1928-33
Rationally considered, one would expect economically wretched masses of workers to develop a keen consciousness of their social situation; one would further expect this consciousness to harden into a determination to rid themselves of their social misery. In short, one would expect the socially wretched working man to revolt against the abuses to which he is subjected and to say: 'After all, I perform responsible social work. It is upon me and those like me that the weal and ill of society rests. I myself assume the responsibility for the work that must be done.' In such a case, the thinking ('con-sciousness) of the worker would be in keeping with his social situation.
The Marxist called it' class consciousness'. We want to call it 'consciousness of one's skills', or 'consciousness of one's social responsibility'. The cleavage between the social situation of the working masses and their consciousness of this situation implies that, instead of improving their social position, the working masses worsen it. It was precisely the wretched masses who helped to put fascism, extreme political reaction, into power.
It is a question of the role of ideology and the emotional attitude of these masses seen as a historical factor, a question of the repercussion of the ideology on the economic basis. If the material wretchedness of the broad masses did not lead to a social revolution; if, objectively considered, contrary revolutionary ideologies resulted from the crisis, then the development of the ideology of the masses in the critical years thwarted the 'efflorescence of the forces of production', prevented, to use Marxist concepts, the' revolutionary resolution of the contradictions between the forces of production of monopolistic capitalism and its methods of production'.
The composition of the classes in Germany appears as follows. Quoted from Kunik: 'An Attempt to Establish the Social Composition of the German Population', Die Inter nationak, 1928, edited by Lenz: 'Proletarian Policies', Inter-nationaler Arbeiterverlag, 1931.
No matter how many middle-class employees may have voted for left-wing parties and how many workers may have voted for right-wing parties, it is nonetheless striking that the figures of the ideological distribution, arrived at by us, agree approximately with the election figures of 1932: Taken together the Communists and the Social Democrats received twelve to thirteen million votes, while the NSDAP and the German Nationalists received some nineteen to twenty million votes. Thus, with respect to practical politics, it was not the economic but the ideological distribution that was decisive. In short, the political importance of the lower middle class is greater than had been assumed.
During the rapid decline of the German economy, 1929-32, the NSDAP jumped from 800,000 votes in 1928 to 6,400,000 in the fall of 1930, to 13,000,000 in the summer of 1932 and 17,000,000 in January of 1933. According to Jager's calculations ('Hitler', Refer Aufbau, October 1930) the votes cast by the workers made up approximately 3,000,000 of the 6,400,000 votes received by the National Socialists in 1930. Of these 3,000,000 votes, some 60 to 70 per cent came from employees and 30 to 40 per cent from workers.
To my knowledge it was Karl Radek who most clearly grasped the problematic aspect of this sociological process as early as 1930, following the N S D A P's first upsurge. He wrote:
Nothing similar to this is known in the history of political struggle, particularly in a country with firmly established political differentiations, in which every new party has had to fight for any position held Ly the old parties. There is nothing more characteristic than the fact that, neither in bourgeois nor in socialist literature, has anything been said about this party, which assumes the second place in German political life. It is a party without history which suddenly emerges in German political life, just as an island suddenly emerges in the middle of the sea owing to volcanic forces. ['German Elections', Roter Aufbau, October 1930]
We have no doubt that this island also has a history and follows an inner logic.
The choice between the Marxist alternative: 'fall to barbarism' or 'rise to socialism', was a choice that, according to all previous experience, would be determined by the ideological structure of the dominated classes. Either this structure would be in keeping with the economic situation or it would be at variance with it, as, for instance, we find in large Asian societies, where exploitation is passively endured, or in present-day Germany, where a cleavage exists between economic situation and ideology.
Thus, the basic problem is this: What causes this cleavage, or to put it another way, what prevents the economic situation from coinciding with the psychic structure of the masses? It is a problem, in short, of comprehending the nature of the psychological structure of the masses and its relation to the economic basis from which it derives. To comprehend this, we must first of all free ourselves from vulgar Marxist concepts, which only block the way to an understanding of fascism. Essentially, they are as follows:
In accordance with one of its formulas, vulgar Marxism completely separates economic existence from social existence as a whole, and states that man's' ideology' and' consciousness' are solely and directly determined by his economic existence. Thus, it sets up a mechanical antithesis between economy and ideology, between 'structure' and 'superstructure'; it makes ideology rigidly and one-sidedly dependent upon economy, and fails to see the dependency of economic development upon that of ideology.
For this reason the problem of the so-called 'repercussion of ideology' does not exist for it. Notwithstanding the fact that vulgar Marxism now speaks of the “lagging behind of the subjective factor', as Lenin understood it, it can do nothing about it in a practical way, for its former conception of ideology as the product of the economic situation was too rigid. It did not explore the contradictions of economy in ideology, and it did not comprehend ideology as a historical force.
In fact, it does everything in its power not to comprehend the structure and dynamics of ideology; it brushes it aside as 'psychology', which is not supposed to be 'Marxistic', and leaves the handling of the subjective factor, the so-called 'psychic life' in history, to the metaphysical idealism of political reaction, to the gentiles and Rosenbergs, who make 'mind' and 'soul' solely responsible for the progress of history and, strange to say, have enormous success with this thesis. The neglect of this aspect of sociology is something Marx himself criticized in the materialism of the eighteenth century.
To the vulgar Marxist, psychology is a metaphysical system pure and simple, and he draws no distinction whatever between the metaphysical character of reactionary psychology and the basic elements of psychology, which were furnished by revolutionary psychological research and which it is our task to develop. The vulgar Marxist simply negates, instead of offering constructive criticism, and feels himself to be a 'materialist* when he rejects facts such as ' drive',' need' or' inner process', as being 'idealistic'. The result is that he gets into serious difficulties and meets with one failure after another, for he js continually forced to employ practical psychology in political practice, is forced to speak of the 'needs of the masses', 'revolutionary consciousness', 'the will to strike', etc.
The more the vulgar Marxist tries to gainsay psychology, the more he finds himself practising metaphysical psychologism and worse, insipid Coueism. For example, he will try to explain a historical situation on the basis of a 'Hitler psychosis', or console the masses and persuade them not to lose faith in Marxism. Despite everything, he asserts, headway is being made, the revolution will not be subdued, etc. He sinks to the point finally of pumping illusionary courage into the people, without in reality saying anything essential about the situation, without having comprehended what has happened.
That political reaction is never at a loss to find a way put of a difficult situation, that an acute economic crisis can lead to barbarism as well as it can lead to social freedom, must remain for him a book with seven seals. Instead of allowing his thoughts and acts to issue from social reality, he transposes reality in his fantasy in such a way as to make it correspond to his wishes.
Our political psychology can be nothing other than an investigation of this 'subjective factor of history', of the character structure of man in a given epoch and of the ideological structure of society that it forms. Unlike reactionary psychology and psychologistic economy, it does not try to lord it over Marxist sociology by throwing 'psychological conceptions' of social processes in its teeth, but gives it its proper due as that which deduces consciousness from existence.
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 becomes a mass psychology.
Thus it proceeds directly from Marx himself. The presuppositions with which we begin are not arbitrary presuppositions; they are not dogmas; they are real presuppositions from which one can abstract only in fancy. They are the actual individuals, their actions and the material conditions of their lives, those already existing as well as those produced by action.
[German Ideology]
Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of every other production which he achieves. In other words, all conditions affect and more or less modify all of the functions and activities of man - the subject of production & the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this connection it can be indeed proven that all human conditions and functions, no matter how and when they are manifested, influence material production and have a more or less determining effect on them [My italics, WR].
[Theory of Surplus Value]
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.
When an 'ideology has a repercussive effect upon the economic process', this means that it must have become a material force. When an ideology becomes a material force, as soon as it has the ability to arouse masses, then we must go on to ask: How does this take place? How is it possible for an ideological factor to produce a materialistic result, that is, for a theory to produce a revolutionary effect? The answer to this question must also be the answer to the question of reactionary mass psychology; it must, in other words, elucidate the 'Hitler psychosis'.
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 repercussions of a society's ideology on the economic basis from which it derives is possible. The 'repercussion' loses its apparent metaphysical and psychologistic character when it can be comprehended as the functioning of the character structure of socially active man. As such, it is the object of natural scientific investigations of the character. 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 and the new social situation.