending everything that took place in the Soviet Union, they deprived themselves of every practical possibility of solving the social difficulties. And yet it is certain that the natural scientific elucidation of the irrational contradictions of the human character structure will, in the long run, do more for the development of the Soviet Union than any stupid hullabaloo about salvation. Such a scientific approach may be unpleasant and painful, but in reality it is prompted by far deeper feelings of friendship than political slogans are. The Soviet Russians who are engaged in everyday practical work know this very well. I can only affirm that at that time the sex-economic physicians and educators were as concerned as the champions of Sovietism were.
This concern was certainly justified. In the industrial plants, the original ‘triumviral directorship’ and the democratic economic production advisers were replaced by authoritarian ‘responsible’ management.
In the schools, the first attempts at self-government (Dalton plan, etc.) had failed; and the old authoritarian school regulations, however disguised by formal student organizations, were reintroduced.
In the army the original, straightforward and democratic officer-system was replaced by a rigid order of rank. At first the ‘Marshal of the Soviet Union’ was an incomprehensible innovation. Then it seemed dangerous. It had overtones of ‘tsar’ and ‘kaiser’.
Indications of a regression to authoritarian and moralistic views and laws accumulated in the field of sex-economic sociology. This is thoroughly described in Part II of my book Die Sexualitdt im Kulturkampf, 1936.
In human intercourse, suspicion, cynicism, contrivance and byzantine obedience became more and more rife. If in 1929 the mood of the average Soviet Russian was still imbued with heroic sacrifice for the five-year plan and full of high hopes for the success of the Revolution, around 1935 one sensed an evasive, unsteady and embarrassed oscillation in the feelings and thinking of the population. One sensed cynicism, disappointment and that certain kind of ‘worldly wiseness’, which is incompatible with serious social aims.
It was not only that the Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Union had failed. In the course of a few years the regression in the cultural process stifled the enthusiasm and hope of an entire world.
It is not the fault of a social leadership if a social regression takes place. But this social leadership consolidates regression if it: (1) tries to pass off the regression as progress, (2) proclaims itself to be the saviour of the world, and (3) shoots those who remind it of its duties.
Sooner or later it will have to give way to a different social leadership, one that adheres to the generally valid principles of social development.
There were socialist movements and a socialist yearning long before there was scientific knowledge on the social preconditions of socialism. The fight of the disappropriated against their oppressors has been raging for thousands of years. It was these fights that provided the scientific knowledge of the freedom aspirations of the suppressed and not vice versa, as the fascist character believes. It cannot be denied that it was precisely between 1918 and 1938, i.e., years of enormous social magnitude, that the socialists suffered very serious defeats. Precisely at a time that should have offered living proof of the maturity and rationality of the socialist freedom movement, the workers’ movement split up and became bureaucratic, became more and more separated from the thirst for freedom and truth from which it had originally sprung.
The socialist yearning of the millions was an intense desire for freedom from every form of suppression. But this intense desire for freedom was coupled with a fear of responsibility and thus appeared in the form of a compromise. The fear of social responsibility on the part of the masses of people brought the socialist movement into the political sphere. However, in the scientific sociology of Karl Marx, who worked out the economic conditions of social independence, we find no mention of the state as the goal of socialist freedom. The ‘socialist’ state is an invention of party bureaucrats. And now, it, ‘the state’, was supposed to introduce freedom: not the masses of the people, you see, but the state. It will be my object in what follows to show that the socialist idea of the state not only had nothing to do with the theory of the early socialists, but, on the contrary, represented a distortion of the socialist movement. However unconsciously it may have been brought about, this distortion is to be imputed to the structural helplessness of the masses of people, who were nonetheless imbued with an intense desire for freedom. An intense desire for freedom on the one hand, coupled with a structural fear of the responsibility of self-government on the other hand, produced in the Soviet Union a form
of state that was less and less in accord with the original programme of the Communists and eventually assumed an authoritarian, totalitarian and dictatorial form.
Let us attempt to sketch the basic socialist character of the most important social movements towards freedom.
The early Christian movement is often and rightfully designated as ‘socialist’. The founders of socialism also regarded the slave revolts of antiquity and the peasant wars of the middle Ages as precursors of the socialist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was the lack of development of the industrial conditions and the international means of communication, as well as the lack of a sociological theory, that precluded their success. According to the sociology of its founders, ‘socialism’ was conceivable only on an international scale. A national or even nationalistic socialism (National Socialism = fascism) is sociological nonsense. In the strictest sense of the word it is mass deception. Imagine that a physician discovers a medicine to fight a certain disease and calls it ‘serum’. Now a clever profiteer comes along who wants to make money on people’s illnesses. He concocts a poison that produces this sickness, which in turn evokes an intense desire in man to get well again, and he calls this poisonous agent a ‘healing agent’. He would be the national socialist heir of this physician,, just as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin became the national socialist heirs of Karl Marx’s international socialism.
To be correct, the profiteer who wants to get rich on illnesses should call his poison a ‘toxin’. However, he calls it a ‘serum’, because he knows very well that he would not be able to sell toxin as a medicine. The very same thing applies to the words ‘social’ and ‘socialist’.
Words that have been stamped with a very definite meaning cannot be used arbitrarily without causing hopeless confusion. The concept ‘socialism’ was inextricably related to the concept ‘international’. The theory of socialism presupposed a definite degree of maturity in international economy. The imperialistic struggle for markets, natural resources and centres of power will have to have assumed the character of rapacious wars. Economic anarchy will have to have become the chief obstacle to the further development of social productivity. The chaos of economy will have to have become clear to everyone, for example: the destruction of excess goods to check a sudden drop in prices, while masses of people are hungry and starving. The private appropriation of collectively produced goods will have to have come into sharp conflict with the needs of the society. International trade will have to have begun to feel that the tariff boundaries of the national states and the market principle are insurmountable barriers.
The objective socio-economic preconditions of an international attitude and orientation on the part of the inhabitants of the earth have developed enormously since 1918. The aeroplane lessened the distances between peoples and bridged the expanses that formerly preserved differences in degrees of civilization that were equivalent to thousands of years. With ever-increasing rapidity, international traffic has begun to obliterate the civilization gaps of earlier centuries. There was an infinitely greater gap between the Arab of the nineteenth century and the Englishman of the nineteenth century than there is between the Arab and Englishman of the middle of the twentieth century.
More and more curbs were placed upon capitalistic adventurers. In short, the socioeconomic preconditions of internationalism increased by leaps and bounds. However, this economic ripening of internationalism was not accompanied by a corresponding
development in man’s structure and ideology. While the idea of internationalism continued to develop along economic lines, it made little headway in man’s structure and ideology. This was shown not only in the workers’ movement, but also in the development of nationalistic dictators in Europe: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Doriot and Laval in France, Stalin in Russia, Manner-heim in Finland, Horthy in Hungary, etc. No one could have anticipated this cleavage between socio-economic progress and a regression in man’s structure. The degeneration of the Workers’ International to a chauvinistic national socialism was more than a collapse of the old freedom movement, which had always been nothing but international. It was an unprecedented outbreak of the emotional plague on an enormous scale in the very midst of the suppressed social strata, in which great minds had placed hopes that they would one day create a new order in the world. A nadir of this ‘national socialist’ degeneration was the racial hatred felt by the white workers against the black workers in the United States and the loss of all socio-political initiative and perspective in many a large union. When the freedom idea is seized upon by the mentality of sergeants, then freedom is in a. bad plight. Old and brutal injustice revenged itself upon those masses who had nothing to sell but their working power. Unscrupulous exploitation and irresponsibility on the part of powerful capitalists struck back like a boomerang. Since the idea of internationalism had failed to take root in man’s structure, the national socialist movements took the wind out of its sails by exploiting the intense desire for international socialism. Under the leadership of ‘sergeants’ who had risen from the ranks of the suppressed, the international socialist movement split up into nationally confined, isolated, mutually hostile mass movements, which merely gave the appearance of being revolutionary. To make matters worse, a number of these rigidly nationalistic mass movements became international movements, no doubt owing to the effect of the old international orientation of their followers. Italian and German National Socialism became international fascism. In the strict sense of the word it attracted masses on an international scale in the form of a perverse ‘nationalistic internationalism’. In this form it crushed genuine democratic revolts in Spain and in Austria. The heroic fight of the genuine revolutionaries who had been isolated by the masses of the people (1934-6) was another Thermopylae.
In all of this the irrationalism of the mass structure, as well as politics in general, was clearly expressed. For years the German working masses had resisted the programme of a revolutionary internationalism. And yet, from 1933 on, they endured all the suffering that a genuine social revolution would have entailed, without, however, enjoying a single fruit that a genuine social revolution would have brought them. They had grossly deceived themselves and were defeated by their own irrationalism, i.e., their fear of social responsibility.
These facts were hardly comprehensible. Yet, let us make an honest endeavour to understand them, despite their seeming incomprehensibility.
Since the entry of the United States into the Second World War an international and generally human orientation has gained more and more ground. Yet it is to be feared that even more fantastic irrational mass reactions and even more deadly social catastrophes will result someday, if the responsible sociologists and psychologists fail to put off their grandiloquent academicism before it is too late, take an active part in the course of events and make an honest effort to help clarify them. There has been a fundamental shift in the line of questioning of sociology from economics to the structure of the masses of people.
We no longer ask if the economic preconditions of work-democratic internationalism have reached maturity. Now we are faced with a question of greater magnitude: Assuming fully matured international socio-economic conditions, what obstacles could again prevent the idea of internationalism from taking root and developing in man’s structure and ideology? How can the social irresponsibility and propensity for authority on the part of the masses be overcome before it is too late? How can this second international war, which is rightfully referred to as a war in which ideological rather than economic issues are at stake, be prevented from decaying into a new, even more brutal, even more deadly nationalistic, chauvinistic, fascistic-dictatorial nationalism? Political reaction lives and operates within the human structure and in the thinking and acting of the suppressed masses in the form of character armour, fear of responsibility, incapacity for freedom and, last but not least, as an endemic crippling of biologic functioning. These are grave facts. The fate of future centuries depends upon our ability or inability to cope with them in a natural scientific way. All leading circles have an enormous responsibility. Not a single one of these decisive tasks can be solved with political chatter and formalities. Our basic slogan, ‘Enough! No more politics! Let’s get down to the vital social issues!’ is not a play on words. Nothing is more staggering than the fact that a world population of two billion people does not muster the energy to eliminate a handful of suppressors and biopathic warmongers. Man’s intensive desire for freedom fails to become a reality owing to the many views as to how freedom can be best achieved without also assuming the direct responsibility for the painful readjustment of the human structure and its social institutions.
The anarchists (i.e., the syndicalists) strove to achieve social self-government, but they refused to take cognizance of the profound problem of the human incapacity for freedom, and they rejected all guidance of social development. They were Utopians and they went’ down in Spain. They saw only the intense desire for freedom, but they confounded this intense desire with the actual capacity to be free and the ability to work and live without authoritarian leadership. They rejected the party system, but they were at a loss to say how the enslaved masses of people were to learn to govern their lives by themselves. Not much is accomplished by solely hating the state. Nor with nudist colonies. The problem is deeper and more serious.
The international Christians preached peace, brotherhood, .compassion, and mutual help. Ideologically, they were anti-capitalist, and they conceived of human existence in international terms. Basically, their ideas were in accord with international socialism, and they called themselves, e.g., in Austria, Christian Socialists. Yet, concretely speaking, they rejected and continue to reject every step of social development that moves precisely towards that goal that they have proclaimed to be their ideal. Catholic Christianity in particular has long since divested itself of the revolutionary, i.e., rebellious, character of the primitive Christian movement. It seduces its millions of devotees into accepting war as an act of fate, as a ‘punishment of sin’. Wars are indeed the consequences of sins, but entirely different sins from those conceived of by Catholicism. For the Catholics, peaceful existence is possible only in heaven. The Catholic Church’ preaches the acceptance of distress in this world and thereby systematically ruins man’s ability to achieve the goal of freedom, to fight for it in an honest way. It does not protest when its rival churches, the Greek Orthodox churches, are bombed; but it importunes God and culture when bombs fall on Rome. Catholicism produces structural helplessness in
masses of people with the result that, instead of relying upon their own strength and self-confidence when they are in distress, they call upon God for help. Catholicism makes the human structure both incapable and afraid of pleasure. A good portion of human sadism derives from this. German Catholics give their blessings to German weapons and American Catholics give their blessings to American weapons. One and the same God is supposed to lead two arch enemies to victory in war. The irrational absurdity of this is conspicuous.
Social Democracy, which followed the Bernsteinian adaptation of Marxian sociology, also failed on the question of mass structure. It lived, as did Christianity and anarchy, on the compromise of the masses between strivings after happiness and irresponsibility. Thus it offered the masses a hazy ideology, an ‘education in socialism’, which was not backed up by a strong and genuine tackling of concrete life-tasks. They dreamed of social democracy, but they refused to understand that the structure of masses of people would have to undergo basic changes to become capable of being social democratic and of living in a ‘social democratic’ way. In actual practice it had no inkling of the idea that the public schools, trade schools, kindergartens, etc., had to operate on a self-regulatory basis. Moreover, it failed to realize that every reactionary tendency - including those in one’s own camp - had to be countered sharply and objectively, that, finally, the term ‘freedom’ had to be imbued with a concrete content to bring about social democracy. It would be far more sensible to use all one’s forces against fascist reaction while one is in power than to develop the courage to do so only after one has relinquished it. In many European countries Social Democracy had all the necessary power at its disposal to dethrone the patriarchal power in and outside of man, a power that had been accumulating over thousands of years and finally celebrated its most bloody triumph in the fascist ideology.
Social Democracy made the fatal mistake of assuming that those who had been crippled by thousands of years of patriarchal power were capable of democracy without any further preliminaries and were capable of governing themselves. Officially, it rejected the rigorous scientific efforts - those of Freud, for instance - to comprehend man’s complicated structure. Hence, it was forced to assume dictatorial forms within its own ranks and to make compromises outside of them. We can understand a compromise in the good sense of the word, i.e., the awareness that the viewpoint of the other person, the opponent, has to be understood and agreed with where it is superior to one’s own viewpoint; but there is no justification for a compromise in which principles are sacrificed for fear of precipitating a confrontation. In the latter, rash efforts are often made ‘to get along’ with an arch enemy bent on murder. Unadulterated Chamberlainism existed in the camp of socialism.
In ideology, Social Democracy was radical; in actual practice, it was conservative. A phrase such as ‘His Royal Highness and Majesty’s socialist opposition’ shows how ludicrous its position often was. Without intending to, it helped fascism, for the fascism of the masses is nothing other than disappointed radicalism plus nationalistic ‘petty bourgeoisism’. Social Democracy foundered on the contradictory structure of the masses, a structure that it did not understand. It cannot be denied that the bourgeois governments of Europe had a democratic orientation, but in practice they were conservative administrative bodies, which were averse to freedom efforts based on fundamental scientific knowledge. The enormous influence of the capitalist market economy and of
profit interests far exceeded all other interests. The bourgeois democracies of Europe separated themselves from their original revolutionary character of the 1848 years much more quickly and thoroughly than Christianity separated itself from its revolutionary character. Liberal measures were a kind of decorum, a voucher that one was after all ‘democratic’. None of these governments would have been able to state how the enslaved masses of people were to be extricated from their condition of blind acceptance and craving for authority. They had all the power in their hands, but social self-government and self-regulation was a book with seven seals to it. In such government circles it was impossible even to hint at the basic problem, i.e., the sexual question of the masses. The extolling of the Austrian Dollfuss government as a model of democratic administration bears witness to a complete lack of social awareness.
The powerful capitalists who emerged from the bourgeois revolution in Europe had a great deal of social power in their hands. They had the influence to determine who should govern. Basically, they acted in a short-sighted and self-damaging way. With the help of their power and their means, they could have spurred human society to unprecedented social achievements. I am not referring to the building of palaces, churches, museums and theatres. I mean the practical realisation of their concept of culture. Instead, they completely alienated themselves from those who had but one commodity to sell, their working power. In their hearts they held ‘the people’ in contempt. They were petty, limited, cynical, contemptuous, avaricious and very often unscrupulous. In Germany they helped Hitler to obtain power. They proved themselves to be completely unworthy of the role society had relegated them to. They abused their role, instead of using it to guide and educate the masses of people. They were not even capable of checking the dangers that threatened their own cultural system. As a social class they deteriorated more and more. Insofar as they themselves were familiar with the processes of work and achievement, they understood the democratic freedom movements. But they did nothing to help them. It was ostentation and not knowledge that they encouraged. The encouragement of the arts and sciences was once in the hands of the feudal lords, whom the bourgeoisie later dethroned. But the bourgeois capitalists had far less of an objective interest in art and science than the leading aristocracy had had. While in 1848 the sons of the bourgeois capitalists bled to death at the barricades, fighting for democratic ideals, the sons of the bourgeois capitalists between 1920 and 1930 used the university platforms to deride democratic demonstrations. Later, they were the elite troops of fascist chauvinism. To be sure, they had fulfilled their function of opening up the world economically, but they stifled their own accomplishment with the institution of tariffs and they had not the least notion of what to do with the internationalism that originated from their economic accomplishment. They aged rapidly, and as a social class they became senile.
This assessment of the so-called economic magnates does not derive from an ideology. I come from these circles and know them well. I am happy to have rid myself of their influence.
Fascism grew out of the conservatism of the Social Democrats on the one hand and the narrow-mindedness and senility of the capitalists on the other hand. It did not embody those ideals that had been advocated by its predecessors in a practical way, but solely in an ideological way (and this was the only thing that mattered to the masses of people whose psychic structures were ridden with illusions). It included the most brutal political reaction, the same political reaction that had devastated human life and property in the
middle Ages. It paid tribute to so-called native tradition in a mystical and brutal way, which had nothing to do with a genuine feeling for one’s native country and attachment to the soil. By calling itself’ socialist’ and ‘revolutionary’, it took over the unfulfilled functions of the socialists. By dominating industrial magnates, it took over capitalism. From now on, the achievement of ‘socialism’ was entrusted to an all-powerful fuhrer who had been sent by God. The powerlessness and helplessness of the masses of people gave impetus to this fuhrer ideology, which had been implanted in man’s structure by the authoritarian school and nourished by the church and compulsive family. The ‘salvation of the nation’ by an all-powerful fuhrer who had been sent by God was in complete accord with the intense desire of the masses for salvation. Incapable of conceiving of themselves as having a different nature, their subservient structure eagerly imbibed the idea of man’s immutability and of the ‘natural division of humanity into the few who lead and the many who are led’. Now the responsibility rested in the hands of a strong man. In fascism or wherever else it is encountered, this fascist fuhrer ideology rests upon the mystical hereditary idea of man’s immutable nature, upon the helplessness, craving for authority, and incapacity for freedom of the masses of people. Admitted that the formula, ‘Man requires leadership and discipline’, ‘authority and order’, can be justified in terms of man’s present anti-social structure, the attempt to eternalize this structure and to hold it to be immutable is reactionary. The fascist ideology had the best of intentions. Those who did not recognize this subjective honesty failed altogether to comprehend fascism and its attraction for the masses. Since the problem of the human structure was never brought up or discussed, let alone mastered, the idea of a non-authoritarian, self-regulatory society was looked upon as chimerical and Utopian.
It was precisely at this point, in the period between 1850 and 1917, that the critique and constructive policies of the founders of the Russian Revolution made a start. Lenin’s standpoint was this: Social Democracy had failed; the masses cannot achieve freedom spontaneously on their own volition. They need a leadership that is constructed along hierarchical lines and acts authoritatively on the surface, but at the same time has a strict democratic structure internally. Lenin’s communism is always conscious of its task: The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is that social form that leads from an authoritarian society to a non-authoritarian, self-regulatory social order requiring neither police force nor compulsive morality.
Basically, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a politico-ideological revolution and not a purely social revolution. It was based on political ideas which derived from politics and economics and not from the science of man. We have to have a thorough comprehension of Lenin’s sociological theory and his accomplishment to understand the weak spots that later made possible the authoritarian totalitarian technique of the Russian mass leadership. It is necessary to stress that the founders of the Russian Revolution had no inkling of the biopathic nature of the masses of people. But then no reasonable person expects that social and individual freedom lie ready-made in the desk drawer of the revolutionary thinker and politician. Every new social effort is based on the errors and omissions of earlier sociologists and revolutionary leaders. Lenin’s theory of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ embodied a number of preconditions for the establishment of a genuine social democracy - but by no means all of them. It pursued the goal of a self-governing human society. It held the view that present-day man is not capable of achieving social revolution without an organisation constructed along hierarchical lines
and that the enormous social tasks cannot be accomplished without authoritarian discipline and loyalty. As Lenin conceived it, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to become the authority that had to be created to abolish every kind of authority. In the beginning it was fundamentally different from the fascist ideology of dictatorship in that
// set itself the task of undermining itself, that is to say, of replacing the authoritarian government of society by social self-regulation.
In addition to establishing the economic preconditions for social democracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat had the task of effecting a basic change in man’s structure by means of a complete industrialization and technicalization of production and commerce. Granted that Lenin himself did not speak of it in these terms, the effecting of basic change in man’s structure was an essential and integral part of his sociological theory. According to Lenin’s conception the social revolution had the task not only of eliminating surface formality and actual conditions of servitude, but also, and essentially, of making men and women incapable of being exploited.
The creation of the economic preconditions of social democracy, i.e., socialist-planned economy, proved in the course of time to be a trifle compared with the task of effecting a basic change in the character structure of the masses. To understand the victory of fascism and the nationalistic development of the Soviet Union, one must first comprehend the full magnitude of this problem.
The first act of Lenin’s programme, the establishment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, was a success. The state apparatus that developed consisted entirely of the sons of workers and peasants. Descendants of the former feudal and upper classes were excluded.
The second and most important act, the replacement of the proletarian state apparatus by social self-administration, failed to materialise. In 1944, twenty-seven years after the victory of the Russian Revolution, there is still no sign that points to the implementation of the second, genuinely democratic act of the Revolution. The Russian people are ruled by a dictatorial one-party system with an authoritarian fuhrer at the top.
How was this possible? Had Stalin ‘defrauded’, ‘betrayed’, the Leninian revolution -had he ‘usurped power’?
Let us see what happened.
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