On the Marxist use of psychoanalysis to understand fascism
Victor Cova
Platypus Review 140 | October 2021
THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM, manifested in 2016 with both the election of Trump as U.S. President and the Brexit vote, has sparked a renewed interest in authoritarianism and the Frankfurt School’s concept of the authoritarian personality. It has led to the re-edition in 2019 of the Authoritarian Personality book which Adorno co-wrote, as well as of his conference entitled, “Aspects of the New Right Extremism” in 2020. It has also sparked various commentaries and attempts at actualizing Adorno’s argument, such as the 2018 volume entitled Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, with essays by Wendy Brown and Peter Gordon and Max Pensky. The Platypus Review has itself published for the first time Adorno's “Remarks on the Authoritarian Personality” as well as commentaries in November 2016 and a slender volume, Marxism in the Age of Trump, that also addresses the question of the authoritarian personality. The conference by Copenhagen-based organisation Próblema, to which this text was originally responding to, asked, "What can psychoanalysis say about the far-right?" in September 2020, was a late example of that trend. Two questions lay behind this renewed interest: Are Trump and Brexit contemporary manifestations of what Adorno called “the authoritarian personality”? What role can Frankfurt School style critical theory play in making sense of these phenomena?
Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis plays an important role in Adorno's concept of the authoritarian personality. As Adorno put it, “Our whole study, though its subject-matter falls into the area of social psychology, is in full harmony with psychoanalysis in its more orthodox, Freudian version. On theoretical grounds, our group opposed the attempts to ‘sociologize’ psychoanalysis through the softening of basic concepts”[1] — in opposition to the revisionism of Erich Fromm, which Adorno had repeatedly criticized. As Peter Gordon clarifies, more than Freud directly, the early Frankfurt School drew inspiration from Whilelm Reich's “Character Analysis,” and particularly from his Mass Psychology of Fascism, which he published in 1933.[2] Yet very little attention has been paid to that work over the past few years,[3] in spite of the re-edition of Reich's early writings a few years earlier. As perhaps the first full-length work dedicated to the study of fascism written by a practicing Marxist psychoanalyst, moreover written and published as fascism and Nazism were still taking shape, Reich's work can illuminate, if not our present situation, at least the necessities, possibilities and limits of psychoanalysis when faced with a phenomenon like fascism.
In what follows I try to answer the following questions: Why did Reich believe it both possible and necessary to mobilize Freudian concepts to understand the rise of Nazism in Germany? What did he perceive to be the limits or mistakes this might involve? What characterized this mass psychology of fascism? What did the Frankfurt School mean by authoritarianism beyond the mere phenomenon of fascism? What might this mean for contemporary attempts to mobilize psychoanalysis in order to understand phenomena such as Trump or Brexit?
In brief: For Reich it is the disintegration of the Marxist party from 1914 onwards which makes it both possible and necessary to rely on Freudian concepts in order first of all to understand the workers’ authoritarian personality structure which had led to that disintegration in the first place. Yet such a use of Freudian concepts should properly lead to a rediscovery of orthodox Marxism, not to its replacement or complementation with a heterpgeneous theory, and certainly not to the pathologization of Nazi voters or to psychologically reform individuals from their authoritarianism. The Frankfurt School more broadly understood fascism to be only one form of the authoritarian state, with the New Deal welfare state and the USSR embodying other forms of the same, and relying just as much on the authoritarian personality. Contemporary attempts at mobilizing "authoritarianism" and "the authoritarian personality" must contend with the widespread nature both among leaders and movements they might consider "left-wing" as well as with the diminished plausibility of psychoanalysis as the bourgeois society which produced the Freudian individual has largely disintegrated.
Why did orthodox Marxists such as Reich, Benjamin or Adorno use concepts inherited from Freudian psychoanalysis? We should remember that similar attempts were roundly criticised by Lenin only a decade prior: “The extension of Freudian hypotheses seems ‘educated’, even scientific, but it is ignorant, bungling [...] There is no place for it in the Party, in the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.”[4] Yet far from being a heretical move to correct Marxism or complement its understanding of material conditions with a science of subjectivity, the introduction of psychoanalysis into theory was meant by Reich as a return to Marx in the context of the practical disappearance of the party and of class-consciousness more broadly. Fascism, as the inheritor and caricature of socialism, itself was the prime symptom of the death of the party, but Reich also considered the economism of both the Social Democrat and Communist parties to be further symptoms, as well as “the camouflaging of defeats and the covering of important facts with illusions.”[5]
Thus the very idea that Marxism describes material, economic factors, and that psychoanalysis would serve to address a subjective factor out of the reach of Marxism, that very idea was a symptom of the crisis to be analysed. The Left's refusal or inability to take fascism seriously was another manifestation of these symptoms. The Social Democrat and Stalinian parties presented the rise of the Nazi party as a product of the workers’ irrationality, that is, their inability to recognise their interests in a moment of economic crisis. Vulgar Marxism, which is the name that the revolutionary Marxists gave to the revisionists of their time, capitulates to the existing order of things and collapses itself into an analysis of economic factors, as Reich put it, “to the problem of unemployment and pay rates.” Vulgar Marxism, now as Stalinism, expected the crisis of 1929–33 to necessarily lead to a move of the masses to the left, but instead moved the proletariat to the right. Instead of analysing that contradiction, intellectuals pathologized the working class response as “psychotic” or “chauvinistic.”
Psychoanalysis was to go beyond such facile dismissal of the workers’ support for fascism. More specifically, the absence of a socialist party made psychoanalysis necessary for two reasons: first because the party was itself meant to be the very medium for the apprehension of the dialectical relations between subjectivity and objectivity, but also because the party transformed society, and its disintegration left in its wake a disorganized mass of individuals. Indeed, the Marxist parties of the 2nd International were not the mere marketing agencies they have become today, but were tasked with both the organization of proletarian civil society and, for and through this organization, an understanding of its contradictions, and more broadly of the contradictions of capitalism, in order to guide the masses in revolutionary action. Controversies, whether they opposed revisionist and orthodox Marxists in the German SPD (Social Democratic Party) on the relation between reform and revolution, or Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, were treated by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg as an index of the transformation of the party, the proletariat, and capitalism, and as indicators of the possibility for revolution. This ended when the SPD in power in Germany commanded the murder of Rosa Luxemburg at the hands of the pre-fascist Freikorps, and when Russian party bureaucrats helped Stalin take control of the Third International.
Freud’s work could lend itself to a Marxist appropriation because of his recognition of the historical nature of subjectivity, and particularly of the pathologies produced by the crisis of labor and the family in capitalism. Reich highlighted the following of Freud's discoveries: (1) Consciousness is driven by psychic processes which are not accessible to conscious control; (2) Sexuality is the prime motor of psychic life from infancy onward; (3) Childhood sexuality is repressed out of fear of punishment and thus manifest all the stronger in pathological disturbances of the mind; (4) Morality is the incorporation of that external prohibition. Freud thought that repression is necessary for all of cultural civilization to exist, that is for humans to forgo pleasure and go to work, but for Reich there was a history to the repression of sexuality, and in particular its thriving as a result of the specific form of the exploitation of human labour under capitalism. Sexual repression turns into a moral defense, withdraws sexuality from consciousness and prevents rebellion against the suppression of both material and sexual needs: “The result is conservatism, fear of freedom, in a word, reactionary thinking.”[6] The sexual needs find substitute gratifications in brutal sadism and in masochism, in the counter girl’s sexual desire for marching officers and in the young men’s joining the army to “travel to foreign countries.”
According to Marx, the crisis of labor, which also manifests as an excessive repression of sexuality, expresses the core contradiction of bourgeois society under the industrial mode of production. Bourgeois society was based on the free exchange of labor, and more particularly on the value of labor time. The development of bourgeois society had deprived European nobility from much of its power, yet continued to live under its laws. For Adam Smith, such a society would guarantee ever greater wealth for all for ever less effort as labor became more efficient. Yet with the industrial revolution, the automatization of labor rendered its value self-contradictory. Indeed, the workers made the machines that would replace them, actively destroying the value of their own labor as they worked, leading to both overwork and underwork, that is, mass unemployment, but also to economic crises that periodically disrupted social life.[7]
For Marx, socialism and Bonapartism were the political manifestations of this crisis of labor. The revolution of 1848 was the political manifestation of an economic crisis. The call for socialism that emerged at that time expressed the increased socialization of production, but missed its self-contradictory nature and only demanded the full realization of the value of labor. The election of a socialist, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, showed the impasse of such a demand. He managed the crisis by alternatingly supporting different sectors of society, now the unemployed, now the petty bourgeoisie, now the peasants, all the while increasing the power of the state over society through the police and the army to repress discontent and employ the lumpen proletariat. His crowning himself emperor in order to protect universal suffrage and democracy fully expressed the self-contradictory nature of bourgeois society under capitalism. For Marx, this did not mean that the bourgeois revolutions had been hypocritical or delusional, but rather that their success had produced the potential for heretofore unimaginable forms of freedom. It was this unfulfilled potential which expressed itself as political repression.[8]
More specifically, both the potential of industrial production and its repression were the responsibility of the workers. They made both the machine and the revolution, and they gave up on both by choosing for themselves a master, shying away from the overcoming of capitalism and unable to learn from their failure. What was needed, then, was an organization dedicated to maintaining a consciousness of history and of articulating the self-contradictory relations between labor and capital, the realization of class and its overcoming. The first step such an organization would take would be to carry out the revolution to its term, and not to abandon power to the bourgeoisie. Authoritarianism, though a symptom of the self-contradictory nature of bourgeois society under the industrial mode of production, was not to be avoided but worked through. As Engels put it:
Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?[9]
Hence for Reich fascism should be understood on the basis of Marxism, should rely on psychoanalysis because of the failure of the party, and serves to discover the emancipatory potential of fascism, that is, the worker's desire for freedom which fascism both expressed and recoiled from — in the same way as neurosis, for Freud, expresses both a desire for (sexual) freedom and its repression. Reich takes the example of rebelling soldiers during the 1905 Russian revolution, who, having successfully risen up against their immediate commanders, capitulated before the rest of the hierarchy and gave themselves up for slaughter. As he puts it, “In their officers the soldiers of 1905 unconsciously perceived their childhood fathers (condensed in the conception of God) who denied sexuality and whom one could neither kill nor want to kill, though they shattered one’s joy of life. Both their repentance and their irresolution subsequent to the seizure of power were an expression of its opposite, hate transformed into pity, which as such could not be translated into action.” Another example he takes, which for him signalled the end of revolutionary Marxism, was the embrace by the workers of the 1914 war which alone could make possible the carnage that followed.
The Frankfurt School expanded on Reich's insights and generalized them beyond the special case of fascism. For them, the authoritarian state described more broadly the different regressive (i.e., barbaric) state forms that emerged in response to the crisis of 1929. As with Marx, Kautsky, and Rosa Luxemburg, the choice that had been posed was between an intensification of barbarism, or the transition to socialism. The restructuring of capitalism after 1929 took the form of a liquidation of liberalism and its replacement with the authoritarian state — as fascism in Italy and Germany, central planning in the USSR, or the welfare state in Western Europe and the U.S.[10] The authoritarian state was marked by a regression to neo-feudal relations of domination yet in a hyper-modern form that mimicked the industrial process.
This raised questions concerning the possibility for psychoanalysis to continue making sense as a critical analytic in this brave new world. As Adorno put it, the administered society is that in which the proletarian housewife, who used to be afraid of her drunken husband, is now more terrified of her social worker.[11] This also meant the disappearance of the Oedipus complex as the state, now both father and mother, cannot ever be competed with — Adorno notes in Minima Moralia that what remains from Oedipus is parricide, without desire for the mother or competition with the father, parricide to efface the emancipatory possibilities contained in those patriarchal relations.[12] As bourgeois society disintegrated, so did the very possibility of individuality which Freudian psychoanalysis aimed at, became increasingly out of reach, utopian even. Instead, as Christopher Lasch has argued, “under siege, the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity,” and hence a retreat into narcissism, while psychotherapy turned into a technique to adapt patients to society to ensure their mere survival.[13] Twenty years after Lasch, psychoanalyst Charles Melman would describe an age where addictive need has replaced desire, and, after him, Jean Pierre Lebrun described a psychological structure dominated by perversion.
We can thus conclude that, at least from the perspective of the Marxist appropriation of Freudian psychoanalysis by Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School, the possibility of using the concept of authoritarianism in the age of Trump and to understand what this conference calls the rise of the new Right must be circumscribed. Not that the objective structures that gave rise to the authoritarian state and the authoritarian personality have disappeared, quite the opposite, but rather because the wish to provide a psycho-pathological diagnostic of Trump and Brexit voters may be wrong-headed. First and foremost, Trump is not (and cannot be) more a phenomenon of authoritarianism than Obama was, and probably less so. Obama deported more migrants than Trump, killed more civilians abroad than Trump, and Trump did not start new imperialist wars, nor did he condemn whistleblowers like Manning, Assange, or Snowden. Nor is the so-called “new Right” necessarily more authoritarian than the current Left. The past few years have been rich in pathological expressions of authoritarianism by self-proclaimed leftists. If Freudian psychoanalysis aimed at re-establishing the analysand's ability for love and work, two central forms that freedom took in bourgeois societies and which had become mutually contradictory, self-avowed leftists in 2020 have portrayed the desire for both as “problematic,” which is Millennial lingo for “morally indefensible.”
D. M. Faes has argued:
when millennials are confronted with the emotions surrounding desire, for which they already did not have the disposition, they further placate their anxieties with the screen-image of abuse. The childish identification with either the prey or the predator prematurely resolves what is still at play emotionally and moreover condemns the mutually transactional character of romance. Rather than recognizing romance as a social relation of mutual self-possession and exchange, millennials neatly divide men and women and project this division upon all eternity as if men only want sex and women only want relationships.[14]
Hence the millennial Left's pathological fear of sex, projection of abnormal sexuality onto political enemies, and attempts at controlling the sexual lives of other leftists. Michaela Coel's 2020 series I May Destroy You presents the archetypical millennial sex-panic, particularly clarifying because of its quality and sophistication. In her attempt to deal with drug-rape, the hero becomes an increasingly authoritarian Twitter pasionaria, denouncing and cancelling left and right. Meanwhile, all sex portrayed in the series is presented as rape, whether the characters realise it at the time or not. For example, an enjoyable, apparently spontaneous threesome appears in hindsight as possibly a carefully planned trick played by two white Italian men on the black female character. The only character who does not rape anyone is a lonely, apparently asexual white man who meditates and cares for his plants in the flat he never leaves. In this late millennial world, it is not just men, but men and white people generally, who do not just want sex, but rape, where in fact all penetration is rape, and where women only want “self-care.”
But work as well has become suspicious. The image of a child holding a placcard with the words "Work Is Freedom" during an anti-lockdown protest in the spring was widely circulated among leftists, supposedly to prove the neo-Nazi allegiances of Trump voters. The words “arbeit macht frei” at the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp, meant to mock of the bourgeois revolutions by violently enforcing slave-labor, were taken by leftists as a literal pronouncement of Nazi ideology. The bourgeois emancipation from feudalism through wage-labor, the revolutionary tradition which that child inherited, was thus denounced as its antithesis, the concentration camp. Instead, leftists were content to be told by Mette Frederiksen or Jacinda Ardern to stay home like grounded children.
Further, as Cutrone put it, "In a narcissistic — authoritarian — society everyone becomes trapped in a static and self-reinforcing identity, where the need was actually to allow the opening to non-identity of freedom: the freedom to ‘overcome oneself’ allowed by the healthy ego.”[15] The Millenial Left's humourlessness and attempts to control speech, thought, and art alike, its obsession with identity categories and anger at transgression, its fascination for mysticism like astrology or authoritarian forms of Islam, or the sado-masochistic violence of its meaningless protests have long demonstrated its authoritarianism. This became particularly clear over the summer as protests against police violence became the occasion to enforce strict racial divisions and bully people into behaving like their attributed race. Black people who even dared to question whether they (individually) should vote for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party were called (in Biden's words) “not black,” or “Uncle Toms,” and relentlessly bullied on social media until they would recant. Those like Adolph Reed Jr. who questioned the usefulness of racism as an explanatory factor for social inequality and unrest in the USA were "cancelled" and "de-platformed."[16] This year also saw a swath of mostly women academics being exposed for having presented themselves as black or hispanic when everyone else in their families was considered white — and were then forced to issue tearful, self-flagellating apologies. More recently, leftists have enthusiastically participated in police efforts to identify, shame, and arrest participants in the Capitol protests. Whining and snitching have become the Left's modus operandi.
Finally, the protests that took place throughout the U.S. and Europe over the summer also demand to be seen as a demand for authoritarianism. Although the protests explicitly demanded the abolition of the police, which was always a central concern of Marxism, their form, content, and consequences show that this was instead a demand for intensified policing of social life under new forms. The protests, whether peaceful or violent, did not form part of a strategy to take over the state, but rather to express demands loud enough that our overlords may hear them and act for the people. The violence that was at times exercised, pointlessly, aimed at nothing else than to provoke the police into action, a desperate attempt to have Our Father the state show tough love for his children. Those demanding the abolition of the police were quick to clarify that this meant increasing the amount of social workers and “community” policing — presumably led by self-appointed "community leaders" — as well as stricter Human Resources policies to fight against microaggressions in the workplace and have more black managers. It ultimately led to Biden's choosing for his running mate California's “top cop,” Kamala Harris, and his plan to start his mandate with a new, stricter set of anti-terrorism laws.
It is important to emphasize that we should not expect the Left to be less authoritarian, or not authoritarian at all, because the authoritarian personality does not result from a lack of education or a moral failing, anymore than the authoritarian state results from the moral corruption of its elites, but rather from the contradiction between bourgeois society and the industrial mode of production. Left authoritarianism is already being mobilized to political ends, for example by the Democratic Party to keep blacks, women, and young people as captive constituencies to keep electing their old, ineffective, and corrupt politicians. The only way out is through: the mobilization of authoritarianism by a socialist party towards the dictatorship of the proletariat and the overcoming of capitalism.
Were we to forget this, we would certainly have a lot of fun using Freud and Lacan to make fun of the basket of deplorables, the hicks and the rednecks who are silly enough to vote for that evil orange man or to leave the sweet embrace of the European Union, wishing them ruin, illness, and death when they refuse to vote for those who have relentlessly betrayed them for generations, or mistaking the end of neoliberalism for the end of the world — as much of the self-professed Left has done publicly and in private since 2016. Giving free reign to infantile sado-masochism sure is enjoyable, but it will not help the Left face its own responsibility in the traumatic history of the never-ending 20th century, therefore even less to take the necessary steps toward redeeming that history. That is, we should use psychoanalytic concepts not to explain away the rise of the far Right but to perceive in it, even in its most grotesque and pathological manifestations, the potential for freedom whose failure it embodies. Finally, we should also remember that if we are left with psychoanalysis it is as a desperate measure, a last resort, at least until a socialist party, an organization dedicated to the overcoming of capitalism through the dictatorship of the proletariat, makes more fruitful forms of analysis possible.
Yet we should also beware calls to action, often more akin to urges to act out. It was clear for Wilhelm Reich that the sexual revolution, the emancipation from repressive sexual morality that would also liberate humanity from its surplus authoritarianism, could only take place as part and consequence of a world revolution. Yet in his later years, as the tragic consequences of the failure of the world revolution became clearer to him, and as the Left appeared more authoritarian than ever, he came to think that the sexual revolution was to come first for the actual revolution to possibly take place.[17] Such a call was heard loud and clear by parts of the New Left, which dedicated itself to eradicating sexual morality and to the politicization of sexuality, to such an extent that talk of the revolution became a means towards organizing communes, taking part in orgies, and leading consciousness-raising workshops — all of which contributed to the general shift towards what Marcuse called “repressive desublimation”[18] and Lasch “the culture of narcissism.”[19]
Rather, the role of a socialist party would be to preserve and further class consciousness, that is, to make sense of the failures of the working class up to this point, its responsibility in the failures of revolutionary movements since 1848, and by extension in the horrors of the 20th century which this failure produced — a responsibility which is the counterpart of the working class's historical task to overcome the contradictions between bourgeois society and the industrial mode of production, and to make possible unprecedented forms of freedom. In other words, the party's task is not to act, but to maintain hope. Hopelessness and resignation led to the soldiers giving themselves up to their superiors, to Ebert ordering the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg, to the Stalinian suppression of the world revolutionary movement in order to protect “socialism in one country.” Such hopelessness and resignation were perhaps never as well expressed as in Obama's “Yes We Can” slogan or in the Left's enthusiasm for Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg's apocalyptic vision.
As Omair Hussain put it:
This is the real pathology of the Left. It continually reconstitutes the domination it wants to overcome precisely on the basis of its discontents against this domination. What would it mean to overcome this pathology? Platypus has no answer. All we can do, like Freud, is attempt to provoke recognition in the patient of its pathology. Freud’s goal was to strengthen the ego of the patient through self-consciousness. If the patient could be made conscious of the pathology, perhaps that would point to its overcoming. We seek to incite the same kind of self-recognition and self-overcoming on the Left. Freud’s goal was to increase the patient’s freedom through self-mastery. Our goal is the same for the history of humanity.[20]
[1] Theodor Adorno, “Remarks on ‘The Authoritarian Personality,’” Platypus Review 91 (November 2016), <https://platypus1917.org/2016/11/08/remarks-authoritarian-personality-adorno-frenkel-brunswik-levinson-sanford/>.
[2] Peter E. Gordon, “The Authoritarian Personality Revisited: Reading Adorno in the Age of Trump,” in Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory, eds. Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 51.
[3] Except for Chris Cutrone, “Adorno and Freud: The relation of Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxist critical social theory,” Platypus Review 24 (June 2010), <https://platypus1917.org/2010/06/10/adorno-and-freud/>.
[4] Clara Zetkin, “Lenin on the Women's Question,” in My Recollections of Lenin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House).
[5] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
[6] Ibid.
[7] See also Chris Cutrone, “Robots and sweatshops,” Platypus Review 123 (February 2020), <https://platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/robots-and-sweatshops/>.
[8] See Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.).
[9] Friedrich Engels, “On Authority,” in The Marx-Engels Reader.
[10] See Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations” and Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York: Continuum).
[11] Theodor Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
[12] Theodor Adorno, “For Marcel Proust,” in Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2020).
[13] Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.).
[14] D. M. Faes, “#MeToo and the millennial sex panic,” Platypus Review 111 (November 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2018/11/02/metoo-and-the-millennial-sex-panic/>.
[15] Chris Cutrone, “Critical authoritarianism,” Platypus Review 91 (November 2016), <https://platypus1917.org/2016/11/08/critical-authoritarianism/>.
[16] See Adolph Reed Jr., “Antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left” Dialectical Anthropology 42 (2018): 105–15; Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed Jr., “Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19: Caution and Context,” The New England Journal of Medicine 383 (2020): 201–03.
[17] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).
[18] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2003).
[19] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1979).
[20] Omair Hussain, “What does it mean to say that Platypus is the psychoanalyst of the Left?,” Platypus Review 115 (April 2019), <https://platypus1917.org/2019/04/01/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-platypus-is-the-psychoanalyst-of-the-left/>.
