In the individual structures of the masses of the lower middle class, national and familial ties coincide. These ties are especially intensified by a process that not only runs parallel to it but is actually derived from it. From the standpoint of the masses, the nationalistic fuhrer is the personification of the nation. Only insofar as this fuhrer actually personifies the nation in conformity with the national sentiments of the masses does a personal tie to him develop. Insofar as he knows how to arouse emotional family ties in the individuals of the masses, he is also an authoritarian father figure.
He attracts all the emotional attitudes that at one time were meant for the strict but also protecting and impressive father (impressive in the child’s eyes). In discussions with National Socialist enthusiasts about the untenability and contradictoriness of the NSDAP programme, one often heard it said that Hitler understood all of that much better - ‘he would manage everything all right’. Here we have a clear expression of the child’s need for the protective attitude of the father. In terms of social reality it is this need for protection on the part of the masses of the people that enables the dictator ‘to manage everything’. This attitude on the part of masses of people impedes social self-administration, i.e., rational independence and cooperation. No genuine democracy can or should build upon it.
Even more essential, however, is the identification of the individuals in the masses with the ‘fuhrer’. The more helpless the ‘mass-individual’ has become, owing to his upbringing, the more pronounced is his identification with the fuhrer, and the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling at one with the fuhrer. This inclination to identify is the psychological basis of national narcissism, i.e., of the self-confidence that individual man derives from the ‘greatness of the nation’.
The reactionary lower middle-class man perceives himself in the fuhrer, in the authoritarian state. On the basis of this identification he feels himself to be a defender of the ‘national heritage’, of the ‘nation’, which does not prevent him, likewise on the basis of this identification, from simultaneously despising ‘the masses’ and confronting them as an individual. The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalted idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant fuhrer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realize how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance.
The worker who is conscious of his skills - he, in short, who has rid himself of his submissive structure, who identifies with his work and not with the fuhrer, with the international working masses and not with the national homeland - represents the opposite of this. He feels himself to be a leader, not on the basis of his identification with the fuhrer, but on the basis of his consciousness of performing work that is vitally necessary for society’s existence.
What are the emotional forces that are at work here? This is not difficult to answer. The emotions by which this fundamentally different mass-psychological type is motivated are the same as those that are to be found in the nationalists. It is merely the content of that which excites the emotions that is different. The need to identify is the same, but the objects of identification are different, namely fellow workers and not the fuhrer, one’s own work and not an illusion, the working men of the earth and not the family.
In short, international consciousness of one’s skills is opposed to mysticism and nationalism. But this certainly does not imply a neglect of the liberated worker’s self-confidence; it is the reactionary man who begins to rave about’ service to the community’, and’ general welfare comes before personal welfare’, at a time of crisis. It merely implies that the self-confidence of the liberated worker is derived from the consciousness of his skills.
During the past fifteen years we have been confronted with a fact which is difficult to comprehend: Economically, society is divided into sharply defined social classes and occupations. According to the purely economic point of view, the social ideology is derived from the specific social situation. It follows from this that the specific ideology of a class would more or less have to correspond to the socio-economic situation of that class.
In keeping with their collective working habits, the industrial workers would have to develop a stronger collective feeling, while the small businessmen would have to develop a stronger individualism. The employees of large concerns would have to have a collective feeling similar to that of the industrial workers. But we have already seen that psychic structure and social situation seldom coincide. We draw a distinction between the
responsible worker who is conscious of his skills and the mystical-nationalistic reactionary subject. We meet with both types in every social and professional class. There are millions of reactionary industrial workers and there are just as many teachers and physicians who are conscious of their skills and champion the cause of freedom. Hence, there is no simple mechanistic connection between social situation and character structure.
The social situation is only the external condition that has an influence on the ideological process in the individual. The instinctual drives through which the various social influences gain exclusive control over the emotions are now to be investigated. To begin with, this much is clear: Hunger is not one of them; at least, it is not the decisive factor. If it were, the international revolution would have followed upon the world crisis of 1929-33. This is a sound statement, no matter how dangerous it may be to antiquated, purely economic points of view.
When psychoanalysts unversed in sociology try to explain social revolution as an ‘infantile revolt against the father’, they have in mind the ‘revolutionary’, who comes from intellectual circles. This is indeed the case there. But it does not apply to the industrial workers. The paternal suppression of children among the working class is not less severe, indeed, it is sometimes more brutal than it is among the lower middle class.
This is not the issue. That which specifically distinguishes these two classes is found in their modes of production and the attitude towards sex which derives from these modes. The point is this: Sexuality is suppressed by the parents among the industrial workers also. But the contradictions to which the children of industrial workers are subjected don’t exist in the lower middle class. Among the lower middle class it is only sexuality that is suppressed.
The sexual activity of this class is a pure expression of the contradiction between sexual drive and sexual inhibition. This is not the case among the industrial workers. Along with their moralistic ideology the industrial workers have their own - in some cases more and in others less pronounced - sexual views, which are diametrically opposed to the moralistic ideology. Moreover, there is the influence exercised by their living conditions and their close association in their work. All of this runs counter to their moralistic sexual ideology.
Accordingly, the average industrial worker differs from the average lower middle-class worker by his open and untrammelled attitude towards sexuality, no matter how muddled and conservative he might be otherwise. He is incomparably more accessible to sex-economic views than the typical lower middle-class worker is. And it is precisely the absence of those attitudes that are central to national socialistic and clerical ideology that makes him more accessible: identification with the authoritarian state-power, with the ‘supreme fuhrer’, with the nation. This, too, is proof of the fact that the basic elements of National Socialist ideology have a sex-economic origin.
Owing to his individualistic economy and to the extreme isolation of his family situation, the small farmer is very accessible to the ideology of political reaction. This is the reason for the cleavage between social situation and ideology. Characterized by the strictest practice of patriarchy and the morality corresponding to it, the small farmer nonetheless develops natural - even if distorted - forms in his sexuality. Just as in the case of the industrial workers - in contrast to the lower middle-class workers - farm youths begin to have sexual intercourse at an early age; owing to the strict patriarchal education,
however, the youth is sexually very disturbed or even brutal; sexuality is practised in secret; sexual frigidity is the rule among girls; sexual murder and brutal jealousy, as well as enslavement of the women, are typical sexual occurrences among the peasantry. Hysteria is nowhere so rampant as it is in the country. Patriarchal marriage is the final aim of rural upbringing, rigidly dictated by rural economy.
An ideologic process has begun to take shape among the industrial workers during the last decades. The material manifestations of this process are most evident in the pure culture of the workers’ aristocracy, but they are also to be noted among the average industrial worker. The industrial workers of the twentieth century are not the nineteenth-century proletariat of Karl Marx’s time. To a very large extent they have accepted the conventions and views of the bourgeois layers of society.
To be sure, formal bourgeois democracy did not eliminate economic distinctions any more than it did away with racial prejudices. Yet the social tendencies that are gaining ground within its compass have obliterated the structural and ideologic boundaries among the various social classes. The industrial workers of England, America, Scandinavia, Germany, are becoming more and more bourgeois. To understand how fascism infiltrates the working classes, has to be traced from bourgeois democracy to the ‘emergency powers act’ to the suspension of parliament to open fascist dictatorship.