The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

eactionary family politics is the decisive factor; it is much more important than the factors stressed previously,
namely, the interest in an industrial reserve army and the interest in cannon fodder for imperialistic war. The
argument of the industrial reserve army became practically meaningless during the economic crisis, when there
were many millions of unemployed in Germany alone, and over forty million all over the world. When political
reaction keeps repeating that the maintenance of the abortion paragraph is necessary in the interest of the family
and the "moral order," we can no longer doubt that the "authoritarian family" and "the morality of moralism" are
reactionary forces of decisive weight. We cannot shrug them off as unimportant. It is a matter of giving women a
fixation on the authoritarian family by means of suppressing their sexual needs; a matter of the reactionary
influence of these women on their men; of safeguarding the effects of reactionary sex propaganda on the millions
of women who are sexually suppressed and who tolerate this suppression. It is a great mistake not to follow
reaction to wherever it exerts its influence. It must be beaten precisely where it defends its system.
The interest in the authoritarian family as an institution which "preserves the state" ranks first in every aspect of
reactionary sex politics. It is identical with the interest of the middle class in which the family is—or rather used
to be—also the economic unit.
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1 This is the objective imperialistic function of the large family.
[92] It is from this standpoint that fascist ideology views state and society, economics and politics. It is also from
this standpoint that reactionary sexology considers the state as an "organic whole." To the working individuals in
modern society, family and social existence are not identical; the family is not economically rooted. For this
reason, they are able to recognize the "state" as a compulsive social institution. In their sexology and sexeconomy
the "biological" viewpoint that the state is an "organic whole" is not valid. The extent to which the
working individual is accessible to such a reactionary concept is determined by his authoritarian family
upbringing. The lower middle classes and the peasantry would be more inclined to recognize their social
responsibility if their family situation were not so interwoven with their economic position.
During the world economic crisis, with the economic ruin of many thousands of small businesses, this
connection between family situation and economic situation was loosened. But the much-talked-about tradition of
the lower middle classes, that is, their fixation on the authoritarian family, still had its effects. For this reason,
they were much more accessible to the fascist ideology of the "large family" than to the revolutionary concept of
birth control; this all the more because the revolutionary movement failed to clarify this question and to put it in
the forefront.
As unequivocal as this fact is, we would go wrong if we did not consider it in connection with other,
contradictory facts. We must not overlook the contradictions in the sexually inhibited individual. To begin with,
there is the decisive contradiction between sex-moralistic thinking and feeling on the one hand and concrete
sexual living conditions on the other. For example: In Western Germany, there were a great many birth control
leagues, largely of a "Socialist" character. During the Wolf-Kienle campaign in 1931, a great many women who
voted Center or NSDAP party were for the abolition of the abortion paragraph while their own parties were
violently against it. These women voted for sex-economic birth control because they wanted to safeguard their
sexual gratification. But at the same time they voted for their parties because, unaware of the contradiction, they
had in them-[93]selves the reactionary ideology of "pure motherhood," of the antithesis of motherhood and
sexuality, in brief, authoritarian ideology. True, these women knew nothing of the sociological role of the
authoritarian family in dictatorship, but they were under the influence of the sex politics of political reaction: they
affirmed birth control but were afraid of the responsibility imposed on them by a revolutionary world.
Sexual reaction, indeed, utilized sexual anxiety for its own purposes in every possible way. In the absence of a
sex-economic counter-propaganda, the average middle-class woman with a Christian or Nationalist orientation
was, of course, impressed by such propaganda as the following. In 1918, the "Association for the Fight against
Bolshevism" issued a poster as follows: