The Communist inside us.

Just a quick follow up to an earlier post on the fascist/ communist distinction, or rather, the importance of making, maintaining and theorising the distinction rather than just lamenting that both fascism and communism are equally distant from liberal democracy (conceived of as the telos of History).

You remember some of the provisional differences outlined by Zizek, and other examples from Adorno, from John Berger. It seems to me there's another one that might be worth mentioning, which is that some (Deleuze, Foucault for example) talk about the 'fascist inside us', fascism as a mentality. No one, by contrast talks about the 'communist inside us' or the 'communist personality'. The 'Psychopathic god' named by Auden is of a piece with many who have seen in fascism something rooted in or corresponding to psychological structures.

Now admittedly, much of the 'fascist psychology' stuff is dismissable (one thinks of most obviously of early theories linking fascism to repressed homosexuality), but isn't it intuitively meaningful to speak of fascism as a kind of predisposition, an obscene injunction to be resisted perhaps, a lurking atavism cross-pollinated with certain definitively modern developments.

Communism, conversely, appeals to something impossible, unattained, 'the claims of the ideal'. I think George Steiner called it the 'blackmail of transcendence'. (The blackmail is that if you do not answer this call, you will not be able to live with yourself). The following, lifted from Marx, might have consoled or inspired a Communist, but it could never have served, and will never serve as a fascist's credo:

'Assume man to be man and his relation to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust.'