Sexual Politics – Selma James

Wilhelm Reich & Karl Teschitz, Selected Sex-Pol Essays 1934-37, Socialist Reproduction, London, 40p

Marx began with the basic assumption that human individual and social activity was the motive force of human development, and that the human condition at any particular historical moment was a stage of that development.

Freud, on the contrary, assumed the human condition under capitalism was given, static, natural. Not a result of human activity, we humans could do precious little about it, Penis envy, for example, was an attribute of women, not one of many responses of women to male power, Neurosis and sexual repression were man's (and of course woman's) fate.

Not until Wilhelm Reich in the turbulent twenties in Germany related sexual repression and neurosis to the capitalist organisation of society was the human sexual condition and the social activity of transcending it—the class struggle—reintegrated.

Sex-Pol was a theoretical and organisational attempt by Reich and his comrades to integrate "sexual politics" (his phrase) with the. reactionary and vanguardist politics of the leading working class political organisation in Germany, the Communist Party. The reason Reich was anxious to do this was that the Communist Party was the heir apparent of the Russian Revolution. But the attempt was doomed because the politics of the Communist Party were based precisely on the same repression that Reich and Sex-Pol were fighting. Their work was of course discredited and maligned by that party. (Reich himself died in an American prison some years later, having been persecuted, this Lime, by the American State.)

The essays in this book are from the period 1934-37. The Introduction by the publishers, Socialist Reproduction, attempts to place the essays historically, and to show how useful they can be to us as a critique not only of capitalist sexual politics, but of the depth of misunderstan-ing of so-called Marxists. "Reich's concern," they say, "was not at all to draw a line between sexual politics and all other forms of political activity, but, on the contrary, to establish the precise function of his sexual/cultural critique in relation to existing forms of political activity, and hence to integrate his sexual analysis into, rather than substitute it for, other forms of class struggle." (p.27) Earlier they give some idea of Reich's political frame of reference, quoting Reich:

The practical consequence of Marx's theory of value is the appropriation of the use values by ail working individuals, that is, the social appropriation of the products. I repeat: the social appropriation, not appropriation by the 'state' or private monopolies. The socialist politicians confused social appropriation and appropriation by the state, greatly to the detriment of the clarification of socio-economic questions. While social development as a whole, as a result of the war, is more and more in the direction against private monopoly as well as state monopoly, the socialist parties still wish to replace private monopoly by state monopoly. This follows logically from their equating state and society... (pp.25/6)

This is clearly directed against the Communist Party and shows that Reich understood what was fundamentally wrong with the Communist Party. (This analysis only reappeared and was developed in the forties in the United States [see Falling Wall Book Review No. 1, 'The Power of the State] . Socialist Reproduction take it for granted thirty years later, but in this they are still unusual in Britain.) While Reich understands the distinction between appropriation of property by the State and social appropriation, he does not develop what this means in terms of the production relations which produce that property. Because of this, he fails to see sexuality as part of production.

As for Reich's concern to integrate sexuality with the rest of politics, this could not become a mass concern, that is, a mass struggle, without the birth and development of a mass feminist movement. The book shows there was a connection between Sex-Pol's emergence and a tremendous youth movement, But what exactly was the connection between the struggle of women and Reich's revolutionary views on sexuality as a form of capitalist repression is not clear from Reich's writing (or from the Introduction to this book), and it should be. There must have been a struggle of women for these ideas to emerge at all. But from reading Reich it is clear that feminism was not yet strong enough to show him what at least one international tendency in the feminist movement now knows.

First, sexuality for women is itself capitalist work; and therefore sexual repression is first and foremost sexual repression of women, whose work is also to pass on our own repression to our children.

Second, and following from this, human social activity to bring about the transformation of sexuality from work to a free social activity cannot be left for professional sexologists even to initiate. Social activity for freedom is the opposite of professionalism and specialisation; it is mass activity against all the exploitation and restraints of capitalist life by the working class. Our violence in the struggle against the State is a crucial expression of our break with its restraints, is itself a sexual liberation. Where specifically sexual exploitation and restraints are concerned, the spearhead of mass activity must be women. James Connolly, the Irish revolutionary, said of women: "None so fit to break the chains as those who wear them." We must rephrase more accurately: the chains will never be broken unless the people who wear them break them.

Reich, whose ideas were opposed in Germany by Fascist and Communist and Socialist parties alike, and in the U.S. by the government, was isolated by them from the mass of the people. This isolation not only helped stunt his development but led to some rather strange ideas (what Lenin might have called 'sexual project-hatching'). Of course the Establishment has guaranteed that he is better known for these than for his early exploratory work and revolutionary insights. Sex-Pol Essays aims, among other things, to bring some of these early writings and the struggle for survival of Sex-Poi in Germany to our attention. That alone makes it a worthwhile book. Here is one of Reich's insights, quoted in the Introduction, from his book The Sexual Resolution:

…Owing to the economic dependence of the women on the man and her lesser gratification in the processes of production, marriage is a protective institution for her, but at the same time she is exploited in it.
For, she is not only the sexual object of the man and the provider of children for the state, but her unpaid work in the household indirectly increases the profit of the employer. For the man can work at the usual low wages only on the condition that in the home so and so much work is done without pay. If the employer were responsible for the running of his workers' homes, he either would have to pay a housekeeper for them or would have to pay them wages which would allow the workers to hire one. This work, however, is done by the housewife, without remuneration...

This was part of an essay, 'Sexual Maturity, Continence, Marital Morality', originally published as early as 1929. So that long before the present debate on whether or not women in the home labour productively for capital, and whether or not our wage-lessness is the key to our powerlessness (and the struggle for wages the key to our power), Reich in a paragraph deals successfully with both questions. Women are productive, —exploited as well as oppressed—we are sexual objects producing workers for the State, and our wage-lessness ensures that we continue in this way. We accept his view that women have "lesser gratification in the processes of production" only if sexuality is considered one of the "processes of production" (production by women of workers for the State, of labour power). Otherwise there is a presumption that there is any gratification for any worker in any process of capitalist production. But this would be to criticise Reich ahistorically. Germany in the thirties was still substantially a country of the skilled craftsmen who no doubt received gratifications which those of us who grew up on the assembly line can't even imagine.

Sex-Pol itself was limited by this historical limitation. It could see sexual repression as capital's need for submissiveness; it could see sexual sublimation in violence for the state (fascism); it could see the unwaged sexual situation of housewives as productive, as adding to profit by lowering wages. But it could not see that sexual repression and repression through work of other aspects of individual and social creativity were one and the same thing. It could not see that were we not sexually repressed, women and men would find that work had even "lesser gratification"; and conversely, that the possibility of sexual gratification is destroyed by work.

The passive sexual receptivity of women creates the compulsively tidy housewife and can make a monotonous assembly line therapeutic. The trivia of most of housework and the discipline which is required to perform the same work over every day, every week, every year, double on holidays, destroys the possibilities of uninhibited sexuality.

(The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, p.41)

So that sexual repression is a necessity of capitalist work, is the product of capitalist work and for a woman, is itself capitalist work.
The Introduction shows that `revolutionaries' like Gramsci understood this better than Reich—but from the other side! The authors quote Comrade Gramsci:

The formation of a new feminine personality is the most important question of an ethical and civil order connected with the sexual question. Until women can attain not only a genuine independence in relation to men but also a new way of conceiving themselves and their role in sexual relations, the sexual question will remain full of unhealthy characteristics and caution must be exercised in proposals for new legislation . All these factors make any form of regulation of sex and any attempt to create a new sexual ethic suited to the new methods of production and work extremely complicated and difficult. However, it is still necessary to attempt this regulation and to attempt to create a new ethic… The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalisation of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalised. (p.33)

The Introduction comments: "Gramsci's reasoning on this is very curious. The reason for supporting female emancipation is to get more work out of male workers!" Clearly this Introduction is not a routine piece of work. It is an attempt to synthesise a number of relatively new currents in Marxist theory, among them C.L.R. James who did his basic political work in the United States, and Mario Tronti who was one of the midwives of the Italian extra-parliamentary left of the sixties (all wings of which are now either defunct, or no longer extra-parliamentary). Its weakness is that no question, and particularly not the sexual question, can be adequately confronted without confronting the exploitation of women and the questions raised by the feminist struggle, Despite this, it is an exciting introduction and is evidence that the new Marxist spirit is growing in the land. Next to it, The Irrational in Politics, an attempt by a man in Solidarity to explain Reich, looks like the philistine, elitist document that it is: the political vanguard is replaced by the sexual vanguard. Big deal.

One final question. Clearly Sex-Pol was dead wrong when it spoke of a “natural sex life". There is as little natural in sexual life as there is in exploitation; both are social, and when we have abolished the latter, we will begin for the first time in human history to explore the former in freedom, freedom from forced labour and from the repression it demands and creates. At the moment, we know very little about human sexuality. It is our good fortune that Gramsci's wish to rationalise it proved impossible for the ruling class of either State or private monopoly. Sexuality can be repressed, channelled and distorted, but it cannot he rationalised; it is the essence of our spontaneity, bound up with every other facet of our capacity to become the social individuals we will make ourselves into by the process of revolution.

To the credit of Reich and Sex-Rol, they opened the question Freud and the `Marxist' parties had closed, the relation between sexuality and other aspects of the class struggle. To the credit of Marx, he saw that communist society, which comes into existence by the mass creative human activity of the revolution, would lay the basis for us to consciously plan a society which would give full scope to our "natural and acquired powers". In such a society, sexuality would no longer be a compartment of living, no longer a ritual (as eating and steeping and leisure—'not working'—have become), no longer making women slaves and men masters, degrading both; but some-thing else, What else? Reich introduces his book, The Sexual Revolution, with the following quote from old Karl:

Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely, what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be.

We have not transcended Reich yet. Even some who do not fear physical conflict with the powers that be are still afraid of the results of an open sexual critique. If they are men, it challenges their power to the degree that sexual prowess is the mythical measure of that power. If they are women, it questions whether they are challenging the absence of that power and the compromises that inevitably follow from all relations with men. We are all frightened, as Reich said we were. But now there is a feminist movement internationally to confront this fright, to confront the powers that be on all questions and particularly on this one. For the "uncompromising critical evaluation" of sexuality we are dependent above all on lesbian women.

Selma James

Note: This pamphlet is now out of print. It is available from Falling Wall Book Service to individual subscribers only. The publishers of the pamphlet, Socialist Reproduction as they were then called, have asked us to add the following note:

The pamphlet producing activity of Socialist Reproduction has now been discontinued. However, certain of the pamphlets they have produced are still available from 'communist basis', the group within which the comrades responsible for this material have subsumed their prior activity as Socialist Reproduction. This does not include any of the pamphlets by Reich, the reprinting and distribution of which are been altogether discontinued on political grounds, the basis of which will be outlined in forthcoming material produced by 'communist basis'.