Istanbul c.1875, in an early photo by the Swedish photographer Guillaume Berggren

Port cities like Constantinople, Smyrna and Malacca were microcosms of the world market in the sense that people from all or most parts of the world were drawn there, so that many different languages could be heard. When the state was committed to maintaining this cosmopolitan character, rulers consciously sought to encourage a culture of religious tolerance. One can hardly say this about the present government of India, despite all of Modi’s international pretensions!

Religious tolerance was the main feature of Calicut / Kozhikode that impressed the shipwrecked Breton navigator François Pyrard, who wrote (in the early 17th century), ‘it has merchants from all parts of the world, and of all nations and religions, by reason of the liberty and security accorded to them there: for the king permits the exercise of every kind of religion…(he) holds that to be a cardinal maxim of government’. ‘Everyone lives there in great peace and concord, notwithstanding the great diversity of races and religions…and of strangers and sojourners’. Calicut was ruled by the Nair Samoothiris. On the other coast of India, Masulipatnam in the 17th century was another case of a cosmopolitan port with a mixed population where the rulers (in this case the Qutub Shahis, who were Shias) ensured what Arasaratnam describes as ‘communal harmony’ at a time when most east-coast ports were plagued by ‘civil strife’, mainly caste rivalries among Hindus.
 
Against Kirti Chaudhuri’s strange view that ‘it was unusual for a Hindu merchant to conduct business with a Muslim’, Irfan Habib was able to show that ‘the brokers of Muslim merchants (in Surat) were invariably Hindus’, that is, Banias.
 
This image of an early capitalism characterized by cosmopolitan cultures of trade partly survives in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, only there it is transposed to industrial capital with its restless search for markets and sources of raw materials. What doesn’t characterize capital in the pages of the Manifesto is the fierce nationalist rivalries that would start tearing the world apart from the early part of the twentieth century. Nationalism, prepared by the struggles between mercantilist powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only finally blossomed in the age of industrial capital. And we are still living with its hideous legacies.
 
Take the latest example of this: the NRC is overloaded with meanings. At one, totally prosaic, level it is an elaborate attempt to manipulate the voter lists, so terrified is the BJP of losing the next election. At another, more purely ideological, level it is an exercise in communalism, a drive to purge some mythical ‘nation’ of so-called ‘illegal’ immigrants (read: unwanted Muslims) in a way that mimics Trump and goes way beyond him. And it tries to do all this by deliberately stirring up sub-nationalisms throughout the country, destroying the very idea of ‘India’ itself.
 
(From the author’s FB Profile)

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Gauri Lankesh was given the Anna Politkovskaya Award in 2017, posthumously. And everyone who knew him and read him knows that the one feature Praful shared with both women (and with other women journalists like Rana Ayyub) was his own indomitable courage as a journalist and his passion for investigative reporting. (In India eleven journalists were murdered in 2017. That is almost 25% of the total number murdered worldwide last year.)
 

  

There’s a good Wikipedia entry on Politkovskaya, her extraordinary reporting on the war in Chechnya, and her opposition to the regime in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya#cite_note-politkovskaya-16

For a sample of Praful’s own hard-hitting journalism, see http://www.prafulbidwai.org/index.php?post/2010/08/27/A-tightening-noose, as relevant as ever today when SC benches have actually been fixed to make sure the Court fails to order a proper probe into the murder of Justice Loya, the last in a chain of murders that leads back, of course, to the ‘fake encounters’ that Praful discusses in this piece.

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The Petrograd Soviet in the heady days leading up to October. Photo credit: Time

The Russian Revolution is a startling paradox. It was a revolution largely based on the working class, the first workers’ revolution in history, creating a state that was not a workers’ state. This searing paradox would clinch the fate of the radical left for the rest of the twentieth century, since the chief outcome of the revolution (the regime known as ‘Stalinism’) would exert a preponderant influence on radical sectors of the left in countries like India no less than in Europe, and crucially affect the course of major political events internationally, most notably, Hitler’s unimpeded rise to power at the end of the twenties and the tragic fate of the Spanish Revolution a few years later.
 
As Don Filtzer showed in his seminal book Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization, by the 1930s the working class in the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a collective force, and the sole basis on which a strong opposition might have emerged was therefore preempted. Even more tragically, ‘with Stalin socialism came to mean something altogether different from [its] revolutionary vision, as socialism became identified with top-heavy, centralized bureaucracy, government attempts to control every aspect of social and individual life, a repressive and brutal police apparatus, scarcity, and general economic mismanagement’. The key issue thrown up by the revolution, then, is how this came about or how this was allowed to happen.
 
The Bolsheviks had seized power in October 1917 by garnering the support of Russian workers because they were seen as endorsing the slogan of workers’ control of production and because of the support they extended to the Factory Committees that mushroomed from the middle of 1917. As the most detailed study of those committees suggests, ‘There is no doubt that the notion of workers’ control of production was very popular at the grass roots, and it was the willingness of the Bolsheviks to support this demand which was a crucial reason for their growing appeal’ (S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd, p. 165). Already by June, factory committees were widespread throughout the bigger establishments, where they were dominated by ‘skilled, experienced, relatively well-paid workers’.  
 
Yet within a few weeks of the Revolution the Bolsheviks were demanding the subordination of the factory committees. The first Congress of Trade Unions held in January 1918 ‘voted to transform the Factory Committees into union organs’ (Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, p. 32). By March that year, Lenin ‘made the first of a series of appeals to return to one-man management’ (Smith, Red Petrograd, p. 241). A year later, when the eighth party congress declared portentously, ‘the trade unions must achieve a de facto concentration in their hands of the whole administration of the whole national economy considered as a single economic unit’, the factory committees had ceased to matter entirely. With a brutal civil war dominating most of 1919 and 1920 and massive supply shortages throughout the country, Trotsky was arguing for the ‘militarisation of labour’, that is, for the unabashed exercise of compulsion in industry and other economic sectors, and for the subordination of the unions to the state. Although this was never officially endorsed, by 1920 industrial workers in post-revolutionary Russia were again subject to what one historian called ‘the familiar forms of capitalist industrial organisation’, as if the clock had moved full circle.
 
The only significant challenge to all of this, the group known as the Workers’ Opposition, which emerged at the end of 1920 to espouse a vision of an economy run jointly by the unions and factory committees in a sort of articulated system of management, came closest (among the Bolsheviks) to the revolutionary aspirations of 1917 but was met with sharp reprisals by the party leadership, causing widespread disillusionment among more class-conscious workers (many of them part of the Metalworkers’ Union) and effectively ending an earlier tradition of inner-party democracy. When ‘factions’ were banned at the tenth party congress in March 1921, the Workers’ Opposition was almost alone in opposing the ban publicly.
Suspended in a social void for lack of any organised expression of the autonomous power of the workers such as the factory committees, the Party ‘now exercised absolute power and was outside the control of any social force whatsoever’. This was the situation Kollontai would presciently denounce early in 1921. What it entailed increasingly over the 1920s was a ‘dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat’. 

Alexandra Kollontai

At the very  congress at which the Workers’ Opposition presented its programme for workers’ management of the economy and opposed the ban on factions, Alexandra Kollontai, one of its leading spokespersons and the Revolution’s best known feminist, described the rapid bureaucratisation of the state as ‘breeding an atmosphere altogether repugnant to the working class’. She denounced a nascent party bureaucracy as the source of the cleavage between the government and the masses (Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography, pp. 367ff.). Although he derided Kollontai at the congress itself, even resorting to personal attacks, Lenin was perfectly aware of the justness of her charges. By the early 1920s there had grown up an ‘enormous body of functionaries who, according to Lenin, were former Tsarist bureaucrats’ (Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 8). Suspended in a social void for lack of any organised expression of the autonomous power of the workers such as the factory committees, the Party ‘now exercised absolute power and was outside the control of any social force whatsoever’ (Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 10). This was the situation Kollontai would presciently denounce early in 1921. What it entailed increasingly over the 1920s was a ‘dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat’, as Lewin describes it (Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 17). For the regime known as Stalinism to emerge all it now needed was the domination of the party itself by a clique or, as happened, by one man.     
  
Lenin, who had suffered a stroke in May 1922, never fully regained his health. Further strokes followed in December that year, and in the last week he began to dictate a series of ‘notes’ on what he saw as the impending crisis in the party’s leadership. One of these said, in terms that can only be described as prophetic, ‘Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution’ (Lenin cited Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 80). On 4 January 1923 a further note added, ‘Stalin is too rude, and this defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. This is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post’ (Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84; my italics).

This never happened, of course. Lenin himself died in January 1924 and, as Victor Serge tells us, ‘In the meantime Stalin completes the job of packing all the party secretariats…with his creatures. In 1926 his work is done, he is the master of the party, of a party in whose ranks utter silence reigns; a party in which majorities, docile because they profit by being docile, do nothing but vote the resolutions prescribed by the Central Committee…’ (Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 43–44). Stalin’s consolidation of power in the party in a regime where the party was the state, or the state a massive extension of the party, not only clinched the fate of the revolution but came to embody a form of state-power unique in history. Trotsky struggled with its characterization, never abandoning the delusion that somewhere at the heart of this new web of power lay a workers’ state. He continued to believe that a proletarian nucleus would reassert its control over the party (T. M. Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy, p. 187), when the reality was that ‘the main thrust of regime policy was to break down the working class, to undermine its cohesion and solidarity… and destroy its ability to act collectively as a self-conscious historical force’ (Filtzer, Soviet Workers, p. 255). Without a cohesive working class and autonomous organs of struggle, the Left Opposition was doomed, its heroism matched only by its total isolation, Serge estimating that ‘there must be less than a thousand of us’.

The terrible repression of the 1930s extended well beyond this handful of revolutionaries to include entire groups –  technicians, ‘kulaks’, ethnic minorities, military leaders (the whole Soviet General Staff!), large sectors of a brilliant intelligentsia, so-called ‘harmful elements’ (vagrants, prostitutes, the homeless, etc.), and of course tens of thousands of workers, peasants and other ordinary Soviet citizens. On the NKVD’s own figures, between the early 1930s and 1953 some 1.1–1.2 million Soviet citizens were executed, three-quarters of them in the years 1937–38. This was, as Serge called it, ‘the incessant massacre of an entire revolutionary generation’ (Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 396), but it was also genocide in a stricter legal meaning if only because national communities were being systematically liquidated (for this argument see Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides; on the terror itself there is a magnificent recent account in Karl Schlögel, Moscow, 1937).
Stalin’s consolidation of power in the party in a regime where the party was the state, or the state a massive extension of the party, not only clinched the fate of the revolution but came to embody a form of state-power unique in history. Trotsky struggled with its characterization, never abandoning the delusion that somewhere at the heart of this new web of power lay a workers’ state. He continued to believe that a proletarian nucleus would reassert its control over the party.

Leon Trotsky

The purges and the Moscow show trials ‘served one purpose only – to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad’ (Serge, Memoirs, p. 290). Today the mass media are a simple and effective way for the authorities and ruling groups to achieve the sort of integration that the Stalinist elite sought to achieve by altogether more primitive means. Stalinism produced a ferocious culture of conformity, in part through the intimidation produced by terror but even more importantly through the figure of Stalin himself. Stalin had to be worshipped, wrote Victor Serge, ‘because to the world he was the incarnation of the party…[The Opposition’s] capital error was that their attachment to the past prevented them from seeing that this party is dead’ (Serge, From Lenin to Stalin, p. 82). In the later Marxist tradition the only serious attempt to give a dialectical sense to what Serge might have meant by this ‘incarnation’ is Sartre’s unfinished masterpiece Critique of Dialectical Reason, whose second volume, among the most difficult written by any Marxist intellectual, is essentially an attempt to construct a theory of the Stalinist regime that would make its structure and dynamics intelligible.
 
Sartre argues that Stalin’s personality cult ‘was the first known attempt to change an entire society into a pledged group’, as if the whole of the USSR had voluntarily joined the party and pledged to work for it and for Stalin. Since Stalin’s power was a ‘condensation of the sovereign powers of the group [the party]’, he was ‘incarnated in the pyramid of ruling bodies’ (that is, the bureaucracy) as they were in him. But beyond this ‘reciprocity of incarnation’, Stalin was everywhere, ‘his millions of portraits were just one portrait’, and he was in everyone, as a structure of ‘interiorized inertia’ and as the ‘living (and deceptive) image of pledged passivity’.
 
Forced capital accumulation, the dispossession of millions of expropriated peasants, the silencing of the opposition, the banning of abortion and cult of the family, and then the paroxysm of violence known as the Great Terror – if this was socialism, then Stalin’s Russia was discrediting and destroying it for decades to come, and that effectively is what it did.
 
So the Revolution was tragically betrayed, destroyed or deviated, however one describes its overall trajectory. But behind this lies an important lesson, at least for the Left. In 1917, before October, the soviets and the factory committees had been the only real organised expressions of the power of the masses, veritable organs of mass democracy. Yet, when the Bolsheviks took control of the Petrograd Soviet in September, a more complex dialectic came into play. ‘The party was launched on the road of armed insurrection through the soviets and in the name of the soviets’, wrote Trotsky in his fine History of the Russian Revolution. Here in a nutshell was the dilemma. Where would the locus of real power reside? With the party or with the masses and their own mass organisations such as the soviets and factory committees, or factory councils as they were known elsewhere?

(This article was first published in Hardnews).

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In The Indian Express (September 6, 2016) Prakash Karat, former general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has an opinion piece defending the BJP against its characterisation by sections of the Left in India as the external face of a fascist movement driven by the RSS and its vision of a non-secular, Hindu state. The threat that is sweeping through India today is one of authoritarianism, not fascism, he argues. Nor are the conditions present for a fascist regime to be established, even though a ‘determined effort is being made to reorder society and polity on Hindutva lines’. The crux of Karat’s argument is a conception of fascism lifted straight from the famous formula adopted by the Comintern’s executive committee in December 1933. “Fascism is the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.
 
Why is it that every time mention is made of Prakash Karat powerful images of rigor mortis rush through my brain? Is it because the young student leader from JNU days always impressed me as the pure type of the apparatchik, the social type that flooded the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, swamped it as the emerging base of Stalin’s rapid consolidation of power within the party and then in the country as a whole?

The apparatchik destroyed Lenin’s party but he couldn’t discard Marxism completely. He adapted to Marxism by converting it into a draw full of rubber stamps. Incapable of thought, much less of any more creative process like actual intellectual engagement, the building of theory, unfettered debate, etc., he (for we are dealing overwhelmingly with males) opened the draw to look for the right stamp every time some phrase or expression triggered a signal.

Stalin with Dimitrov

‘Fascism’, ah yes, what does the stamp say? It had Georgi Dimitrov’s name on it.  A definition of fascism first adopted by the executive committee of the Communist International at the end of 1933 became famously associated with Stalin’s favourite Dimitrov when it was taken over and circulated more widely in his report to the Seventh World Congress in 1935. This is the one I’ve cited in the preamble above, ‘Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship (etc.)’. It rapidly became orthodoxy on the Stalinist Left, the ‘official’ line on fascism.  

Karat reiterates it with a profound sense of loyalty and timelessness, citing it in the Indian Express piece. The implication here, of course, is that nothing that has been said or written about fascism since 1933–1935 has any relevance for him. We have gained not a whit (in understanding, knowledge, analysis and so on) since those (pre-Holocaust!) years. Do we have a better understanding of fascism today? Obviously not as far as Karat is concerned. That definition is ‘classic’, as he says. ‘Classic’ here means cut in stone, impermeable to argument, eternally true like some truth of logic. As Karat says, there is ‘no room for ambiguity’ here.

The Comintern had deliberately narrowed the definition to ‘finance capital’ to allow other sections of the capitalist class to join the fight against fascism once Stalin decided he desperately needed alliances (‘Popular Fronts’) with all manner of parties regardless of who they represented. For Karat the reference to ‘finance capital’ suffices. It sums up the essence of fascism, and fascism for him is simply a state form, a type of regime that breaks decisively with democracy (‘bourgeois’ democracy).

The response to this is simple: how did such a state emerge in the first place? Fascism must have existed in some form other than a state for it to become a state? Since Karat stopped reading Marxism decades ago, it may be worth rehearsing some of this for him. Before fascism succeeds as a state it exists as a movement. And fascism only succeeds in seizing power because it first succeeds as a mass movement.

The question the revolutionary Left simply failed to address in the twenties and thirties (with a handful of exceptions such the German Marxist Arthur Rosenberg and the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich) was why fascists are able to build mass movements. How do they create a mass base for the parties they form? As soon as we frame the issue in these terms (breaking with Karat’s myopic fascination with end results), the problem itself becomes a practical one. We have to look at the specific techniques used to generate mass support. We have to ask also how this ‘mass’ that fascism creates and dominates differs from, say, the social forces that Marx saw driving revolutionary movements forward.   

To suggest that fascism is largely or entirely about ‘finance capital’, that a handful of bankers could have created the fascist movements in Germany and Italy shows how detached dogma can become from reality when it ignores the formation of culture and looks simply at the economy as a force that affects politics without mediations of any sort.

To suggest that fascism is largely or entirely about ‘finance capital’, that a handful of bankers could have created the fascist movements in Germany and Italy shows how detached dogma can become from reality when it ignores the formation of culture and looks simply at the economy as a force that affects politics without mediations of any sort.

Anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Islamism, Hindutva, patriarchy, male violence, caste oppression, militarism, and (not least!) nationalism then become basically irrelevant; window-dressing on a beast (capitalism) that works in some purely economic way, as if the ‘formation of the authoritarian structure’ (Reich) which has everything to do with how reactionary ideologies come about in the wider reaches of civil society is not a process every bit as material as the economy.

What does Karat think he is debating? Is there anyone on the Left who claims that we are currently in the throes of a full-blown Hindu Rashtra in India, that the machinery of the law lies in ruins, that the media, servile as they are, have been taken over and remoulded by a self-defining Hindu state, that trade unions have been abolished, opposition parties banned, active opponents rounded up and murdered?  That would be India’s counterpart of a fascist state.

On the other hand, is there anyone (on the Left especially) who is naive enough to think that there is no danger of any of this? That the rampant cultures of communalism, attacks on minorities and repeated violence against them (this includes unlawful detention) are not being used (consciously used) as tools of fascist mobilisation of a spurious ‘Hindu majority’? That the Indian state has not been extensively infiltrated by the RSS at all levels, even down to the vice-chancellorship of JNU?

That the Gujarat cases had to be transferred out of the state of Gujarat by the Supreme Court, no less, speaks volumes for the court’s view of the shamelessly compromised state of the justice system in Gujarat under Modi’s government there. That the mass violence against Muslims in Gujarat became pivotal to the consolidation of Modi’s support-base in the state and then rapidly in other parts of India, leading to his emergence as prime minister; that Modi financed his campaign for power with the explicit backing of big business groups who were looking for a ‘decisive’ leader; that nationalism is now being used to whip up hysteria among the middle classes to try and justify the repeated use of charges like ‘sedition’ and justify attacks on freedom of speech, thought and politics; that the Right-wing in India has repositioned itself in the more totalising and utterly sinister discourse of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ to create the absurd sense of an Indian Volksgemeinschaft and construct definitions of the other as ‘anti-national’, a sort of fifth column of the nation’s enemies… if none of this reminds us of the way fascism emerges and builds itself up historically, then we have no memory, and certainly not a historical one.       

“India today confronts the advance of an authoritarianism…”, Karat argues, wanting to distinguish this from fascism. The issue surely is what form of authoritarianism we are up against in India today. While all authoritarianisms are not fascist, all fascisms are a form of authoritarianism. What is distinctive about fascist authoritarianism is its appeal to forms of mass mobilisation and attempt to create sources of legitimacy among ‘the masses’ – through cultural (e.g. pseudo-religious) and ideological domination.

'The political struggle against the BJP cannot be conducted in alliance with the other major party of the ruling classes'. This of course reflects a major rift within the CPI(M) itself and may well be Karat’s way of posturing for control of loyalties in the web of factional conflicts that have characterised the party for years.

This is why Hindutva becomes a marker of something more sinister than just authoritarian politics. In Karat’s mental map, as I said, culture and ideology play no major role; they are simply tools to divide people to allow those in power to implement what he sees as the truly dangerous agenda of ‘neo-liberalism’. They are a sort of sideshow, pure excrescences on a largely economic programme where capital remains the chief instrumentality.

Karat agrees that the RSS has a “semi-fascist ideology (and) the potential to impose an authoritarian state on the people when it believes that circumstances warrant it”. Why ‘semi-fascist’? What is its other half? When Golwalkar praised the extermination of the Jews as a possible model for the way a future Hindu state might want to deal with its minorities, was he being ‘semi-fascist’? Is the growing culture of intolerance and forcible suppression of political views the BJP finds abrasive ‘semi-fascist’?
 
And the qualification ‘when it believes the circumstances warrant it’? How do people at large tell the RSS has finally come around to that belief?  That it has so decided? The answer, alas, as with so much of the immobile Left, is – when it’s too late!
 
The German film director Alexander Kluge calls this approach to history and politics ‘Learning Processes With a Deadly Outcome’. If that mum with her three kids in the basement of this house in Halberstadt on 8 April 1945 had fought the Nazis in 1928 and millions of others like her had done the same, she wouldn’t be there now, on this dreadful day in April, sheltering from a fleet of 200 American bombers that will, in seconds, wipe out her entire town.
 
If Stalin and the Comintern hadn’t worked overtime to sabotage the possibility of a United Front between the German Communists and the Social Democrats and the two parties had fought fascism with combined strength; if the Left in Germany had campaigned more consistently and vigorously against anti-Semitism than it ever did and started those campaigns much earlier; if feminism had been a stronger force in German society and the patriarchal/authoritarian order less firmly entrenched in German families… and so on and so forth.
 
Learning processes that shape history, that affect its outcome, are those that strive consciously to learn the lessons that generate a politics that preserves and affirms life against the ‘deadly outcome’. Do we wake up one morning and say, India’s fascism was ‘majoritarian communalism’ after all!!    
 
“The political struggle against the BJP cannot be conducted in alliance with the other major party of the ruling classes”. This of course reflects a major rift within the CPI(M) itself and may well be Karat’s way of posturing for control of loyalties in the web of factional conflicts that have characterised the party for years. So why was the CPI(M) in alliance with that ‘other major party of the ruling class’ in the first place?
 
The alliance broke over a nuclear deal with the US but doubtless no similar deal with Putin would have occasioned a major crisis of that sort. Since the United Front has come up and Karat prefers the safety of a 'Third Period' position (short of calling the Congress, a former ally, ‘social fascist’; 'Third Period' refers to the politics of the Comintern in the period of widespread economic collapse that was said to have started in 1928), perhaps we can leave him with Nehru’s more Marxist grasp of this issue than he himself seems to have:
 

 
There is a constant sense in Karat’s opinion piece that neo-liberalism is as dangerous if not more dangerous than communalism. But this is a senseless position. To the extent that communalism leads to a fascist transformation of the state, it deprives working people of any basis for resisting capitalist onslaughts. Neo-liberalism disarms the working class economically, destroying its cohesion in an industrial, economic sense. Racism, communalism and nationalism (all nationalism, not just what Karat calls ‘chauvinist’ nationalism) do the same in more insidious ways, destroying the possibility of the working class ever acquiring a sense of its own solidarity and of what it really is.

(The writer is a well-known historian and Marxist intellectual).

The post Stalin’s Ghost Won’t Save Us from the Spectre of Fascism: A Response to Prakash Karat appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Courtesy: Orange-papers.org

‘Make in India’ has failed to resonate with businesses internationally because the accumulation of capital, worldwide, is driven by more than just propaganda and a fading charisma. But this hasn’t stopped the ruling party and government machinery from ‘making’ at a furious pace. It has manufactured the crisis at JNU as part of a wide-ranging assault on the control of higher education in the country.

To manufacture that crisis it has fabricated ‘sedition’ charges, evidence ostensibly implicating JNUSU leaders (videos, tweets), smear campaigns, hysteria (storm-troopers in black coats), even a conception of patriotism that identifies a country not with its people and their real conditions but with some mythical, half-deified abstraction before which people, real flesh-and-blood people, have to bow in a state of permanent genuflection and fear.

Behind this mixture of tragedy and farce looms the patriarchal shadow of the RSS. Of course, no one elected the RSS in 2014 but they feel they have the right to run the country and are effectively doing so. The ABVP is one of its many arms, extended ruthlessly into campuses to beat them into submission to ‘sanghvaad’. The ABVP has an assurance that it can mobilise the state machinery to enforce this drive to dominate the universities. JNU’s strongly left-wing culture and tradition have warded off this attack with a remarkable display of unity and good political sense.

The following write-up stems from a talk the author gave at JNU on 11 March. It isn’t a transcript but a reconstruction of the essential arguments in that lecture. It looks at fascism through the work of three writers, extracting major insights from each of them. It lays out three basic theses: 1. About the constructed nature of nationalism (or fascism’s use of the “myth of the nation”, Mussolini’s expression!); 2. About the family/patriarchy as the most important instrument of the state’s power; and, 3. About fascist violence as a product of what Sartre calls “the continuous action of a group on a series”.  To be able to confront fascism successfully, supporters of democracy have to be able to build resistance at each of these levels.
 

At a talk I gave in JNU recently I suggested that it was crucial for us to deal with the deeper forces from which fascism stems and not fall into the trap of thinking, for example, that fascism only emerges in a context of massive economic crisis or is even caused by economic crisis, as a lot of Marxists still think. I identified those ‘deeper forces’ with nationalism, patriarchy (or the authoritarian family), and the way organised groups are able to exercise domination over the largely unorganised mass of any modern society.

Each of these perspectives (1. fascism and the myth of the nation, or, if you like, the constructed nature of nationalism; 2. patriarchy as the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society; and, 3. the conception of ‘manipulated seriality’ as the heart of fascist politics) is embodied with special clarity in the work of at least one of three thinkers of the Left, viz. Arthur Rosenberg (1889–1943), Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Sartre is too well known to say much about but the other two, Rosenberg and Reich, are worth introducing briefly.

Arthur Rosenberg was a historian who was also politically active. As a member of what became the KPD (German Communist Party), he was part of the left-of-centre grouping within the party called the ‘Berlin Left’. The Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch was also part of this grouping. Rosenberg was also a Reichstag deputy, that is, a member of the German parliament, but he resigned from the KPD in 1927 out of sheer disgust at the way the Comintern (under Stalin’s influence) kept interfering in the affairs of the German party. He fled from Germany in 1933, and eventually died in the USA (of cancer) some ten years later.

In 1934 he published Fascism as a Mass Movement, which argued that fascism only succeeds to the extent that it succeeds in becoming a mass movement. This raises the whole issue of what it means for the extreme Right (any extreme Right) to be able to construct a ‘mass’ base. How does it do that, given that its political agenda is so manifestly opposed to the economic and democratic interests of ordinary working people?

Wilhelm Reich moved from Vienna to Berlin in the late 1920s. He was a psychoanalyst strongly influenced by Freud but deeply critical of the latter’s separation between psychoanalysis and politics and of his excessive political timidity in the face of fascism.

When Reich moved to Berlin from Vienna he started a series of ‘Sexpol clinics’ which were hugely popular. The clinics attracted thousands of patients from largely working-class families, because they were literally the only places where ordinary people could discuss their sexual problems and their sexual lives in some overt way, especially the kinds of stress and/or distress they were experiencing.

To take one example, in 1931 there were some 1 million illegal abortions in Germany and a staggering forty-four percent of those resulted in fatalities! Reich began to confront the problem of emerging fascism partly through his experience in those clinics, and soon after Hitler came to power in 1933 he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, arguing that it was impossible to understand the appeal of the Nazis without its psychological roots, that is, without looking at the nature of families, domination within them and the sort of character-structures that lay at the back of the fascist success.

Reich was promptly expelled from the German Communist Party when he published Mass Psychology, then hounded by the authorities in all the countries he fled to by way of seeking asylum, and, like Rosenberg, ended up in the USA where he died in an American prison, under FBI custody.

Fascism and the Myth of the Nation

To Rosenberg fascism largely reiterated ideas that were widespread in European society before the First War. (“The ideology which is today called ‘fascist’ was already widespread before the War.”) In his analysis the conservative elites of 19^th-century Europe adjusted to the era of parliamentary democracy and mass politics with an aggressive nationalism imbued with racial ideas, one that canvassed active support for strong states wedded to expansion abroad and was unashamedly willing to use anti-Semitism “as a way of preventing middle-class voters from moving to the Left” (Weiss, Conservatism in Europe 1770-1945, p. 89).

Rosenberg argued that fascism lacked a coherent ideology of its own, it was a pastiche of motifs drawn from the ultra-nationalist political circles of the pre-war period. In this sense he reversed the direction of causality between ideology and politics. The Nazis emerged from a pre-existing ideological milieu dominated by a “stupid, fanatical nationalism”.

“Fascism developed the nationalist propaganda characteristic of the new kind of politics to perfection.” (Fascism as a Mass Movement, p. 27). Rosenberg called this a “demagogic nationalism” that “spontaneously seeks an object through which it can daily demonstrate its own superiority and release the delirium of its racial frenzy” (p. 32). 

With liberalism in retreat across most of Europe it was this aggressive authoritarian xenophobic nationalism that came to the fore. Secondly, the targeting of minorities such as the Jews in Germany became a mobilising strategy and led in Germany to the proliferation of numerous racist ‘action groups’ well before the Nazis themselves became popular.

What was peculiar to fascism, Rosenberg argues, was the storm-trooper tactic, that is, the active use of violent squads that attacked Jews, destroyed Jewish property and so on in pogroms that targeted them the way Muslims and Christians have been targeted in India, but also combated the unions, strikers, Communists, etc. Street clashes between Nazis and Communists dominated the late 1920s but failed to stem the growth of Nazism.

A still from the Hindi film, 'Parzania'

One reason was that the storm-troopers worked with the connivance of the state. The active complicity of the existing state authorities in condoning fascist violence is a key element of Rosenberg’s argument. The authorities turned a blind eye to illegal activities such as conspiracies and political murders and to the repeated atrocities against Jews.  The storm-troopers should have been tried and convicted in the courts of law but nothing of the sort happened.  Trials were used as further platforms for Nazi propaganda. The police and the courts connived in fascist violence instead of dealing with it as the law required.  State complicity for Rosenberg was a major reason why the Nazis could survive into the late 1920s to re-emerge rapidly as a mass movement.

What about nationalism itself?  In the talk at JNU I contra-posed two broad views of the subject, Gellner’s conception of the constructed nature of nationalism (nationalism exists before nations do, nations are simply their invention) and Benedict Anderson’s view of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.  For example, Eric Hobsbawm writes, “with Gellner I would stress the element of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations. ‘Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying [humans], as an inherent … political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality’. In short, for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’’

To explain this a bit more, to think of nations as somehow existing before and outside of nationalism is to reify them. Nationalism is not the self-awakening to consciousness of pre-formed, pre-existing entities called ‘nations’ but the process by which nations are defined and constructed to be or to look like what they are.

For his part, Anderson doesn’t explain who does the “imagining”. And what does it mean to say that the nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”?

Isn’t this a way of almost saying that the imaginary construct of the “nation” is an attempt to make people forget that in real life they are actually divided into classes, castes, genders, and so on and that these divisions are marked by deep inequalities and relations of oppression?

In her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity the American scholar Liah Greenfeld describes something she calls collectivistic nationalism. This it seems to me is an apt description for the sort of nationalism that the BJP and their handlers are trying to shove down our throats today. She writes, “Much more often a nation is defined not as a composite entity but as a collective individual, endowed with a will and interest of its own, which are independent of and take priority over the wills and interests of human individuals within the nation. Such a definition of the nation results in collectivistic nationalism. Collectivistic nationalisms tend to be authoritarian and imply a fundamental inequality between a small group of self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation – the leaders – and the masses, who have to adapt to the elite's interpretations.”

 We are up against an artificially engineered surge of collectivistic nationalism in India today, except that this one is strongly imbued with communal overtones.  But it’s important to see that much of the myth-making about the “nation” is part of a wider fascist agenda. As Mosse pointed out, nationalism is the “bedrock” upon which all fascist movements built themselves.

The indoctrination strats early

Moonje was tremendously impressed by the way the Italian Fascist Party organised the indoctrination and training of Italian youth and transposed the model to India through the RSS. Italian fascism was defeated and overthrown in the 1940s but its legacy lives on, not just in the way youngsters in India are being trained for physical combat and indoctrinated in subservience to some mythical national utopia

Patriarchy as the Mainstay of the State

Reich’s perspective moves the focus away from broad historical movements to the mechanisms which allow ideologies like nationalism to gain a wider purchase. He locates those mechanisms in the structure of the family and the kinds of sexual repression that abound there. The authoritarian family, Reich argues, is a veritable factory of reactionary ideology and structure. As such it is the mainstay of the state’s power in modern (capitalist) society.

Patriarchy for Reich is characterised not just by the domination of women by the leading males of the family but by the sexual suppression of both women and children within the family. “The goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system” (Mass Psychology, p. 25).

Reich went further. He suggested that the submissive, authority-fearing character-structure moulded in this kind of family was the key reason for the emergence of Hitler-type political leaders, Führers or “mass leaders” with a commanding or overpowering presence that could mobilise and dominate “masses”. Fascism’s ability to dominate the middle class and wider masses beyond it could be explained by the way children and adolescents grew up to identify with authority in one form or another – with their employers, with the state authorities, with the state itself and finally with the “nation”.

This process of “identification” was one sense in which ideology could be seen as becoming a “material force”.  “The more helpless the individual is made by his upbringing, the more strongly does he identify himself with the Führer… This tendency to identification is the psychological basis of national narcissism, that is, of a self-confidence based on identification with the “greatness of the nation”.’ (Mass Psychology, p. 38)

Manipulated Seriality and the Climate as Worked Matter

Finally, Sartre. In his great work The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) there are two ideas specifically that we should try and integrate into our understanding of fascism. The first is his notion of “manipulated seriality”, the second his conception of the political climate or fascist violence as “worked matter”.  

Sartre divides modern societies into two sorts of ensembles, “series” and “organised groups”. Seriality is the condition of being unorganised, hence incapable of acting and therefore vulnerable to domination by those who are organised and who do act (collectively). That domination can take the form of manipulating seriality, that is, conditioning series or influencing them to behave in certain ways.

Political propaganda works on the same principle as advertising; it generates what Sartre calls the illusion of “totalised seriality”. The series (ensembles that are unorganised, hence sharply distinct from the “organised groups”) can do nothing, it is dispersed and inert, but through advertising, propaganda, the mass media, climates of fear, violence, etc. it can have a great deal done to it and even think of itself as somehow unified! Advertisers get consumers to buy things by suggesting that ‘others’ are buying them. Those ‘others’ don’t actually exist, since each potential consumer is other to the other and the whole chain forms an infinite regress.

The pogrom is a gruesome example of how powerful organised groups can even extract actions (dispersive acts of violence) from the series while the latter remain serial, that is, dispersed, unorganised and inert. They become the instruments of the violence orchestrated/perpetrated by organised groups. Sartre calls this sort of violence the “passive activity of a directed seriality”.

Advanced criminal jurisdictions in the world today seek to cope with these situations of violence by using a robust concept of “command responsibility”.  Climates of fear, violence, etc. that trigger a wave of lynchings, pogroms and so on are also worked matter, that is, they are the result of organised groups working serialities (or working on series), as if this was a production process where masses of people are literally the raw material of the labour (praxis, freely chosen activity) of organised groups. A climate of violence is created by organised groups as a conscious act/activity. Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics, Sartre argues in the Critique.

A still from Rakesh Sharma's documentary 'Final Solution' on Gujarat 2002 mass crimes

Fascist Origins of the RSS

What the talk at JNU did was to look at fascism through these complementary perspectives and suggest that they need to be seen as different moments of the same general development. Subservience to authority turns out to be a central theme in the conditions that allow for fascist emergence. It was the factor that Reich himself stressed most of all, linking it with the nature of the family and describing the family itself as “the most important instrument of the state’s power”.

The RSS understood this from its inception. Marzia Casolari has shown the reasoning that lay behind the emergence of the shakha. BS Moonje, friend and mentor of Hedgewar, RSS founder, described his 1931 meeting with Mussolini in his diary. Moonje, Casolari points out, “played a crucial role in moulding the RSS along Italian (fascist) lines”.

Here is what he wrote in his diary: “The idea of fascism vividly brings out the conception of unity amongst people… India and particularly Hindu India need some such institution [as the Fascist youth organizations] for the military regeneration of the Hindus… Our institution of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of Nagpur under Dr Hedgewar is of this kind…”.  The RSS would be publicly embarrassed to have these connections widely publicised since they show that its own model of moulding the minds of Indian youth stems directly from the experience of Italy and Mussolini’s recommendations.

Moonje was tremendously impressed by the way the Italian Fascist Party organised the indoctrination and training of Italian youth and transposed the model to India through the RSS. Italian fascism was defeated and overthrown in the 1940s but its legacy lives on, not just in the way youngsters in India are being trained for physical combat and indoctrinated in subservience to some mythical national utopia, but also in the structures that have allowed fascism to become a major threat to India’s democracy, not least among these being the manipulated hysteria of nationalism and the structures of patriarchy and the traditional family. 
 
 

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Alberto Moravia’s earlier, even more brilliant novel The Conformist, published in 1951, was structured on comparable lines, exploring the deep structures of the fascist state in Italy under Mussolini. Moravia himself had been ostracised under fascism, having his books seized or banned, and had an acute sense of how ‘society’ adapted to regimes of the most authoritarian kind. The essay below summarises the story in the novel and shows why its underlying themes (the search for ‘normality’ and the wider complicities abetted by this) resonate or should resonate with us in India today

The great Italian writer Alberto Moravia(1907–1990) published The Conformist in 1951, less than a decade after the fall of fascism in Italy. The English translation of the novel by Tami Calliope runs to some 320 pages. The novel has an exceptionally strong plot line and the narrative is conveyed entirely through the eyes of its hero or anti-hero, a young Italian called Marcello Clerici.

The story revolves around a mission to assassinate his former professor, one Edmondo Quadri, who has left Italy to play an active role against fascism from his newly chosen base in Paris. Quadri leaves his academic job in Italy when Marcello is still a student, and one surmises from the briefest chronological hints in Moravia’s novel that this must have been some time at the end of the1920s.

The assassination of Quadri is in many ways the narrative backbone of the novel, which is partly told like a thriller. However, the chief interest or even contribution of the work lies in what it tells us about Marcello himself and in the retrospective act of reflexion which makes the reader ask, at the end perhaps, ‘so why did he call it “The Conformist”?’  She’s bound to ask this because the words ‘conformist’, ‘conformism’ don’t appear even once across the tense expanse of Moravia’s story.

The novel is divided into a Prologue of three chapters (approx. 60 pages), Part One (approx 80 pages), a long Part Two (of close to 140 pages) and a brief Epilogue (just over 30 pages). The structure alone shows that the narrative concentration is in Part Two, which deals with the mission itself, that is, Marcello and his wife leaving for Paris on their honeymoon and Marcello setting Quadri up for the assassination by passing crucial information on to an agent he works with called Orlando.

Both the Prologue and Part One set the scene for these chapters but they do so through a vivid intense portrait of the protagonist. The Prologue is about Marcello as a child driven by an obsessive sense of his own ‘abnormality’. The term appears repeatedly through the novel, as does its ostensible opposite ‘normality’, even more frequently. Marcello’s ‘abnormality’ is not a physical one, it is entirely of his own making and linked, in his mind, to acts of violence that stemmed or once stemmed from a childish cruelty.

Philosophically Moravia was probably closest to existentialism but to an existentialism of despair such as Kierkegaard’s more than one of choice and moral dilemma such as Sartre’s. Marcello’s character is repeatedly painted in terms of an underlying anguish or melancholy that he’s never quite able to pin down and which may well have a lot to do with his loveless childhood in a home dominated by a violent father.

What he was about to do, he reflected, was certainly much worse than killing a few lizards; just the same, so many people were with him…’  In short, here was a criminality no longer suffered in solitude and therefore perhaps not criminality at all. The crime of Quadri’s murder, Marcello reflects at one point, ‘would have been a crime if he had not known how to justify and make sense of it’

The Prologue, immersed in the memory of this drab childhood, contains two seminal events of the type that Sartre himself in Saint Genet came to call ‘original crises’. These are events that have the potential to define the rest of your life, so forceful or traumatic is one’s experience of them in childhood.

The first of these crises is the rapid escalation of Marcello’s acts of violence from a wanton destruction of a flower bed to a mass slaughter of lizards to the killing of the neighbour’s cat. When Marcello kills the cat, he does so unknowingly, firing shots from a sling at a mass of ivy in the garden that separates his own from the neighbour’s and with the vague thought that his childhood friend Roberto may well be there behind the fence. He is mortified to find that he has killed Roberto’s cat and could well have killed Roberto himself.

The feelings of shame and remorse that dog him then and for much of his childhood lie at the root of Marcello’s deep need for absolution either through the complicity of others, such as when he tells Roberto about the slaughtered lizards but fails to evince any approval, or by ‘being the same as everyone’, absolutely indiscriminately ‘normal’.

The second ‘original crisis’ as I called it is more devastating for Marcello. Once he starts going to school, he is often ragged for being effeminate. The same ambiguity that Moravia hinted at in the killing of the cat (Marcello could have killed Roberto if he’d been there) recurs here as a motif of sexual ambivalence. This culminates in a group of his classmates (his ‘fiercest tormentors’) following him from school one day and then pouncing on him to forcibly tie a girl’s skirt round him.

He is saved from this attack by a man in a dark gray uniform who turns out to be someone now working as a chauffeur who was, in his own description, a defrocked priest. This man, Lino, is a pederast and takes Marcello home. Nothing happens on this occasion but the following Monday when they meet again (Lino has promised to give him a pistol if he comes home with him again), he flings Marcello into the bedroom, throws him onto the bed, and starts to assault him sexually. Marcello grabs the gun which is lying on the bed and fires at Lino.

This act of homicide, as Marcello imagines it to be, concludes the Prologue, filling Marcello, once again, with a ‘stunned premonition of doom’, just as the killing of the cat had inspired him with the sense of a ‘solitary and threatening destiny’, the feeling that in ‘some fatal and mysterious way’ he was ‘predestined to commit acts of cruelty and death’. Like remorse, like the need for absolution and the ‘desperate aspiration’ for ‘normality’, this sense of being ‘predestined’, of having no control over the things you do or will do, is a major leitmotif in The Conformist.

Let me run through the major parts of the story as rapidly as I can. The four chapters of Part One largely revolve around Giulia, Marcello’s wife to be and the role this marriage and the fabric of domesticity connected with it play in constructing a sense of normality for him. But it starts with him going to the public library to look up old newspaper reports of the death of Lino; and then to ‘the ministry’, we are not told exactly which one, to learn of his assignment to assassinate his old professor.

As with his impending marriage, Marcello’s insertion into normality hinges even more decisively on this assignment or ‘mission’. Between these episodes, both in the same chapter, Moravia inserts a passage that I shall come back to, because it strikes me as one of the best insights I myself have read into the nature of contemporary politics.

In India in recent times we’ve lived through all of this, through something frighteningly similar to the regime in Marcello’s Italy, the same unshakeable sense of a ‘nation’ under siege, a nation that demands loyalty, weaves its subtle webs of complicity in crimes committed at many different levels, a nation one is either for or against, and so on. We’ve seen the most dreadful pogroms being orchestrated in secret and publicly televised as well as openly defended on TV.

This part of the novel also includes a chapter where Marcello who is not a religious person by any stretch goes to Santa Maria Maggiore for confession. In the confessional he tells the priest about his encounter with Lino and the subsequent killing, but holds back from saying anything about the murder he will be committing.

Part One ends with a searing description of the madness of Marcello’s father whom he and his mother have gone to visit in an asylum. Marcello was frightened by the thought that there might be a link between his father’s madness and his own distressing sense of abnormality.

Part Two is the narrative crux of the novel. The eleven chapters that make it up move rapidly across a series of encounters that Marcello and Giulia now have with Quadri and his wife Lina (Anna in Bertolucci’s film of the novel), all of this of course in Paris. Here Moravia introduces a new theme entirely, of the violent sexual attraction that Marcello now feels for Lina, which he himself thinks of as ‘love’.

Bound up with this new feeling (Marcello doesn’t love Giulia, he has married her because he needs the stability that his life with her will offer) is an ‘intoxicating sensation of freedom’, the sense that if his feelings are reciprocated he can start an entirely new life, even betraying his ‘political faith’. This ‘new and violent emotion’ as Moravia describes it, generates the dream of an ‘angelic kind of normality’ secured by ‘the strength of love alone’. But Lina, it turns out, detests him and makes no effort to conceal this. She hates him politically because her husband has told her that Marcello is almost certainly a fascist spy, and finds him no less repugnant physically, since she, on the contrary, is strongly attracted to Giulia.
In the interval between their first meeting at Quadri’s apartment and the dinner scheduled by them for that evening, Marcello walks through Paris delirious at the idea of a possible affair with Lina. But when he returns to the hotel, the concierge tells him that his wife has gone up to the room ‘with a lady’. Sure that Lina has come as well, he enters the room without knocking and finds the door to the bedroom slightly ajar. Giulia is sitting on the bed half naked and Lina is embracing her legs with both arms and pressing her breasts against Giulia’s shins.

It was clear to Marcello that while Giulia was flirting, Lina was simply mad with desire for her. He watches them for a while and then heads for the stairs, profoundly shaken. Again Moravia brings in the theme of ambiguity, this time an intensely sexual one, the ‘ambiguous figures of men-women and women-men who crossed paths at random, doubling and mingling their ambiguity’ (p. 237). Marcello promptly abandons his dream of a life with Lina and readjusts painfully to the mission he has come to Paris to pull off.

Moravia’s chapter describing their dinner that evening has the agent Orlando follow them into the restaurant (Marcello has to identify the target by shaking hands with him so Orlando can see what Quadri looks like), and from time to time Orlando’s head stares at Marcello in one of those massive mirrors that Parisian restaurants are so full of, looking as if it’s ‘suspended in midair’. Moravia alludes to this image at least three times in the chapter, for example, Marcello ‘lifted his eyes to the mirror again: Orlando’s head was still there, suspended in the void, his eyes fixed on them’. The dinner itself is laden with the most subtle emotional intrigues as Lina navigates between her passion for Giulia and her repugnance for Marcello. By the end of the evening, Marcello, repeatedly rebuffed, has developed a ‘bloody, murderous hatred’ for Lina, but a hatred ‘mixed in with and inseparable from his love’. In the end, Marcello lets the agent know exactly what Quadri’s movements will be the next day.

This, the longest part of the novel, ends with Marcello back in Rome, scanning the French papers to discover that both Quadri and his wife were murdered out in the countryside. Orlando tells him that an order from the ministry countermanding the assassination because it was more useful for the Italian government to have Quadri alive than dead since they now wanted a rapprochement with the French was never actually received by him, so the murders were, he says, pointless. ‘All that effort, two people dead, and it wasn’t necessary, in fact it was counterproductive’ (p. 283).  The absurd contingency of all this is not lost on Marcello, who is also given a first-hand report which tells him that when they opened fire Lina threw herself on to her husband to protect him from the bullets. Quadri tried to escape but had his throat cut.

 
Moravia’s short epilogue begins with the day Mussolini’s government falls, 25 July 1943. There is a subdued panic in Marcello’s mind, even more in Giulia’s, that he had, ‘as they say, bet on the losing horse’. Marcello discovers that his wife has always known, ever since their trip to Paris, that he was ‘part of the political police’ (Lina had told her) and had always suspected his role in the murder of the Quadris.

That evening they drive around Rome to watch the crowds celebrating the dismissal of Mussolini by the king. Later that night they end up in the gardens at the Villa Borghese where Giulia wants Marcello to make love to her when he is suddenly accosted by Lino, the chauffeur he thought he had killed all those years ago. It strikes him that all these years he had been searching for redemption from an ‘imaginary crime’.

In the final chapter Marcello, Giulia and their small daughter head out for the town of Tagliacozzo in the hills east of Rome when some hours later their car is consumed in flames from an air strike. Marcello and his family are killed in a tranquil sunlit countryside the day after Mussolini is brought down.

There is clearly a strong moral-political subtext to the novel which the writer is careful never to articulate didactically, and I’d like to look at a few remarkable passages where this pushes through the controlled exuberance of Moravia’s prose. The idea of a former student agreeing to assassinate his professor for reasons of state seems at least mildly shocking at several levels but to the writer it is part of Marcello’s underlying quest to affirm his absolute and complete ‘normality’ by engaging in an active expression of loyalty to the state. That loyalty, Moravia tells us in a striking phrase, ‘had origins deeper than any moral standard’ (p. 73).

To Marcello the regime embodied an authority which was ‘mysterious’, ‘like all authorities’, but deeper and more powerful than the authority of the Church (p. 117).Moravia elicits a notion of loyalty to an authoritarian regime as somehow impervious to morality, as if it lies in a different galaxy governed by completely different laws of motion. Moreover, in the confessional at Santa Maria Maggiore where Marcello doesn’t confess the crime he is about to commit, he was held back from the confession by ‘something that would not let him go forward’.

‘It was neither moral disgust, nor shame, nor any other manifestation of guilt, but something very different that had nothing to do with guilt. It was an absolute inhibition, dictated by a profound complicity and loyalty. He was not to speak of the mission, that was all; the same conscience that had remained mute and passive when he had announced to the priest, “I have killed”, now imposed this silence on him with great authority’ (p. 117).

Here the notion of complicity ties into the wider solidarity of a sort of ideological community bound by its invisible codes and faith. Being part of this community of faith gave crime itself a different meaning. Waiting for his mother to get ready so they can visit his father at the asylum, Marcello is again confronted by a lizard (‘It was a big lizard of the most common kind, with a green back and a white belly that throbbed against the yellow enamel of the table’), and he ruminates, ‘He had been left alone to face the death of the lizards, and in this solitude he had recognized the clue to the crime.

But now, he thought, he was not and would never again be alone. Even if he committed a crime – as long as he committed it for certain ends – the state; the political, social, and military organizations that depended on the state; great masses of people that thought as he did; and, outside of Italy, other states and other millions of people would stand behind him.

What he was about to do, he reflected, was certainly much worse than killing a few lizards; just the same, so many people were with him…’ (p. 125). In short, here was a criminality no longer suffered in solitude and therefore perhaps not criminality at all. The crime of Quadri’s murder, Marcello reflects at one point, ‘would have been a crime if he had not known how to justify and make sense of it’ (p. 271).

It made sense because there were wider solidarities behind it, others who needed to do their ‘duty’ to make fascism a resounding success. “The others”, as he knew, were the government he had understood he was serving with that murder; the society embodied by that government; and the very nation that accepted guidance by that same society’ (p. 272).    

Here finally is the passage I said I would come back to. On his way to the ministry to be told his assignment, a newspaper seller is shouting as a headline announces Franco’s latest victory in Spain. Marcello reads this news with true satisfaction. ‘From the beginning he had wanted Franco to win, not fervently but with a sentiment both deep and tenacious, almost as if that victory would bring confirmation of the goodness and rightness of his tastes and ideas, not only in the field of politics but also in all others.

Perhaps he had desired and still desired Franco’s victory for love of symmetry, like someone who is furnishing his house and takes care to collect furniture all of the same style and period. He seemed to read this symmetry in the events of the past few years, growing ever clearer and more important: first the advent of Fascism in Italy, then in Germany; then the war of Ethiopia, then the war in Spain.

This progression pleased him, he wasn’t sure why, maybe because it was easy to recognize a more-than-human logic in it, a recognition that gave him a sense of security and infallibility. On the other hand, he thought, folding the newspaper back up and putting it in his pocket, it couldn’t be said that he was convinced of the justice of Franco’s cause for reasons of politics or propaganda. This conviction had come to him out of nowhere, as it seems to come to ordinary, uneducated people: from the air, that is, as when someone says an idea is in the air.

He sided with Franco the way countless other people did, common folk who knew little or nothing about Spain, uneducated people who barely read the headlines in the papers. For simpatia, he thought, giving a completely unconsidered, alogical, irrational sense to the Italian word. A simpatia that could be said only metaphorically to come from the air; there is flower pollen in the air, smoke from the houses, dust, light, not ideas.

This simpatia, then, arose from deeper regions and demonstrated once more that his normality was neither superficial nor pieced together rationally and voluntarily with debatable motives and reasons, but linked to an instinctive and almost physiological condition, to a faith, that is, shared with millions of other people. He was one with the society he found himself living in, and with its people.’ (p. 72–3)

In this passage Moravia comes close to describing what Sartre would some years later, also in the fifties, describe as ‘seriality’ and the stronger forms of it which he calls ‘recurrence’. Those are Sartre’s drably mathematical expressions for the structures of alterity through which ‘ideas’, inert ideas, take root and circulate, becoming self-evident and unshakeable. They ‘come out of nowhere’ because they stem from a perpetual flight of otherness, since the other is always only other to the other, and Moravia’s ‘chain of normality’ or Sartre’s flight of recurrence are pure infinite regresses.

More importantly, however, the lived experience of these ensembles generates a notion of truth that Moravia himself goes on to spell out a few lines after the passage I just quoted. ‘What else could the truth be, in fact, if not that which was evident to everyone, believed by everyone, held irrefutable?’And for Marcello ‘possession of the truth not only permitted action but demanded it. It was like a confirmation he must offer to himself and others of his own normality…’.(p. 73)
The best commentary on this is what Moravia would tell his biographer Enzo Siciliano in an interview he must have given in the late seventies: ‘Integration into Fascism…always had to be paid with a crime: to begin with, a betrayal, the first thing Mussolini asked an intellectual was to write an article against one of his enemies’.

In India in recent times we’ve lived through all of this, through something frighteningly similar to the regime in Marcello’s Italy, the same unshakeable sense of a ‘nation’ under siege, a nation that demands loyalty, weaves its subtle webs of complicity in crimes committed at many different levels, a nation one is either for or against, and so on. We’ve seen the most dreadful pogroms being orchestrated in secret and publicly televised as well as openly defended on TV; fake encounters being exposed by judicial enquiry, then publicly defended as part of a drive to get the killers off; extra-judicial killings being condoned and the killers let off because they were acting under orders, viz. doing their ‘duty’, that is, fighting a fabricated ‘terrorism’;  ministers being covertly assassinated because they told the truth about crucial events and implicated (‘betrayed’) their leader; and so on, forever. And all of this is camouflaged behind an equally constructed ‘nationalism’ that is pure manipulated hysteria…

Read the way Moravia wanted it to be read, not as a purely moral text but a political one, The Conformist speaks directly to us today, more directly indeed than the brilliant amazing film that Bertolucci made out of the novel in 1970.
 

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Book title: Unpolitische Wissenschaft? Wilhelm Reich und die Psychoanalyse im Nationalsozialismus (Apolitical science? Wilhelm Reich and psychoanalysis in Nazi Germany)

Author: Andreas Peglau

Publisher: Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen, 2013

Language: German

Review

Andreas Peglau’s remarkable study of Wilhelm Reich and of the fate of psychoanalysis under Nazism is a major and outstanding contribution to its subject. Painstakingly researched and lucidly argued, it radically overhauls the prevalent picture of Reich as some ‘half-crazed genius’ or ‘mildly paranoid’ Freudian renegade and reinstates the best period of his work (the late twenties to the end of the thirties) in the context it belongs to.

Two themes are of overriding importance. The first is the sheer significance and uniqueness of Reich’s work within both the Left-political and the psychoanalytic traditions, thanks to his project of integrating the broad framework of Marx’s theory with those elements of Freud’s work that Reich himself found acceptable. Reich’s significance in terms of a history of the Left is that he was probably the only major figure on the Left in the interwar years to argue strongly for the integration of a cultural politics into revolutionary political work, anticipating a strand of politics that only the emergence of feminism would foreground in a major way, and this decades later.

Peglau’s second set of arguments turns a searing spotlight on the conformism and complicity of the wider community of analysts in Germany and German-occupied Austria which, he suggests, was largely rooted in Freud’s own refusal to confront fascism publicly and in a rigorous positivism (Freud’s) that enforced a separation (merely ostensible!) between ‘science’ and ‘politics’, even as many analysts collaborated actively with the regime.

With the exception of Trotsky, it would be hard to think of a major left-wing figure between the wars who was more comprehensively ostracized or more widely persecuted than Wilhelm Reich in the years between the upsurge of fascism and his own dismal isolation and death, in a US prison, in November 1957. Reich was ostracized both by the Left (or a Left largely dominated by the Stalinists) and in his own professional ‘community’ of psychoanalysts, with the result that in 1933 he suffered two expulsions in quick succession, first from the German Psychoanalytical Society (DPG), hence also from the International Psychoanalytical Association, and then a few months later from the KPD (German Communist Party)![i]

Expelled from the Austrian Social Democratic Party early in 1930 for wanting a United Front with the Communists, Reich had then joined the (minuscule) Austrian Communist Party. But later the same year, in November, barely two months after the political earthquake of September when the Nazis emerged as the second strongest party in Germany, he moved to Berlin where he started and ran several Sexpol Clinics that attracted literally thousands of patients from largely working-class suburbs, and used KPD networks (lectures to the Marxistische Arbeiterschule [MASCH] and writings in Die Warte) as a platform for a more radical form of ‘sexual reform’ work.  

Of his early writings Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis demonstrates Reich’s ability to work outside the constraining mould of orthodoxies (‘Marxist’ or psychoanalytic). Here Reich rejected the idea of an immutable Oedipus complex, describing it as an ‘idealist and metaphysical’ notion. ‘To conceive the child’s relations to the father and the mother that we have discovered in our own day as eternal and invariant across all societies is a notion compatible only with the idea that social being itself is immutable’, adding, ‘The Oedipus Complex is bound to disappear in a socialist society’. This was obviously a major departure from Freudian orthodoxy but one that Reich felt no qualms about making.

If Reich’s earliest draft of The Mass Psychology of Fascism had caused tensions with the KPD (because the Social Democrats and not the Nazis were the main enemy then) when the book was finally published in September 1933, Reich, then in Denmark, was soon expelled from the German Communist Party. At one level, Peglau argues, this had everything to do with the retrograde social profile of the KPD, characterized as it was by a striking absence of intellectuals, an absence of younger age-groups (persons aged 18 to 25 formed barely 12 per cent  of members in 1927!) and an overwhelmingly male membership (over 80 per cent). At another level, Reich’s central argument in Mass Psychology collided frontally with the metaphysical economism (‘vulgar Marxism’) that short-circuited the explanation of complex social processes by reducing them to some direct economic determination. In Mass Psychology, one knows, Reich starts by making much of the ‘cleavage’ between ‘economic base’ and ‘ideology’ which, he says is the key challenge for revolutionary theory.

In writing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, something he had started to do in 1931, the problem that confronted Reich was: Why do the working masses allow themselves to be mobilized into movements that are manifestly opposed to their economic interests? This riddle, he argued, could not be solved ‘economically’; there was no economic explanation for it. On the other hand, if the solution to the riddle lay in ideology, we would have to explain what this could mean and that is what Reich set out to do by making the family central to the kind of subjectivity presupposed in fascism. The great themes that Reich develops in Mass Psychology can be summed up in what for me are the three main ‘vectors’ that run through the first two chapters of the book: (1) The conception of ideology as a material force (materielle Gewalt), the ‘biopsychological’ grounding of ideology in the psychic structures moulded by family, by ‘tradition’ and by a repressed and often brutalized sexuality; (2) patriarchy and the authoritarian family as the mainstay of the state’s power; and (3) the resonance between repressed/authoritarian character structures and the Führer ideology that underpins right-wing mass movements.

These are major insights, crucial to a sex-affirming revolutionary politics, and they have scarcely even begun to be developed by later socialist discussion. They were also (Peglau might have noted this) decisively confirmed in Theodore Abel’s study where close to 70 per cent of the active Nazis who sent in essays describing ‘Why I Became a Nazi’ stemmed from families where, in their own description, the father’s politics could be described as ‘nationalist, patriotic’ (45.4 per cent), ‘militarist, authoritarian’ (10.7 per cent) or ‘racist (völkisch), anti-semitic’ (12 per cent).[ii]

What interested Reich was the ‘psychic’ basis of these ‘ideas’. Not only was Reich the only analyst in Germany to grapple with the problem of fascism, he was also one of only two Marxist thinkers to characterise it chiefly in terms of its mass base, that is, as a mass movement. (The other one, Arthur Rosenberg, strangely finds no mention in Peglau’s book.)[iii]

On the other hand, in sharp contrast to Reich’s attempt to deal with the phenomenon of fascism, there was a striking lack of any public opposition to fascism from analysts in Germany. They sedulously avoided discussion of the subject throughout the thirties. This, Peglau argues, explains the Nazi tolerance of the discipline itself. Not only this, however. The bulk of the analysts who stayed behind in Germany chose not only not to resist but to cooperate/collaborate with the regime. Where large numbers of exiled intellectuals of all political shades engaged with Nazism in one form or another, psychoanalysts were not among them. Why not?  ‘In my view, this should be attributed to the “appeasement policy” laid out by Freud and the International Association vis-à-vis the “right-wing” regime.’

The original preface to the first, 1933 edition of Mass Psychology contains this striking criticism of Freud and his followers: “Freud and the majority of his pupils reject the sociological implications of psychoanalysis and do their best not to overstep the framework of bourgeois society”.[iv] Not long after the Machtergreifung Freud advised Felix Boehm that it would be better not to give the government grounds for banning the DPG (German Psychoanalytical Society) by retaining Max Eitingon, a Jew, as its president. He also wanted Reich out of the German Society, knowing this would mean Reich’s automatic loss of membership in the International Association as well. When Reich was deported from Denmark later the same year, Freud refused to help on the grounds that he didn’t agree with his ‘extreme views’! 

Although the book burnings of 1933 did explicitly target the ‘writings of the school of Sigmund Freud’, the blacklisting of psychological literature was selective, not all-embracing. Reich was an exception in having a total ban imposed on his work. The key factor, Peglau insists, was his open, public opposition to the Nazis. Peglau deals at length with the complicity of the profession, through figures like M.H. Göring who sought to ‘integrate’ psychoanalysts in the service of the Nazi state. A particularly odious form of this was their role in the biopolitics of Nazism (forced sterilisations, ‘euthanasia’, the persecution of homosexuals, etc.) with analysts devising diagnostic models to help decide who was ‘psychopathic’ and fit for elimination. The International Association would subsequently prefer to repress the traumas of its own past by erasing the complicity of analysts who had collaborated with the Nazis. Yet the extent of integration had extended to deeper, theoretical levels as well, with Nazi ‘Depth Psychology’ ascribing considerable importance to key concepts like ‘transference’ and ‘resistance’.  

A repressed and brutalized sexuality and the reactionary thinking and structures bound up with it remain powerful sources of social and ideological domination under capitalism. The cultural politics Reich wanted is more of a reality today thanks to the feminist struggles of the postwar period.[v] But both the radical Left and psychoanalysis remain largely immune to the lessons of Reich and ‘sexual politics’, and this perhaps is the best reason why Peglau’s book is a fundamental contribution.      
         
(A slightly revised version of this review will be published in the new format of the web magazine The International Newsletter of Communist Studies. It is published here with grateful acknowledgement to them).           

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