The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

hours. To try to "reach the masses" by arranging festivities was, therefore, a miscalculation, because it appealed
to the conservative tendencies in the workers. In such methods, reactionary fascism was far more successful. The
budding revolutionary forms of living were not being developed. The "evening dress" which a worker's wife put
on for such a "festivity" contained more truth about the reactionary structure of the worker than hundreds of
learned articles. The evening dress and the family beer parties are, after all, only the external manifestations of a
structural process in the worker, a sign that the soil was already prepared for the acceptance of National Socialist
propaganda. When the Fascist then promised "abolition of the proletariat" and was successful in such propaganda,
his success, in ninety out of a hundred cases, was due not to his economic platform but to the "evening dress."
These aspects of everyday living deserve much more attention. It is they that form, in a concrete manner, the
social process, be it progress or reaction, and not the [59] political slogans which create only a fleeting
enthusiasm. Here waits a field for fruitful and important work. The revolutionary mass propaganda in Germany
was restricted almost exclusively to the propaganda "against hunger." As important as this argument is, it proved
too narrow. The youthful worker, for example, has innumerable worries of a sexual and cultural nature as soon as
he has stilled his hunger to a degree. True, the fight against hunger is of primary importance, but the backstage
processes of human life must also be ruthlessly placed in the spotlight of the comedy in which we are both
spectators and actors.
If that were done the working people would show themselves infinitely creative in their attempt to develop their
own concepts and their own natural forms of living. No matter how infested they might be with reactionary
attitudes, social comprehension of their everyday life would give them an invincible impetus. Detailed and
concrete work on this problem is imperative; it will safeguard the victory of the revolution. To object that such a
proposition is an illusion means failure to grasp the problem. This fight for the development of work-democratic
living means a militant turning away from what is reactionary and the development of a mass culture which alone
will guarantee lasting peace. As long as social irresponsibility outweighs social responsibility in the worker he
will hardly learn revolutionary, that is, rational behavior. This mass-psychological work, furthermore, is
indispensable for still another reason.
The debasement of manual work—which makes the manual worker ape the reactionary white-collar worker—is
the mass-psychological strength of fascism when it tries to reach the workers. Fascism promises the abolition of
classes, that is, doing away with one's being a proletarian; in this manner, it appeals to the social inferiority
feeling of the manual worker. Workers which have only recently migrated from the country to the city still have
the family ideology of the peasant, which, as we have shown, is one of the most fertile soils for imperialistic
nationalist ideology. There is, in addition, an ideological process which thus far has been neglected in judging the
chances of the revolutionary move-[60]ment in countries with a high industrial development on the one hand and
those with a low industrial development on the other.
Kautsky (SOZIALE REVOLUTION, 2. Aufl, p. 59-60) found that the worker in highly industrialized England was
politically backward compared with the worker in industrially little developed Russia. The political events of the
past thirty years the world over leave no doubt that revolutionary movements develop more readily in countries
with a low industrial development as is shown, e.g., by a comparison of China, Mexico, and India on the one
hand and England, America, and Germany on the other. This in spite of an older, better trained and organized
labor movement in the last mentioned countries. Leaving out of consideration the bureaucratization of the labor
movement—which in itself is a pathological symptom—one must ask oneself what is the reason for the
extraordinary anchoring of conservatism in the Social Democracy and the trade unions of the Western countries.
The mass-psychological basis of Social Democracy is the conservative structure of its followers. As in fascism,
the problem is not so much one of the politics of the party leadership as one of the mass-psychological basis in
the workers. I shall point out only a few significant facts:
In early capitalism, there was not only a sharp cleavage line between bourgeoisie and proletariat but an equally
sharp ideological, in especial, structural demarcation. The lack of any social politics, the exhausting workday of
sixteen or eighteen hours, the generally low living standard of the industrial workers (as classically described by