In the beginning the family situation of the various strata of the lower middle class is not differentiated from the immediate economic position. The family - those of officials excluded -also constitutes an economic enterprise on a small scale. The members of a small merchant’s family work in his business, thus eliminating the expense of outside help. On small and medium farmsteads the coinciding of family and mode of production is even more pronounced.
The economy of the great patriarchs (the Zagruda, for instance) is essentially built upon this practice. In the close interlacing of family and economy lies the key to the question why the peasantry is ‘bound to the earth’, ‘traditional’, and for that reason so accessible to the influence of political reaction. This does not mean to say that it is solely the economic mode of existence that determines the attachment to the earth and tradition, but that the farmer’s mode of production entails a strict family tie of all members of the family and that this tie presupposes a far-reaching sexual suppression and repression.
It is from this double base then, that the typical peasant way of looking at things arises. Its core is formed by patriarchal sexual morality. Elsewhere I described the difficulties encountered by the Soviet government in the collectivization of agriculture; it was not only the ‘love of the soil’, but first and foremost the family tie conditioned by the soil that created such difficulties.
For one thing, the possibility of preserving a healthy peasant class as a foundation for a whole nation can never be valued highly enough. Many of our present-day sufferings
are only the consequence of the unhealthy relationship between rural and city population. A solid stock of small and middle peasants has at all times been the best defence against social ills such as we possess today. And, moreover, this is the only solution which enables a nation to earn its daily bread within the inner circuit of its economy. Industry and commerce recede from their unhealthy leading position and adjust themselves to the general framework of a national economy of balanced supply and demand.
[Mein Kampf, p. 138] That was the position taken by Hitler. As senseless as it was economically speaking, as little as political reaction could ever succeed in checking the mechanization of big agriculture and the dissolution of agriculture on a small scale, this propaganda was-nonetheless significant from the standpoint of mass psychology, for it had an effect on the close-knit family structure of the lower middle-class strata.
The close interrelation between family tie and rural forms of economy was finally expressed by the NSDAP after the seizure of power. Since, with respect to its mass basis and ideological structure, the Hitler movement was a lower middle-class movement, one of its first measures - intended to secure the middle classes - was the edict issued on 12 May 1933, on the ‘New Order of Agriculture Ownership’, which, reverted to age-old legal codes based on the ‘indissoluble unity of blood and soil’.
A few characteristic passages are appended here:
This indissoluble unity of blood and soil is the indispensable presupposition for a nation’s health. In Germany rural legislation of past centuries also gave legal guarantees to this tie born of a nation’s natural feelings of life. The farmstead was the unsaleable inheritance of the ancestral peasant family. Later non-native legislation was imposed and destroyed the legal basis of this rural constitution. In many parts of the country, nonetheless, the German peasant, having a healthy sense of his people’s basic conception of life, persevered in the old custom, handing down the farmstead from generation to generation.
It is the imperative duty of the government of an awakened people to guarantee the national awakening by legal regulation of the indissoluble unity of blood and soil preserved by German custom through the law of entail.
The owner of a farmstead or forestry who is registered as the heir to entailed property in the competent district court must pass on his property in accordance with the law of entail. The owner of this inherited farm is called a farmer. A farmer cannot own more than one farm inherited under this law. Only one of the farmer’s’ children is allowed to take over the inherited farm. He is the legal inheritor. The co-inheritors will be provided for by the farmstead until they are economically independent. If through no fault of their own they fall into straitened circumstances, they also have the right to seek refuge at the farmstead in later years. The transfer of a non-registered farmstead, which is nonetheless qualified for registration, is governed by the law of entail.
An entail-inherited farmstead can be owned only by a farmer who is a German citizen and of German blood. Only he who has no one among his male ancestry or other ancestry of Jewish or coloured origin for four generations is of German blood. Clearly, however, every Teuton is of German blood according to the letter of this law. A marriage with a person of non-German blood permanently excludes the offspring of this marriage from being the owner of a farmstead inherited under this law.
The purpose of this law is to protect the farmsteads against heavy indebtedness and harmful fragmentation in the process of inheritance, and to preserve it as the permanent inheritance of the families of free farmers. At the same time the law aims at a healthy distribution of the agricultural land. A large number of self-sufficient small and medium farmsteads spread throughout the country as evenly as possible is necessary for the preservation of a state’s and people’s health.
What tendencies are expressed in this law? It was at variance with the interests of big agriculture, which was intent upon, absorbing the medium and small farmsteads and creating ever widening division between landowner and property less rural proletariat. But the frustration of this intent was amply compensated by the preservation of the rural middle class, in which big agriculture had a considerable interest in view of the fact that it represented the mass basis of its power.
It is not only as a private owner of property that the small landowner is identified with the large landowner. By itself this would not mean very much. What is important here is the preservation of the ideologic atmosphere of the small and medium property owners, that atmosphere, namely, that exists in small enterprises operated by a family unit. It is this atmosphere that is known to produce the best nationalistic fighters and to imbue the women with nationalistic fervour. And this explains why political reaction is always prattling about the ‘morality-preserving influence of the peasantry’. However, this is a sex-economic question.
This interlacing of individualistic modes of production and authoritarian family in the lower middle class is one of the many sources of the fascist ideology of the ‘large family’. This question will return later in another context.
The economic pitting of the small businesses against one another corresponds to the family encapsulation and competition typical of the lower middle class, notwithstanding the fascist ideology’ common welfare comes before personal welfare’ and ‘corporate idea’. The basic elements of fascist ideology,’ fuhrer principle’, family policy, etc., have an individualistic character. What is collective in fascism stems from the socialistic tendencies in the mass basis, as the individualistic elements stem from the interests of big business and the fascist leadership.
In view of man’s natural organization, this economic and family situation would break down, if it were not secured by a specific relationship between man and woman, a relationship we designate as patriarchal, and a mode of sexuality derived from this specific relationship.
Economically, the urban middle-class man is not in a better position than the manual labourer. Thus, in his efforts to differentiate himself from the labourer, he must rely essentially on his family and sexual modes of life. His economic deprivations have to be compensated for in a sexual moralistic way. In the case of the official, this motive is the most effective element of his identification with the ruling power. Since one is not on a plane with the upper middle class but is nonetheless identified with it, the sex-moralistic ideologies have to compensate for the economic limitations. Essentially, the sexual modes of life and the cultural modes of life dependent upon them serve to differentiate him from the lower classes.
The sum total of these moralistic attitudes, which duster around one’s attitude towards sex and are commonly designated as ‘philistine’, culminate in notions of - we say notions of, not acts of - honour and duty. The effect of these two words on the lower middle class must be correctly assessed, otherwise it will not serve much purpose to concern ourselves with them. They appear again and again in the fascist dictator-ideology and race theory. Actually it is precisely the lower middle class’s way of life, its business practices that impose a completely opposite behaviour.
A touch of dishonesty is part of the very existence of private merchandizing. When a peasant buys a horse, he runs it down in every possible way. If he sells the same horse a year later, it will have become younger, better and stronger. One’s sense of ‘duty’ is moulded by business interests and not by national character traits. One’s own commodity will always be the best - the other person’s always the worst. Deprecation of one’s competitors - a deprecation that is usually devoid of all honesty - is an essential tool of one’s ‘business’. The small businessman’s obsequious and deferential behaviour towards his customers testifies to the fierce pressure of economic existence, which has to warp the best character in the long run.
Nevertheless the concepts of ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ play a very decisive role in the life of the lower middle class. This cannot be explained solely on the basis of efforts to conceal one’s crude materialistic background. For, despite all hypocrisy, the ecstasy derived from the notions of ‘honour’ and ‘duty’ is genuine. It is merely a question of its source.
This ecstasy stems from sources of unconscious emotional life. One does not pay much attention to these sources at first, and one is only too happy to overlook their relation to the above ideology. However, an analysis of lower middle-class people leaves no doubt about the importance of the relation between sexual life and the ideology of ‘duty’ and ‘honour’.
For one thing, the political and economic position of the father is reflected in his patriarchal relationship to the remainder of the family. In the figure of the father the authoritarian state has its representative in every family, so that the family becomes its most important instrument of power.
The authoritarian position of the father reflects his political role and discloses the relation of the family to the authoritarian state. Within the family the father holds the same position that his boss holds towards him in the production process. And he reproduces his subservient attitude towards authority in his children, particularly in his sons. Lower middle-class man’s passive and servile attitude towards the fuhrer-figure issues from these conditions. Without really divining it, Hitler was building upon this lower middle-class attitude when he wrote:
The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling.
And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially, or that kind of thing.
[op. cit. p. 183]
This is not a question of an ‘inherent disposition’, but of a typical example of the reproduction of an authoritarian social system in the structures of-its members.
What this position of the father actually necessitates is the strictest sexual suppression of the women and the children. While women develop a resigned attitude under lower middle-class influence - an attitude reinforced by repressed sexual rebellion - the sons, apart from a subservient attitude towards authority, develop a strong identification with the father, which forms the basis of the emotional identification with every kind of authority. How it comes about that the psychic structures of the supporting strata of a society are so constructed that they fit the economic framework and serve the purposes of the ruling powers as precisely as the parts of a precision machine will long remain an unsolved riddle. At any rate, what we describe as the structural reproduction of a society’s economic system in the psychology of the masses is the basic mechanism in the process of the formation of political ideas.
It is only much later that the attitude of economic and social competition contributes to the development of the structure of the lower middle class. The reactionary thinking that is shaped at this stage is a secondary continuation of psychic processes that reach back into the first years of a child raised in an authoritarian family atmosphere. For one thing there is the competition between the children and the grown-ups, but of more far-reaching consequence, there is the competition among children of the same family in their relationship to the parents.
In childhood this competition, which later in adulthood and in the life outside the family is predominantly an economic one, is mainly operative in the strong emotional love-hate ^relationships among members of the same family. This is not the place to pursue these relationships in detail. This is a field of study by itself. Let it suffice to say here: the sexual inhibitions and debilitations that constitute the most important prerequisites for the existence of the authoritarian family and are the most essential groundwork of the structural formation of the lower middle-class man are compassed with the help of religious fears, which are infused with sexual guilt-feelings and deeply embedded in the emotions.
Thus we arrive at the problem of the relation of religion to the negation of sexual desire. Sexual debility results in a lowering of self-confidence. In one case it is compensated by the brutalization of sexuality, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one’s sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honour and duty, bravery and self-control. But the pathology and emotionality of these psychic attitudes are strongly at variance with the reality of one’s personal behaviour. The man who attains genital satisfaction is honourable, responsible, brave and controlled, without making much of a fuss about it.
These attitudes are ah organic part of his personality. The man whose genitals are weakened, whose sexual structure is full of contradictions, must continually remind himself to control his sexuality, to preserve his sexual dignity, to be brave in the face of temptations, etc. The struggle to resist the temptation to masturbate is a struggle that is experienced by every adolescent and every child, without exception. All the elements of the reactionary man’s structure are developed in this struggle. It is in the lower middle classes that this structure is reinforced most strongly and embedded most deeply.
Every form of mysticism derives its most Active energy and, in part, also it’s content from this compulsory suppression of sexuality. Insofar as the various categories of industrial workers are subject to the same social influences, they too develop corresponding attitudes; yet, owing to the distinct difference in their way of life compared with the lower middle class, sex-affirming forces are far more pronounced in them and also more conscious. The affective anchoring of these structures by means of
unconscious anxiety, their concealment by character traits that appear completely asexual, are responsible for the fact that these deep layers of the personality cannot be reached with rational arguments alone. What importance this statement has for practical sex-politics will be discussed in the last chapter.
To what extent the unconscious struggle against one’s own sexual needs gives rise to metaphysical and mystical thinking cannot be discussed in detail here. We will mention only one example, which is typical of the National Socialist ideology. Again and again we run across series such as this: personal honour, family honour, racial honour, national honour. This sequence is consistent with the various layers in the individual structure. However, it fails to include the socio-economic basis: capitalism, or rather patriarchy; the institution of compulsive marriage; sexual suppression; personal struggle against one’s own sexuality; personal compensatory feeling of honour; etc. The highest position in the series is assumed by the ideology of ‘national honour’, which is identical with the irrational core of nationalism. To understand this, however, it is necessary to turn aside from our main theme again.
Authoritarian society’s fight against the sexuality of children and adolescents, and the consequent struggle in one’s own ego, takes place within the framework of the authoritarian family, which has thus far proven to be the best institution to carry out this fight successfully. Sexual desires naturally urge a person to enter into all kinds of relations with the world, to enter into close contact with it in a vast variety of forms.
If they are suppressed, they have but one possibility: to vent themselves within the narrow framework of the family. Sexual inhibition is the basis of the familial encapsulation of the individual as well as the basis of individual self-consciousness. One must give strict heed to the fact that metaphysical, individual and familial sentimental behaviour are only various aspects of one and the same basic process of sexual negation, whereas reality-oriented, non-mystical thinking moves along with a loose attitude towards the family and is at the very least indifferent to ascetic sexual ideology.
What is important in this connection is that the tie to the authoritarian family is established by means of sexual inhibition; that it is the original biological tie of the child to the mother and also of the mother to the child that forms the barricade to sexual reality and leads to an indissoluble sexual fixation and to an incapacity to eater into other relations. The tie to the mother is the basis of all family ties. In their subjective emotional core the notions of homeland and nation are notions of mother and family. Among the middle classes the mother is the homeland of the child, just as the family is the ‘nation in miniature’.
This will enable us to understand why the National Socialist Goebbels chose the following words as the motto for his ten commandments in the National Socialist almanac of 1932, doubtlessly without knowledge of its deeper connotation: ‘Never forget that your country is the mother of your life.’ On the occasion of ‘Mother’s Day’, 1933, Angriff stated:
Mother’s Day. The national revolution has swept away everything petty 1 Ideas lead again and lead together - family, society, and nation. The idea of Mother’s Day is perfectly suited to honour that which the German idea symbolizes: The German Mother 1 Nowhere does this importance devolve upon the wife and the mother as it does in new Germany. She is the protectress of the family life from which sprouts the forces which will again lead our nation forward. She -the German mother - is the sole bearer of the idea of the German nation. The idea of ‘Mother’ is inseparable from the idea of ‘being German’. Is there anything which can lead us closer together than our mutual honouring of the mother?
No matter how false these sentences are economically and socially speaking, they are true from the point of view of the human structure. Thus, nationalistic sentiments are the direct continuation of the family tie and are likewise rooted in the fixated tie to the mother. This cannot be explained biologically. For this tie to the mother, insofar as it develops into a familial and nationalistic tie, is itself a social product.
In puberty it would make room for other attachments, i.e., natural sexual relations, if sexual restrictions would not cause it to be eternalized. It is as this socially motivated eternalization that it becomes the basis of nationalist feelings in the adult; it is only at this stage that it becomes a reactionary social force. If the nationalist sentiments of the industrial worker are far less pronounced than those of the lower middle-class worker, it is to be ascribed to the different social life and consequent looser family, ties of the former.
Now I hope no one will get upset and reproach us with wanting to ‘biologize’ sociology, for we know perfectly well that the difference in the industrial worker’s family life is also determined by his position in the production process. The question must be asked, nonetheless, why it is that the industrial worker is clearly accessible to internationalism, whereas the lower middle-class worker has such a strong leaning towards nationalism.
In the objective economic situation this factor of diversity can be ascertained only when the above-described connection between the industrial worker’s economic and familial situation is taken into account. It cannot be ascertained in any other way. The strange refusal on the part of Marxist theorists to regard family life as a factor of equal importance as far as the anchoring of the social system is concerned, indeed to regard it as the decisive factor in the formation of the human structure, is to be traced back to their family ties. The fact that the family tie is the most intense and the most emotional, cannot be overrated.
The essential connection between familial and nationalistic ideology can be pursued further. Families are just as cut off from and opposed to one another as nations are. In both cases the ultimate basis for this separation and opposition is an economic one. The lower middle-class family (those of officials, lower-income white-collar workers, etc.) is continually harassed by food and other material worries. Hence the large lower middle-class family’s expansion tendencies also reproduce an imperialistic ideology: ‘The nation needs space and food.’ It is for this reason that the lower middle-class man is especially accessible to imperialistic ideology. He is capable of fully identifying with the personified conception of the nation. It is in this way that familial imperialism is ideologically reproduced in national imperialism.
Goebbels’ statement printed in the brochure Die verfluchten Hakenkreuler (Eher Verlag, Munich, pp. 16 and 18) is of interest in this connection. It was written in answer to the question whether a Jew is a man.
If someone cracks a whip across your mother’s face, would you say to him, Thank you I Is he a man too!? One who does such a thing is not a man - he is a brute! How many worse things has the Jew inflicted upon our mother Germany [italics mine, WR] and still inflicts upon her! He [the Jew] has debauched our race, sapped our energy, undermined our customs and broken our strength . . . The Jew is the graphic demon of decay . . . begins his criminal butchery of people.
One has to know the importance of the idea of castration as punishment for sexual pleasure; one has to comprehend the sexual-psychological background of fantasies of ritual murder as well as the background of anti-Semitism as such; and moreover, one has to appraise correctly the sexual guilt-feelings and sexual anxieties of the reactionary man, to be able to judge just how such unconsciously written sentences impinge upon the unconscious emotionality of the average reader. It is in such statements and their unconscious emotional impact that we find the psychological roots of National Socialism’s anti-Semitism.
They were supposed to be nothing but’ befogging’. Certainly, befogging also. But it was overlooked that, ideologically, fascism was the resistance of a sexually as well as economically deadly sick society to the painful but resolute revolutionary tendencies towards sexual as well as economic freedom, a freedom the very thought of which instills the reactionary man with mortal terror. That is to say: the establishment of economic freedom goes hand in hand with the dissolution of old .institutions (particularly those governing sexual policies), to which the reactionary man and also the industrial worker, insofar as he is a reactionary, are not immediately equal.
More than anything else it is the fear of’ sexual freedom’, conceived of as sexual chaos and sexual dissipation in the mind, of the reactionary thinker, which has a retarding effect upon the yearning to be free of the yoke of economic exploitation. This will be the case only as long as this misconception of sexual freedom prevails. And it can continue to prevail only in consequence of the lack of clarity surrounding these very decisive questions in masses of people. It is precisely for this reason that sex-economy must play an essential role in the ordering of social relations. The more extensively and deeply the reactionary structure has taken hold of the toiling masses, the more decisive is the importance of the sex-economic work of educating the masses of the people to assume social responsibility.
In this interplay between economic and structural factors, it is the authoritarian family that represents the foremost and most essential source of reproduction of every kind of reactionary thinking; it is a factory where reactionary ideology and reactionary structures are produced. Hence, the ‘safeguarding of the family’, i.e., of the authoritarian and large family, is the first cultural precept of every reactionary policy. This is what is essentially concealed behind the phrase ‘safeguarding of the state, culture and civilization’.
An NSDAP election proclamation for the presidential election of 1932 (Adolf Hitler: "Mein Programm") stated:
By virtue of her nature and destiny, woman is man’s mate. Thus both man and woman are companions in life as well as companions in work. Just as the economic development over the centuries has changed man’s sphere of work, it is only logical that it has also changed woman’s sphere. Over and above the necessity of working together, it is man’s and woman’s duty to preserve man himself. In this most noble mission of the sexes, we also discover the basis of their individual talents, which Providence, in its eternal wisdom, gave to both of them immutably.
Thus, it is the highest task to make the founding of a family possible to the mates in life and companions in work. Its final destruction would mean the end of every form of higher humanity. No matter how far woman’s sphere of activity can be stretched, the ultimate aim of a truly organic and logical development must always be the creation of a family. It is the smallest but most valuable unit in the complete structure of the state. Work honours both man and woman. But the child exalts the woman.
Under the heading ‘Preservation of the Peasantry Means the Preservation of the German Nation’, the same proclamation states: ‘In the preservation and encouragement of a healthy peasantry, I further see the best safeguard against social woes as well as against the racial decay of our people.’
In this respect the traditional family tie of the peasantry must not be forgotten if one does not want to make an error. It continues;
It is my belief that, to build up its resistance, a people must not live solely in accordance with rational principles; it also needs spiritual and religious support. The poisoning and disintegration of the national body by the events of our cultural Bolshevism are almost more disastrous than the effect of political and economic communism.
As a party that, like Italian fascism, owed its initial success to the interests of big landowners, the NSDAP had to win over the small and medium farmers, had to establish a social basis for itself in them. In this, naturally, it could not openly promote the interests of big landowners in its propaganda, but had to direct its appeal to the small farmers, specifically to the structures produced in them by the overlapping of the family and economic situation.
Only with respect to this element of the lower middle class is the sentence valid that man arid woman are companions in work. It does not apply to the body of industrial workers. Even to the peasant it applies only formally, for in reality the peasant’s wife is the peasant’s servant. The prototype and realization of the fascist ideology of the hierarchic organization of the state is to be found in the hierarchic organization of the peasant family.
The peasant family is a nation in miniature, and every member of this family is identified with this miniature nation. Thus, the groundwork for the absorption of a grand imperialistic ideology is present in the peasantry and in the lower middle class where an entire family is engaged in a small enterprise. The idolization of motherhood is conspicuous in both cases. How is this idolization related to reactionary sexual politics?