The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

now already within the capacity of the average city dweller and can well be performed for "workingmen's wages." Let us organize
large-scale production, starting from what capitalism has already created; we workers ourselves, relying on our own experience as
workers, establishing a strict, iron discipline, supported by the state power of the armed workers, shall reduce the role of the state
officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, moderately paid "managers" (of course, with technical
knowledge of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, with this we can and must begin when carrying through a
proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large-scale production, of itself leads to the gradual "withering away" of all
bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of a new order, an order without quotation marks, an order which has nothing to do with wage
slavery [italics mine.—W.R.], an order in which the more and more simplified functions of control and accounting will be performed
by each in turn, will then become a habit, and will finally die out as special functions of a special stratum of the population.
Lenin overlooked the dangers of the new state officialdom. He seemed to believe that the officials from the
proletariat would not misuse their power but would lead the workers to independence. He overlooked the abysmal
biopathy of human structure, because he did not know it.
A fact which has been given scant attention in sociological literature is the fact that Lenin, in his main work on
the revolution, put the main emphasis not on the "overthrow of the bour-[213]geoisie" but on the tasks arising
afterwards: the substitution of the proletarian state for the capitalist state apparatus and the substitution of the selfregulation
of society for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Following the Soviet literature after 1937, one found
that what was in the center of Soviet endeavors was not the weakening but the strengthening of the proletarian
state apparatus. The necessity of its eventual replacement by self-regulation was no longer even mentioned. This
point is of decisive significance for an understanding of the Soviet Union. It is not without reason that it assumes
such an important place in Lenin's main work on the state. It is and remains the life system of any genuine social
democracy. No politician mentions it.
4. THE PROGRAM OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE
SOVIET UNION, 1919
Russian "social democracy" under Lenin grew out of Russian despotism. The program of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union of 1919, two years after the revolution, shows the true democratic character of its endeavors.
It demands a state power which is to prevent a return of despotism and which is to safeguard the establishment of
free self-government of the masses. But in no way does it hint at the nature of people's incapacity for freedom, at
their biopathic fear of freedom or their biopathic sexual structure. The sex-revolutionary laws of 1917 to 1920
were in the right direction, that of a recognition of human biological functioning. But they remained bogged
down in legal formalism, as I have shown in my book, THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION. It is at this point that the
alteration of human structure suffered shipwreck, and with it the fulfilment of the democratic program. This
catastrophic failure of a gigantic social endeavor should be a lesson to any new democratic-revolutionary
movement: No freedom program has any chance of success without an alteration of human sexual structure.
The program of the Communist party was the following: 4
________
4 Italics, throughout, are mine. Cf. also the principle of local self-government in the United States after the emancipation of 1776.
[214] 1. The bourgeois republics, even in their most democratic forms . . . inevitably remained a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, an
apparatus for the exploitation and suppression of the great majority of working people by a handful of capitalists; this for the simple
reason that the private ownership of the means of production continued to exist. In contradistinction, the proletarian or Soviet
democracy changed the mass organization precisely of the classes which were suppressed by capitalism, the proletarians and poor
peasants, the semi-proletarians, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, making them the only basis of the total state
apparatus, the local as well as the central, and from the bottom up. It is precisely in this manner that the Soviet state, to an
incomparably greater extent than was possible anywhere else, made local and provincial self-government, without any
superimposed authority, a reality.
The task of the party is to work indefatigably on the complete establishment of this highest type of democracy, which, in order to
function properly, requires constant raising of the cultural level, of the organization and of the independence of the masses.