Reproduction; social and sexual

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a psychoanalyst who fused Freud with Marx, before going a bit batshit and claiming to have discovered a 'primordial cosmic energy' called 'orgone' that caused weather events, the colour of the sky, gravity and the formation of galaxies. And orgasms. Reich's earlier work was repopularised during the 1960s, primarily by Solidarity member Maurice Brinton's pamphlet 'The Irrational in Politics' (I'm using '60s' figuratively here in the colloquial sense for the period 1968-72, rather than literally. This pamphlet was published in 1970). Solidarity's introduction to the pamphlet describes its central thesis as follows:

    ...an attempt to analyse the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery and - at least in the short term - seems to succeed. It does not deal with 'police' and 'jails' as ordinarily conceived but with those internalised patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the 'mass individual' is today entrapped (...) It looks at the family as the locus of reproduction of the dominant ideology, and at sexual repression as an important determinant of social conditioning, resulting in the mass production of individuals perpetually craving authority and leadership and forever afraid of walking on their own or of thinking for themselves.

Consequently Reich linked the predominant sexuality with the predominant social relations, and saw the mechanism for this linkage as being sexual repression; the behaviours promoted by traditional Judeo-Christian morality - monogamous marriage, kids disciplined for wanking etc. The prevailing material relations of society - in particular the family - were seen to produce certain ideas - in particular craving authority - which in turn reproduced authoritarian society in a dialectical interaction. This idea had an obvious resonance with libertarians, who saw a clear political implication; the Man doesn't want you to have fun, so fun is subversive in itself and you can fuck your way out of capitalist society. The most hilarious contemporary example of this comes from the lifestyle anarchist group CrimethInc, who in their article "washing... and brainwashing" list the first of "eight reasons why capitalists want to sell you deoderant" as:

Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don't like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.

While this is only the most ridiculous example, these sentiments are not restricted to lifestylist muppets, and crop up during many discussions with class struggle anarchists too, attracted by the libertarine slogan 'it is forbidden to forbid.' For example an article by the Anarchist Federation concludes that:

When people are really being sexually honest, some weird shit can start to happen. And that, in its own way, can be quite revolutionary.

There are two reasons this is problematic; the first is the speculative nature of Reich's theories in the first place, the second is the massive social changes that have taken place since 1960s which would render them of primarily historical interest even if the theories themselves were shown to be sound. However, for the purpose of this blog there is one thing we can take from Brinton; the thesis that prevailing sexuality and prevailing social relations are not independent phenomenon. Before leaving the 60s, we should consider the theories of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, who addressed this question from the point of view of housewives.

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