A CURIOUSLY inadvertent glimpse into the authoritarian nature of Leftism comes to us by way of Frankfurt School psychologist, Erich Fromm (1900-1980). Between 1929 and 1931, as German National-Socialists were beginning to close-in on power, Fromm and his fellow researchers were keen to establish precisely what was required for workers to rise up and fight against the threat of fascism. As a result, they went out into the factories and distributed 3,300 questionnaires, each containing a total of 271 open-ended questions.
The information-gathering exercise was partly based on a 1912 study by Adolf Levenstein (b. 1870), who had divided the psychological characteristics of German workers into three distinct categories:
(i) revolutionary,
(ii) ambivalent and
(iii) conservative-deferential.
Interestingly, despite the fact that 82% of workers identified with either the Social Democratic (SPD) or Communist (KPD) parties, only 15% possessed the required levels of anti-authoritarianism considered necessary to resist totalitarianism. On the other hand, 25% of workers displayed strong authoritarian characteristics.
These results, given the historical degeneration of Marxist and anti-fascist principles into the mirror-image of that which they were allegedly designed to overcome, suggest that there are often more sinister motives behind one’s political allegiances.
