Antifa (originally, in spirit, in pre-Nazi Germany Antifaschistische Aktion) has been in the news quite frequently over the last many months; although since Biden’s supposed POTUS win (at least according to their dim lights) their profile has strangely slumped back into the shadows they came from. In this post, though, I want to think further out, in regard to the ideology of any anti –fascist position. I want to take us back into the history and development of the neo-Marxist ideology that developed in the Frankfurt School in Germany; what produced what we call today: ‘critical theory.’ Antifa is supposedly against fascism, but ironically they are the tool of it; as we’ll see. This might seem ironic, since Antifa, de jure, is supposedly contra what they perceive as fascism; I say ironic because they identify the nationalism that Trump and his supporters forward to be ‘fascist,’ while the globalism they hope to usher in (I guess) is the communist antidote. What they are idiot to, though, is that they are really just tools in the hands of a globalist (SUPERCRONYCAPITALIST) consumerist Oligarchy class that seeks to corporatize the whole globe per their own dystopian and ejaculatory dreams (think the CCP model). But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Stuart Jeffries in his book Grand Hotel Abyss offers a nice entrée into the ideology that drove the so-called critical theory of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School in the early to mid –twentieth century. He writes of one of its original icons:

The Frankfurt School’s leading psychoanalytic thinker Erich Fromm agreed with much of Reich’s analysis, though worried it had too little empirical confirmation and focused too much on genital sexuality. He contended that the rise of fascism was to do with sadomasochism. In his essay ‘Social-Psychological Aspects’, he distinguished the ‘revolutionary’ character from the ‘masochist’. The former had ego strength and sought to change his destiny to a higher power. Fromm followed Freud in taking sadism to be of the same coin as masochism: the sadist turned himself against those who showed signs of weakness. The sadomasochistic social character was essential for authoritarian society, involving as it did deference to those above and contempt for those below. For Fromm, the sadomasochist was characterised by anal strivings for order, punctuality and frugality: this was the kind of social character a fascist would want in spades if he wanted to make the trains run on time or murder Jews on an industrial scale.

But all this said little about why fascism arose in Germany in particular. During the 1930s, Fromm developed an account of what happened that enriched his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, published after he had left the Institute. Fromm argued that, as Germany shifted from early to monopoly capitalism, the social character of the lower middle class persisted. The petit bourgeoisie, who were the icons of early capitalism, owning and managing their own businesses, became anomalies under corporate forms of capitalism. This class had been the unwitting heroes of the story Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: it was the parsimonious, pleasure-denying, duty-bound characters who predominated under early capitalism. Now they were politically powerless, economically crushed and spiritually alienated in the Weimar Republic. Sadomasochistically, they yearned not to change their own destiny but to yield to the authority that would do that for them. ‘The desire for authority is channeled towards the strong leader, while other specific father figures become the objects of the rebellion’, wrote Fromm in ‘Psychoanalytic Characterology and its Relevance for Social Psychology’ in 1932. By 1941, when he came to write Escape from Freedom, Fromm was to cast this sadomasochistic yearning on part of the German petit bourgeois for a strong leader as part of a grand historical dialectical process. The process of becoming freed from authority (whether the authority of God or of social convention) resulted, Fromm argued, in a kind of anguish or hopelessness akin to what infants feel during child development.[1]

As with any development of thought there are internecine scuffles among the Frankfurters, but by and large, this sort of Freudian frame served as a sort of macro orthodoxy for the inchoate and early development of neo-Marxism and critical theory.

Just at this level, when a denomination, like the Southern Baptist Convention in their ‘resolution 9’ says they will use critical theory as an analytical tool, when it comes to discerning and deconstructing systemic racism, the thoughtful Christian would say: get behind me Satan. I don’t want to reduce this post down to the SBC, but they are one contemporary ecclesial example of a group who is taking the neo-Marxist mantle on as a methodological tool and supplement to the Gospel.

At a political level, it is ironic, indeed, when we think of how the mainstream has attempted to construct the narrative. I.e. that Donald Trump, and the populist movement that supports him, are the sadomasochists in search of a grand ‘father figure’ who will ‘big brother them’ into a sense of safety and security. But when we get past the superficial, as I alluded to earlier, if anyone fits the Frommian mode of critical theory, and the fascist picture, if we will indulge this mood in order to flip it on its head, it is Antifa, the Democratic Party, and the leftists who are seeking out a father figure in the Oligarchic globalists; Trump then becomes their orange-headed step-child.

It is rather foreboding, really, when the global culture in the main, inclusive of many groups of Christians, have bought into this sort of inverted picture of neo-Marxist critical theory. I say inverted, to underscore once again, because even if we were going to follow the Frankfurt School, it is Antifa and the leftists in general who in fact are forwarding the fascist agenda in the world; it is called corporatocracy. It clearly comes back to the avarice and greed of the human heart. Critical theory is not the answer to the human heart’s problem; the Gospel is. The Gospel is sufficient in itself to ‘analyze’ the cultural problem, and prescribe the cure; insofar as the church is capable of bearing witness to her reality in Jesus Christ. Let God be true, and every neo-Marxist a liar.   

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[1] Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London/New York: Verso, 2017), 248-49.