The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

antiquity, from which, over a period of thousands of years, a useful sexual order has developed."
Compulsive family and marriage life are also attacked by the proclamation of full freedom in sexual intercourse.
The well-known Communist Smidowitch published a statement on sexual morality 3 of adolescents, somewhat
like the following:
1. Every student of the workers' faculty, including those not of age, is entitled and obliged to satisfy his sexual
needs.
2. When a man desires a girl, be it a student, a worker or even
________
2 "Welt vor dem Abgrund"—"Der Einfluss des russischen Kulturbolschewismus auf die anderen Völker." Deutscher Volkskalender, 1932.
3 These remarks of Smidowitch were actually meant ironically and implied a criticism of adolescent sex life.
[96] a schoolgirl, the girl has to submit to his wishes, otherwise she is considered bourgeois and unworthy of
calling herself a Communist.
The Pravda writes openly, "With us, there are only sexual relationships between man and woman, we do not
recognize love, love is only something psychological; with us, only physiology counts." In keeping with this
Communist attitude, every woman or girl is under obligation to satisfy the sexual desire of the men. Since they do
not do this altogether voluntarily, rape has become a veritable plague in Soviet Russia.
Such lies by the political reaction cannot be made ineffective by being unmasked as lies, nor by protestations
such as that one is just as "moral" as the reactionaries, that the revolution does not destroy the authoritarian family
and its moralism, etc. The fact is that the revolution brings with it a change in sexual living, that the old
compulsive order disintegrates. One also cannot arrive at a sex-economic orientation if one tolerates in one's own
camp ascetic attitudes toward these questions. This we shall have to discuss later.
Revolutionary sex politics failed to explain continuously the sex-economic regulation of sexual life and to
comprehend and counteract women's fear of sexual health; it failed, furthermore, to create clarity in its own rank
and file by consistently and clearly distinguishing reactionary from sex-economic concepts. Experience shows
that the average individual will affirm the sex-economic regulation of sexual life if he is made to understand it.
It is from the concepts of political reaction—which are based economically on the economic conditions of the
lower middle classes and ideologically on mysticism—that the anti-revolutionary movement originates. The core
of the cultural politics of political reaction is the sexual question. It follows that the core of revolutionary cultural
politics also must be the sexual question.
Sex-economy gives the political answer to the chaos which was created by the conflict between compulsive
morality and sexual libertinism.
[97]
CHAPTER VI
ORGANIZED MYSTICISM: THE
INTERNATIONAL ANTISEXUAL
ORGANIZATION
1. THE INTEREST IN THE CHURCH
If we are to formulate the tasks of sex-economic mental hygiene, we must pay the closest attention to the modes
of attack and defense of political reaction on the front of cultural politics. We cannot do away with the mystical
slogans of reaction by calling them "diversion manoeuvres." As we have said: If reaction is successful with a
certain ideological propaganda, this success cannot be due simply to "obfuscation"; rather, in each and every
instance there must be a mass-psychological problem. There must be in the masses an as yet unrecognized