Benjamin is right in saying that fascism may help the masses to express themselves, but that it certainly doesn't help them to gain their rights. We need to go one step further, though, and specify what is being expressed. For fascism does not allow the masses to express their interests (class interests, economic interests)—communists, when they come to power, are the ones who tend to let those interests be expressed, though not satisfied. No, what fascism allows the masses to express are suppressed drives, imprisoned desires. Fascist masses may portray their desire for deliverance from the social double bind, for lives that are not inevitably entrapping, but not their desire for full stomachs. The success of fascism demonstrates that masses who become fascist suffer more from their internal states of being than from hunger or unemployment. Fascism teaches us that under certain circumstances, human beings imprisoned within themselves, within body armor and social constraints, would rather break out than fill their stomachs; and that their politics may consist in organizing that escape, rather than an economic order that promises future generations full stomachs for life. The Utopia of fascism is an edenic freedom from responsibility. That in itself, I think, is a source of "beauty in the most profound distortion." Meanwhile, communists and the left in general still stubbornly refuse to accept fascism's horrifying proof that the materialism they preach and practice only goes halfway. The desiring-production of the unconscious, as molecular driving-force of history, has never entered their materialism—an omission that has had (and still has) tragic consequences.
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies Vol. 1
