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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Photo Courtesy: Indian Express  Home Page Image: Foxnews.com

One hundred and eighty million workers in India went out on strike on 2 September. It is the largest strike in human history. Workers came from all sectors – from the mines and crèches, from the rail yards and the banks. All trade unions – except the one backed by the RSS – backed the strike. Even workers in the RSS union joined the action. What was most notable about the strike was that it crossed lines of formal and informal sector, with the unions fierce in their determination on working-class unity at the deepest level.
 
A few days later, at Jawaharlal Nehru University, long-time campus adversaries – the Student Federation of India (SFI) and the All-India Students Association (AISA) – put up a united left slate to defeat the RSS-BJP’s student wing, the ABVP. The campaign was hard fought. In the name of JNU’s integrity, the Left fought to define the ABVP as party to the attack on freedom of expression and the rights of students across the country – from Hyderabad Central University to Jadavpur University to Himachal University. Student struggle against the pressure from the BJP-led government at the Centre has been fierce. The Left slate in JNU triumphed, winning the entire central leadership panel and most of the councillor seats in the various schools. SFI, AISA and the All-India Student Federation (who campaigned with the Left) understand that this is the time of Left unity. There were principled disagreements between the SFI and the AISA, but these were articulated in an honest and comradely fashion.
 
A few weeks before, in Una (Gujarat) and in Mumbai (Maharashtra), mass demonstrations took place that brought Dalit groups and the Left together to combat the atrocities against Dalits and the disregard shown to the legacy of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Despite great divides that still come between Dalit organisations and Left parties, all sides recognize that building bridges is the task of the present. As Brinda Karat, CPI-M Politburo member wrote at the LeftWord Books blog, ‘The slogan of class unity will have more meaning for a Dalit worker if working class and agrarian class organisations and movements, mobilize all workers against the specific oppression and exploitation that a worker faces as a Dalit’.
 
In this atmosphere, with Left Unity in the air, historian Jairus Banaji comes out with a harsh denunciation of CPI-M Politburo member Prakash Karat. It is a nasty piece of writing, ad hominem by definition, starting with crude statements to describe what Banaji thinks is Karat’s character. If Banaji’s larger point is that the need of the hour is unity of all forces against fascism, then his own prose fails the test – there is no comradely tone here, no attempt to win over Karat to Banaji’s view. The essay by Banaji oscillates between condescension and juvenile derision. To disagree is necessary and important. But how one disagrees is as necessary and as important.

Brinda Karat, CPI-M Politburo member wrote at the LeftWord Books blog, ‘The slogan of class unity will have more meaning for a Dalit worker if working class and agrarian class organisations and movements, mobilize all workers against the specific oppression and exploitation that a worker faces as a Dalit’

 
Why would Banaji write in this vein? It is as if Banaji is fighting ancient battles, the contest of Stalin versus Trotsky on the one hand, and the squabbles at JNU in the 1970s between the SFI and the Trotskyites on the other. His is not the tone of the United Front or the Popular Front, but one that emerges from the deepest wells of sectarianism. Must the Left return to those old debates to find its way in the present?

In most contexts, including in India, the debates between ‘Stalinists’ and ‘Trotskyites’ are of little concern. These are the parlour room discussions of hardened militants who find it hard to come to terms with the new debates over questions of strategy and tactics to organise the large segments of the ‘informal sector’ of workers who have been politically disarmed by neo-liberal policy and the mass media. But this is not Banaji’s interest. He is in the mood to score points.
 

Defending the BJP?

 
Prakash Karat makes a distinction in his short essay in the Indian Express between a fascist regime and an authoritarian one. What is the basis of this distinction? It is that fascism is an extreme form of rule sanctified by the bourgeoisie when the capitalist system faces great threats of collapse. No such signs are evident in India today. There is no imminent crisis to the fractured and complex Indian bourgeoisie, nor is there any indication that the BJP government has the stomach to move against the Constitution or even towards an Emergency regime. The BJP pushes its right-wing agenda, but it is hampered by a host of political adversaries – not only political parties, but also pressure groups and mass sentiment that will not allow it to enact its complete agenda. The fact that one hundred and eighty million workers went on strike shows that there remains wide opposition to the BJP’s ‘labour reform’ agenda, one that is otherwise quite acceptable to large sections of the parliamentary opposition (including the Congress Party).
 
The BJP itself, Karat acknowledges, is ‘not an ordinary bourgeois party’. It is, after all, part of the Sangh Parivar and linked, therefore, to the RSS. The RSS, Karat notes, ‘has a semi-fascist ideology’. What makes it ‘semi-fascist’, asks Banaji? It is semi-fascist or fascisant because it can never hope to achieve hegemony over the popular imagination, but has to impose its fascistic ideology from above, through the institutions, by manipulation of the media, by deceit rather than by the creation of conviction. Fissures along caste and regional lines are too deep to allow the RSS to dig its roots into the Indian popular imagination. If it elevates Hindi, it will alienate Tamils. If it pushes the Ram Mandir, it does not speak as loudly to Bengalis as those who read Tulsidas. The BJP – the electoral arm of the Parivar – finds it hard to break into regions of India where the RSS is not as powerful. It makes alliances. These are opportunistic. These alliances strengthen the BJP in Delhi, but do not allow it to penetrate the popular consciousness elsewhere.When the BJP is on the RSS’s (and VHP’s) turf, then matters are different. The Gujarat pogrom of 2002 took place in a setting where the RSS and the VHP had prepared the terrain. All this is well-described in TeestaSetalvad’s forthcoming memoir from LeftWord Books.
 
What we have in the BJP is authoritarianism – a strong determination to use force of various kinds to gets its way, to use fear to stifle dissent, to use intimidation to transform culture. Modi moves the authoritarianism of the BJP to its extreme. The leader is venerated, the style of politics is menacing, and the agenda is business-friendly. Echoes of Turkey’s AKP are loud, as Karat notes, but so too are there echoes of the Eastern European right-wing.
 
But in Turkey or Bulgaria, these right-wing parties are able to formulate a stable kind of racist nationalism. The societies appear more homogeneous. India is, in that sense, different. It is a multi-national state, with caste as a fissure that tears through society. No simple racist authoritarianism can succeed in India. That is why the BJP attempts to change the idea of India, push against the multi-national consensus towards what first appears as an anodyne One India politics but which later could provide the cultural basis for the Hindu Rashtra. But this feint is being contested openly and successfully. The BJP foists its representatives on the cultural institutions, but they are not obeyed. Legitimacy is not going to be easy to earn.
 
Because Banaji does not like Karat’s distinction between fascism and authoritarianism, he suggests that Karat is defending the BJP. That is outrageous. None other than the Left has been the fiercest combatant against communalism of all kinds. Others truck with communalism when it suits their electoral purposes. But the Left is principled on this issue. To make a distinction so as to clarify one’s tactics does not amount to a defence of the BJP.
 

Alliance with the Congress?
 

Banaji’s insistence that the BJP is a fascist party is not merely a technical discussion nor a debate about Germany in the 1920s (although it sometimes reads that way). This is an argument about the strategy for the Indian Left. Banaji seems to suggest – by analogy from Germany’s 1920s – that the Congress Party could be the Social Democratic ally that the German Communist Party of the 1920s rejected in the fight against Nazism. If the Communists in India today join up with the Congress Party, he implies, then they will be able to take on the BJP.

The essay by Banaji oscillates between condescension and juvenile derision. To disagree is necessary and important. But how one disagrees is as necessary and as important.

 
There are two strikingly peculiar premises to this assessment. First, the assumption that the Congress Party today is Social Democratic would be hard to sustain. The only reason that the Congress Party-led UPA 1 government adopted parts of a watered-down social democratic agenda was because of the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) it had to sign with the Left.
 
The CMP, even with the addition of the Left’s social welfare demands, remained neo-liberal in its orientation. There was no illusion about that. At that time, the Left had a bloc in parliament that made a difference to the stability of the government. It was able to force the Congress Party, whose temperament on economic matters is shared with the BJP, to pay attention to the acute crisis in the country. No such Left parliamentary bloc exists today.Evidence of the Congress Party’s social democracy is weak. Apart from the occasional speech about poverty, Congress leaders are utterly committed to the same kind of economic policies as pursued by the BJP.
 
The second assumption of Banaji’s text is that the Left – by abjuring an electoral alliance at the national level with the Congress Party – is somehow sectarian. In fact, the Left unions worked closely with the Congress unions for the September strike.
 
Sectarianism from below is not the agenda at all. In fact, it is the opposite – to build the largest coalition from below to confront the exercise of authoritarian power by the BJP government and semi-fascist power by the RSS in its boroughs. There is ample evidence of non-electoral joint struggles on the ground.
 
Banaji does not register this joint action. The Left’s hesitancy about the Congress is not a repeat of the Comintern’s social fascism doctrine, where actions with the social democrats were forbidden. If Leon Trotsky were to have appeared in India on 2 September and give his December 1931 speech, his words would appear to be quite ordinary: ‘Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank’, he said. ‘Your salvation lies in merciless struggle. And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory’.
 
The Left mass organisations work closely with the mass organisations of other groups, and with workers and peasants who are not in any formal organisation. They are already building that ‘fighting unity’. The building of mass struggles – such as the strike of 2 September and the post-Una protests – is the task of our time.
 
Banaji’s ill-toned attack on Prakash Karat is evidence of the kind of sectarianism that the broadly defined Indian Left needs to shed. Left unity is essential if the Left in India is to create the unity of the workers and peasants whose lives and hopes depend on it. As Trotsky said in that 1931 speech, ‘Make haste, worker-Communists, you have very little time left!’
 
 
(Vijay Prashad is the Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. He is the author of No Free Left: the Futures of Indian Communism (2015) and the editor of Communist Histories, vol. 1 (2016), both published by LeftWord Books)

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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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