The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

2. In contradistinction to bourgeois democracy, which obfuscates the class character of its state, the Soviets openly acknowledge
that every state, inevitably, must have a class character 5 as long as the division of society into classes, and with that any state power,
has not definitely disappeared. It is inherent in the Soviet state to suppress the resistance of the exploiters; since the Soviet
constitution believes that every freedom is a fraud if it is at variance with the liberation of work from the pressure of capital, it does
not shrink from depriving the exploiters of political rights.
The task of the party of the proletariat is to suppress incessantly the resistance of the exploiters, to fight, ideologically, the deeplyrooted
prejudices concerning the absolute character of the bourgeois rights and freedoms, and to make clear that the deprivation of
political rights and any restriction of freedom are nothing but transitory means of fighting the attempts of the exploiters to maintain
their privileges or to re-establish them. To the extent to which the objective possibilities
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5 This important democratic point of view was lost sight of later on. The emphasis came to be on the "state," without the fact being mentioned that "class
society" is an important characteristic of any state apparatus. For if there were no classes, ruling and suppressed, there would also be no state apparatus, but a
simple apparatus of social administration.
[215] of exploitation disappear will also the necessity of these transitory measures disappear, and the party will strive for their
reduction and complete abolition.
3. Bourgeois democracy limited itself to extending, in a formal way, the political rights and freedoms, such as the freedom of
assembly and freedom of the press, to all citizens. In reality, however, administrative policy and, even to a greater extent, the
economic slavery of the workers under bourgeois democracy made it impossible for the people to enjoy these rights and freedoms to
any considerable extent.
In contradistinction, proletarian democracy replaces the formal proclamation of rights and freedoms by their actual establishment,
and primarily for those classes who were suppressed by capitalism, that is, the proletariat and the peasantry. To that end, the Soviets
expropriate printing establishments, paper stocks, etc., and put them at the exclusive disposal of the workers and their organizations.
The task of the Communist party of the Soviet Union is to provide democratic rights and freedoms to ever larger masses of working
people and to provide ever increasing economic possibilities for these rights and freedoms.
4. Bourgeois democracy, for centuries, proclaimed the equality of all people, regardless of sex, religion, race and nationality, but
capitalism everywhere prevented this equality from becoming a reality, and in its imperialistic stage led to an acute intensification of
the suppression of nationalities and races. Only because the power of the Soviets is the power of the working people, did it succeed,
for the first time in the history of world, in making this equality a reality, in all fields, including the eradication of the last traces of
inequality between man and woman in the field of marriage and family legislation.
The task of the party is at present primarily an educational one; all traces of the previous inequality and previous prejudice,
particularly among the backward strata of the proletariat and the peasantry, must be definitively eradicated.
The party, not content with a formal equality of the woman, strives to free her from the burdens of the obsolete, domestic economy
by replacing it by communes, public eating places, central laundries, nurseries, etc.
5. The Soviet power secures for the working masses, to an incomparably higher degree than was possible under bourgeois
democracy and parliamentarism, the possibility of electing and recalling deputies [216] in a manner most easily accessible to
workers and peasants; at the same time, it eliminates the negative aspects of parliamentarism, especially the separation of legislative
and executive power, and the lack of any bonds between the representative bodies and the masses.
The Soviet state takes the state apparatus to the people also by the fact that the election unit and the cell of the state is not the
district of domicile, but the unit of production (mine, factory, etc.).
It is the task of the party to bring about a still closer cooperation between the organs of power and the masses of workers by an ever
stricter and more complete realization of democracy by the action of the masses, and particularly by the introduction of
responsibility and obligatory accounting of officials concerning their activities.
6. While bourgeois democracy—its protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—made the army a tool of the ruling class and
separated the army from the working people, setting it over against them, and made the exercise of their political rights difficult or
impossible to the soldiers, the Soviets, on the other hand, combine the workers and soldiers on the basis of complete equality and
common interests. It is the task of the part to defend and further develop this unity of the workers and soldiers in the Soviets, and to
consolidate the bonds between the armed forces and the organizations of the proletariat.
7. The urban industrial proletariat, being the most concentrated, well-informed and battle-tested part of the working masses, has had
a leading role in the whole revolution, as was shown in the development of the Soviets as well as in the whole course of their
development into government organs. This leading role is reflected in the Soviet constitution in certain privileges which are granted
the industrial proletariat as compared with the less organized petit-bourgeois masses of the country. The Communist party of the
Soviet Union has to make clear the fact that these privileges, which are due to the difficulties of socialist organization in the open
country, are of a transitory nature.
8. It was only due to the Soviet organization of the state that the proletarian revolution was capable of smashing and completely