Sexuality and Class Struggle

Reimut Reiche

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781781681114
• eBook ISBN: 9781788731539
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the author makes clear, the anti-authoritarian movement took more thoroughgoing and trenchant forms in West Germany than anywhere else. A new sexual morality was not only preached but practised.

Is it possible, however - the author asks - that this new emphasis on sexual enlightenment and liberty can become merely a characteristic of Western capitalism, which serves to activate the market economy, deflect rebellion, and hence contribute to the preservation of the system? In answering this question Reiche explains and develops Marcuse's widely misunderstood concept of 'repressive desublimation'. He exposes the artificial and illusory nature of many attempts - in Germany and elsewhere - at 'sexual liberation', and shows why it is impossible to overcome sexual oppression and mystification in our society in isolation from the political struggle.

Chapter 1

What has Class Struggle to do with Sexuality?

In the period following the collapse of fascism, the socialists and the rest of the radical opposition in Germany paid very little attention to the question of sexuality in their political programmes. The emancipation of women was regarded by the trade unions, the SPD (German Social Democratic Party), and the other large organizations, as simply a matter of eliminating discrepancies in the social and legal status of the sexes, and in many quarters it was felt that even here the demand for absolute equality need not be too strictly interpreted. In their time, the political demands which had arisen under the Weimar Republic (1919–33) for the deletion from the legal code of the paragraphs on abortion and homosexuality, though essentially bourgeois-egalitarian, had given the impetus to a very broad popular front on the issue. Under the Federal Republic, such demands have been confined to humanistic circles, and have at best given rise to brief campaigns or petitions to parliament. There has been nothing comparable to the Sexpol movement (see p. 14) of the pre-fascist era, located within and on the fringe of the proletarian organizations. The reason for this lies, on the one hand, in the far-reaching changes effected in West Germany on the workers’ movement and the socialist movement in general after their defeat under fascism, and their second defeat in the post-war era of capitalist reconstruction; and on the other, in the drastic change in the role of sexuality under the post-fascist regime.

This book grew out of an actual situation: the theoretical discussions and active political controversy taking place in West Germany at the present time, in which sexuality, political struggle and social liberation all play a part. Yet it deals almost exclusively with one aspect of the question: the change in the role of sexuality under the cultural dominance of late capitalism. The reason for this is not an academic desire to limit the field of study. The methods of ruling human beings under contemporary capitalism have borrowed in so sophisticated a manner from the sexual revolution that a naïve belief in the self-liberating force of sexuality under such a system is no longer easy. There have in fact only been two movements within the radical camp in West Germany which have openly attempted to formulate the problems of sexuality and have combined the aim of social emancipation with a direct aim to revolutionize sexuality: the First Commune in West Berlin and the Independent High-School Students’ Action Centre (AUSS). But in practice, their attempts to revolutionize the sexual attitudes of society and the sexuality of their own members, or to incorporate the necessity of such a revolution into a programme of political enlightenment, have so far been a failure. The reasons for this failure lie on the one hand in the almost insoluble problem of the ‘already formed’ sexual character of those they are attempting to revolutionize, and on the other in a self-contradictory conception of sexuality in their theory of anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian struggle. It is mainly for these reasons that I have chosen in this book to treat the current political questions principally from one angle: sexual oppression in late capitalism, and the economic and psychological preconditions for defensive action against such oppression. The other side of the question, the practical measures to be taken to spread sexual liberation, and the means by which people can organize themselves to this end, has remained very sketchy, and at times has had to be left completely open.

Wilhelm Reich, in the last years before the onset of fascism, realized that these aims were not compatible with the belief, common to the SPD and KPD (the German Communist Party), in party politics and agitation. In both these parties, the community of membership, leaders and masses as a single fighting unit was on the wane. The parties could no longer represent the interests of the masses, because they did not understand them. The SPD and KPD were perpetuating themselves in the form of ever stronger and ever more authoritarian machines.¹

From this, Reich drew an at least partially correct conclusion. He built up a movement for Sexual Economy and Politics – Sexpol – which saw itself as a group within the communist workers’ movement. A very large number of youth groups, medical advisory centres, and teachers’ and doctors’ groups belonged to Sexpol; they organized working parties, evening instruction sessions, and sex education meetings. By 1933 the KPD had formally cut off all association with the group, and Reich was excluded both from the party and from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Sexpol spoke directly to the workers, through meetings and in written material, the two chief themes of which were consistently housing and contraception. These points were constantly returned to as major sources of working-class misery, and were taken as points of departure for the awakening of class consciousness. For example Reich wrote in his pamphlet for working-class youth, Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend:

The sheath should not be carried in a jacket pocket, because the rubber perishes in the warmth. If one does split, and this is only noticed after intercourse, the girl must wash out her vagina at once with a solution of a tablespoon of vinegar in a litre of water. Young proletarians will object, with reason, that in the circumstances in which they have intercourse, this is impossible. All one can say in answer is that here is yet another reason for not simply worrying about the possibilities for sexual intercourse, but getting to know more about the form of social organization which creates such problems for young people.²

Such direct forms of political enlightenment have become more difficult today, and often impossible, because the sting has been taken out of subjectively experienced conflict by the development of pseudo-satisfactions, and because the conflict itself has been absorbed by existing conditions. Contraceptives are cheap and young people can use their cars for petting and intercourse. Even though it is still the case in some late-capitalist societies that oral contraception is only available to certain people, this is not really enough to convince anyone of the necessity for class struggle. The chief reason why the lower social classes of contemporary capitalist societies have less access to oral contraceptives is that the social attitudes of the medical profession reinforce already existing prejudices and reactionary ideas. Moreover, medical attitudes are in their turn moulded into a reactionary cast by the feudal and bureaucratic organization of the medical establishment in these societies.

This relationship is in turn mirrored by the fear – neurotic in its degree but well-founded in its origin – which lower-class people have of any medical treatment. This fear can however only be broken down by social medicine campaigns with a democratic, not a public health, orientation. It cannot be overcome simply by basic sexual instruction since this, in present circumstances, invariably terminates in the inculcation of mental attitudes rejecting free sexuality. In the most advanced capitalist countries oral contraceptives are offered freely for sale, e.g. in drugstores in the USA. It would be reactionary to combat this new advance, but it does take away a large part of the directly revolutionary political force of the demand for sexual liberation, that is to say, the demand for an improvement in the technical and social conditions for the practice of sexuality. In this particular case the demand has been absorbed by the system of partial satisfaction. The scope of demands for sexual liberation on this front is now limited, as the following example demonstrates – yet it is the only existing method of direct political agitation. An intelligent middle-class young person has no difficulty in finding a doctor who prescribes contraceptives; in fact the chief media for mass social and sexual conditioning, from which she is liable to derive her social norms, already openly publicize the best means of obtaining them.

Let us concentrate for a moment on this example: the progress from mechanical contraceptives, which are of poor quality and expensive for young working-class people, to the pill. The pill is in principle obtainable for everybody; it is reasonably cheap and absolutely reliable. Yet in some culturally backward countries, significantly, it has remained a social symbol confined to an exclusive minority. When the High-School Students’ Action Centre was forming and was engaged in building up local groups, it drew a large amount of its political publicity in schools, and in the community at large, from the demand for free access to the pill for all young people past puberty. This could not help but bring about a negative reaction.

Firstly, the barely established foundations of a joint political platform for high-school students and apprentices (i.e. those at technical schools) were shattered. The high-school students formulated their demands in a way that made it only too clear to the technical-school students that there was a social gap between them, and the division was further aggravated by the young workers’ sexual envy of privileged high-school students.

Secondly, though the high-school students are more directly under the control of the social institutions governing them, in so far as their sexual life is concerned, than any other group of their age, they would seem at the same time to form a subculture which – due to its intellectual training, its particular emotional bias, and its distance from the pressures of material production – should be most readily capable of insight into its own sexual oppression. In fact, however, they were only influenced for a space of a few weeks by the politically orientated campaigns organized locally in their schools and towns. Of course this indicates that high-school students also are repressed in their sex lives, but it also indicates, even more clearly, that the sexual morality of society and the sexual behaviour of the individual can only become the source of personal political enlightenment – and, after that has been achieved, spur the individual on to a wider-ranging and ultimately class-conscious political commitment – when backed by political enlightenment, reflection and action in other social spheres. The initial ‘sex’ discussions organized by the AUSS in the individual schools drew a crowd everywhere, but this interest soon fell off. It was certainly true – and this is fundamental – that the initial effect was a strong one. But its power to lead on to wider things, in political terms, had been overestimated.

It was possible for Wilhelm Reich in his day to link every demand for the liberation of sexuality from the complex of forces oppressing it under the capitalist system, with a political demand which struck explicitly at the economic roots of the system. For it was an objective fact that at that time every move towards free sexuality was either openly repressed or hindered by immediately visible causes such as the housing shortage and the expense of contraceptives. The economic, physiological and utopian function which Reich gave to sexuality in his conception of how human liberty was to be achieved was doubtless unacceptably mechanistic in many respects, and some of the conclusions he came to were demonstrably wrong. Moreover, it has to be recognized that in today’s context it is difficult to relate quantitatively greater sexual freedom to radical and class-conscious demands, and in many cases this has become historically impossible. At the same time it has become very much more difficult to make the qualitative distinction between apparent and real sexual freedom.

Analysis of the class antagonisms in the pre-fascist era could point to three clearly defined social classes: proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie and ruling class. With the advance of monopoly capitalism the large majority of the petty-bourgeoisie were economically absorbed into the proletariat, while ideologically playing the role of functionaries for the ruling class. They shared ruling-class attitudes, or at least attempted to do so, and acted in its interest, either in practical economic terms as the ‘straw-bosses’ between the ruling class and the oppressed class, or as its ideological agents: retailers, teachers, officials and employees. The workers’ organizations recognized this by concentrating on the ‘real’ proletariat, especially its hard core of industrial workers, in the build-up of political forces for the class struggle, and by laying the chief stress in their agitation and propaganda on the antagonistic contradiction between ruling class and proletariat. In doing so, however, they neglected, theoretically and practically, the ‘anachronistic’ section of the ruling class, the petty-bourgeoisie. In their theory, the workers’ organizations either ignored the petty-bourgeoisie altogether, or else assimilated them unconsciously to the ruling class, simply because they voted, thought and spoke the same way. In their practice, they either paid no attention to them at all or rationalized the problem by relegating them to a ‘later stage’ of agitation, only requiring attention when the ‘proletariat’ had already effected the revolution.

The German petty-bourgeoisie formed the central psychological and political reservoir of mass support for fascism. The reason for this lay, at least in part, in the inability of the workers’ movement to seize on the anti-capitalist aspects of petty-bourgeoisie life and consciousness and mobilize them in a revolutionary direction. In 1930, Ernst Bloch wrote in Erbschaft dieser Zeit (‘The Inheritance of Our Time’): ‘The vulgar marxists are not keeping sufficient watch on what is happening to primitive and utopian trends. The Nazis are already occupying this territory, and it will be an important one.’ He reproached the Communists with ‘delivering the petty-bourgeoisie without a struggle into the hands of reaction’. After fascism the old confusion in the workers’ movement arose all over again. Who could properly be counted as a member of the petty-bourgeoisie ? What elements in it were proletarian ? Should it in fact be combated like the ruling class, because, objectively, it represented their interests? – and so on. The German Federal Republic was formed: capitalism began to rise again, and the ruling classes took the solution of this problem into their own hands by declaring, ostensibly on behalf of everybody, that class differences – and certainly those between petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat – had ceased to exist, since the entire nation now belonged to the middle class.

This ideological decree has been reflected in the elaboration of pluralistic social theories and ideologies: in political and sociological theory with the purely formal differentiation of social ‘strata’, in government ideology by lumping together all the inhabitants of the ‘free’ part of Germany, in the unions and SPD in the simple division between ‘employers’ and ‘employees’ and in the KPD in the notion of an a priori anti-monopolistic and peace-loving working population as opposed to the masters in Bonn and the Abs’ and Flicks.³ That theoretical attitudes should have received this particular bias has a certain objective justification: the classes have indeed been transformed, and the differences between them are now of a more disguised, less readily visible nature. Looked at in formal terms, it does not make much difference whether one assumes an expansion of the middle classes, whether, like the majority of critical socialists, one talks about a ‘new working class’, meaning every ‘manual, intellectual or white-collar worker who is … cut off from what he produces’,⁴ or whether like the new dogmatists of East Germany, one considers that manual and white-collar workers, because of their shared relationships to the proces of production, both belong to the working class, thus leaving this concept as full of contradictions as ever. The debate over the concept of class only becomes meaningful when the purpose is to explain why these variants were coined, what the oppressed class really does suffer from, what it is doing, what it understands and does not understand, whether it is fighting, and if so whom, to abolish its oppression in order to take possession of its own products, and to understand what it is not supposed to understand.

Only the answers to such questions as these will produce a meaningful conception of class. So, although it is quite correct that ‘the existence of the common class enemy produces identity of interest, whether this is generally recognized or not’,⁵ this truth remains abstract and isolated if the objective identity is not accompanied by an equally objective solidarity among those concerned. And this only comes about through the class struggle.

The workers’ movement of the previous generation was able to conceive a variety of practical applications of the formula ‘Expropriate the expropriators’. It is not by chance that in the countries of late capitalism, there is no class, and not even any socially relevant group among the wage- and salary-earning population of West Germany, who would voice this demand today. Even in Italy, a country described with monotonous regularity as having preserved the older kind of workers’ movement, the people who protest against the war in Vietnam are chiefly intellectuals and young people, who because of their social background cannot be included under the heading of traditional working class. Today in all late capitalist countries, intellectuals, young people and students are to a great extent acting as proxy for a class identity of the subordinate classes as a whole which has yet to be established. They cannot exclaim ‘Expropriate the expropriators’ except from a reflective distance, as exemplified by the demand ‘Expropriate Springer’; or else they formulate it in generalized terms, such as the SDS’s resolution: ‘Break the Power of the Manipulators!’⁶

A change has taken place in the objects of attack. Where once it was direct social exploitation that came under fire, now it is mental manipulation. This change is indicative of a change in the structure of capitalist rule itself. Not that manipulation has replaced and cancelled out exploitation. But it becomes evident, when one observes the manipulation of needs, and of situations producing pseudo-satisfaction in the commodity market, in communications, and in sexuality, that exploitation is not now confined to its direct physical form but relies upon a gigantic apparatus of created needs which are constantly being manipulated to get people to comply with meaningless social goals. Even the structure of exploitation has changed. The classic structure was: minimization both of primary needs (food, clothing, sexuality) and of secondary needs (free time, sport, etc.), with, in contrast, maximization of exploitation (low pay, long working hours, accelerated work tempo, women and children at work, very few social benefits or none at all). The present structure is: manipulative optimization of needs which accord with the needs of the system, abolition of the difference between primary and secondary needs, and thereby maximization of exploitation.⁷

In the days before fascism it was the proletariat (chiefly the industrial workers) who seemed destined, through their position in the process of production, to become subjectively aware of the exploitation basic to capitalism, make it objectively visible through the class struggle, and finally wipe it out through revolution on the whole of society’s behalf. But today, because of the increased sophistication of the methods of exploitation and the masking of class divisions, another link has to be added to the chain. This link provides the answer to the question which embarrasses even those who claim elsewhere to hold most firmly to their belief in the working class, and who tend to answer it in evasive rather than in concrete terms.

Steinhaus’s answer, to be found in the conclusion of his ‘Theory of International Class Struggle’, is as follows: ‘In all capitalist countries at present a politicization process is visibly affecting intellectuals and young people. This results from their having become aware, whether directly or indirectly, of the barbarism of the colonial counter-revolution.’⁸ This assessment is right in itself, but the people who have become politicized belong to no special class. It is of course by no means essential that the fighting class should always have its centre in the industrial proletariat. Such a demand would not only be dogmatic and unrealistic. It would, if one takes the experience of the Chinese, the Cuban, and the Vietnamese revolutions into account, seem to be largely wrong. The young people and intellectuals now in c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s note
• Acknowledgement
• Preface to the English Edition
• Chapter 1: What has Class Struggle to do with Sexuality ?
• Chapter 2: The Changing Role of Sexual Oppression
• Chapter 3: The Enforcement of Sexual Conformity
• Chapter 4: The Repressive Conquest of Modern Nervous Illness
• Chapter 5: Examples of Late-Capitalist Sexual Practice
• Chapter 6: Defensive Action Against Repressive Desublimation
• Chapter 7: Current Problems of Defensive Action
• Postscript 1970
• Notes