Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957)

Wilhelm Reich wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1930-33 and revised and expanded it in 1942. He thus began it in an effort to explain the rise to power of the Nazis and other fascist parties of the interwar period, and developed it with a view to the likely demise of these particular governments and concern about what would succeed them. He also discussed the development of the Soviet system towards authoritarianism and away from its original socialist ideals. When I first read the show more book in the 1980s, it was fascinating as a piece of firsthand history, but my 2019 reread found me and contemporary society back in the position faced by Reich: the perplexing ascendancy of authoritarian governments throughout the "developed" world.

Reich is not a fan of "great man theories"--how could he be, when confronted with the "failed house painter" at the helm of Nazism? (How can we be, with our failed casino operator?) Nor does he attribute causal primacy to ideology or party programs; "National Socialism" was even more incoherent than the neoliberal capitalism of the Republican party. For Reich, the blame rests squarely with the mass population and their "character structure," formed and reproduced through conditioning in the patriarchal home, the superstitious church, and the exploitative workplace. Such people possess a pervasive fear of freedom which is channeled into authoritarian politics. All other things being equal, then, fascism could be expected to regrow after the defeat of the Axis powers:

"Viewed with respect to man's character, 'fascism' is the basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man of our authoritarian machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical conception of life. It is the mechanistic-mystical character of modern man that produces fascist parties, and not vice versa." (xiii, ital. in original)

Reich has an idiosyncratic use of the word translated here as "mysticism." He seems to treat it as a synonym for metaphysical and superstitious thought, and rather than being a neighbor or subset of religion, it serves as a superset embracing various irrationalisms. At some points, though, he expressly defines it as sexual abstinence (140 e.g.). When using it in a more conventional sense, he scare-quotes the term:

"... religion's attitude toward sexuality underwent a change in patriarchal society. Originally, it was a religion of sexuality; later it became an anti-sexual religion. The 'mysticism' of the primitives who were members of a sexually affirmative society is partially direct orgastic experience and partially animistic interpretation of natural processes." (138)
"When sexual feelings and religious feelings became separated from one another, that which is sexual was forced to become the bad, the infernal, the diabolical." (148)

Reich's program for escaping the abiding hazard of totalitarianism is thus not focused on politics but pathology, what he calls the "emotional plague" of sexual self-revulsion that expresses itself in imperial projects of enslavement and war. In his own time, he endorsed and supported a campaign for "sex hygiene" that would affirm and protect the sexuality of children, believing that only a generation raised in this fashion could instigate the real social changes needed to transcend the cycle of internalized and projected hatreds. He found opposition to this effort in all established social factions, of course.

"'Away from the animal; away from sexuality!' are the guiding principles of the formation of all human ideology. This is the case whether it is the communist form of proletarian class honor, the Christian form of man's 'spiritual and ethical nature,' or the liberal form of 'higher human values.' All these ideas harp on the same monotonous tune: 'We are not animals; it was we who discovered the machine--not the animal! And we don't have genitals like the animals!'" (339) When Reich wrote that "Race ideology is the pure biopathic expression of the character structure of the orgastically impotent man" (xiv), he was discussing the racist social theories that "can have meaning only to a numbskull" (78). But the same ideological germ can be seen in mass monoculture farming, antibiotic abuse, and other blunders of our teetering civilization.

Reich's social ideal is one that he insists is already extant in the fabric of everyday life, even though in some respects it seems as utopian as the anticipated socialism of Fourier or communist future of Marx. What Reich calls "work democracy" is the "voluntary association and self-government" that he claims to have been prevalent "in pagan society" (238) and persistent in practical work at the scale of the individual shop. He refuses to reduce it to a political ideology or an economic theory, instead asserting that it is nothing other than the proper organic social expression of humanity through meaningful participation.

"More than anything else it is a matter of changing the nature of work so that it ceases to be an onerous duty and becomes a gratifying fulfillment of a need." (286, i.e. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.") show less

This is one largely for political antiquarians but it has its moments. Wilhelm Reich should need no introduction. These works, from 1929 to 1934, represent the culmination of his socialist experiment in exploring working class sexuality as a means to class liberation.

Reich was a Freudian and a Communist but found his views incompatible with closed and increasingly sclerotic systems of thought. His criticisms of both struck home and he was thrown out of both Party and profession in show more 1933/34.

The National Socialists had embedded themselves in Germany - the Freudians seeking a fruitless accommodation with Hitler and the Communists in denial about the reasons for their crushing defeat. Reich's critique were to the point but too inconvenient.

Reich had tried to do the impossible in those five years - to merge the scientific materialism of Marxism with the attempt at a scientific psychology by the psychoanalysts. The futility, of course, lay in the fact that neither was open-minded and so truly scientific.

Rather than explain one of the most fertile, unusual and ultimately influential minds in twentieth century thought, I must refer you to the full Wikipedia entry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich - and allow you to put what follows into its full context.

The book is certainly not an entertainment. The pamphlets, essays, provocations and the book that takes up the bulk of the text [The Imposition of Sexual Morality] are out-of-date intellectually and filled with jargon and theory from worlds long since discredited.

It is hard-going at times - especially in the 1932 book where the central section is an extensive review of anthropological research long since superseded in the academy and so unreliable as to both analysis and findings.

Having said that, there are insights into the gathering storm inside the Communist Party as it bureaucratised under Stalin and as the free thought of the 1920s began to collapse. Party discipline became enforced under the twin threats of economic breakdown and Hitler.

This aspect alone would not be worth the reading but in the final three pamphlets we have inklings of what would be Reich's more profound contribution to human liberation and its link to politics.

In 1932, he is still fighting his corner but by 1934 he can do little but burn his bridges with a coruscating and accurate critique of the failure of socialism in the face of fascism - a critique as pertinent today of left-liberalism in the face of national populism.

There are powerful insights to be derived from his practical work about what really matters to working class people and why, given the weight of history, they 'rationally' will walk away from socialism and choose fascism unless socialists change their tune.

It is the weight of history that matters - personal and private life, 'patriarchalism' (in its correct sense rather than the propagandistic light weight nonsense of modern post-Marxists) and sexual repression combine to push people to the devil they think they know.

His psychoanalysis is an investigation of the primal drives that express themselves as political choices - expressed more fully in his 1933 master work The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The Marxism is just the liberatory framework in which he wants to frame the findings.

His insights are, in fact, much 'bigger' than either of the two closed systems of the day. They survive formal abandonment of Freudianism and Marxism. What he has found are important correlations between sexuality and social and political attitudes.

His programme of liberation, started as the Sex-Pol movement in Berlin in 1927, was aborted by fascism, Stalinist bureaucratism, the paradoxical sexual conservatism of the Left (a quality in it to be found as much today as then) and war.

Nevertheless we should not forget that in the end it was liberal Americans, over-reacting to his late mental problems, who jailed him and burned his books. He was uncomfortable not just to conservative psychotherapists and sexually repressed Communists ...

Reich himself must be counted a failure of sorts - much like Leary - one who possibly did the cause of responsible sexual liberation no long term service (any more than did Leary responsible psychedelic use) but, without him, we might not even be discussing the subject.

A strange man, he was also intellectually brave and (I suggest) was limited only by his need to try and justify within sets of ideology (Science, Marxism, Freudianism) what, in fact, needs no such justification and which many of us now see as simply intuitively true.

Beyond the sexual aspects of the case, the final essays have other and often staggeringly to-the-point insights into political mobilisation - even if one can quibble with this or that suggestion or conclusion.

If the soi-disant Left ever came close to understanding some of what Reich, in his sometimes clumsy way, tries to tell them (and us) about engaging with the masses, with full respect for their own perspective, then it would not be in the mess it is in today.

Just as Communists' and Social Democrats' high seriousness, bureaucratism and talking-down to the masses were trounced by more emotionally canny Nazis with some real flair, so the same mistakes are being repeated today by left-liberal intellectuals and civil society.

As I write, the liberal-left is probably congratulating itself on the 'win' against liberal governments in getting migrants accepted into Europe. It appears to control the media agenda. But the larger mass has not yet spoken and come election time, it will.

Reich would have seen the potential for disaster here because the liberal-left has picked and chosen the identities that we are to privilege and yet has neglected to respect the identity (objective condition) of the indigenous working and lower middle classes.

There has been no strategy of engagement and political education, just an attitude of patronising self-righteousness about theoretically self-evident moral propositions. The liberal-left witters on about empathy but fails to enter into a dialogue on values with the masses.

Although 'rationally' the interests of the masses might be one with those of the migrants against the neo-liberal system, left-liberals have actually not explained why this should be so. The resentments of the masses may be primal and, if so, will out at some stage.

Reich's Politicising the Sexual Problem of Youth (1932), his long pamphlet What is Class Consciousness of 1934 and his short paper Reforming the Labour Movement all deserve careful study as relevant to current conditions.

There is also (in this edition) a rather worthy but inconsequential 1972 Introduction by Bertell Ollman which reminds one that the Marxists of the early 1970s, like the Bourbons, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. show less

Un texto que va más allá de la explicación materialista plata de lo hegemónico y va a buscar la razón de por qué alemania votó a los nazis. Arranca con un aroma a "nosotros, lo victorianos". El planteo del libro es que la moral sexual reprimida de las clases populares (tanto campesinas como industriales, así como la pequeña burguesía) es lo que hizo que se identifiquen con las clases burguesas y derivasen en una solución fascista, hija sana de la socialdemocracia que no dio show more respuestas a sus necesidades. Interesante para pensar el momento actual, aunque no deja de ser un libro de 1933. show less

(This is an old review that I wrote in 2002 and thought that I had copied here, but hadn't. I haven't read Reich since then so I'm not sure what I would think now.)

As you may know, Reich was a student of Freud who's now known as a colorful crackpot (or, in California, a genius) who believed sexual life-energy could cure cancer, change the weather, etc. He was also a crusading anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist, and he thought dangerous politics were a side effect of unconscious contradictions show more in society; this book makes a pretty good case for that. But it's also disorganized, repetitive, and self-righteous, and in general it gives the impression of someone who found it very easy to convince himself he had "proved" things. I think this is partly due to the way he went back and revised the book in the '40s (I've never read the original edition) to get rid of some Communist bits and put in more orgone theory; this results in some strange choices such as always saying "sex-economic" when he means "revolutionary." And I'm not sure I trust his retrospective view of the progressive movement in Germany, when he claims that he managed to turn an audience of 1,000 lower-middle-class Christians away from the Church just by explaining that sexual taboos were reactionary. (Of course I may be biased because he believes that not only religion, but fairy tales and detective stories and really anything "irrational," are nothing but fascist bullshit getting in the way of "mental hygiene." For a guy who said he was all about release, he's got pretty strict ideas about where people should find comfort.)

The main theme of the book still seems true: when people grow up cramped and dishonest and afraid of pleasure, they're likely to support horrible leaders without understanding why.

Anyway, besides being an interesting and frustrating read, this was a particularly good used copy to have found, because it came with a whole lot of handwritten margin notes by a mysterious Irish woman who was apparently reading it in Seattle some time in the last 30 years. Besides trying to apply Reich to her surroundings and enthusiastically underlining about 50% of the book, she was also gathering thoughts for a study of an Irish revolutionary about whom she had mixed feelings. There are a lot of pages where this reader's notes are more interesting than Reich's writing, and certainly more practical. Among my favorites: "'Liberalism lays stress upon its ethics for the purpose of holding in suppression the "monster in man"': You can visibly see this in the deadness lack of spontaneity in certain political groups. The unattractiveness rigidity of facial expression." "'Hitler speaks of his mother with great sentimentality': As do most Irish men. But do they love the real person or the myth." "'Employees of aristocratic families ... often appear as caricatures of the people whom they serve': My aunt Louise." "There is no day more empty than the day following an election for the average vol[unteer] worker. What do you have???" "Sadism: 'She doesn't know where she stands w. me. That's the way it should be!'" "To say good-bye to mysticism. I am resistant. Who is it that said 'Walk softly. I have only my dreams?' Does it really do so much damage? ... Beauty of Irene's face at Mass. But it doesn't work for everyone. Didn't for my mom." "'We have to designate as non-work that activity that is detrimental to the life process': Would running a bar be non-work?" Thanks, whoever you are; I hope you figured out what you were trying to figure out. show less