The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

Let us summarize first the concepts of Marx and Engels concerning the development of "Communist society."
Engels and Lenin on self-regulation. In his most popular work, THE ORIGIN OF THE FAMILY, PRIVATE
PROPERTY, AND THE STATE, Engels destroyed the belief in the "absolute and eternal state," that is, in our
context, in the indispensability of authoritarian leadership of society. Based on Lewis Morgan's studies of the
organization of clan society, he arrived at the following conclusion: The state has not always been in existence.
There have been societies which functioned without it, which had no trace of state or state power. When society
split into classes, when the class differences threatened the existence of the total society, then state power
developed of necessity. Society rapidly approached a stage in the development of production at which the
existence of classes has not only ceased to be a necessity but becomes an actual hindrance to the development of
production. "They will disappear as inevitably as they developed at an earlier stage. Along with them, the state
will inevitably disappear. A [204] society which organizes production anew on the basis of a free and equal
association of the producers will relegate the whole state machine to where it will then belong: in the museum of
antiquities, side by side with the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (italics mine—W.R.).
In clan society, there was voluntary association and self-regulation of social life 3 ; with the development of
classes, the state arose, for the purpose of "checking the class differences" and of safeguarding the continued
existence of society. Soon, and "as a rule," it entered the service of the "most powerful, economically ruling class
which, with the help of the state also became the political ruling class" and thus acquired new means of
suppressing and exploiting the suppressed class. What, then, takes the place of the state's authoritarian leadership
from above and of obedience from below when the social revolution wins?
Engels' picture of the transition to the new social order was the following: The proletariat "seizes the power of
the state" and brings the means of production, FOR THE TIME BEING, under state ownership. In so doing, it
abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes class differences and, also, "THE STATE AS STATE." Up to that time,
the state had been the official representation of the total society; this, however, only insofar as it was the state of
that class which for its time represented society as a whole: in antiquity the slave-owning citizens, in the middle
ages the feudal nobility, later on the bourgeoisie. Once the state actually becomes the representation of total
society, it makes itself superfluous. This formulation of Engels becomes understandable when one considers what
the state had become: from an agent which held the class society together it had become the instrument of the
economically powerful class for the domination of the economically weaker class. For, continues Engels, as soon
as there is no longer any class to be kept in suppression, as soon as, together with class rule and the struggle for
individual existence which was caused by the chaos of production, the resulting excesses and clashes are
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3 Cf. e.g., Malinowski's reports on the work discipline among the matriarchal Trobrianders; discussed in Reich, DER EINBRUCH DER SEXUALMORAL.
[205] eliminated, there is nothing left to suppress which would make necessary a special suppressive power such
as the state. The first act in which the state appears as the representation of the total society, that is, the taking
over of the means of production in the name of society, is also its last independent act as "state." From then on,
the "participation of a state power in social conditions . . . becomes superfluous in one field after another and
finally ceases of itself." GOVERNMENT OVER PERSONS IS REPLACED BY THE ADMINISTRATION OF
THINGS AND OF PRODUCTION PROCESSES. The state is not "abolished," it "withers away."
Lenin, in STATE AND REVOLUTION, amplified as follows: At first, the capitalist state (state apparatus) is by no
means merely taken over or changed, it is "smashed"; this apparatus, and the capitalistic police, the capitalistic
bureaucracy, are replaced by the "power apparatus of the proletariat" and the peasants and other working people
affiliated with it. This apparatus is still a suppressive apparatus, but now there is no longer a majority of workers
suppressed by a minority of capital owners, but, conversely, the minority of the previous rulers is kept in check
by the majority of working people. This is what is called the "dictatorship of the proletariat."
The "withering away of the state" as described by Engels, then, is preceded by the abolition of the capitalistic
and the establishment of the "revolutionary proletarian state apparatus." Lenin described in some detail why this