Fascism according to....

But what did fascism mean to the Frankfurt School? A decade earlier: Wilhelm Reich, in his 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism: ascribed its rise to sexual repression. He wrote: 

Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyses the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties"

The family was not for Reich, as it had been for Hegel, an autonomous zone that offered resistance to the state, but rather an authoritarian miniature state that prepared the child for later subordination. 

The Frankfurt School’s leading psychoanalytical thinker Erich Fromm agreed with much of Reich’s analysis, though worried it had too little empirical continuation and focused too much on genital sexuality. He contended that the rise of fascism was to do with sadomasochism. In his essay ‘Social Psychological Aspects: he distinguished the ‘revolutionary' character from the ‘masochist’. The former had ego strength and sought to change his destiny, the latter submitted to his fate, turning over his destiny to a higher power. Fromm followed Freud in taking sadism to be of the same coin as masochism: the sadist turned himself against those who showed signs of weakness. The sadomasochistic social character was essential for authoritarian society, involving as it did deference to those above and contempt for those below. For Fromm, the sadomasochist was characterised by anal strivings for order, punctuality and frugality: this was the kind of social character a fascist would want in spades if he wanted to make the trams run on time or murder Jews on an industrial scale. 

But all this said little about why fascism arose in Germany in particular. During the 1930s, Fromm developed an account of what happened that enriched his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, published after he had left the Institute. Fromm argued that, as Germany shifted from early to monopoly capitalism, the social character of the lower middle class persisted. The petit bourgeoisie, who were the icons of early capitalism, owning and managing their own businesses, became anomalies under corporate forms of capitalism. This class had been the unwitting heroes of the story Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: it was the parsimonious, pleasure-denying, duty bound diameters who predominated under early capitalism. Now they were politically powerless, economically crushed and spiritually alienated in the Weimar Republic. Sadomasochistically, they yearned not to change their own destiny but to yield to the authority that would do that for them. ‘The desire for authority is channelled towards the strong leader, while other specific father figures become the objects of the rebellion; wrote From in ‘Psychoanalytic
Characterology and its Relevance for Social Psychology‘ in 1932. By 1941, when he came to write Escape from Freedom. Fromm was to cast this sadomasochistic yearning on the part of the German petit bourgeois for a strong leader as part of a grand historical dialectical process. The process of becoming freed from authority (whether the authority of God or of social convention) resulted. Fromm argued, in a kind of anguish or hopelessness akin to what infants feel during child development. 

He thought that freedom from authority can be experienced as crushing and terrifying. Fromm distinguished between negative and positive freedom --freedom from and freedom to. The responsibility conferred on humans by having freedom from authority can be unbearable unless we are able to exercise our positive freedom creatively. Fromm’s thought connected with the near contemporaneous account of the anguish of freedom as experienced in the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's 1938 novel Nausea. But while Sartre took the nauseating experience of freedom to be a human fact, Fromm set it in a historical, dialectical context. But taking the responsibility to exercise positive freedom creatively was precisely what the weak. ego-depleted social character was incapable of doing. Instead, in order to achieve spiritual security and escape from the unbearable burden of freedom. the frightened individual replaced one form of authority with another. 

Fromm wrote: ‘The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self. Hence Hitler: the Fuhrer‘s authoritarian personality not only made him want to rule over Germany in the name of a higher if fictional authority (the German master race) but also made him appealing for an insecure middle class. Fromm argued that this fear of freedom was not a peculiarly fascist one, but threatened the basis of democracy in every modern state. Indeed, at the outset of Escape from Freedom. he quoted with approval the words of the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. ‘The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon the Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here- within ourselves and our institutions.
Fromm's view of fascism as premised on the sadomasochism of its supporters became Frankfurt School orthodox. This ideology, wrote Marcuse in 1934, exhibits the status quo but with a radical transvaluation of values: unhappiness is turned into grace, misery into blessing, poverty into destiny.

The German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, writing in exile in lunch, dissented from this Frankfurt School orthodoxy, which took Nazism to be a symptom of a desire for an authority figure. In his 1935 book Heritage of Our Times, Bloch instead argued that fascism was a perverted religious movement that won people over with anachronistic kitsch and quasi utopian ideas about the wonders of a future Reich.’ Fascism was, as a result, a paradox, being both ancient and modem: more precisely it was a system that used a tradition hostile to capitalism for the preservation of capitalism. For Bloch, as for Walter Benjamin, fascism was a cultural synthesis that contained both anti-capitalist and utopian aspects. The Frankfurt School failed to emphasise in its analysis of fascism what Benjamin called the ‘aestheticisation of politics’. It fell to Benjamin, Bloch and Slegfried Kracauer to reflect on the Nazi deployment of myths, symbols, parades and demonstrations to command support. Benjamin wrote in 1936 that mankind’s self alienation had ‘reached such a degree that it can contemplate its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. By mankind he meant that part of it had succumbed to the delusive dreams of the Italian futurist poet and fascist Filippo Marinetti who saw war as beautiful.

These conflicting ideas fed into a dispute between two of the leading Frankfurt School theoristsof Fascism, Friedrich Pollack and Franz Neumann. Pollock had long argued that there was such a thing as state capitalism, and that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had not abolished capitalism,but rather by means of state planning, the encouragement of technological innovation and the boost to industry from increased military spending, had made It possible to defer its contradictions. Perhaps. hypothesized Pollock pessimistically, Hitler and Stalin had made the capitalist system vulnerable even during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This in itself was heretical: it certainly flew in the face of Henryk Grossman's account wherein capitalism was destined to founder on Its own contradictions. Neumann demurred. For him ‘state capitalism’ was a contradiction in terms. If the state became the sole owner of the means of production it stopped capitalism functioning properly. Rather, Neumann believed that what was happening in Germany under Nazi rule was ‘that the antagonisms of capitalism are operating at a higher and, therefore, more dangerous level. even if these antagonisms are covered by bureaucratic apparatus and by the ideology of the people’s community’. What Neumann called Hitler’s totalitarian monopoly capitalism was perhaps even more prone to crisis than liberal monopoly capitalism. 

But even Neumann, who was not especially amenable to psycho-social or aesthetic explanations of Hitler’s success, still less to the Idea that sadomasochism supposedly characterized his key supporters could write in his 1942 book Behemoth :‘Charismatic rule has long been neglected and ridiculed, but apparently it has deep roots and becomes a powerful stimulus once the proper psychological and social conditions are set. The leader's charismatic power is not a mere phantasm none can doubt that millions believe in it".  But what proved disastrous for the Nazis was that they made the error of believing their own publicity. Adorno recognised as much when he wrote this passage during the last days of the Second World War: 

They [the Nazi leaders] saw nothing before them except cheering assemblies and frightened negotiators: this blocked their view of the objective power of a greater mass of capital. It was immanent revenge on Hitler that he, the executioner of liberal society, was yet in his own state of consciousness too liberal to perceive how industrial potential outside Germany was establishing, under the veil of liberalism, its irresistible domination.

For Adorno, Germany was defeated b a more advanced formof capitalism.Indeed in a letter to Horkheimer, he wrote that "the forces of production of moreprogressive countries have been proved to be the stronger after all... the war has been won by industry against the military. There is something in this, though it does leave out the role of the Soviet Union, that non-liberal polity, whose defeat of Hitler's forces at Stalingrad in 1943 was decisive in the course of the European conflict. It was Soviet totalitarianism that delivered the crucial blow to Nazi totalitarianism, not liberal capitalism.