Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929-1934

Reich makes a compelling argument in this book that sexual repression (and the bourgeouis sexual morality such repression creates) is a crucial element of class domination, and that revolutionary political movements must incorporate the struggle for healthy human sexuality or doom themselves to failure. This collection gathers six essays from the period during and just after Reich struggled to implement a liberatory sexual program through the auspices of the German Communist Party in the late 20s and early 30s. These efforts resulted in his being outcast from both the CP and Freud's psychoanalytic circles. In the years following, Reich was dismissed as a crank for his studies of the 'Orgone', but these early writings on sexuality and class struggle were to prove prescient in light of the upheavals of the 1960s. Bertell Ollman's introduction is a pithy summation of Reich's project and his importance, and indeed presents the key ideas in the book in a more concise and transparent fashion than Reich himself. The first essay is a rather belabored effort to reconcile Marx and Freud, but it perhaps provides a useful introduction to dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis. The central piece, "The Imposition of Sexual Morality" relies on some rather sparse anthropological evidence to chart the course of human development from the free sexuality of matriarchal society through the sexual repression that marriage institutions of paternal, accumulative society require. Here as elsewhere, Reich makes some striking assertions about the role and origins of sexual repression, but he is less fastidious than his mentor Freud in making clear claims illustrated by example. In the latter essays, Reich makes some suggestions, drawn from his experiences in Germany, as to how a program of sexual liberation might be incorporated into the larger struggle to develop class consciousness and bring about socialism.