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Title: The Irrational in Politics
Author: Maurice Brinton
Date: 1970
Language: en
Topics: Childhood, Russian revolution, Wilhelm Reich, alienation, authority, commodification, family, parenting, patriarchy, politics, psychoanalysis, sexual repression, solidarity, youth
Source: Retrieved on 29 September 2018 from http://www.uncarved.org/pol/irat.html

Maurice Brinton

The Irrational in Politics

[We are republishing this text with reservations. Were it not for the

fact that the previous version on the web is now offline and the also

that one of us had downloaded it to read at work, we certainly wouldn’t

go to the effort of scanning it all in! It’s a good starting point for

the issues discussed, but we would ask you to read it critically. We

don’t have time for a full critique at the moment, but our initial

thoughts are that the text is very much a product of its times. Things

have moved on from the 1970s and it would not be appropriate to write

such a text today without being extremely critical of Freud, and of the

attitudes towards women (“housewives”) and the working class shown in

the text. That said, being rooted in the early 1970s is a great

improvement on many other anarchists and communists, who still display

attitudes rooted in the 1870s. It should go without saying that some

aspects of sexual repression has changed since this text was written

(for example, in relation to A.I.D.S., and also the pseudo-liberation of

commoditised sex as presented by the media).]

Propaganda and policemen, prisons and schools, traditional values and

traditional morality all serve to reinforce the power of the few and to

convince or coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal, degrading and

irrational system.

(AS WE SEE IT — Solidarity)

INTRODUCTION

This pamphlet is an attempt to analyse the various mechanisms whereby

modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery and —

at least in the short term — seems to succeed. It does not deal with

‘police’ and ‘jails’ as ordinarily conceived but with those internalised

patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons

in which the ‘mass individual’ is today entrapped.

The pamphlet starts by giving a few examples of the irrational behaviour

— at the level of politics — of classes, groups and individuals. It

proceeds to reject certain facile ‘interpretations’ put forward to

explain these phenomena. It probes the various ways in which the soil

(the individual psyche of modern man) has been rendered fertile

(receptive) for an authoritarian, hierarchical and class dominated

culture. It looks at the family as the locus of reproduction of the

dominant ideology, and at sexual repression as an important determinant

of social conditioning, resulting in the mass production of individuals

perpetually craving authority and leadership and forever afraid of

walking on their own or of thinking for themselves. Some of the problems

of the developing sexual revolution are then discussed. The pamphlet

concludes by exploring a new dimension in the failure of the Russian

Revolution. Throughout the aim is to help people acquire additional

insight into their own psychic structure. The fundamental desires and

aspirations of the ordinary individual, so long distorted and repressed,

are in deep harmony with an objective such as the libertarian

reconstruction of society. The revolutionary ‘ideal’ must therefore be

made less remote and abstract. It must be shown to be the fulfilment —

starting here and now — of peoples’ own independent lives.

The pamphlet consists of two main essays: ‘The Irrational In Politics’

and ‘The Russian Experience’. These can be read independently. The

subject matter does not overlap although the main arguments interlock at

several levels.

Frequent references will be found in this pamphlet to the works of

Wilhelm Reich. This should not be taken to imply that we subscribe to

all that Reich wrote — a point spelt out in fuller and more specific

detail later on. In the area that concerns us Reich’s most relevant

works were written in the early 1930’s. At that time, although critical

of developments in Russia (and more critical still of the policy of the

German Communist Party) Reich still subscribed to many of their common

fundamental assumptions. Even later he still spoke of the ‘basic

socialism of the Soviet Union’[1] and muted his criticisms of the

Bolshevik leaders to an extent that is no longer possible for us writing

four decades later. Moreover such is the influence of authoritarian

conditioning that even those who have achieved the deepest insight into

its mechanisms cannot fully escape its effects. There is an undoubted

authoritarian strand in Reich.[2]

A final point concerns the section on the historical roots of sexual

repression. The author (who is neither a historian nor an

anthropologist) found this difficult to write. There seems little doubt,

on the evidence available, that sexual repression arose at a specific

point in time and fulfilled a specific social function — although

experts differ as to many of the details. The difficulty here has been

to steer a middle course between the great system builders of the

19^(th) century — who tended to ‘tidy up reality’ in order to make it

conform to their grandiose generalisations and the theoretical nihilism

of many contemporary social scientists who refuse to see the wood for

the trees. For instance the reluctance of Establishment anthropologists

to envisage their subject from a historical viewpoint often stems, one

suspects, from fear of the revolutionary implications of such an

approach and of its implicit threat to contemporary institutions. We

share none of these fears and can therefore look into this area without

it generating either anxiety or hostile reactions.

THE IRRATIONAL IN POLITICS

1. SOME EXAMPLES

For anyone interested in politics the ‘irrational’ behaviour of

individuals, groups or large sections of the population looms as an

unpleasant, frightening, but incontrovertible fact. Here are a few

examples.

Between 1914 and 1918 millions of working people slaughtered one another

in the ‘war to end wars’. They died for ends which were not theirs,

defending the interests of their respective rulers. Those who had

nothing rallied to their respective flags and butchered one another in

the name of ‘Kaiser’ or ‘King and Country’. Twenty years later the

process was repeated, on an even vaster scale.

In the early 1930’s the economic crisis hit Germany. Hundreds of

thousands were out of work and many were hungry. Bourgeois society

revealed its utter incapacity even to provide the elementary material

needs of men. The time was ripe for radical change. Yet at this critical

juncture millions of men and women (including very substantial sections

of the German working class) preferred to follow the crudely

nationalistic, self contradictory (anti-capitalist and anti-communist)

exhortations of a reactionary demagogue, preaching a mixture of racial

hatred, puritanism and ethnological nonsense, rather than embark on the

unknown road of social revolution.[3]

In New Delhi in 1966 hundreds of thousands of half-starving Indian

peasants and urban poor actively participated in the biggest and most

militant demonstration the town had ever known. Whole sections of the

city were occupied, policemen attacked, cars and buses burnt. The object

of this massive action was not, however, to protest against the social

system which maintained the vast mass of the people in a state of

permanent poverty and made a mockery of their lives. It was to denounce

some contemplated legislation permitting cow slaughter under specific

circumstances. Indian ‘revolutionaries’ meanwhile were in no position to

make meaningful comment. Did they not still allow their parents to fix

their marriages for them and considerations of caste repeatedly to

colour their politics?

In Britain several million working people, disappointed with the record

of the present Labour Government, with its wage freeze and attempted

assault on the unions, will vote Conservative within the next few weeks.

As they did in 1930. And in 1950–51. Or, to the unheard tune of

encouragement from self-styled revolutionaries, they will vote Labour,

expecting (or not) that things will be ‘different’ next time.[4]

At a more mundane level the behaviour of consumers today is no more

‘rational’ than that of voters or of the oppressed classes in history.

Those who understand the roots of popular preference know how easily

demand can be manipulated. Advertising experts are fully aware that

rational choice has little to do with consumer preferences. When a

housewife is asked why she prefers one product to another the reasons

she gives are seldom the real ones (even if she is answering in total

good faith).

Largely unconscious motives even influence the ideas of revolutionaries

and the type of organisation in which they choose to be active. At first

sight it might appear paradoxical that those aspiring to a non-alienated

and creative society based on equality and freedom should ‘break’ with

bourgeois conceptions... only to espouse the hierarchical, dogmatic,

manipulatory and puritanical ideas of Leninism. It might appear odd that

their ‘rejection’ of the irrational and arbitrarily imposed behaviour

patterns of bourgeois society, with its demands for uncritical obedience

and acceptance of authority, should take the form of that epitome of

alienated activity: following the tortuous ‘line’ of a vanguard Party.

It might seem strange that those who urge people to think for themselves

and to resist the brainwashing of the mass media should be filled with

anxiety whenever new ideas raise their troublesome heads within their

own ranks.[5] Or that revolutionaries today should still seek to settle

personal scores through resort to the methods prevailing in the

bourgeois jungle outside. But, as we shall show, there is an internal

coherence in all this apparent rationality.

2. SOME INADEQUATE EXPLANATIONS

Confronted with disturbing facts like mass popular support for

imperialist wars or the rise of fascism a certain type of traditional

revolutionary can be guaranteed to provide a stereotyped answer. He will

automatically stress the ‘betrayal’ or ‘inadequacy’ of the Second or

Third Internationals, or of the German Communist Party... or of this or

that leadership which, for some reason or another, failed to rise to the

historical occasion. (People who argue this way don’t even seem to

appreciate that the repeated tolerance by the masses of such ‘betrayals’

or ‘inadequacies’ itself warrants a serious explanation.)

Most sophisticated revolutionaries will lay the blame elsewhere. The

means of moulding public opinion (press, radio, TV, churches, schools

and universities) are in the hands of the ruling class. These media

consequently disseminate ruling class ideas, values and priorities — day

in, day out. What is disseminated affects all layers of the population,

contaminating everyone. Is it surprising, these revolutionaries will ask

with a withering smile, that under such circumstances these mass of

people still retain reactionary ideas?[6]

This explanation, although partially correct, is insufficient. In the

long run it will not explain the continued acceptance by the working

class of bourgeois rule — or that such rule has only been overthrown to

be replaced by institutions of state capitalist type, embodying

fundamentally similar hierarchical relationships (cult of leader, total

delegation of authority to an ‘elite’ Party, worship of revealed truth

to be found in sacred texts or in the edicts of the Central Committee).

If — both East and West — millions of people cannot face up to

implications of their exploitation, if they cannot perceive their

enforced intellectual and personal under-development, if they are

unaware of the intrinsically repressive character of so much that they

consider ‘rational’, ‘common sense’, ‘obvious’, or ‘natural’ (hierarchy,

inequality and the puritan ethos, for instance), if they are afraid of

initiative and of self-activity, afraid of thinking new thoughts and of

treading new paths, and if they are ever ready to follow this leader or

that (promising them the moon), or this Party or that (undertaking to

change the world ‘on their behalf’), it is because there are powerful

factors conditioning their behavior from a very early age and inhibiting

their accession to a different kind of consciousness.

Let us consider for a moment — and not through rose tinted spectacles —

the average middle-aged working class voter today (it matters little in

this respect whether he votes ‘Conservative’ or ‘Labour’). He is

probably hierarchy-conscious, xenophobic, racially-prejudiced,

pro-monarchy, pro-capital punishment, pro-law and order,

anti-demonstrator, anti-long haired students and anti-drop out. He is

almost certainly sexually repressed (and hence an avid, if vicarious,

consumer of the distorted sexuality endlessly depicted in the pages of

the News of the World). No ‘practical’ Party (aiming at power through

the ballot-box) would ever dream of appealing to him through the

advocacy of wage equality, workers’ management of production, racial

integration, penal reform, abolition of the monarchy, dissolution of the

police, sexual freedom or the legalisation of pot. Any one proclaiming

this kind of ‘transitional programme’ would not only fail to get support

but would probably be considered some kind of a nut.

But there is an even more important fact. Anyone trying to discuss

matters of this kind will almost certainly meet not only with disbelief

but also that positive hostility that often denotes latent anxiety.[7]

One doesn’t meet this kind of response if one argues various meaningless

or downright ludicrous propositions. Certain subjects are clearly

emotionally loaded. Discussing them generates peculiar resistances that

are hardly amenable to rational argument.

It is the purpose of this pamphlet to explore the nature and cause of

these resistances and to point out that they were not innate but

socially determined. (If they were innate there would be no rational or

socialist perspective whatsoever.) We will be led to conclude that these

resistances are the result of a long-standing conditioning, going back

to earliest childhood, and that this conditioning is mediated through

the whole institution of the patriarchal family. The net result is a

powerful reinforcement and perpetuation of the dominant ideology and the

mass production of individuals with slavery built into them, individuals

ready at a later stage to accept the authority of school teacher,

priest, employer and politician (and to endorse the prevailing pattern

of ‘rationality’). Understanding this collective character structure

gives one new insight into the frequently ‘irrational’ behaviour of

individuals or social groups and into the ‘irrational in politics’. It

might also provide mankind with new means of transcending these

obstacles.

3. THE IGNORED AREA AND THE TRADITIONAL LEFT

This whole area has been largely ignored by marxist revolutionaries. The

appropriate tool for understanding this aspect of human behaviour —

namely psychoanalysis — was only developed in the first two decades of

this century. Freud’s major contribution to knowledge (the investigation

of causality in psychological life, the description of infantile and

juvenile sexuality, the honest statement of fact that there was more to

sex than procreation, the recognition of the influence of unconscious

instinctual drives — and of their repression — in determining behaviour

patterns, the description of how such drives are repressed in accordance

with the prevailing social dictates, the analysis of the consequences of

this repression in terms of symptoms, and in general ‘the consideration

of the unofficial and unacknowledged sides of human life’[8] only became

part of our social heritage several decades after Marx’s death. Certain

reactionary aspects of classical psychoanalysis (the ‘necessary’

adaptation of the instinctual life to the requirements of a society

whose class nature was never explicitly proclaimed, the ‘necessary’

sublimation of ‘undisciplined’ sexuality in order to maintain ‘social

stability’, ‘civilisation’ and the cultural life of society,[9] the

theory of the death instinct, etc.) were only to be transcended later

still by the revolutionary psychoanalysis of Wilhelm Reich[10] and

others.

Reich set out to elaborate a social psychology based on both marxism and

psychoanalysis. His aim was to explain how ideas arose in men’s minds,

in relation to the real condition of their lives, and how in turn such

ideas influenced human behaviour. There was clearly a discrepancy

between the material conditions of the masses and their conservative

outlook. No appeal to psychology was necessary to understand why a

hungry man stole bread or why workers, fed up with being pushed around,

decided to down tools. What social psychology had to explain however ‘is

not why the starving individual steals or why the exploited individual

strikes, but why the majority of starving individuals do not steal, and

the majority of exploited individuals do not strike’. Classical

sociology could ‘satisfactorily explain asocial phenomenon when human

thinking and acting serve a rational purpose, when they serve the

satisfaction of needs and directly express the economic situation. It

fails, however, when human thinking and acting contradict the economic

situation, when, in other words, they are irrational’.[11]

What was new, at the level of revolutionary theory, in this kind of

concern? Traditional marxists had always underestimated — and still

underestimate — the effect of ideas on the material structure of

society. Like parrots, they repeat that economic infrastructure and

ideological superstructures mutually interact. But then they proceed to

look upon what is essentially a dialectical, two-way relationship as an

almost exclusively one-sided process (economic ‘base’ determining what

goes on in the realm of ideas). They have never sought concretely to

explain how a reactionary political doctrine could gain a mass foothold

and later set a whole nation in motion (how, for instance, in the early

1930s, nazi ideology rapidly spread throughout all layers of German

society, the process including the now well documented massive desertion

of thousands of communist militants to the ranks of the Nazis).[12] In

the words of a ‘heretical’ marxist, Daniel Guerin, author of one of the

most sophisticated social, economic and psychological interpretations of

the fascist phenomenon: ‘Some people believe themselves very ‘marxist’

and very ‘materialist’ when they neglect human factors and only concern

themselves with material and economic facts. They accumulate figures,

statistics, percentages. They study with extreme precision the deep

causes of social phenomena. But because they don’t follow with similar

precision how these causes are reflected in human consciousness, living

reality eludes them. Because they are only interested in material

factors, they understand absolutely nothing about how the deprivations

endured by the masses are converted into aspirations of a religious

type’.[13]

Neglecting this subjective factor in history, such ‘marxists’ — and they

constitute today the overwhelming majority of the species — cannot

explain the lack of correlation between the economic frustrations of the

working class and its lack of will to put an end to the system which

engenders them. They do not grasp the fact that when certain beliefs

become anchored in the thinking (and influence the behaviour) of the

masses, they become themselves material facts of history.

What was it therefore, Reich asked, which in the real life of the

oppressed limited their will to revolution? His answer was that the

working class was readily influenced by reactionary and irrational ideas

because such ideas fell on fertile Soil.[14] For the average Marxist,

workers were adults who hired their labour power to capitalists and were

exploited by them. This was correct as far as it went. But one had to

take into account all aspects of working class life if one wanted to

understand the political attitudes of the working class. This meant one

had to recognise some obvious facts, namely that the worker had a

childhood, that he was brought up by parents themselves conditioned by

the society in which they lived, that he had a wife and children, sexual

needs, financial insecurity, and backstreet abortions rendered these

problems particularly acute in working class circles. Why should such

factors be neglected in seeking to explain working class behaviour?

Reich sought to develop a total analysis which would incorporate such

facts and attach the appropriate importance to them.

4. THE PROCESS OF CONDITIONING

In learning to obey their parents, children learn obedience in general.

This deference learned in the family setting will manifest itself

whenever the child faces a ‘superior’ in later life. Sexual repression —

by the already sexually repressed parents[15] — is an integral part of

the conditioning process.

Rigid and obsessional parents start by imposing rigid feeding times on

the newborn. They then seek to impose regular potting habits on infants

scarcely capable of maintaining the sitting posture. They are obsessed

by food, bowels, and the ‘inculcating of good eating habits’. A little

later they will start scolding and punishing their masturbating

five-year old. At times they will even threaten their male children with

physical mutilation.[16] (They cannot accept that children at that — or

any other age for that matter — should derive pleasure from sex.) They

are horrified at their discovery of sexual exhibitionism between

consenting juniors in private. Later still, they will warn their 12 year

old boys of the dire dangers of ‘real masturbation’. They will watch the

clock to see what time their 15 year-old daughters get home, or search

their son’s pockets for contraceptives. For most parents, the

child-rearing years are one long, anti-sexual saga.

How does the child react to this? He adapts by trial and error. He is

scolded when he masturbates. He adapts by repressing his sexuality.

Attempted affirmation of sexual needs then takes the form of revolt

against parental authority. But this revolt is again punished. Obedience

is achieved through punishment. Punishment also ensures that forbidden

activities are invested with feelings of guilt[17] which may be (but

more often aren’t) sufficient to inhibit them.[18]

The anxiety associated with the fulfilment of sexual needs becomes part

of the anxiety associated with all rebellious thoughts or actions

(sexuality and all manifestations of rebelliousness are both

indiscriminately curbed by the ‘educators’). The child gradually comes

to suppress needs whose acting out would incur parental displeasure or

result in punishment, and ends up afraid of his sexual drives and of his

tendencies to revolt. At a later stage another kind of equilibrium is

achieved which has been described as ‘being torn between desires that

are repugnant to my conscience and a conscience repugnant to my

desires.’[19] The individual is ‘marked like a road map from-head to

toes by his repressions.’[20]

In the little boy, early repression is associated with an identification

with the paternal image. In a sense, this is a prefiguration of the

later identification of the young adult with the ‘authority’ of ‘his’

firm, or with the needs of ‘his’ country or party. The father, in this

sense, is the representative of the state and of authority in the family

nucleus.

To neutralise his sexual needs and his rebellion against his parents,

the child develops ‘overcompensations’. The unconscious revolt against

the father engenders servility. The fear of sexuality engenders prudery.

We all know those old maids of both sexes, ever on the alert against any

hint of sexuality among children. Their preoccupations are obviously

determined by deep fears of their own sexuality. The reluctance of most

revolutionaries to discuss these topics is similarly motivated.

Another frequent by-product of sexual repression is to split sexuality

into its component parts. Tenderness is given a positive value, whereas

sensuality is condemned. A dissociation between affection and sexual

pleasure is seen in many male adolescents and leads them to adopt double

sexual standards. They idealise some girl on a pedestal while seeking to

satisfy their sexual needs with other girls whom they openly or

subconsciously despise.

The road to a healthy sex life for adolescents is blocked by both

external and internal obstacles (difficulty in finding an undisturbed

place, difficulty in escaping from family surveillance, etc.) are

obvious enough. The internal (psychological) obstacles may, at times, be

severe enough to influence the perception of the sexual need. The two

kinds of obstacles (internal and external) mutually reinforce one

another. External factors consolidate sexual repression and the sexual

repression predisposes to the influence of the external factors. The

family is the hub of this vicious circle.

However apparently successful the repression, the repressed material is,

of course, still there. But it is now running in subterranean channels.

Having accepted a given set of ‘cultural’ values, the individual must

now defend himself against anything that might disrupt the painfully

established equilibrium. He has constantly to mobilise part of his

psychological potentialities against the ‘disturbing’ influences. In

addition to neuroses and psychoses the ‘energy’ expended in this

constant repression results in difficulties in thought and

concentration, in a diminution of awareness and probably in some

impairment of mental capacity. ‘Inability to concentrate’ is perhaps the

most common of neurotic symptoms.

According to Reich, the ‘suppression of the natural sexuality in the

child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child

apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, “good” and “adjusted”

in the authoritarian sense; it paralyses the rebellious forces because

any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual

curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of

thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual

repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the

authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and

degradation... The result is fear of freedom, and a conservative,

reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not

only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and

unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in

actively supporting the authoritarian order.’[21] (My emphasis — M.B.)

When a child’s upbringing has been completed the individual has acquired

something more complex and harmful than a simple obedience response to

those in authority. He has developed a whole system of reactions,

regressions, thoughts, rationalisations, which form a character

structure adapted to the authoritarian social system. The purpose of

education — both East and West — is the mass production of robots of

this kind who have so internalised social constraints that they submit

to them automatically.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have written pages about the medical

effects of sexual repression.[22] Reich however constantly reiterated

its social function, exercised through the family. The purpose of sexual

repression was to anchor submission to authority and the fear of freedom

into peoples’ ‘character armour’. The net result was the reproduction,

generation after generation, of the basic conditions necessary for the

manipulation and enslavement of the masses.

5. THE FUNCTION OF THE FAMILY

In his classical study on The Origin of the Family, Private Property and

the State, Engels attributes three main functions to the family in

capitalist society:

a) It was a mechanism for the transmission of wealth through

inheritance, a process which permitted the dominant social groups to

perpetuate their economic power. This has undoubtedly been an important

function of the bourgeois society. However Engels’ hope that ‘with the

disappearance of private property the family would lose its last reason

to exist’ has not materialised. The private ownership of the means of

production has been abolished in Russia for over 50 years and yet the

family (in the compulsive, bourgeois sense) still seems deeply embedded

both in Russian consciousness and in Russian reality. By a strange

paradox, it is in the capitalist West that the bourgeois family is being

submitted to the most radical critique — in both theory and practice.

b) The family was also a unit of economic production, particularly in

the countryside and in petty trade. Large scale industry and the general

drift to the towns characteristic of the 20^(th) century have markedly

reduced the significance of this function.

c) The family was finally a mechanism for the propagation of the human

species. This statement is also correct, in relation to a whole period

of human history. It should not, of course, be taken to imply that, were

it not for the civil or religious marriages of the bourgeois type (what

Engels called ‘those permits to practise sex’) the propagation of the

human species would abruptly cease! Other types of relationships (more

or less lasting, monogamous — or otherwise — while they last) are

certainly conceivable. In a communist society technological changes and

new living patterns would largely do away with household chores. The

bringing up of children would probably not be the exclusive function of

one pair of individuals for more than a short time. What are usually

given as psychological reasons for the perpetuation of the compulsive

marriage are often just rationalisations.

Engels’ comments about the family, partly valid as they still are (and

valid as they may have been) don’t really allow one to grasp the full

significance of this institution. They ignore a whole dimension of life.

Classical psychoanalysis hinted at a further function: the transmission

of the dominant cultural pattern. Revolutionary psychoanalysis was to

take this concept much further.

Freud himself had pointed out that the parents had brought up their

children according to the dictates of their own (the parents’)

superegos.[23] ‘In general parents and similar authorities follow the

dictates of their own super-egos in the upbringing of children... In the

education of the child they are severe and exacting. They have forgotten

the difficulties of their own childhood, and are glad to be able to

identify themselves fully at last with their own parents, who in their

day subjected them to such severe restraints. The result is that the

super-ego of the child is not really built on the model of the parents

but on that of the parents’ super-ego. It takes over the same content,

it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the age-long values which

have been handed down in this way from generation to generation...

Mankind never lives completely in the present; the ideologies of the

super-ego perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the

people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present and to

new developments. So long as they work through the super-ego, they play

an important part in man’s life, quite independently of economic

conditions’.[24]

Reich was to develop these ideas to explain the lag between class

consciousness and economic reality, and the tremendous social inertia

represented by habits of deference and submission among the oppressed.

In order to do this he had to launch a frontal attack on the institution

of the bourgeois family, an assault which was to provoke heated attacks

on him. These were to be launched not only by reactionaries and

religious bigots of all kinds, but also by orthodox psychoanalysts[25]

and by orthodox Marxists.[26]

‘As the economic basis (of the family) became less significant’, Reich

wrote, ‘its place was taken by the political function which the family

now began to assume. Its cardinal function, that for which it is mostly

supported and defended by conservative science and law, is that of

serving as a factory for authoritarian ideologies and conservative

structures. It forms the educational apparatus through which practically

every individual of our society, from the moment of drawing his first

breath, has to pass ...it is the conveyor belt between the economic

structure of conservative society and its ideological

superstructure’.[27]

Reich probed ruthlessly into familial behaviour. The predominating type

(the ‘lower middle class’ family) extended high up the social scale, but

even further down into the class of industrial workers. Its basis was

‘the relation of the patriarchal father to his wife and children...

because of the contradiction between his position in the productive

process (subordinate) and his family function (boss) he is a

sergeant-major type. He kowtows to those above, absorbs the prevailing

attitudes (hence his tendency to imitation) and dominates those below.

He transmits the governmental and social concepts and enforces

them.’[28] The process is mitigated in the industrial workers’ milieu by

the fact that the children are much less supervised.’[29]

Nearly all reactionaries clearly perceive that sexual freedom would

subvert the compulsive marriage and with it the authoritarian structure

of which the family is a part. (The attitude of the Greek colonels

towards miniskirts, co-education and ‘permissive’ literature would be a

textbook example of what we are talking about.) Sexual inhibitions must

therefore be anchored in the young. ‘Authoritarian society is not

concerned about “morality per se”. Rather, the anchoring of sexual

morality and the changes it brings about in the organism create that

specific psychic structure which forms the mass-psychological basis of

any authoritarian social order. The vassal-structure is a mixture of

sexual impotence, helplessness, longing for a Führer, fear of authority,

fear of life, and mysticism. It is characterised by devout loyalty and

simultaneous rebellion... People with such a structure are incapable of

democratic living. Their structure nullifies all attempts at

establishing or maintaining organisations run along truly democratic

principles.[30] They form the mass-psychological soil on which the

dictatorial or bureaucratic tendencies of their democratically-elected

leaders can develop’.[31]

A class society can only function as long as those it exploits accept

their exploitation. The statement would seem so obvious as hardly to

need elaboration. Yet there are, on the political scene today, groups

who maintain that the conditions are ‘rotten ripe for revolution’ and

that only the lack of an appropriate leadership prevents the

revolutionary masses, yearning for a total transformation of their

conditions of life, from carrying out such a revolution. Unfortunately,

this is very far from being the case. In an empirical way even Lenin

perceived this. In April 1917 he wrote: ‘The bourgeoisie maintains

itself not only by force, but also by the lack of consciousness, by the

force of custom and habit among the masses.’[32]

It is obvious that if large sections of the population were constantly

questioning the principles of hierarchy, the authoritarian organisation

of production, the wages system, or other fundamental aspects of the

social structure, no ruling class could maintain itself in power for

long. For rulers to continue ruling it is necessary that those at the

bottom of the social ladder not only accept their condition, but

eventually lose even the sense of being exploited. Once this

psychological process has been achieved the division of society becomes

legitimised in peoples’ minds. The exploited cease to perceive it as

something imposed on them from without. The oppressed have internalised

their own oppression. They tend to behave like robots, programmed not to

rebel against the established order. The robots may even seek to defend

their subordinate position, to rationalise it and will often reject as

‘pie-in-the-sky’ any talk of emancipation. They are often impermeable to

progressive ideas. Only at times of occasional insurrectionary outbursts

do the rulers have to resort to force, as a kind of reinforcement of a

conditioning stimulus.

Reich describes this process as follows: ‘It is not merely a matter of

imposing ideologies, attitudes and concepts on the members of society.

It is a matter of a deep-reaching process in each new generation of the

formation of a psychic structure which corresponds to the existing

social order, in all strata of the population... Because this order

moulds the psychic structure of all members of society it reproduces

itself in people... the first and most important place of reproduction

of the social order is the patriarchal family which creates in children

a character which makes them amenable to the later influence of an

authoritarian order... this characteriological anchoring of the social

order explains the tolerance of the suppressed toward the rule of the

upper class, a tolerance which sometimes goes as far as the affirmation

of their own subjugation... The investigation of character structure,

therefore, is of more than clinical interest. It leads to the question

why it is that ideologies change so much more slowly than the

socioeconomic base, why man as a rule lags so far behind what he creates

and which should and could change him. The reason is that the character

structure is aquired in early childhood and undergoes little

change.’[33]

To return to the title of this pamphlet, it is this collective character

structure, this ‘protective’ armour of rigid and stereotyped reactions

and thoughts, which determines the irrational behaviour of individuals,

groups or large masses of people. In the words of Spinoza our job is

‘neither to laugh nor to weep, but to understand.’ It is not in this

collective character structure of the masses that one might find

explanations for the proletariat’s lack of class consciousness, for its

acceptance of the established order, for its ready endorsement of

reactionary ideas, for its participation in imperialist wars. It is also

here that one should seek the cause of dogmatism, of religious attitudes

in politics, of conservatism among ‘revolutionaries’ and of the

anxieties generated by the new. It is here that one should seek the

roots of ‘the irrational in politics.’

6. THE HISTORICAL ROOTS

Not all human societies are — or have been — sexually repressed. There

is considerable evidence that the sexual ethos and mores of certain

early societies — and of certain ‘primitive’ societies today — are very

different from those of ‘modern, western man’.

It is impossible to understand how or why sexual repression originated —

and what influences maintain, enhance or weaken it without seeing the

problem in a much wider context, namely that of the historical evolution

of relations between the sexes, in particular of the evolution of such

human relationships as kinship and marriage. These are the central

concerns of modern social anthropology.

The whole subject is like a minefield, littered with methodological and

terminological trip wires. About a hundred years ago a number of

important books were published which shook established thinking to the

roots in that they questioned the immutability of human institutions and

behaviour.[34] The authors of these books played an important role in

the history of anthropology. They sought to put the subject on a firm

historical basis. They pointed out important connections between forms

of marriage and sexual customs on the one hand and — on the other hand —

such factors as the level of technology, the inheritance of property,

and the authority relations prevailing within various social groups,

etc. They founded the whole study of kinship and gave it its

terminology. But carried away in the great scientific and rationalist

euphoria of the late 19^(th) century these authors generalised far

beyond what was permissible on the basis of the available data. They

constructed great schemes and drew conclusions about the history of

mankind which some modern experts have politely described as ‘famous

pseudohistorical speculations’[35] and others as ‘quite staggeringly

without foundation’.[36]

We will now briefly summarise these ‘classical’ conceptions (in relation

to the areas which concern us) with a view to commenting on what is

still valid within them, what is dubious and what can no longer be

accepted in the light of modern knowledge.

In primitive societies the level of technology was very low and there

was no surplus product to be appropriated by non-productive sections of

the community. There was an elementary, ‘biological’ division of labour:

the men , who were stronger, went out hunting or sowed the fields; the

women prepared the meals and looked after the children. It was held that

in these societies ‘group marriages’ were common. As a result it was

difficult or impossible to know the father of any particular child. The

mother, of course, was always known and descent was therefore

acknowledged in matrilinear terms. Such societies were described as

‘matriarchal’. With improvements in technology (the discovery of bronze

and copper, the smelting of iron ore, the manufacture of implements, the

development of new methods of soil cultivation and of rearing cattle) it

soon became possible for ‘two arms to produce more than one mouth could

consume’. War and the capture of slaves became a meaningful proposition.

The economic role of the men in the tribe soon assumed a preponderance

which was no longer in keeping with their equivocal social status. In

Engels’ words ‘as wealth increased, it on the one hand gave the man a

more important status in the family than the woman, and on the other

hand it created a stimulus to utilise this strengthened position to

overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of his

children. But this was impossible as long as descent according to

mother-right prevailed.’[37]

According to the ‘classical’ theory a profound change then took place,

probably spread over many centuries, which Engels described as ‘the

world historic defeat of the female sex’.[38] The males gradually became

the dominant sex, both economically and socially. Women became a

commodity to be exchanged against cattle or weapons. With further

changes in the productivity of labour, a definite social surplus was now

being produced. Those who had access to this surplus sought to

institutionalise their right to it as ‘private property’ and to leave

part of it to their descendants. But to do this they have to know who

their descendants were. Hence the appearance of the patriarchal family,

of monogamous marriage, and of a sexual morality which stressed female

chastity and which demanded of women virginity before marriage and

faithfulness during it. Female unfaithfulness became a crime punishable

by death for it allows doubts to arise as to the legitimacy of the

descendants.

What is false in this schema is the notion — often explicitly stated —

that the whole of mankind went through a series of states characterised

by specific forms of social organisation and specific patterns of

inheritance.

There is little evidence that societies based on ‘matriarchy’[39] or

even on ‘mother-right’ were universally dominant forms. It is wrong to

regard any contemporary tribe in which matrilinear descent still

pertains as some kind of fossil, arrested at an earlier stage of

evolutionary development.[40] It is also wrong to associate specific

marriage forms with specific levels of technological development (‘group

marriage’ for ‘savage society’, ‘the syndiasmic family’ for ‘barbarism’,

‘the monogamous marriage’ for ‘civilisation’, etc.). This is not to say

that kinship systems are arbitrary. They are adaptable and have

certainly been adapted to fulfil varying human needs. These ‘needs’ have

differed widely according to population density, climatic conditions,

land fertility, and numerous other variables, known and unknown. The

alternatives ‘patriarchal’-‘matriarchal’ are moreover extremely

naive.[41] We now know that we must distinguish between matrilinear,

patrilinear or ‘cognatic’ (kinship through both lines) patterns of

inheritance and between matrilocal and patrilocal (who lives where?)

patterns of abode, and that these in turn exercise considerable

influence on social and sexual mores. There are also differences between

person-to-person relationships and obligations (inheritance, etc.) and

group obligations (in relation to common or impartable land, to ancestor

worship, to ‘duties’ to avenge death, etc.) and these may conflict.

Reality is extremely complex in its manifestations and these cannot

today be as readily ‘tidied up’ as they were in the past. Moreover the

‘very rigidity of the (classical) theories makes them difficult to use

and is in stark contrast to the malleability of human beings’.[42]

What remains therefore of the classical scheme? Firstly the intellectual

courage and ambition of seeking to grasp reality in its totality and of

not seeking refuge behind the complexity of facts to proclaim the

incoherence of nature. When one hears that ‘modern anthropology’ has

‘invalidated Morgan’ one is reminded of oft heard verdicts that ‘modern

sociology’ has ‘invalidated Marx’. At one level it is true but there is

also a deliberately entertained confusion between perspective and

detail, between method and content, between intention and fulfilment.

At the more specific level it remains true that the appearance of a

social surplus led to a struggle for its appropriation and to attempts

to restrict its dispersal by institutionalised means. It is also true

that by and large this process was associated with a progressive

restriction of female sexual rights and with the appearance of an

increasingly authoritarian morality. Although some matrilinear societies

may have been sexually inhibited, and although all patriarchal societies

are necessarily repressive, it remains true that by and large the more

widespread the ‘patriarchal’ functions the more repressive the societies

have been. Modern psychoanalysis may throw further light on the

mechanisms whereby this came about. At this point we can only pinpoint

an area that badly needs to be studied.

The ‘inferior’ status of women soon came to be widely accepted. Over the

centuries, throughout slave society, feudal society and capitalist

society — but also in the many parts of the world which have not gone

through this sequence — a whole ethos, a whole philosophy and a whole

set of social customs were to emerge which consecrated this subordinate

relationship, both in real life and in the minds of both men and women.

The sacred texts of the Hindus limit women’s access to freedom and to

material belongings. The Ancient Greeks were profoundly misogynist and

relegated their women to the gynecaeum. Pythagoras speaks of ‘a good

principle which created order, light and man — and a bad principle which

created chaos, darkness and woman’. Demosthenes proclaimed that ‘one

took a wife to have legitimate children, concubines to be well looked

after and courtesans for the pleasures of physical love’. Plato in his

Republic declares that ‘the most holy marriages are those which are of

most benefit to the State’. The fathers of the Christian Church soon

succeeded in destroying the early hopes of freedom and emancipation

which had led many women to martyrdom. Women became synonymous with

eternal temptation. They are seen as a constant ‘invitation to

fornication, a trap for the unwary’. Saint Paul states that ‘man was not

created for woman, but woman for man’. Saint John Chrysostome proclaims

that ‘among all wild beasts, none are as dangerous as women’. According

to St. Thomas Aquinas ‘woman is destined to live under man’s domination

and has no authority of her own right’.

These attitudes are perpetuated in the dominant ideology of the Middle

Ages and even into more recent times. Milton, in Paradise Lost,

proclaims that ‘man was made for God and woman was made for man’.

Schopenhauer defines woman as ‘an animal with long hair and short

ideas’, Nietzsche calls her ‘the warrior’s pastime’. Even the muddle

headed Proudhon sees her as ‘housewife or courtesan’ and proclaims that

‘neither by nature or destiny can woman be an associate, a citizen or a

holder of public office’. Kaiser Wilhelm the Second defined a role for

women (later echoed by the Third Reich) as being ‘Kirche, Küche, Kinder’

(Church, Kitchen and Kids).

In 1935 Wilhelm Reich wrote a major work Der Einbruch der sexual-moral

which discussed how an authoritarian sexual morality developed. In it

Reich discusses some interesting observations of Malinowski’s concerning

the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands (off Eastern New Guinea), where

matrilinear forms of kinship prevailed. (Reich had met Malinowski in

London in 1934.) Among the Trobrianders there was free sexual play

during childhood and considerable sexual freedom during adolescence.

Tics and neuroses were virtually unknown and the general attitude to

life was easy and relaxed. Reich discusses however the practice whereby,

among the ruling groups, certain girls were encouraged to marry their

first cousins (the sons of their mother’s brother) thereby enabling

marriage settlements to be recuperated and remain within the family.

Whereas sexual freedom was widespread among all other young

Trobrianders, those destined for a marriage of this kind were submitted

from an early age to all sorts of sexual taboos. Economic interests —

the accumulation of wealth within the ruling group — determined

restrictions of sexual freedom within this group.

Reich vividly contrasts the Trobrianders and other sexually uninhibited

societies with classical patriarchal societies which produce mass

neurosis and mass misery through sexual repression. With the

strengthening of patriarchy ‘the family acquires, in addition to its

economic function, the far more significant function of changing the

human structure from that of the free clan member to that of the

suppressed family member... the relationship between clan members, which

was free and voluntary, based only on common vital interests. Voluntary

achievement in work is replaced by compulsive work and rebellion against

it. Natural sexual sociality is replaced by the demands of morality;

voluntary, happy love relationship is replaced by genital repression,

neurotic disturbances and sexual perversions; the naturally strong,

self-reliant biological organism becomes weak, helpless, dependent,

fearful of God, the orgiastic experiencing of nature is replaced by

mystical ecstasy, “religious experience” and unfulfilled vegetative

longing; the weakened ego of the individual seeks strength in the

identification with the tribe, later the “nation”, and with the chief of

the tribe, later the patriarch of the tribe and the king of the

nation.[43] With that the birth of the vassal structure has taken place;

the structural anchoring of human subjugation is secured’.[44]

7. WILHELM REICH AND THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

Those who want to change society must seek to understand how people act

and think in society. This is not a field in which traditional

revolutionaries are at home. For reasons we have shown they feel

distinctly uncomfortable in it. Reich’s views on sexual conditioning are

certainly of relevance here, whatever one may think of other aspects of

his work.[45]

Some possible misunderstandings should be cleared up immediately. We are

not saying that the sexual revolution is the revolution. We have not

abandoned the fight for the Revolution to become ‘prophets of the better

orgasm’. We are not in transit from collective revolutionary politics to

individual sexual emancipation. We are not saying that sexual factors

are to be substituted for economic ones in the understanding of social

reality or that understanding sexual repression will automatically

generate an insight into the mechanisms of exploitation and alienation

which are at the root of class society. Nor are we endorsing Reich’s

later writings, whether in the field of biology or in the field of

politics.

What we are saying is that revolution is a total phenomenon or it is

nothing,[46] that a social revolution which is not also a sexual

revolution is unlikely to have gone much below the surface of things and

that sexual emancipation is not something that will ‘come later’,

‘automatically’ or as a ‘by-product’ of a revolution in other aspects of

peoples’ lives. We are stressing that no ‘understanding’ of social

reality can be total which neglects the sexual factors and that sexual

repression itself has both economic origins and social effects. We are

trying to explain some of the difficulties confronting revolutionaries

and some of the real problems they are up against — here and now. We are

finally trying to explain why the task of the purely ‘industrial’

militant or of the purely ‘political’ revolutionary is so difficult,

unrewarding and in the long run sterile.

Unless revolutionaries are clearly aware of all the resistances they are

up against, how can they hope to break them down? Unless revolutionaries

are clearly aware of the resistances (i.e. the unsuspected influences of

the dominant ideology) within themselves, how can they hope to come to

grips with the problems of others?

How much of the life of the ordinary person is devoted to ‘politics’

(even in basic terms of organised economic struggle) and how much to

problems of interpersonal relationships? To ask the question is already

to provide an answer. Yet just look at the average Left political

literature today. Reading the columns of the Morning Star, Workers’

Press or Socialist Standard (or in the U.S. The Daily World, Workers’

Power or The People’s Voice — eds.) one doesn’t get a hint that the

problems discussed in this pamphlet even exist. Man is seen as a

ridiculous fragment of his full stature. One seldom gets the impression

that the traditional revolutionaries are talking about real people,

whose problems in relation to wives, parents, companions or children

occupy at least as much of their lives as their struggle against

economic exploitation. Marxists sometimes state (but more often just

imply) that a change in the property relations (or in the relations of

production) will initiate a process which will eventually solve the

emotional problems of mankind (an end to sexual misery through a change

in the leadership?). This does not follow in the least. If Marx is

right, that ‘socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness,’ the

struggle at the level of sexual emancipation must be waged in explicit

terms and victory not just left to happen (or not happen) in the wake of

economic change. It is difficult, however, to convince the average

revolutionary of this. Their own ‘character armour’ renders them

impervious to the basic needs of many of those on whose behalf they

believe they are acting. They are afraid to politicise the sexual

question because they are afraid of what is in themselves.

What are the practical implications of the ideas we have here outlined?

Can the sexual revolution take place within a capitalist context? Can a

total revolution take place while people are still sexually repressed?

We hope, in this section, to show that even posing the question in these

terms is wrong and that there is a profound dialectical relation between

the two which should never be lost sight of.

Reich originally hoped it might be possible to eliminate people’s

neuroses by education, explanation and a change in their sexual habits.

But he soon came to realize that it was a waste of time to line patients

up for the analysts couch if society was producing neuroses faster than

analysts were capable of coping with them. Capitalist society was a mass

production industry as far as neuroses were concerned. And where it did

not produce well-defined clinically recognisable neuroses, it often

produced ‘adaptations’ that crippled the individual by compelling him to

submit. (In modern society submission and adaptation are often the price

paid for avoiding an individual neurosis.) Growing awareness of this

fact led Reich increasingly to question the whole pattern of social

organisation and to draw revolutionary conclusions. He came to see that

‘the sexual problem’ was deeply related to authoritarian social

structures and could not be solved short of overthrowing the established

order.

At this point many would have abandoned psychoanalysis for radical

politics of the classical type. What makes Reich such an interesting and

original thinker is that he also perceived the converse, namely that it

would be, impossible fundamentally to alter the existing social order as

long as people were conditioned (through sexual repression and an

authoritarian upbringing) into accepting the fundamental norms of the

society around them. Reich joined the Austrian Communist Party in July

1927 following the shootings in Schattendorf and Vienna.[47] He

participated in meetings, leafleting, demonstrations, etc. But he

simultaneously continued to develop revolutionary psychoanalysis,

guiding it into biologically uncharted territory. He took it from where

it ceased to be a comfortable profession into areas where it began to be

a dangerous occupation. He set up free sexual hygiene clinics in the

working, class districts of Vienna. These proved extremely popular. They

gave Reich a very deep insight not only into the sexual and economic

misery of the population, but also into ‘the acquired irrational

structure of the masses’ which made ‘dictatorship through utilization of

the irrational possible’.[48] In Reich’s writings ‘man’ as patient and

‘man’ as social being merged more and more into one. Reich’s very

experiences in politics (the endorsement and ‘justification’ of police

brutality by large sections of the Austrian population, the acceptance

of authority even by the starving, the relatively easy accession to

power by the Nazis in Germany, the triumph of the ‘political pirates’

over the ‘repressed and hungry masses’) led him to question ever more

deeply the mechanisms whereby the dominant ideology permeated the ranks

of the oppressed, to search ever more thoroughly for the roots of the

‘irrational in politics’.

Reich’s conclusions have already been indicated: people’s character

structure prevents them from becoming aware of their real interests. The

fear of freedom, the longing for order (of any kind), the panic at the

thought of being deprived of a leader, the anxiety with which they

confront pleasure or new ideas, the distress caused by having to think

for oneself, all act against any wish at social emancipation. ‘Now we

understand’, Reich wrote, ‘a basic element in the “retroaction of

ideology on the economic base”. Sexual inhibition alters the structure

of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he

thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests’.

It might be thought that only pessimistic conclusions could flow from

such an analysis. If a rational attitude to sexuality is impossible

under capitalism (because the continuation of capitalism precludes the

development of rationality in general), and if no real social change is

possible as long as people are sexually repressed (because this

conditions their acceptance of authority) the outlook would seem bleak

indeed, in relation to both sexual and social revolutions.

Cattier’s biography of Reich[49] contains a passage which brilliantly

illustrates this dilemma: ‘When Reich was with his patients he had

noticed that they would mobilise all their defence reactions against

him. They would hang on to their neurotic equilibrium and experience

fear as the analyst got near the repressed material. In the same way

revolutionary ideas slither off the character armour of the masses

because such ideas are appealing to everything that people had had to

smother within themselves in order to put up with their own

brutalisation.

‘It would be wrong to believe that working people fail to revolt because

they lack information about the mechanisms of economic exploitation. In

fact revolutionary propaganda which seeks to explain to the masses the

social injustice and irrationality of the economic system falls on deaf

ears. Those who get up at five in the morning to work in a factory, and

have on top of it spend two hours of every day on underground or

suburban trains have to adapt to these conditions by eliminating from

their minds anything that might put such conditions in question again.

If they realised that they were wasting their lives in the service of an

absurd system they would either go mad or commit suicide. To avoid

achieving such anxiety-laden insight they justify their existence by

rationalising it.[50] They repress everything that might disturb them

and acquire a character structure adapted to the conditions under which

they must live. Hence it follows that the idealistic tactic consisting

of explaining to people that they were oppressed is useless, as people

have had to suppress the perception of oppression in order to live with

it. Revolutionary propagandists often claim they are trying to raise

people’s level of consciousness. Experience shows that their endeavours

are seldom successful. Why? Because such endeavours come up against all

the unconscious defence mechanisms and against all the various

rationalisations that people have built up in order not to become aware

of the exploitation and of the void in their lives’.

This sombre image has far more truth in it than most revolutionaries can

comfortably admit. But in the last analysis it is inadequate. It is

inadequate because it implies totally malleable individuals, in whom

total sexual repression has produced the prerequisites for total

conditioning and therefore for total acceptance of the dominant

ideology. The image is inadequate because it is undialectical. It does

not encompass the possibility that attitudes might change, that the

‘laws’ governing psychological mechanisms might alter, that a fight

against sexual repression (dictated by sexual needs themselves) might

loosen the ‘character armour’ of individuals and render them more

capable of rational thought and action. In a sense the model described

implies a vision of psychological reactions as something unalterable and

fixed, governed by objective laws which operate independently of the

actions or wishes of men. In this sense it bears a strange similarity to

the image of capitalism present in the mind of so many

revolutionaries.[51] But neither the external nor the internal world of

man in fact exist in this form. The working class does not submit to its

history, until one day it makes it explode. Its continuous struggle in

production constantly modifies the area in which the next phase of the

struggle will have to be fought. Much the same applies to man’s struggle

for sexual freedom.

Reich himself was aware of this possibility. In the preface to the first

edition of Character Analysis (1933) he wrote: ‘Gradually, with the

development of the social process, there develops an increasing

discrepancy between enforced renunciation and increased libidinal

tension: this discrepancy undermines “tradition” and forms the

psychological core attitudes which threaten the anchoring’.

8. LIMITS AND PERSPECTIVES

The ‘undermining of tradition’ to which Reich referred has certainly

progressed within recent years. The change in traditional attitudes is

both gaining momentum and becoming more explicit in a manner which would

have surprised and delighted Reich. Seeing the havoc around him in the

working class districts of Vienna and Berlin (in the late 1920s and

early 1930s) Reich wrote brilliant and bitter pages about the sexual

misery of adolescence, about the damage done to the personality by guilt

about masturbation, about ignorance and misinformation concerning birth

control, about the high cost of contraceptives, about back street

abortions (so often the fate of the working class girl or the housewife)

and about the hypocrisy of the ‘compulsive’ bourgeois marriage with its

inevitable concomitant of jealousy, adultery and prostitution. Real

sexual freedom for the young, Reich wrote, would mean the end of this

type of marriage. Bourgeois society needed bourgeois marriage for one of

the cornerstones of its edifice. For Reich any large scale sexual

freedom was inconceivable within the framework of capitalism.

What has happened has been rather different thing from anything Reich

could have foreseen. In advanced industrial societies the persistent

struggle of the young for what is one of their fundamental rights — the

right to a normal sex life from the age at which they are capable of it

— has succeeded in denting the repressive ideology, in bringing about

changes and in modifying the ground on which the next stage of the

struggle will have to be fought. Adolescents are breaking out of the

stifling atmosphere of the traditional family, an act which could be of

considerable significance. Information and practical help about birth

control is now available, even to the non-married. The increasing

financial independence of young people and the discovery of oral

contraception provide a solid material foundation for the whole process.

The attitude to ‘illegitimacy’ is gradually changing. The upbringing of

children is more enlightened. Abortion is now more widely available,

divorce much easier and the economic rights of women more widely

recognised. Understanding is increasing. People are beginning to grasp

that society itself engenders the antisocial behavior which it condemns.

It is true that all this has only been achieved on a small scale, only

in some countries[52] and only in the face of tremendous opposition. It

is also true that, as in Reich’s day, every concession is ‘too late and

too little’ belatedly recognising established facts rather than blazing

a new trail. Moreover none of the ‘reformers’ are as yet demystified or

unrepressed enough to boldly trumpet the message that sex is a natural

and pleasurable activity — or that the right to sexual happiness is a

basic human right. It is rarely proclaimed that throughout history the

practice of sex has never had procreation as its main end, whatever the

preachings of moralists, priests, philosophers or politicians. But

despite these limitations the fact of a developing sexual revolution is

undeniable, irreversible and of deep significance.

As in other areas, the attempt at sexual emancipation encounters two

kinds of response from established society: frontal opposition — from

those who still live in the Victorian era — and an attempt at

recuperation. Modern society seeks first to neutralise any threat

presented to it, and ultimately to convert such challenges into

something useful to its own ends. It seeks to regain with one hand what

it has been compelled to yield with the other: parts of its control of

the total situation.

In relation to sex, the phenomenon of recuperation takes the form of

first alienating and reifying sexuality, and then of frenetically

exploiting this empty shell for commercial ends. As modern youth breaks

out of the dual stranglehold of repressive traditional morality and of

the authoritarian patriarchal family it encounters a projected image of

free sexuality which is in fact a manipulatory distortion of it. The

image is often little more than a means of selling products. Today sex

is used to sell everything from cigarettes to real estate, from bottles

of perfume to pay-as-you-earn holidays; from hair lotions to models of

next year’s car. The potential market is systematically surveyed,

quantified, exploited. The ‘pornographic’ explosion on Broadway (New

York) now caters for a previously repressed clientele of massive

proportions and varied tastes. Here as elsewhere it is often a question

of consumer research. Separate booths and displays are arranged for

homosexuals (active and passive), for fetishists, for sadists, for

masochists, for voyeurs, etc. Fashion advertising, strip-tease shows and

certain magazines and movies all highlight the successful development of

sex into a major consumer industry.

In all this sex is presented as something to be consumed. But the sexual

instinct differs from certain other instincts. Hunger can be satisfied

by food. The ‘food’ of the sexual instinct is, however, another human

being, capable of thinking, acting, suffering. The alienation of

sexuality under the conditions of modern capitalism is very much part of

the general alienating process, in which people are converted into

objects (in this case, objects of sexual consumption) and relations are

drained of human content. Undiscriminating, compulsive sexual activity

is not sexual freedom — although it may sometimes be a preparation for

it (which repressive morality can never be). The illusion that alienated

sex is sexual freedom constitutes yet another obstacle in the road to

total emancipation. Sexual freedom implies a realization and

understanding of the autonomy of others. Unfortunately, most people

don’t yet think in this way.

The recuperation by society of the sexual revolution is therefore partly

successful. But it creates the basis for a deeper and more fundamental

challenge. Modern society can tolerate alienated sexuality, just as it

tolerates alienated consumption, wage increases which do not exceed

increases in the productivity of labour, or colonial ‘freedom’ in which

the ‘facts of economic life’ still perpetuate the division of the world

into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Modern capitalism not only tolerates these

‘challenges’ but converts them into essential cogs of its own expansion

and perpetuation. It seeks to harness the sexual demands of youth by

first distorting them and then by integrating them into the present

system, in much the same way as working class demands are integrated

into the economy of the consumer society. From a potential liberating

force these demands tend thereby to be converted into a further

mechanism of repression. What exploiting society will not long be able

to tolerate, however, is the mass development of critical, demystified,

self-reliant, sexually emancipated, autonomous, non-alienated persons,

conscious of what they want and prepared to struggle for it.

The assertion of the right to manage one’s own life, in the realm of sex

as in the realm of work, is helping to disintegrate the dominant

ideology. It is producing less compulsive and obsessional individuals,

and in this respect preparing the ground for libertarian revolution. (In

the long run even the traditional revolutionaries, that repository of

repressed puritanism, will be affected.)

The incessant questioning and challenge to authority on the subject of

sex and of the compulsive family can only complement the questioning and

challenge to authority in other areas (for instance on the subject of

who is to dominate the work process — or of the purpose of work itself).

Both challenges stress the autonomy of individuals and their domination

over important aspects of their lives. Both expose the alienated

concepts which pass for rationality and which govern so much of our

thinking and behaviour. The task of the conscious revolutionary is to

make both challenges explicit, to point out their deeply subversive

content, and to explain their inter-relation. To understand

revolutionary psychoanalysis is to add a new dimension to the marxist

critique of ideologies and to the marxist understanding of false

consciousness. Only then will we have the tools to master our own

history, will socialism (‘man’s positive self-consciousness’) be a real

possibility, and will man be able to break once for all with the

‘irrational in politics’ and with the irrational in life.

THE RUSSIAN EXPERIENCE

In the years following the Russian Revolution, ‘official’ thought and

action concerning sexual matters were colored by four main facts: a) The

novelty, depth and vast scale of the problems which the Bolsheviks had

inherited. The new tasks had to be tackled at a time when innumerable

other problems claimed urgent attention. In the struggle for sexual

freedom classical marxist teaching provided no blueprint as to ‘what was

to be done’. Despite the vast social intellectual and cultural turmoil,

despite the widespread breaking up of families and despite the

disintegration of many traditional values, there was no clear or

coherent vision as to what ought eventually to follow. b) This lack of

conscious purpose was associated with a widespread, false, and rather

naive belief that the abolition of economic exploitation and the

promulgation of new, progressive legislation were sufficient to ensure

the liberation of women. It was thought that this liberation (often

conceived of in the restrictive sense of ‘equal rights’) would

automatically follow the changes in the ownership of property and it was

assumed that its growth would be guaranteed by the new laws and

institutions of the ‘workers’ state’. c) There was massive unawareness

of the significance of sexual repression — and of the traditional

morality based upon it — as a central factor in social conditioning.

Only a small minority of revolutionaries saw a conscious sexual

revolution as the indispensable means of deepening and completing the

proposed social transformation, through changing the mental structure of

the mass individual. d) Among many of the Bolshevik leaders there was a

gross lack of insight as to their own repressive conditioning in matters

of sex and as to the impact this could be having on their thoughts and

actions. Many had had a fairly typical authoritarian upbringing. Later,

deportation, imprisonment and struggle under conditions of persecution

and illegality had prevented most of the Old Guard from enjoying a

normal sex life. After the Revolution a retrospective virtue was made

out of what had been a historical necessity, and this ‘dedication’ was

made an ideal not only for ‘the vanguard’ but for the masses themselves.

Many leading Bolsheviks considered propaganda for sexual freedom as a

‘diversion from the real struggle’. (So do many would-be Bolsheviks

today). Some of them were actively to oppose all attempts at such

propaganda. These various factors were to play their part in the series

of internal defeats that followed the great events of 1917. They were to

undermine important areas of human freedom, conquered in the first few

months of the Revolution. The inhibition of the sexual revolution in

Russia was to combine with other defeats (discussed at length

elsewhere)[53] to reinforce the whole process of bureaucratic

degeneration.

Classical Marxism contained little from which the Bolsheviks could have

sought practical guidance. True, Engels had written passages with which

no libertarian could quarrel.[54] But there were other passages, more

doctrinaire in nature.[55] Moreover, Engels’ historical analyses had

constantly emphasised the social background against which the sexual

revolution was to take place but had rarely dealt with the content of

the process. As for Marx he had certainly stigmatised bourgeois marriage

and the bourgeois family. He had mercilessly flayed the whole hypocrisy

of bourgeois morality. But he had also denounced the ‘movement

counterposing universal private property to private property’, a

movement which ‘finds expression in the bestial form of counterposing to

marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community

of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common

property...’ If such a movement triumphed the woman would pass ‘from

marriage to general prostitution... from a relationship of exclusive

marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal

prostitution with the community’.[56] The terms are emotionally loaded

and the antithesis suggested is a false one. (Marx still formulates the

alternative to individual property in terms of property — and not in

terms of the free self-determination of both men and women. It is in

much the same vein that Engels still speaks of ‘surrender’).

However ambiguous or indistinct the ‘guide-lines’ may have been in 1917

the problems requiring solution were real and practical enough. The

cultural heritage of tsarism had to be uprooted. This was an enormous

task. Tsarist laws had certainly ‘protected’ the family. They decreed

that the husband ‘had to love his wife like his own body’. The wife

‘owed unlimited obedience to the husband’. Men could call on the police

to compel women to return to the happy home. Parents could have their

children of either sex confined to prison ‘for wilfully disobeying

parental power’. Young people contracting marriage without parental

consent were also liable to imprisonment. Only religious marriages were

deemed legal. Divorces, which only the Church could grant, were costly

and only available to the rich.

All this reactionary legislation was swept aside by the new marriage

decrees of December 19 and 20, 1917. These proclaimed the total equality

of the contracting parties, an end to the legal incapacity of women, and

the end of ‘indissoluble’ marriage through the ready availability of

divorce. The husband was deprived of his prerogative of domination over

the family. Women were given the right freely to determine their name,

domicile and citizenship. Any man over the age of 18 (and any woman over

the age of 16) could contract a marriage. As far as the offspring were

concerned, no difference was recognised between ‘natural parentage’ and

‘legal parentage’.

Divorce was made very easy. The only criterion was mutual agreement

between the parties. When a partner wanted to relinquish a sexual

companionship he did not have to ‘give reasons’. Marriage and divorce

became purely private matters. The registration of a relationship was

not mandatory. Even when a relationship was registered sexual

relationships with others were not ‘prosecuted’. (Not telling the

partner about another relationship was, however, considered ‘fraud’.)

The obligation to pay alimony persisted for six months only after a

separation, and only came into force if the partner was unemployed or

otherwise incapable of earning a living. A law of 1919 legalised

abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. All the old

legislation directed against homosexuality amongst adults was repealed.

Aspirations in this whole area of personal freedom are summarised by the

jurist Hoichbarg, who wrote in the Preface to the Bolshevik Marriage

Code of 1919 that ‘the institution of marriage carried within itself the

seeds of its own destruction’ and that ‘the family still persisted only

because we are dealing with socialism in a nascent state’.

The newly proclaimed laws were radical indeed. Writing in Pravda on

September 15, 1919, Lenin could truthfully state that ‘in the Soviet

Republic not a stone remains of the laws that confined women to an

inferior status’. Particularly degrading had been the laws ‘which had

deprived her of her rights and which have often humiliated her — that is

to say the laws on divorce, the laws distinguishing natural from

legitimate children, the laws demanding the determination of fatherhood

before the upkeep of the child could be considered’. Lenin also seems to

have been aware of the fact that ‘laws were not enough’ and that ‘even

when a full equality of rights has been achieved the oppression of women

would continue’. But he saw this persisting oppression solely in terms

of the domestic chores which for a while would still be her lot. ‘In

most cases such chores were the least productive, the most barbarous and

the heaviest to fall on women’s shoulders. For women to be totally free

and the real equal of man household chores must be made a public

responsibility and the women must participate in general

production’.[57] Communal kitchens, creches and kindergartens — combined

with access to all kinds of labour — were seen as the essential

ingredients of woman’s emancipation. ‘The abolition of private property

on the land and in the factories alone opens the road’, wrote Lenin, ‘to

the total and emancipation of women’. Along this road there would be a

‘transition from the small individual household to the big socialist

household’.[58] This vision was undoubtedly shared by most of the

leading Bolsheviks, who saw ‘women’s liberation’ as the summated

freedoms from economic exploitation and from domestic slavery. The

repressive mechanisms whereby female subjugation had become internalised

in the minds of millions of women were not even suspected.

The new laws, it is true, provided a framework within which future

attempts might be made, free from external constraints, at constructing

human relationships of a new type. It is also true that the Bolsheviks

wished to break patriarchal power. But they were only dimly aware of the

role of the patriarchal family as the ‘structure-forming cell of class

society’[59] — as ‘the structural and ideological place of reproduction

of every social order based on authoritarian principles’.[60] Still less

did they realise the role of sexual repression in perpetuating such

important aspects of the dominant ideology as the compliance with

authority and the fear of freedom. Had they been more conscious of these

facts many practical problems would have been differently managed, many

fruitless discussions by-passed, many retrogressive statements or acts

avoided. The revolutionaries would have shown less tolerance with the

spokesmen of the old ideology and morality, many of whom had been left

in high positions, from where they were inflicting untold damage upon

the developing cultural revolution. The Bolsheviks repeatedly stressed

that the new laws were ‘only the beginning’. But a beginning of what?

Wilhelm Reich points out that in the heated discussions of that period

the conservatives seemed always to have the edge in all the arguments

and the most ready access to all the ‘proofs’. The revolutionaries ‘were

prepared neither theoretically nor practically for the difficulties

which the cultural revolution brought with it’.[61] They knew little

about the psychic structure of the generation they were seeking to win

over from ideological allegiance to the Tsarist patriarchate. They were

certainly trying to do something new, but they ‘felt very clearly that

they were not able to put the “new” thing into words. They fought

valiantly, but finally tired and failed in the discussion, partly

because they themselves were caught in old concepts, from which they

were unable to shake loose’.[62]

The Revolution encountered tremendous problems. The compulsive family

had only been legally abolished. The attitudes on which it was based

persisted. Economic difficulties persisted too. And ‘as long as society

could not guarantee security to all adults and adolescents two guarantee

remained the function of the family.’[63] The family therefore continued

to exist. Its demands conflicted more and more with the new social

obligations and aspirations of the group. The ‘life-affirmative sexual

relationships in the collectives’ struggled against the old family ties

which ‘pervaded every corner of everyday life and the psychic

structure.’[64] For instance ‘parents, proletarians included, did not

like to see their adolescent daughters go to meetings. They feared that

the girls would “go wrong” — that is start a sexual life. Though the

children ought to go to the collective, the parents still made their old

possessive demands on them. They were horrified when the children began

to look at them with a critical eye’.[65] Even in the most radical

circles girls could still be denounced as ‘promiscuous’, thereby

revealing the deep-seated residual moral condemnation of female

sexuality underlying all the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric.

The economic whip-hand of the patriarchal father over wife and children

was certainly loosened. But the increased opportunities for sexual

happiness did not as yet mean the psychic capacity to enjoy such

happiness. The internalised constraints had barely been dented.

Everything was still distorted by the legacy of the past. ‘Infantile

attitudes and pathological sexual habits’ persisted. Family members

would drown out unconscious antagonisms to one another with a forced

affection and sticky dependence. ‘One of the main difficulties was the

inability of the women — genitally crippled and unprepared for economic

independence as they were — to give up their slave-like protection of

the family’[66] and the substitute gratification which they derived from

their domination over the children. Those whose whole lives were

sexually empty and economically dependent had made of the upbringing of

children the be-all and end-all of their existence. It was difficult to

combat these possessive tendencies and this misuse of power on the part

of the mothers without real insight to their origin. The mothers fought

bitterly against any restriction of these powers.

Everyday life proved much more conservative than economy mainly because

it was a much less conscious process. The revolutionaries were not

equipped either ideologically or in terms of their own upbringing to

intervene effectively in the heated discussions that raged up and down

the country on the ‘sexual question’. There was no theory of the sexual

revolution. Trotsky’s pamphlet ‘Problems of Life’,[67] written in 1923,

does not even mention the sexual question. Many Bolshevik leaders took

refuge in the formula that ‘sexuality was a private matter’. This was

unfortunate and ‘essentially an expression of the inability of the

members of the Communist Party to manage the revolution in their own

personal lives’.[68]

There was undoubtedly considerable malaise, at least to begin with. Many

young people felt that these were important questions which should be

honestly and openly talked about. Kollontai[69] gives some idea of what

was being discussed. A functionary, Koltsov, points out that the key

questions ‘are never discussed. It is as if for some reason they were

being avoided. I myself have never given them serious thought. They are

new to me’. Another, Finkovsky, pinpoints the reasons for this

avoidance. ‘The subject is rarely talked about because it hits home too

closely with everybody... The Communists usually point to the golden

future and thus avoid getting into acute problems... the workers know

that in Communist families things are even worse than in their own’. Yet

another official, Tseitlin, stressed that these were ‘exactly the

questions which interest the workers, male and female alike’. When such

questions were the topic of Party meetings people would hear about it

and flock to attend them. ‘They keep asking these questions and find no

answers’. Reich points out that ordinary people, without sexological

training or knowledge, were describing exactly what is contended by

sex-economy, namely that ‘the interest of the mass-individual is not

political but sexual’.[70]

Answers were in fact being provided. They were inadequate, incomplete,

and sometimes positively harmful. Sex ‘education’ was slipping into the

hands of public hygienists, biologists, urologists and professors of

philosophy, ethics and sociology. The repercussions soon began to be

felt — the cultural revolution began to wither at the roots. The ‘heated

discussions’ eventually died down. The impetus provided by the new

legislation petered out — clearly revealing the obvious fact that a

sexual revolution could not, like an economic revolution, be expressed

through plans and laws. To be successful it had to manifest itself in

all the details of everyday personal life. But here it encountered major

obstacles. The revolution in the ideological superstructure had not yet

taken place. The ‘bearer of this revolution, the psychic structure of

human beings’[71] was not yet changed.

Apart from the internalised inhibitions of the mass individual — a

legacy of the past — change was also being inhibited from without (i.e.

as a result of the internalised inhibitions of those now in authority).

Lenin denounced the youth movement as being ‘exaggeratedly interested in

sex’.[72] The youth had been ‘attacked by the disease of modernity in

its attitude towards sexual questions’. All this was ‘particularly

harmful, particularly dangerous’. The new ‘flourishing sexual theories’

arose out of the personal need of people ‘to justify personal

abnormality in sexual life before bourgeois morality’. They were being

peddled by ‘little yellow-beaked birds who had just broken from the egg

of bourgeois ideas’. Psychoanalysis was to be mistrusted for it ‘grew on

the dirty soil of bourgeois society’. All that was relevant in this new

concern with sexual matters ‘the workers had already read in Bebel, long

ago’. The new sexual life young people were trying to create was ‘an

extension of bourgeois brothels’. Within a short while every timid

official, every repressed reactionary was to be found echoing Lenin’s

famous phrase: ‘Thirst must be satisfied — but will the normal man in

normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle,

or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips?’[73]

The more far-sighted among the revolutionaries sensed the backsliding,

but their prescription was an intensification of the calls for

industrialisation. The lack of purely economic prerequisites for radical

social change was stressed again and again. But as Reich points out ‘the

attitude “first the economic questions, then those of everyday life” was

wrong and only the expression of the unpreparedness for the seemingly

chaotic forms of the cultural revolution... true, a society which is

exhausted by civil war, which is unable immediately to establish public

kitchens, laundries and kindergartens must first of all think of the

economic prerequisites... But it was not just a matter of lifting the

masses to the level of the capitalist countries... It was also necessary

to be clear as to the nature of the new culture... the cultural

revolution posed infinitely more difficult problems than the political

revolution. This is easy to understand. The political revolution

requires essentially nothing but a strong trained leadership and the

confidence of the masses in it. The cultural revolution, however,

requires an alteration it the psychic structure of the mass individual.

About this there was hardly any scientific, let alone practical, concept

at that time’.[74] It might perhaps be added that the dissemination of

what little knowledge there was, instead of being actively encouraged,

was being actively opposed by most of the Russian leaders. Attempts at

establishing various kinds of ‘counter-milieu’ — such as youth communes

— were now also being actively discouraged by the authorities.

It was naive indeed to expect ‘progressive’ legislation plus new

property relations to solve these fundamental problems. The change in

property relations may have prepared the ground for a new society but

men alone were going to build it. For such a task a different kind of

vision was necessary and it was precisely such a vision that was

lacking.

Too many factors were combining to prevent the formal, legal changes

that had been proclaimed from really influencing the course of events.

As Reich was later to point out ‘an ideology or programme can only

become a revolutionary power of historical dimensions if it achieves a

deep-reaching change in the emotions and instinctual life of the

masses’. It influenced the development of society either ‘by passively

tolerating despotism and suppression’ or ‘by adjustment to the technical

process of development instituted by the powers that be’, or finally ‘by

actively taking part in social development, as for example in a

revolution’. No concept of historical development could be called

revolutionary ‘if it considers the psychic structure of the masses as

nothing but the result of economic processes and not also as their

motive power’.[75] In the Russian Revolution the psychic structure of

the masses never became — and was never allowed to become — a

‘revolutionary power of historical dimensions’.

Between 1920 and about 1933 the situation gradually regressed to the

point where the sexual ideology of the leading groups in the USSR could

no longer be distinguished from that of the leading groups in any

conservative country. Summing up the whole process Reich wrote that the

leaders of the new Russian state could not be blamed for not knowing the

solution to these problems, ‘but they must be blamed for avoiding the

difficulties, for taking the line of least resistance, for not asking

themselves what it all meant, for talking about the revolution of life

without looking for it in real life itself, for misinterpreting the

existing chaos as a “moral chaos” (using the terms in the same sense as

the political reaction) instead of comprehending it as chaotic

conditions which were inherent in the transition to new forms, and last

but not least for repudiating the contributions to an understanding of

the problem which the German sex-political movement had to offer’.[76]

In March 1934 the law punishing homosexuality was reintroduced into the

Soviet Union. In June 1935 an editorial in Pravda wrote that ‘only a

good family man could be a good Soviet citizen’. By early 1936 a Russian

trade union paper (Trud, April 27, 1936) could write ‘abortion, which

destroys life, is inadmissible in any country. Soviet woman has the same

rights as Soviet man, but that does not absolve her from the great and

honorable duty (sic!) imposed on her by nature: she is to be a mother.

She is to bear life.[77] And this is certainly not a private matter, but

a matter of great social significance’.[78] A decree of June 27, 1936

was to prohibit abortion. A further decree of July 8, 1944 established

that ‘only a legally recognised marriage entails rights and duties for

both husband and wife’. In other words ‘illegitimate’ children — or the

offspring of nonregistered relationships — reverted to their earlier

inferior status. Unmarried couples living together were urged to

‘regularise’ their relationship. Divorce would only be allowed ‘in

important cases’ and after ‘full consideration of all the relevant facts

by a special tribunal’. The cult of motherhood was given official

blessing. An official Stalinist publication[79] could boast that ‘on

June 1, 1949 in Soviet Russia, there were over 2 million mothers with

families of 5 or 6 children who hold the “maternity medal”; 700,000 with

families of 7, 8 or 9 children holding the “Glory to Motherhod” medal;

and 30,000 mothers of 10 or more children entitled to the medal of

“Heroine Mother”. (Enough to warm the heart of the most reactionary of

Popes!) The author proclaims that ‘Soviet legislation on the question of

the family has always been inspired by marxism-leninism’ and that ‘its

evolution, over a 30 year period, had always had as its constant concern

the wish to defend woman and to free her. This preoccupation had led the

Soviet legislator from free divorce to regulated divorce and from legal

abortion to the prohibition of abortion’!

From the middle thirties on, various critics of the bureaucracy became

increasingly vocal. Trotsky’s book The Revolution Betrayed first

published in 1936, contains an interesting chapter on ‘Family, Youth and

Culture’. In it Trotsky stigmatised those who proclaimed that woman had

to accept ‘the joys of motherhood’. This was ‘the philosophy of the

priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme’. Trotsky correctly

points out that the ‘problem of problems had not been solved: the forty

million Soviet families remained in their overwhelming majority nests of

medievalism, female slavery and hysteria, daily humiliation of children,

feminine and childish superstition’. ‘The most compelling motive of the

present cult of the family [was] undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy

for a stable hierarchy of relations and for the disciplining of youth by

means of forty million points of support for authority and power’. The

description is excellent. What is lacking is any real understanding of

how it all came about. Economic and cultural backwardness are still seen

as the sole ingredients of the failure. A whole dimension is missing.

The role of Bolshevik obscurantism in relation to sex is not even

suspected. One would search in vain among Trotsky’s voluminous writings

for any criticism, however muted, of what Lenin had said on the subject.

In the last twenty years — despite a steady ‘development of the

productive forces’ — the sexual counter-revolution has gained even

further momentum. The distance travelled is perhaps best epitomised in a

book by T.S. Atarov, ‘Physician Emeritus of the Russian Soviet Socialist

Republic’. The book, published in Moscow in 1959, is called Problems of

Sexual Education, and reveals the full extent of the sexual Thermidor.

The author proclaims that ‘Soviet marriage is not only a private matter.

It is a question involving society and the State’. Young people are

denounced who have pre-marital intercourse ‘without even experiencing

guilt’. ‘Unadapted elements’ in Russian society are denounced, who had

even sought to give ‘philosophical expression’ to their attitude — in

other words who had sought to argue a coherent case against the sexually

repressive ideology of the Party leaders. Atarov bemoans the fact that

young people ‘don’t seem to realise the difference between puberty and

sexual maturity’ and that they seem to believe ‘that the mere existence

of sexual desire is a justification for its satisfaction’. But there

were also encouraging signs. ‘Under Soviet conditions masturbation is no

longer the mass phenomenon it was in the past’. But ‘unfortunately’ it

still persisted. According to Atarov, various factors tended to

perpetuate this alarming state of affairs, factors such as ‘tight

fitting clothing in the nether parts, the bad habits of boys who keep

their hands in their pockets or under their blankets or who lie on their

stomachs, constipation and full bladders, the reading of erotic books

and the contemplation of the sexual activities of animals’.

How was one to fight this menace to the stability of Russian society?

Yes! How did you guess? ‘Regular meals, hard beds, exercise, walking,

sport and gymnastics, in fact anything that deflect the child’s

attention from sexual preoccupations’.[80] Discussing menstruation,

Atarov is even more with it! ‘Under no circumstances should any cotton

or gauze appliance be inserted into the vagina as so many women do’. The

‘outer parts’ should be washed twice a day with warm boiled water. Our

political spinster advises that ‘young people should be forbidden from

serving in cafes, restaurants or bars for the atmosphere in these places

encourages them to indulge in pre-marital relations’. ‘No illness’, he

stresses, ‘was ever caused through abstinence, which is quite harmless

for young and less young alike’. In a frightening phrase Atarov sums up

the spirit of his book. ‘The law cannot concern itself with every case

of immoral conduct. The pressure of public concern must continue to play

the leading role against all forms of immorality’. The vice squad and

public opinion were again to be the pillars of the sexual Establishment.

Readers will grasp the deeply reactionary significance of Atarov’s

pronouncements, particularly when endorsed by the full might of the

Russian Educational Establishment (over 100,000 copies of Atarov’s book

were sold within a few days of the publication of the first edition).

The ‘public opinion’ which Atarov refers to is the one which had sought

emancipation for a short while in 1917, but had soon been dragged back

into the old rut of bigotry and repression. It could now be used again

for censurious ends — as it had been for generations in the past.

Official Russian sexual morality — as seen through other official works

— today resembles the kind of ‘advice to parents’ dished out about 1890

by the bourgeois do-gooders of that time.[81] One finds in it all the

fetishes of bourgeois sexual morality — or more generally of all systems

of morality characterising class societies of patriarchal type.

Everything is there: all the reactionary anti-life ideas pompously

disguised as ‘science’, every backward prejudice, all the hypocritical

bad faith of screwed-up and repressed puritans. But these ‘irrational’

ideas not only have definite social roots (which we have sought to

expose). They also have a precise significance and a specific function.

In this they closely resemble the repressive morality which still

prevails (although on a diminishing scale) in some Church-dominated

Western countries.

Both East and West ideologies aim at denying to individuals the

autonomous (i.e. the conscious and self-managing) exercise of their own

activities. They aim at depriving people of freedom and responsibility

in a fundamental realm and at obliging them to conform to externally

imposed norms and to the pressures of ‘public opinion’ rather than to

criteria determined by each person according to his own needs and

experience. The objective of these repressive and alienating moralities

is the mass creation of individuals whose character structure

complements and reinforces the hierarchical structure of society. Such

individuals will revert to infantile attitudes when confronted with

those who symbolise authority, with those who incarnate — at the scale

of society — the image of their parents (i.e. rulers of the state,

managers of industry, priests, political pundits, etc.). In the Russian

context they will comply with the edicts of the Central Committee,

obediently follow the zig-zags of the Party line, develop religious

attitudes to the Holy Writings, etc. Such individuals will also react in

an anxiety laden manner when confronted with deviants of all kinds

(perceptive writers, poets, cosmopolitans, the apostles of ‘modernity’,

those with long hair and those with long ideas). Is it really surprising

that the most sexually repressed segment of the Russian population

(obese, middle aged women) still seem to be the main vehicle for the

dissemination of ‘public opinion’ and of the prevailing ‘kulturnost’

despite the creches, despite the kitchens, despite the kindergartens —

and despite the nationalisation, nearly two generations ago, of the vast

majority of the means of production?

‘Having children is no substitute for creating one’s own life, for

producing. And since so many women in this culture devote themselves to

nothing else, they end up by becoming intolerable burdens upon their

children because in fact these children are their whole lives. Juliet

Mitchell, Women: The Longest Revolution, has caught the situation

exactly:

“At present, reproduction in our society is often a kind of sad mimicry

of reproduction. Work in a capitalist society is an alienation of labour

in the making of a social product which is confiscated by capital. But

it can still sometimes be a real act of creation, purposive and

responsible, even in conditions of the worst exploitation. Maternity is

often a caricature of this. The biological product — the child — is

treated as if it were a solid product. Parenthood becomes a kind of

substitute for work, an activity in which the child is seen as an object

created by the mother, in the same way that a commodity is created by a

worker. Naturally, the child does not literally escape, but the mother’s

alienation can be much worse than that of the worker whose product is

appropriated by the boss. No human being can create another human being.

A person’s biological origin is an abstraction. The child as an

autonomous person inevitably threatens the activity which claims to

create it continually merely as a possession of the parent. Possessions

are felt as extensions of the self. The child as a possession is

supremely this. Anything the child does is therefore a threat to the

mother herself who has renounced her autonomy through this misconception

of her reproductive role. There are few more precarious ventures on

which to base a life.”

‘So we have the forty or fifty year old woman complaining to her grown

child: “But I gave you everything”. This is quite true: this is the

tragedy. It is a gift the child hardly wanted, and indeed, many children

are daily mutilated by it. And it leaves women at the waning of their

years with the feeling that they have been deceived, that their children

are ungrateful, that no one appreciates them because they have come to

the realisation that they have done nothing.’

[1] See The Sexual Revolution, The Noonday Press, New York, 1962, p.204

[2] See for instance the recent biography by his third wife. Ilse

Ollendorf, referred to farther on

[3] The popular vote for Nazi candidates in the last stages of the

Weimar Republic increased from 800,000 to 61/z millions in September

1930. See A. Rosenberg, A History of the German Republic, Methuen, 1936,

pp. 275, 304

[4] This refers to a previous British election, not the one held in

October 1974 — Ed

[5] We have recently heard it quite seriously proposed in an allegedly

libertarian organization — our own (London Solidarity, ed.) — that no

one should speak on behalf of the organization before submitting the

substance of his proposed comments to a ‘meetings committee’, lest

anything new be suddenly sprung on the unsuspecting and presumably

defenceless ranks of the ideologically emancipated

[6] To accept this as an ‘explanation’ would be to vest in ideas a power

they cannot have, namely the power totally to dominate material

conditions, neutralizing the influence of the economic facts of life. It

is surprising that this should never have occurred to our ‘marxists’

[7] In the words of Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks: ‘We are most likely to

get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves

are not quite certain of our position, and are inwardly tempted to take

the other side’

[8]

B. Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Meridian Books,

Cleveland, 9^(th) printing, November 1966, p.6

[9] An example (among many) of Freud’s reactionary pronouncements is to

be found in his essay, The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, in

which he wrote: ‘It is just as impossible to do without control of the

mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of

civilisation. The masses are lazy and unintelligent: they have no love

for instinctual renunciation, and they are not convinced by argument of

its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one

another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.’

[10] An excellent study dealing with both Reich, the psychoanalyst, and

Reich the revolutionary, has recently been published in Switzerland, La

Vie et l’Oeuvre du Docteur Wilhelm Reich, by Michel Cattier, La Cite,

Lausanne, 1969. It is essential reading for anyone seriously concerned

at understanding the tragic life of this remarkable man. The author of

this pamphlet has borrowed from this source

[11]

W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Orgone Institute Press, New

York, 1946, p. 15. Also available in a new edition published by

Simon and Schuster as a Touchstone paperback

[12] No, we are not slandering those courageous German anti-fascists who

were the first to die in Hitler’s concentration camps. We are only

saying that for every Communist of this kind, at least two others joined

the Nazis, while dozens of others said nothing and did nothing

[13] Fascisme et Grande Capital, Gallimard, Paris, 1945, p.88. Also

available as Fascism and Big Business, Pathfinder Press, 1973

[14] In the next section we will describe how the ‘soil’ is rendered

‘fertile’ for the acceptance of such ideas. At this stage we would only

like to point out that other sections of the population are also

affected. Ruling classes, for instance, are often mystified by their own

ideology. But politically this is a phenomenon of lesser significance

(ruling elites in fact benefit by the maintenance of ideological

mystification and of irrational social systems which proclaim the ‘need’

for such elites!)

[15] For a discussion of the historical roots of the whole process of

sexual repression, see section 6 of this pamphlet

[16] For an extremely amusing account of this kind of conditioning in a

New York Jewish family — and of its consequences — see Portnoy’s

Complaint, Cape, 1968; also referred to as the Gripes of Roth

[17] Parents are ‘the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in

our time.’ P. Roth, op. cit., p. 36

[18] The unstable equilibrium is known as ‘publicly pleasing my parents,

while privately pulling my putz.’ Ibid; p. 37

[19] Ibid., p. 32

[20] Ibid., p.124

[21]

W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, pp. 25–26

[22] This factual approach is a relatively recent development. As

Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin point out in their famous study on the Sexual

Behaviour of the Human Male, Saunders, Philadelphia, 1948, pp 21–22:

‘From the dawn of human history, from the drawings left by primitive

peoples, on through the developments of all civilisations (ancient,

classic, oriental, medieval and modern), men have recorded their sexual

activities and their thinking about sex. The printed literature is

enormous and the other material is inexhaustible ...[This literature] is

at once an interesting reflection on man’s absorbing interest in sex and

his astounding ignorance of it; his desire to know and his unwillingness

to face the facts; his respect for an objective scientific approach to

the problems involved and his overwhelming urge to be poetic,

pornographic, literary, philosophical, traditional and moral ...in

short, to do anything except ascertain the basic facts about himself.’

[23] According to the Freudian model, the personality consists of the

id, the ego and the superego. The first and last are unconscious. The id

is the sum total of the instinctual drives of the individual. The

superego is a kind of internal policeman, originating in the constraints

exercised on the individual ‘on behalf of society’ by parents and other

educators. The ego is man’s conscious self

[24]

S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, The Hogarth

Press, London, 1933, pp 90–91

[25] In 1927 Freud himself warned Reich, his former pupil, that in

attacking the family he was ‘walking into a hornet’s nest.’ In August

1934, Reich was to be expelled from the German Association of

Psychoanalysts

[26] Reich was expelled from the German Communist Party in 1933. In

December 1932 the Party had forbidden the circulation of his works in

the Communist Youth Movement, among whom they had evoked a considerable

echo. Marxist and psychoanalyst, Reich saw his work condemned by those

who claimed to be the standard bearers of marxism and psychoanalysis. A

little later, the Nazis were also to forbid the circulation of his works

in Germany

[27] W Reich, The Sexual Revolution, The Noonday Press, New York, 1962,

p. 72

[28] Ibid., p 73

[29] Ibid., p. 75

[30] The relevance of this to most ‘left’ organisations hardly needs

stressing. The revolutionaries themselves — in this as in so many other

respects — are among the worst enemies of the revolution

[31] Ibid., p 79

[32]

V. I. Lenin, Selected Works, vol. VI, p. 36. Lenin wrote this despite

a complete lack of understanding or awareness of the mechanisms

whereby ‘the force of custom and habit among the masses’ were

mediated and perpetuated. This lack of understanding was to lead

to his open hostility to the sexual revolution which swept

Russia in the wake of the Civil War and to contribute yet

another element to the bureaucratic degeneration

[33]

W. Reich, Character Analysis, Vision Press Ltd., London 1958, Preface

to first edition, pp xxii, xxiii, xxiv; also available in a new

Touchstone edition

[34] Among such books one should mention J.J. Bachophen s Das

Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1861, J.F. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, Black,

London, 1865, and Studies in Ancient History, Macmillan, London, 1876,

L.H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, Halt, New York, 1870, and Systems of

Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, Smithsonian Institute,

Washington 1877, Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and

the State, Zurich, 1884, and E. Westermarck’s The History of Human

Marriage, Macmillan, London, 1889

[35] See A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and D. Forde’s African Systems of Kinship

and Marriage, O.U.P., 1950, p. 72

[36]

R. Fox, Kinship and Marriage, Penguin Books, 1967, p 18

[37]

F. Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,

Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954, p.92

[38] Ibid., p. 94

[39] There has probably never been a truly ‘matriarchal’ society in the

sense of a mirror image of patriarchal society. The notion of such a

society where wives hold the purse strings, order their husbands about,

beat them up from time to time and take all the important decisions

concerning both individuals and the tribe as a whole is at best a

retrospective projection or nightmare of guilt-laden males

[40] It is interesting that the best known modern matrilinear societies

(the Nayars of Kerela and the Menangkabau Malays) far from being

‘primitive’, are advanced, literate and cultured people, who have

produced an extensive literature. The Khasi of Assam are less advanced

but are far from being savages. As Radcliffe-Brown and Frode point out

(African Systems of Kinship and Marriage) ‘the typical instances of

mother-right are found not amongst the most primitive people but in

advanced or relatively advanced societies’

[41] In this they resemble many of the ‘alternatives’ propounded today

by many so-called revolutionaries (for instance ‘monogamous marriage’ or

‘communes’ for life ‘after the Revolution’)

[42]

P. Fox., op. cit., p. 63

[43] Or with the Party — or the General Secretary of the Party

[44]

W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, pp 161–2

[45] In the fast years Reich developed paranoid symptoms and quarrelled

with nearly all his erstwhile supporters. He was driven mad, at least in

part, by the apparently insoluble contradiction ‘no social revolution

without sexual revolution — no sexual revolution without social

revolution’. A recent biography Wilhelm Reich, by Ilse Ollendorf Reich,

Elek, London 1969, his third wife gives a fairly objective account of

the last phase of the life of this remarkable man

[46] As St. Just once emphasised, ‘those who will only carry out half a

revolution dig their own graves’

[47] Early in 1927, in the little Austrian town of Schattendorf, some

members of the Heimwehr (a paramilitary, right-wing formation, part of

which later defected to the Nazis) had opened fire from a barricaded inn

on a peaceful procession of Socialist workers, killing two and wounding

many. On July 14 the assassins were acquitted by a judge faithful to the

Old Regime. The following day there was a mass strike and street

demonstrations in Vienna, in the course of which the crowd set fire to

the Palace of ‘Justice’. The police opened fire at short range.

Eighty-five civilians, all workers, were killed, some of them by police

whom they were actually trying to rescue from the burning building. Most

of the dead were buried in a mass ‘Grave of Honour’ provided by the

Vienna Council, then under Socialist control. The events proved a

turning point in Austrian history. For further details see Fallen

Bastions, by G. E. R. Geyde

[48]

W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 212

[49] See footnote

[50] This is absolutely correct. It is often the most oppressed

economically and the most culturally deprived who will argue most

strenuously about the need for leaders and hierarchy and about the

impossibility of equality or workers management, all of which are

vehemently described as contrary to ‘human nature’ — M.B

[51] See Modern Capitalism and Revolution, by Paul Cardan (in particular

the chapter on ‘Capitalist ideology yesterday and today’)

[52] In Catholic or Muslim countries, sexual repression remains a pillar

of the social order, but even the Catholic Clergy is having trouble

(both with its clergy and with its youth). Among the Palestinian

guerillas women are fighting alongside men. This fight cannot be waged

wearing a yashmak or accepting traditional Arab values as to the role

and function of women in society

[53] See The Bolsheviks and Workers Control 1917–1921, by M. Brinton

[54] What we can conjecture at present about the regulation of sex

relationships after the impending effacement of capitalist production

is, in the main, of a negative character, limited mostly to what will

vanish. But what will be added? That will be settled after the new

generation has grown up: a generation of men who will never in all their

lives have had occasion to purchase a woman’s surrender either with

money or with any other means of social power, and of women who have

never been obliged to surrender to any man out of any other

consideration other than that of real love, or to refrain from giving

themselves to their beloved for fear of the economic consequences. Once

such people appear, they won’t care a rap about what we today think they

should do. They will establish their own practice and their own

public... and that’s the end of it! (F. Engels, The Origin of the

Family, Private Property and the State, F.L.P.H.. Moscow 1954, pp.

137–8.)

[55] Describing for instance the effects of the industrial revolution

which uprooted women from the home and drove them into factories, Engels

says (in The Condition of the Working Class in 1844) that at times women

even became the breadwinners while the husbands stayed at home as

housekeepers. According to Engels this was ‘an insane state of things’

which ‘unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness’. The

notion that woman’s place is in the home has some strange advocates!

[56]

K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, published for

F.L.P.H., Moscow, by Lawrence and Wishart, 1959, pp. 99–100

[57] In 1916 Lenin had denounced a capitalism which maintained woman as

‘the slave of the household, imprisoned in the bedroom, the kitchen and

the nursery,’ Sochineniya, XIX, pp 232–233

[58] Pravda, March 8, 1921

[59]

W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p. 166

[60] Ibid., p. 157

[61] Ibid., p. 169–170

[62] Ibid., p. 168

[63] Ibid., p. 167

[64] Ibid., p. 160

[65] Ibid., p. 182

[66] Ibid., p. 160

[67] Voprosybyta, Moscow 1932, Translated by Z. Vengerova, English

Edition by Methuen, 1924

[68]

W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p. 172

[69]

A. Kollantai, Novaya moral i rabochi klass, The new morality and the

working class, Moscow, 1919, pp 65, ff

[70]

W. Reich, op. cit., p. 174

[71]

W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p.159

[72] From Lenin on the question of sex. The authenticity of Clara

Zetkin’s account has never been questioned. Her Reminiscences of Lenin

have been produced many times by official Communist publishing houses

both in Russia and elsewhere.

[73] Lenins metaphors concerning ‘the gutter’ and ‘puddles’ are

revealing on two grounds. Implicit in them are (a) the conception that

sex is intrinsically dirty; and (b) the conception that sex is a

relation with an object — water — rather than a relationship with

another human being. The second point, it is true, is mitigated by

Lenin’s later statement that ‘two lives are concerned...’ But the

overall image was to be remembered long after the qualifying statement

had been forgotten.

[74]

W. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, p. 175–6.

[75] Ibid., p. 169.

[76] Ibid., p. 190

[77] The myth that childbearing and rearing are the fulfilment of a

woman’s destiny is among the most pernicious and damaging myths that

imprison her. It has harmful effects on the children themselves. The

situation is well described in the following passage taken from an

article by Laurel Limpus, Liberation of Women, Sexual Repression, and

the Family, recently reprinted by Agit aprop, 160 N. Gower Street,

London NW1.

[78] In his Principles of Communism, Engels had written that the

socialist revolution ‘would transform the relations between the sexes

into purely private relations, only concerning the people participating

in them and in which society had not to intervene.’

[79] La Femme et le Communisme, Editions Sociales, Paris 1951

[80] Lenin had also spoken of ‘healthy sport, swimming, racing, walking,

bodily exercises of every kind’ as giving young people more than

‘eternal theories and discussions about sexual problems’. ‘Healthy

bodies, healthy minds’, he said, echoing the words of Juvenal (‘mens

sana in corpore sano’, Satires, !), 356), the Stoic moralist and

mysogynist who had ‘exposed the vices’ of ancient Rome

[81] Much contemporary sexological Russian literature reads like the

works of Scout founder Baden-Powell, but with the word ‘socialism’

occasionally scattered among the references to ‘duty’, ‘loyalty’,

‘discipline’, ‘service’, and ‘patriotism’