There Is No Philosophy Of Fascism. There Can Only Be A Psychology Of Fascism.

Says Bertrand Russell and Wilhelm Reich (while Leandro Konder offers a second opinion).

Pedro Barbalho fka Alex P. Bird
The Apeiron Blog
7 min readSep 21, 2021

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All authors quoted by this article: (1) Leandro Konder; (2) Wilhelm Reich; (3) Bertrand Russell. Images from Wikimedia Commons.

Introduction

What does it mean to say: there can only be a psychology of fascism? It means to say that fascism is a pathology and that it is incapable of sustaining itself as a rational, or consistent, philosophy.

This phrase promotes, I would say, a way of underestimating fascism but authors such as Bertrand Russell and Wilhelm Reich defend this position very well (that fascism is a fallacy). Let’s see how they do it.

Bertrand Russell on Fascism

Russell lists the following social-cultural changes as the main factors that explain the rise of fascism in the 20th century:

“Comparing the world of 1920 with that of 1820, we find that there had
been an increase of power on the part of: large industrialists, wage earners,
women, heretics (…). (By “heretics” I mean those whose
religion was not that of the Government of their country.) Correlatively,
there had been a loss of power on the part of: monarchs, aristocracies
ecclesiastics, the lower middle classes, and males as opposed to females.” — (Russell, 1996, p.432).

According to him, envy, intolerance against different people, dishonesty, resentment, pride, would be emotions that explain the rise of fascism. As well as a preference for force as opposed to rationality. He says,

“The founders of the school of thought out of which Fascism has grown
all have certain common characteristics. They seek the good in will rather
than in feeling or cognition; they value power more than happiness; they
prefer force to argument, war to peace, aristocracy to democracy, propaganda to scientific impartiality” — (Russell, 1996, p.427).

But how could propaganda triumph over scientific knowledge? Science is not good enough? As Russell is well aware, in the modern world, relativism has gained space for a variety of reasons (see this text to better understand modern relativism, and this other one to know more about a logical problem Russell failed to solve). So conflicting truths began to coexist in the scientific realm.

This, according to Russell, would have allowed fascism to become the violent response against this state of the art of modern society (i.e., where problems have not yet found a definitive logical solution). Russell says,

“Between these different “truths”, if rational persuasion is despaired of, the only possible decision is by means of war and rivalry in propagandist insanity.

(…)

It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal
and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the wellbeing
of the human species, not only in ages in which it easily prevails,
but also, and even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised
and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill
where they cannot agree” — (Russell, 1996, p.435).

Wilhelm Reich on fascism

Reich understands that irrational attachment to mysticism, authoritarianism, and conservative practices as the main causes of fascism, and he advocates that the cure against fascism would be the exercise of progressive psychology (that would lead to a sexual revolution). Only thru such a revolution, society would be able to experience enlightenment and freedom.

Let’s see how he arrives at these conclusions: he first points out that Marxist theory alone would not be able to promote such a cultural revolution. He says Marxism:

“makes ideology rigidly and one-sidedly dependent upon economy, and fails to see the dependency of economic development upon that of ideology” — (Reich, 2013).

That is, according to the classic Marxist thesis, ideology would be shaped by the surrounding economic conditions (as by the working relations). While for Reich and for Russell, in addition to the economic factor, the development of theoretical ideas would also influence ideology. Russell believes:

“A widespread political doctrine has, as a rule, two very different kinds of causes. On the one hand, there are intellectual antecedents: men who have advanced theories which have grown, by development or reaction, from previous theories. On the other hand, there are economic and political circumstances which predispose people to accept views that minister to certain moods” — (Russell, 1996, p.423).

This idea that society matures its own culture also by its intellectual development is, according to Reich, poorly perceived by Marxist materialism. Reich demonstrates this very clearly in the following example where he quotes Lenin (leader of the Russian revolution) and proposes a solution to what is clearly a mystery for Lenin.

“Several times military power passed into the hands of the soldiers, but this power was hardly ever used resolutely. The soldiers wavered. A few hours after they had disposed of a hated superior, they released the others, entered into negotiations with the authorities, and then had themselves shot, submitted to the rod, had themselves yoked again.” — (Lenin apud Reich, 2013).

And that’s how Reich explains this contradictory movement of the revolutionary soldiers:

“Any mystic will explain such behavior on the basis of man’s eternal moral nature, which, he would contend, prohibits a rebellion against the divine scheme and the “authority of the state” and its representatives. The vulgar Marxist simply disregards such phenomena, and he would have neither an understanding nor an explanation for them because they are not to be explained from a purely economic point of view. The Freudian conception comes considerably closer to the facts of the case, for it recognizes such behavior as the effect of infantile guilt-feelings toward the father figure” — (Reich, 2013).

Cutting a long story short, where Reich is getting at is: for him, fascists, and other unenlightened people, are contradictory, repressed, and in need of psychological treatment. Therefore, for Reich, fascism would be like a childhood disease that would require a set of psychological care to get properly cured.

Leandro Konder on fascism

Konder, on the other hand, is a Marxist intellectual, and the most interesting thing about a strictly Marxist view of fascism is that, according to Marx, the working class would be the “leading actor of modern history”, and therefore the working class would be the only political actor capable to defend us from fascism.

It would be, according to Konder, useless to wait for newspapers, governments, or the army to do something about the growth of fascism or nazism (they only do something when their interests are at risk). Only the working class would be capable to lead and defend a democratic and progressive society. After all, one cannot expect revolutionary impetus from those who profit most from a capitalist society, or from a fascist society.

So, according to Konder, fascism advances when it is possible to outwit the revolutionary impetus of the working class. In his words, Konder says that fascism is

“a political movement of conservative social content, which disguises itself under a “modernizing” mask, guided by the ideology of radical pragmatism, making use of irrationalist myths and reconciling them with rationalist-formal procedures of a manipulative type. (…) Its growth in a country presupposes special historical conditions: presupposes a reactionary preparation able to undermine the bases of potentially anti-fascist forces (weakening their influence with the masses)” — (Konder, 2009, p.14).

But fascism isn’t just propaganda…

Unlike Reich or Russell, Konder understands that there can be a strong fascist philosophy. That is, fascism is not necessarily a contradictory philosophy. It is just neither democratic nor progressive. According to him,

“Marx believed that, at the present stage of history, humanity was prepared for the revolutionary action of the proletariat to put an end to the class struggle and create communism. Mussolini, on the other hand, saw class struggle as a permanent aspect of human existence, an insurmountable tragic reality. For him, what needed to be done was to discipline ‘class struggle’, and the only possible agent of this disciplinary action would have to be an elite of a new type, energetic and willing to everything” — (Konder, 2009, p.32).

That is, fascism would be such an enemy that should not be underestimated. Fascism wishes to eliminate or subjugate a large part of society and advances by any means necessary to that end.

Final Thoughts

In this article, I quoted what I considered to be the better arguments of three texts, one from each of these intellectuals: Russell, Konder, and Reich. But there is a greater number of reasonings, ideas, and interpretations about fascism promoted by these authors in these same texts. The texts are:

Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Ed. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013.

Konder, Leandro. Introdução Ao Fascismo. Ed. Expressão Popular, 1977.

Russell, Bertrand. A Fresh Look at Empiricism: Part VII, Chapter: The Ancestry of Fascism. Ed. Routledge, 1996.

In addition to these texts, I also recommend the movies: Love, Work, and Knowledge: The Life and Trials of Wilhelm Reich, and The Century of the Self for those who want to study more about the relationship between psychoanalysis, Reich, and the world of advertising.

And there are many movies about World War II, or about Nazism and Fascism, but these two: Vincere, and Amen are very surprising because they show the minimum popularity fascism and nazism gathered when they were rising to power.

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Published in The Apeiron Blog

An easy to read philosophical space that aims to elicit discussion and debate on matters of the universe.

Written by Pedro Barbalho fka Alex P. Bird

Brazilian postgraduate student in logic and metaphysics. Science fiction writer and cinephile. pedro.barbalho@ufrj.br

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