Orgone Addicts: Wilhelm Reich versus the Situationists - Jim Martin

The Monday morning, almost ten years ago, I rose to make myself a cup of coffee. I went to the kitchen to grab a mug from the drying rack when I propitiously dropped a Chinese cleaver on my big toe. Sidelined from my job as a canvasser for a community organizing group, I spent a week off my feet reading the Situationist International Anthology. Fantastic. Here, I finally found a voice for my own frustrations with bullshit reformism, and a new vocabulary to insult people with. They appealed to me with their unitary critique, their attack on specialization, and their ruthless rhetoric against traditional leftist politics. Yet when I tried to apply these doctrines in my practical life, I was led down a path of futility.

I soon learned that the Situationists were very hip at that time, especially in San Francisco. There were lots of people incorporating their ideas into detourned1 progressive politics. There is not enough space (and I do not have the patience) to give a complete history of the situationists here, but I highly recommend the anthology, as well as Vague #16-17 for its Boy Scout's Guide to the Situationist International. I will also discuss other left-libertarians who wrote about Reich, as they bear on the general discussion of Reich's ideas.

Briefly, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was one of the shining young stars of Sigmund Freud's inner circle, until he strained the tolerance of older psychoanalysts with his insistence that orgastic potency was essential for health. He further strained the connection by pointing to the futility of individuated therapy while the larger society was a veritable factory of neurosis. As a member of the socialist and communist parties in Germany, he advocated an uncompromising political platform based on larger sexual issues including the sexual rights of young people, legalized birth control, and an end to compulsory sex and marriage laws. This, in turn, upset party functionaries, forcing Reich to reevaluate his position on Marxist politics

I write neither as a genital character nor as a revolutionary. I am limping along, blindly groping a path littered by casualties. I will not reiterate Reich's writing here for two reasons. First, he ably expresses himself in his books and any attempts to paraphrase his work inevitably collapses into parody (see Vaneigem). Second, the current trustee of his estate, Mary Boyd Higgins, has been wary in giving such permission. Although frustrating for researchers, in many ways this works in Reich's favor, as he is an excellent writer. His prose has a rhythm all his own. He was often perturbed that his translator, Theodore Wolfe, tried to smooth out the crashing climaxes, as Reich termed them. To excerpt Reich's work is to take it completely out of context. Situationists, on the other hand, never copyrighted anything, consistent with their "property is theft" attitude. This has worked in their favor as a stunning advertising coup. Quotations, excerpts and translations are appearing everywhere. Unlike Reich, situationism is easy to excerpt. Discrete sentences and phrases maybe lifted out almost anywhere, retaining that hammer-on-the-head ambience. Of all the situationists, only Vaneigem had any nair as a prose stylist.

Paul Goodman: The Anarchist

In 1944, Paul Goodman, author of Growing Up Absurd, The Empire City, and co-author of Gestalt Therapy, began to discover the work of Wilhelm Reich for his American audience in the tiny libertarian socialist and anarchist milieu. The first article that broached the separation of politics and sexuality was The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud. After criticizing Freud for his obvious placement of psychoanalysis at the service of civilization and culture, he turns to Erich Fromm and Karen Horney. In contrast to their Stakhanovism2 , Goodman declares "there is only one kind of matter that the frank and fearless gaze of a child or of a sane man can infallibly penetrate: his strong desires and daily acts." Sounds like a pro-situ3 pronouncement, doesn't it? Yet it predates the situs by more than a decade, directly inspired by the findings of Reich. Finally, "what a pleasure it is to turn from this philistine ethical culture to a Freudian deviation to the left! I am referring to the work of Wilhelm Reich. " Goodman discusses Reich's conception of orgastic potency, and the formation of mass psychological society. "It is the psychology of revolution . "

Immediately upon the publication of this essay in an obscure publication, the sacred cause for sublimating workers' desire into activities aimed at social forces and institutions was taken up by C. Wright Mills and Patricia J. Slater in their hilarious essay The Barricade and the Bedroom. Evidently Goodman aroused extreme emotional turbulence among Marxist theorists. "This gonad revolution" is what Mills and Slater called Reich's findings. What contempt! "The 'circle of orgastic potency' is much more likely to be from bedroom to bedroom, than from bedroom to barricade." Right, onward comrades, to the circle jerk at the barricades! "If we accept Goodman's concept of the cultivation of biological release, freedom becomes identified with the fixed irrationalities of the leisured and private life." Amen. "Freedom, as well as other values for which we should strive, must be viewed in terms of institutional structures and the opportunity for social planning." Zzzzzzzzzz.

It is against this brain-dead backdrop that the Situationists found their stage. Formed from the remnants of The Lettriste International and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus in July of 1957, the Situationists began a propaganda campaign for precisely this kind of 'good revolution.'

The Situationists

Stewart Home, in his excellent book The Assault on Culture Utopian Currents From Lettrisme to Class War, connects the lineage from Futurism and Dada to Surrealism, Lettrisme, the Situationists, Mail Art, Punk Rock and Neoism. In this introduction he states:

"Since 'art' as a category has been projected back onto the religious icons of the middle ages, it is not surprising that those who oppose it should situate themselves within a 'utopian current' that they, in turn, trace back to medieval heresies."

Although the Situationists had been formed in 1957 (the very year Reich died in prison) they did not gain notoriety until the onset of the student occupations movement during the mid-sixties in France. Suddenly a generation of youth milk-fed on liberal expectation was ready to blow its lunch. In places like Nanterre, Strasbourg and Paris, students began to question the entire terrain of modern living, to develop a unitary critique, as the Situationists put it, of their own subjective alienation. (Reich would call it contactlessness and place the responsibility with the individual, rather than abstract social forces).

"In France, Marxist thought had been dominated by the Communist Party, and it was not until after the liberation that there was any attempt at philosophic revision. In many ways the debate was similar to that carried out in Germany in the 20s," (Home). In fact, Wilhelm Reich had been a part of those debates in German Marxist circles during the 20s, and I believe he carried his ideas further than the Situationists did 40 years later.

The leading light of the May 22nd Movement at Nanterre University in France was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, or "Danny The Red." He was infused with the pro-situ spirit. The SI openly criticized him for his spectacular approach in becoming a media star. Perhaps they were jealous of his ability lo exploit the media more successfully than they had. How did Danny the Red grab the limelight? Here's how Tom Vague described it in the periodical Vague (#16-17):

The first major incident occurred when the Minister of Sport came to open a new swimming pool. A vandal orgy had been planned for the opening ceremony and the minister's route was sprayed with grafitti. But nothing happened until the minister was about to leave. Then, so the story goes, a redhaired youth stepped out from the crowd and shouted:

"Minister, you've drawn up a report on french youth 600 pages long but there isn't a word in it about our sexual problems. Why not?"

The minister replied, "I'm quite willing to discuss this matter with responsible people, but you are certainly not one of them. I myself prefer sport to sexual education. If you have sexual problems, I suggest you jump in the pool."

To which Danny Cohn-Bendit countered, "that's what the Hitler Youth used to say!" and immediately shot into the headlines and secret police files (if he wasn't in the latter already.)

Direct references to Reich in Situationist writings are few and far between although numerous parallels between their political philosophies exist. It's worthwhile examining the finest situationist writer, Raoul Vaneigem, and his references to Reich in the classic, The Revolution of Everyday Life.

"The search for real nature, for a natural life that has nothing to do with the lie of social ideology, is one of the most touching naivetes of a good part of the revolutionary proletariat, not to mention the anarchists and such notable figures as the young Wilhelm Reich.

Note the emphasis on the young Reich. Europeans have never understood the later work of Reich, in particular his anti-collectivism and his orgonomy, and may have only been exposed to it through secondhand sources.

"The order of things is sick: this is what our leaders would conceal at all costs. In a fine passage of The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich relates how after long months of psychoanalytic treatment he managed to cure a young Viennese working woman. She was suffering from depression brought on by the conditions of her life and work. When she recovered Reich sent her back home. A fortnight later she killed herself. Reich's intransigent honesty condemned him, as everyone knows, to exclusion from the psychoanalytic establishment, to isolation, delusion and death in prison: the duplicity of our neo-demonologists cannot be exposed with impunity."

As best as I can determine, from the American edition at least, no such passage appears in The Function of the Orgasm. As Home has pointed out, the Situationists were fond of projecting their own views onto other parties.

"There is no pleasure that does not seek its own coherence. Its interruption, its lack of satisfaction, causes a disturbance analogous to Reichian "stasis." Oppression by power keeps human beings in a state of permanent crisis. Thus the function of pleasure, as of the anxiety born of its absence, is essentially a social function. The erotic is the development of the passions as they become unitary, a game of unity and variety without which revolutionary coherence cannot exist (Boredom is always counterrevolutionary)."

Boredom may be counterrevolutionary, but it is a function of the level of psychic contact possessed by each individual. Perhaps it was my own lack of psychic contact that first drew me to the Situationists?

To examine the roots of the Situationist project, understand that it represented the tendency to bind psychoanalytic ideas with dialectical materialism. As the surrealists had brought Freudian dream analysis into a bolshevik artistic putsch, the situs had their psychogeography and their conception of alienation from the subjective standpoint of desire.

"Wilhelm Reich attributes most neurotic behavior to disturbances of the orgasm, to what he called "orgastic impotence." He maintains that anxiety is created by inability to experience a complete orgasm, by a sexual discharge which fails to liquidate all the excitation mobilized by preliminary sexual activity. The accumulated and unspent energy becomes free-floating and is converted into anxiety. Anxiety in its turn still further impedes orgastic potency.

But the problem of tensions and their liquidation does not exist solely on the level of sexuality. It characterizes all human relationships. And Reich, although he sensed that this was so, failed to emphasize strongly enough that the present social crisis is also a crisis of an orgastic kind. If it is true that "The energy source of neurosis lies in the disparity between the accumulation and discharge of sexual energy," it seems to me that such neurotic energy also derives from the accumulation and discharge of the energy set in motion by human relationships. Total enjoyment is still possible in the moment of love, but as soon as one tries to prolong this moment, to extend it into social life itself, one cannot avoid what Reich called 'stasis.' The world of dissatisfaction and non-consummation is a world of permanent crisis. What would a society without neurosis be like? An endless banquet, with pleasure as the only yardstick."

(Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, pp 196-197)

Here, Vaneigem admires Reich's theory of orgastic potency the primary biological impulse is a yearning for pleasure and health and is regulated by the capacity of an organism to discharge accumulated tension completely through orgasm. Reich disappoints Vaneigem in his failure to politicize orgastic pleasure. It is unlikely that Vaneigem had read Reich's book People in Trouble, since it was not published in English until 1953. Reich describes his participation in the "social irrationalism of Central Europe" and makes precisely the kind of analogy Vaneigem found missing, that between individual and collective intercourse. In a remarkably intense and personal account, Reich conveys his deep conviction that politics is bankrupt. He convicts right-wing mysticism alongside left-wing mechanism with the same gavel. He seems personally hurt by the left's immobilization of healthy aggression, it's hiding from life, its emotional stasis. To him, the Nazis seemed more direct.

Later, pamphlets appeared in the United States which attempted to rehabilitate Reich from a situationist standpoint. Ken Knabb, in a touching pamphlet published in 1973, titled Remarks on Contradiction and its Failure4 , evaluated his own participation in an American pro-situ group ("Contradiction") from the standpoint of Reich's character analysis. This was Reich's novel technique of therapy which identified the petrified role played by the neurotic, at the service of defending him or her from total contact with life. It focuses specifically on the resistance to analysis, and uses deep breathing along with the physical release of muscular holding (character armor) to restore health.

"The members of Contradiction might well have confronted their dilemma by enlisting that fundamental tactic of breaking the impasse by concentrating precisely on the resistance to analysis. This would have pointed not only to the basic collective organizational errors I have outlined in "Remarks," but also to our individual resistances, that is to say, our characters...Suffice it to say, for now, that if it is indisputable that the practice of theory is individually therapeutic, it seems to me equally true that an assault on one's own character is socially strategic, a practical contribution to the international revolutionary movement. The character of the pro-situ is objectively reinforced by the spectacle (which character, of course is most evidenced by his inability to recognize its existence, other than as a "banality," until excessive symptoms, perhaps visibly inhibiting his social practice, force his attention there). At the opposite pole, all the lucidity of an Artaud, who attacks his character in isolation, does not prevent the "external" commodity-spectacle he disdainfully brushes aside from reappearing in his internal world as the fantasy of being possessed by alien, malignant beings. Like a revolution in a small country, the person who breaks a block, a routine, or a fetish must advance aggressively to discover or incite radical allies outside, or lose what he gained and fall victim to his own internal Thermidor. The dissolution of character and the dissolution of the spectacle are two movements which imply and require each other."

Here Knabb puts his finger on the heart of the matter. He restates Reich's critique of the character rebel. He surpasses anything the Situationists ever wrote about pro-situs by this self-referential analysis. Unlike the French philosophers, he has been able to understand Reich's work.

That same year Knabb published a broadside, Jean-Pierre Voyer's Reich: How to Use5 . Voyer discusses the dissolution of character and its role in the dissolution of the spectacle.

"In all of the societies in which modern conditions of production prevail, the impossibility of living takes individually the form of death, of madness, or of character. With the intrepid Dr. Reich, and against his horrified recuperators and vilifiers, we postulate the pathological nature of all character traits, that is to say of all chronicity in human behavior. What is important to us is not the individual structure of our character, nor the explanation of it's formulation, but the impossibility of its application in the construction of situations. Character is therefore not simply an unhealthy excrescence which could be treated separately, but at the same time an individual remedy in a globally ill society, a remedy which enables us to bear the illness while aggravating it. We hold that people can only dissolve their character in contesting the entire society (this is in opposition to Reich insofar as he envisages character analysis from a specialized point of view); where, on the other hand, the function of character being accommodation to the state of things, its dissolution is preliminary to the global critique of society. We must destroy this vicious cycle."

In 1975 Black and Red of Detroit republished a Solidarity (UK) pamphlet by Maurice Brinton called "Authoritarian Conditioning, Sexual Repression and the Irrational in Politics."6 It contains a worthy recount of three of Reich's books: The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The first of these three was a study of the relevance of the work of anthropologist Stanislaw Malinowski in uncovering the cultural-specific nature of the oedipal complex, pathology and sexual repression. The Sexual Revolution is mainly a report of Reich's visit to the Soviet Union which led toward his disillusionment with the Bolshevik revolution, having retreated from its initial removal of all moralistic marriage and sex laws. From The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Brinton draws on Reich's analysis of "the various methods whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery." Although Brinton seems to have done quite a bit of research into the anthropology of Malinowski, he seems to have missed one of the main features of his work: the study of primitive economies in the light of industrial capitalism. One of the most fascinating aspects of Malinowski's work is his discussion of gift-exchange, an economy which was reciprocal, wageless, and pervaded all aspects of cultural life (unitary). All production was geared toward the free exchange of gifts on holidays with neighboring clans. Competition was based not on who could get the most, but who could give the most. This form of economy was given little serious consideration, although one pre-situationist journal was significantly entitled Potlatch (referring to tribal gifts).

The basic problem for Brinton is that he would have rather Reich died in 1936. From Brinton we will search in vain for any mention of the concept of red fascism, the emotional plague or orgone.

Reich's "Delusion"

One problem that arises in a discussion of Reich and the Situationists is Reich's notion of 'red fascism'. Philosophers have reacted with incomprehension to Reich's critique of the character rebel, the "movement's" emotional equivalent to the national socialist, or Nazi.

The character rebel fails to dissolve the petrified role of rebelliousness under changing conditions that require a more positive engagement. The emotional plague character, whether operating from the left or right, works unconsciously yet tirelessly for the suppression of life, of free movement, of all that is juicy.

Traditionally, Europeans have shown great appreciation for Reich's theories developed during the late 1920s and early [19]30s, when he was an active member of the German left. It was then that Reich wrote his classic, The Mass Psychology of Fascism with the same red thread of logic, Reich exposed the Nazis' and the Stalinists' emotional foundation in the patriarchal family. He proposed that the same history of sexual repression was the foundation of each tradition's ability to create mass psychosis and mass murder. However, when Reich was forced to seek refuge in the United States from Nazi book-burning and death threats, Communist purges and the moralistic legal persecution of the liberal socialist states of Scandinavia, he began a devastating critique against Marxism itself that most progressive Europeans could not face. Thus, his American period is dismissed as a result of the madness, the "understandable" paranoia he suffered because of his early prosecution. [Hell, he was reported to like Ike.] Hatred of Reich's politics extended into his scientific work, specifically his discovery of a biological energy, the basis for Freud's libido theory, which he called orgone.

Yet it is the issue of orgone which truly disturbs many progressives. It is a theme which reoccurs again and again in liberal treatments of Reich's work that one mustn't let Reich's "insanity and paranoia" in his later years obscure the sex-economic work he did while a Marxist in the [19]20's and [19]30's in Germany.

Let me state that this position is dead wrong. At first, I myself was amazed by Reich's prescient analysis of modern politics and at the same time disappointed with his "later degeneracy into madness" with the "orgone business". Suffice it to say that I have since carried out experiments devised by Reich and found, much to my surprise, total agreement with his later findings. The orgone accumulator works. It creates an environment that is warmer than the surrounding air, in direct contradiction to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It aids biological processes and healing. His cloudbuster can make it rain where pollution has stagnated the atmosphere. I have used one in the driest months of the summer in the Bay Area when it never rains. My operations were followed by floods along the Russian River. [I am not necessarily making the claim of a causal relationship here, just stating the facts. It was enough for me to quit fooling around with it.]

Sex-Economy

Reich's early work as Freud's top student in the 1920s centered on the concept of genitality. Unlike older psychoanalysts, who focused their typology on pathological character types, Reich attempted to identify a picture of healthy behavior. Although psychoanalytic typology is often taken literally, these "types" only refer to idealized exaggerations.

Thus, Reich's genital character only approaches the ideal of health. Genital character regulates health by complete discharge through orgasm. Potency is not measured by the number of frequency of climaxes, but in the quality of the experience. Genital orgasm is differentiated from ejaculation in the male and from clitoral climax in the female by the total surrender to involuntary contractions of the entire bodily musculature.

Reich brought psychoanalysis into the streets when he began free sexual hygiene clinics in the working class districts of Vienna. The work graduated into what became the "Sex-Pol" (or sexual-political) movement when Reich became convinced that individual therapy was useless unless coupled with broad social changes. For instance, many of the psychological problems of his working class patients were the direct result of their economic conditions, i.e. the housing shortages which compressed the nuclear patriarchal family had a strong impact on the sexual life of the youngsters. It was at this juncture that Reich became deeply involved in the Socialist and Communist groupings of his time, which comprised a full two-thirds majority of the parliamentary system in Austria. For this hybrid of sexual and economic freedom Reich coined the term sex-economy. This referred not only to the sexual nature of economics, but the economic nature of sexuality, for Reich saw healthy sexuality as well as a healthy economy as primarily self-regulated circulation.

Working within the framework of the parties gave Reich a platform to espouse his unique ideas to young, sexually active working class youth. Sex-Pol handed out free contraceptives offered sexual counseling, provided abortions, and brought thousands of young people into the parties. For their part, traditional leftists tolerated Reich's novel blend of psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism precisely because of this huge influx of people. It was during this period that Reich wrote The Sexual Struggle of Youth, a classic which would later be distributed in France during the May 22nd Movement in 1968.

However, Reich's unyielding advocacy of the sexual rights of youth cost him the confidence of his more traditional comrades, and it wasn't long before they refused to print his writings. In 1933, Reich published his own book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which demonstrated the origins of fascism in the neurotic patriarchal family structure, thus exposing the real nature of the crisis that Nazism presented to the German working class. German socialists responded, to the contrary, that Hitler merely represented a "temporary setback" and as the Nazis burned his books, Reich fled the country.

If Reich's total commitment to the principles of psychoanalysis, not to mention his commitment to the sexual rights of young people, had cost him his "home" in the Socialist and Communist parties, so his commitment to dialectical materialism cost him his "home" in the International Psychoanalytic Association. The I.P.A. expelled Reich in 1934. Reich, then living in Norway, met briefly with Leon Trotsky, who was also living in exile in that country. No record of this conversation is reported, but it can be assumed that beyond their mutual distrust of Stalinism, they found little common ground. I mention this incident only to point to the eagerness with which Reich sought allies, and to make a connection between Trotsky, Reich and the Situationists, who adopted many Trotskyist ideas from the group Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Reich's approach to dialectical materialism was much like that of Marx's. It was simply a method of functional thinking. Based in Hegelian dialectics, dialectical materialism is the root basis for all of modern scientific experimentation and discovery. The dialectic is the counter-play between the original idea, preconception or thesis; when one experiments or interacts with material reality one encounters an antithesis; and from this new information one may draw conclusions, or syntheses, which simply lead to more profitable avenues of inquiry.

Theory is indispensable to human survival because it allows us, in a situation where we lack adequate information, to make the best decisions possible. Theoretical questions are life and death questions, despite what is taught in schools.

In Norway, Reich began a profound re-evaluation of his psychoanalytic practice and began to search for a material basis for Freud's libido theory. This theory postulated that neurotic behavior was the direct result of dammed up sexual energy, the core human impulse. Reich sensed that was this theory adequate, it would be possible to show sexual energy, libido, to be a tangible, measurable energy. He began to test his thesis of "bioelectricity" by measuring minute changes In the electrical charge on the skin surfaces of subjects experiencing different kinds of pleasurable and unpleasurable stimuli. He discovered that there was indeed an increase in potential charge (expansion) during pleasurable stimulus, and a decrease (contraction) during unpleasure.

Orgonomy

This line of inquiry led Reich into the question of biological energy. Was there a specifically biological energy, different from electromagnetism, that operated under comprehensible laws and that regulated all living things? It was this line of questioning that Reich pursued as he was expelled from Norway and emigrated to The United States.

It is beyond the scope of this article to convey the entire range of discoveries Reich stumbled onto with the advent of his new science, Orgonomy. Suffice to say, that if you mention orgone to a left-wing social gearheads, they get a rash.

The Situationists also attempted to address this gap between ideology and the application of functional thinking. While they depended on many of the ideas of Reich's (the vital importance of the subjective alienation of working people, rather than vulgar Marxism's alienation of surplus value, for instance), it seems that they read Reich's work from his pre-USA days. These works, largely written for the milieu of which he was a part, lack the comprehension Reich developed later for the Modju 7 , the Red Fascist, and the liberal recuperator. Reich's American writings are so uncompromising on these points that it is nearly impossible for the average liberal to get past the first few pages of any of his books without throwing it down in disgust. Added to this difficulty is the fact that upon his arrival in the U.S., Reich began to reissue his books in English in completely revised editions that restate his earlier work with the intent of correcting his former position as a Marxist. The Europeans have their Reich, and we have ours.

One of the most striking differences between American and European observers of Reich's life and work is the way they each view his late period, beginning with his exile to the United States in the early [19]40s until his death in prison in 1957. In America, Reich taught himself English and pursued a two-fold departure from his earlier work: he devoted more time and energy to natural research, culminating in the discovery of orgone energy and his new science or orgonomy; and he rewrote and republished his earlier writings with a critical rebuke of his previous Marxist revolutionism. Combined, these two features of Reich's later work make him an incomprehensible figure for Europeans raised on a diet of strict sex-economy.

Thus, European pro-situs speak fondly of the young Reich, while Americans interested in Reich are dominated by those interested in free energy machines, universal cure-alls: ideas about secret power and the power of secret ideas. Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs are representative of the American approach to Reich. Burroughs was excited by the work of orgonomists working with Reich in New York City in the [19]40s. He owned an orgone accumulator and used it. His writings against centralized authority frequently draw on Reich's analogy of communism as cancer. Robert Anton Wilson is an example of what Judi Bari 8 has called California woo-woo, a spiritualist eclecticism. Here, orgone is another curiosity in the cosmic junk shop.

As someone who came to Reich's work in the same Eurocentric position as did the Situationists, Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism seemed to solve the riddle unanswered by the Situationists: why was their dialectical prophecy of subjectively intolerable conditions leading into generalized insurrection not fulfilled? It was Reich's point that Fascism was not a single party or movement but an emotional state of being. It is the premise of this article that everything the Situationists based their theories on was preconceived by Reich more than 30 years earlier; and that Reich's late period far outstrips Situationist theory for its daring and outrageousness, as well as its practical application. Of specific importance was his emphasis on the prophylaxis of neurosis through the protection of children from compulsory sex morality, his development of a wide range of tools to aid in the protection of life (the orgone accumulator, the cloudbuster, and orgone therapy), and his identification of the role of the emotional plague in human misery.

Again, I was as dismayed as anyone by Reich's late period and his delusion of a biological energy called orgone. Yet Reich's revisions of his early books make it clear that he saw all of his work, including his false left turn, as a whole. Try to take any single element out and it all falls apart. If there is no orgone, then there is no libido, therefore no psychoanalysis. If there is no psychoanalysis, there is no point in speculating about the emotional basis of fascism. So it seemed to me that any real comprehension of Reich's work must include a first-hand testing of the experiments Reich described in his later books, for example the TO-T experiment where Reich claims a positive temperature difference between the air in an orgone accumulator and the surrounding air. Having done so, I satisfied myself that the basic facts Reich describes in his orgonomic findings can be verified independently.

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide arguments for the existence of orgone energy; indeed too much writing in this area has been limited to textual analysis reminiscent of the theological disputes of the middle ages. The only way to understand the phenomena is to try the experiment for yourself. May I say that is dialectical? Science has become the contemporary religion; it is time to translate the Bible into vernacular.

I am no physicist, yet it seems to me, based on everything I learned in high school and on my own common sense, that if you constructed a box and left it in your garage this box should be pretty close to the temperature of the garage. Should it be consistently warmer than the temperature of the garage, you might wonder where this heat is coming from. I have sought an explanation from people I know who work in scientifically oriented jobs, in particular progressive scientists involved in solar energy who choke with purple rage at the notion of orgone. For anyone interested in an introduction to the basic experiments Reich used to demonstrate the existence of a biological energy, the only book in print dealing directly with it is James DeMeo's Orgone Accumulator Handbook.

I believe that in Reich's later writings, the toughest element for progressives to swallow is his rants against red fascism and the emotional plague. (Although they never fail to claim the prima facie evidence of the absurdity of orgone energy, they merely hide behind this to prevent the revelation of their true characters.) Beginning with The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich drove home the point that Nazism (black fascism) and Stalinism (red fascism) were functional equivalents.

Like the anarchists, he noted the authoritarianism of each. Unlike any political writers, however, Reich was able to draw on his years of experience as a pro bono psychoanalyst in the slums of Germany to discover the emotional underpinnings of red and black fascism. He found that the authoritarian, sex-negative and patriarchal family reproduces the kind of desensitized, petrified and frozen adults necessary to carry out routine and banalized labor of industrial capitalism. The emotional plague, or the organized suppression of life, represented the mass psychology of fascism. In his later years, Reich saw a greater threat from the left than from the right, and indeed, it was an article published in the leftist New Statesman that precipitated his prosecution and imprisonment, culminating in the burning of his books and research materials. For a progressive unwilling to confront the fascist little man dwelling inside his or her own body, reading Reich's books is intolerable.

By the time he had relocated to America, Reich had long been expelled from both the Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association for trying to find a way each could help the other end human suffering. It was here that he realized the difficulties of political change. Reich was more deeply involved in socialist politics than is currently understood in this country. Reports from those working in orgonomy in East and West Germany include references to the minutes of party meetings in the late [19]20s indicating Reich's adherence to the most extreme revolutionist positions of that time.

It takes one to know one. Much of Reich's later writings was aimed at guarding his position from recuperators of his work, from "commie symps" and "freedom peddlers". Alongside his honest reappraisal of his early positions as a Marxist-Leninist, there was the desire to defend himself against attacks by Christian defenders of the morality of youth, who wanted him deported. To his credit, he never stooped to opportunism and to his death advocated the rational elements of dialectical materialism as a method of functional thinking.

Work Democracy versus Workers' Councils

After his rejection of Marxist politics, Reich proposed a theory of labor he called work democracy. Ironically, work democracy is the stepchild of various Trotskyist formulations that were orphaned during WWII but found new importance with the rise of independent trade movements in Eastern and Central Europe, as in the Hungarian worker's councils in Hungary in 1956. Work democracy implies that those who labor hold the reins within their province of activity. It is a critique of Stalinism, democratic centralism, and state capitalism. Repugnance for bureaucracy, political ideology and religious moralism tie Reich's work democracy to the Situationist brand of council communism.

Each claimed to lean neither left nor right, though each would dispute it of the other. Both derided specialization. Each believed that their proposals had nothing to do with existing political movements, and favored lively, spontaneous responses to real life conditions as opposed to forced repetitive labor and banalized sexual living.

While Reich was intensely pragmatic yet uncompromising, the Situationists are criticized for the impossibility of their solutions.

Reich was a member of the revolutionary movement when there actually was one. Contemporary developments have made it impossible to rationally speak of taking state power as in the Bolshevik revolution. The plasmoid translucence of capital and national sovereignty make the old social mechanics of traditional Marxism archaic. The Situationists returned to the point where Reich left the revolution, to the point of sale. They understood consumption, the subjective feeling of alienation and the suppression of desire. In my view they failed to grasp Reich's sense of the inability of individuals to take charge of their own lives. Reich called this tendency to advocate insurrection without addressing the real capacity of the public for tolerating true life freedom peddling.

Reich' s conception of work democracy was based on what he called the natural organization of work. Drawn from his study of the natural processes of life, he stated that work democracy precluded dictatorship. There was one important difference between council communism and work democracy: work democracy demands as a prerequisite that citizens become emotionally free, and most importantly, able to bear full responsibility for their lives. This is in contradiction to the libertinism of the Situationists. Mass neurotic societies will always demand paternalist authoritarianism to mirror the internal character structure of the average citizen. For Reich, the burden of proof rested upon the people of any would-be democracy. Reich blamed the foot-dragging do-gooders of the liberal and socialist democracies for the victory of Hitler in Northern Europe. In this, he is in agreement with the Situationists' condemnation of false, parliamentary democracy as opposed to the democratization of real life, daily life.

The crucial difference that Reich pointed out between himself and the anarchists (and it holds true for situs, Libertarians, and council-communists as well) was the question of the emotional capacity for freedom that the average citizen possesses. In the end, I must endorse Ken Knabb's position that the fundamental failure of the Situationists was their inability to confront their own characters.

Resources
1. The Situationist International Anthology; edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets (1981), P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA 94701.
2. The Assault on Culture; Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War; by Stewart Home, Aporia Press and Unpopular Books (1988), 308 Camberwell New Road, London, UK, SE5 ORW.
3. Nature Heals; The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman; edited by Taylor Stoehr, E.P. Dutton (1979), 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016.
4. Authoritarian Conditioning, Sexual Repression and The Irrational in Politics; by Maurice Brinton, Black and Red (1975), See Sharp Press (1988).
5. Reich: How to Use; by Jean-Pierre Voyer, translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets (1973), P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA, 94701.
6. Remarks on Contradiction and its Failures; by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets (1973), P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley, CA 94701 .
7. The Revolution of Everyday Life; by Raoul Vaneigem, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank Books and Rebel Press (1983).
8. The Orgone Accumulator Handbook; by James V. DeMeo, Ph.D., Natural Energy Works (1989).
9. Fury on Earth; A Biography of Wilhelm Reich; by Myron Sharaf, Hutchinson & Co., 17-21 Conwat St., London WIP 6JD.
10. 1984; The Summer of Hate; by Jim Martin, Flatland Books (1989).

Originally published in Version 90 #2 (Allston, 1991)

• 1From the French, meaning literally 'hijacking'. Refers to the practice of
  recombining elements of popular culture with a subversive intent.
• 2Stakhanov was a Stalinist-era worker who was rewarded for his superprod uction and made a national hero to be emulated by other workers. 'Stakhanovites' were often killed or disabled by their co-workers.
• 3Pro-situ, or pro-situationist, was the pejorative term by which the situationists referred to their fans; they denounced the passive idolatry of their spectators. Yet, in the end, even the situationists became pro-situs by their own admission.
• 4https://libcom.org/article/remarks-contradiction-and-its-failure
• 5https://libcom.org/article/reich-how-use-jean-pierre-voyer-1971
• 6https://libcom.org/article/irrational-politics-maurice-brinton
• 7Reich's term for the most virulent of emotional plague characters. Combines the names of Mocenigo, who persecuted medieval scientist Giordano Bruno, and Stalin's given name Djugashvili.
• 8Judi Bari, a northern California Earth First! activist and labor organizer, was recently injured in a bombing while organizing for 'Redwood Summer' in Oakland, California.