"It can be seen that the history of industry and industry as it
object-ively exists is an open book of the human faculties, and a human psychology which can be sensuously apprehended. This history has not so far been conceived in relation to human nature, but only in a superficial utilitarian point of view, since in the condition
of alienation it was only possible to conceive real human faculties and
human species-action in the form of general human existence, as
religion, or as history in its abstract, general aspect as politics, art and literature, etc. Everyday material industry
(which can be conceived as part of that general development;
or equally, the general development can be conceived as a specific part
of industry since all human activity up to the present has been labour,
i.e. industry, self-alienated activity) shows us, in the form of sensuous useful objects, in an alienated form, the essential human faculties transformed into objects. No psychology for which this book, i.e. the most tangible and
accessible part of history, remains closed, can become a real
science
with a genuine content. What is to be thought of a science which stays
aloof from this enormous field of human labour, and which does not feel
its own inadequacy even though this great wealth of human activity
means nothing to it except perhaps what can be expressed in the single
phrase -- "need", "common need"? 1 -- Karl Marx in Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts
Many of the contemporary so-called 'Reichian' therapists totally
ignore Reich's theories of social revolution, sexual-politics, of the
characterological sources of totalitarianism, his theory of
work-democracy,
and his own practical involvement in the pre-World War II revolutionary
movement in tenuous association with the German "Communist" (so-called)
Party. Or they treat all of this as a youthful transgression, a relic
of his early theory which he later abandoned absolutely, or with a few
"eccentric", purely "personal" holdovers. They do not in any sense see
Reich's social theory and his social involvement as a
necessary moment
of his psychological theory and practice, and as a principal reason for the effective murder of Reich
the person
by the U.S. State during precisely those "anti-revolutionary" later
years. Thus they inadvertently perpetuate the murder of Reich in the
sense of the murder of his
work;
the dismemberment of its essential unity, its marketing as a commodity
spectacle, and its recuperation by capitalist ideology. The murder of
Reich continues, and more insidiously because at the hands of those who
claim to be his friends; those who (posthumously) represent him. The
only other case of this kind of phenomenon in the twentieth century
which surpasses this one in egregiousness is the expropriation and
representation of Marx' work -- a critique of
all ideology, and of
every possible
ruling class and form of class society -- by the
bureaucratic ruling classes of the state-capitalist nations and their
ideologies, and by their retainers or competitors in the form of the
state-capitalist (the so-called "Communist", including the "Trotskyist"
and "Maoist", etc.) parties all around the world.
For our part, we have no interest in the deification of Reich, whether
as a psychologist, therapist, or as a revolutionary, and we are among
the first to point out Reich's complicity in his own murder -- in all
the senses of the term employed above. Reich's murder was committed in
part with the aid of his own hand. We locate this complicity in Reich's
failure to ever fully supersede the remnants of Leninism-Kautskyism
that mar even his best contributions to revolutionary theory --
namely, the doctrine to the effect that capacity for
self-management must be brought to the working-class
from outside, by a bureaucratic Party and a "transitional" State. Despite Reich's early development of the theory of state-capitalism
2,
this failure, once he saw the monstrous outcome of this
Leninist-Kautskyist practice
in the Soviet Union, left him nothing but to bash his brains out in
Kantian oscillation on the twin rocks of the Scylla of Stalinist
state-capitalism on one side, and the Charybdis of private capitalism
and Fascist state-capitalism on the other. Reich's inability to locate
a
third force in the history of proletarian revolutionary practice, a force opposed
identically
to both forms of capitalist class society, lead him deeper into
isolation, cut him off from contact with the tiny
agitational currents, such as that of the council-communists, which
preserved the memory of that history -- the history of the workers'
councils -- in a theoretical form during the long night of
counter-revolution which began with the defeat of the Russian and German
workers' councils in the 1920s and of the Spanish councils in 1937.
Reich's failures are also related to his inadequate appropriation of
dialectics -- his "functionalism" and his tendencies toward an
uncritical rationalism, scientism, and positivism. But we see imbedded
in his work a wealth of theories and practices in areas most
revolutionaries have left untouched; areas vital to the development of
a revolutionary movement which, this time around -- in the context of
the global economic and general social crisis now opening --
has a chance to win.
The social moment in Reich's theory, and therefore also the
social-critical or revolutionary moment, is indispensable, unavoidable,
inescapable. Without it the theory is crippled, incomplete. Individual
therapeutics is transformed into an ideology, to the extent that it
claims to contain
as such a method for solving the problem of individual character-deformation (what we will henceforth call "character-armor").
Amour and armor: in so many weighs, what's not to love?
Character-armor is essentially not a
thing; not an atomic, separate
fact, a self-evident discrete particular entity located uniquely in an
isolated individual. Character-armor is essentially a
social relation. It may in fact be manifested generally in social individuals at
present, and with particular intensity in some, and it may indeed be
mapped onto their bodies in the form of chronic contraction of
various muscular segments -- the so-called 'muscle-armor'. But it is
generated and reproduced in social relation, in social interactions,
and, moreover, in definite, historically specific modes of social
relation or forms of human intercourse -- in the present case,
specifically
capital; the capital-relation.
More precisely, character-armor is not simply a social relation, but a
social relation of production, a relation of production of capitalist society. It is, in fact, a
necessary aspect of capital, or, phrased another way, a necessity of
wage-labor.
(To any who have
bothered to study the Marxian critique of political economy -- a group
which includes surprisingly few of the self-proclaimed "Marxists" -- it
is abundantly clear that capital is not essentially a
thing, but rather the social relation of production of "capitalist" society).
One's character-armor is truly one's o[w]nly social value: anonymity for exchange
It is not mere accident or contingency, the formation of "neurotic"
character in social individuals under capitalism. Rather, the
production in individuals of specific pathologies, specific armoring
patterns, is a necessary part of the reproduction process of capitalist
society. Capital must find on the labor market proletarians whose
personality structure is characterologically congruent with capitalist
production practices. It must find individuals willing to alienate
themselves, that is, to
sell
their time, to dis-own their lives 8 or more hours per day, to follow
someone else's orders in producing, and to give up all control over the
world which they produce.
Authoritarianism is located, in capitalist society, not fundamentally
in the family, which helps to reproduce it. Rather, it is a necessary
aspect of capital, of the capital-relation itself. (It should be clear
by now
that by the term 'proletarian' we understand all those whose relation
to production is the wage-labor relation -- all those who directly
alienate [sell] their living-time in exchange for money. Thus the
proletariat
is the class of most of us -- of the vast majority of human social-individuals now
living in the "First" and "Second" Worlds -- and not just of those of us who "work with our hands", wear
"blue collars", etc.).
The production of this
prostitute character is necessary in order that capital find on the market one of the
means of production
necessary to its production -- indeed, the most essential ingredient in
its production: human labor-power. Just as much as the production of
capitalist machines and of raw materials, the production of workers
with the appropriate character-structure is necessary to the reproduction of capital.
Individual proletarians cannot long be "cured" of their character-armor
in the environment of capitalist society simply because
they
need it to survive.
Without it, they would become "trouble-makers"; blacklisted,
unemployable -- of no further use-value to capital. And when a
proletarian becomes useless to capital, what happens to him/her? To his/her
use-value to himself/herself? Poverty, ostracism, imprisonment, confinement to
a mental hospital, etc. Thus, under capitalism, each proletarian has an
interest in his/her own deformation. His/her character-armor has a survival
use-value for him/her, a use-value in maintaining his/her exchange-value; in
getting him/her the exchange-value s/he needs to survive, and without which
his/her own life has no use-value for him/her - namely, his/her wages.
Indeed, the products of contemporary individualist "Reichian" therapy
are typically marginally employable or unemployable individuals
who subsist on the periphery of capitalist society -- who either become
"Reichian" therapists themselves or survive by various other
modes of self-employment, involvement in handicrafts production, etc.
The fact that this is usually by conscious choice and for good reason
does not change the fact that these individuals are no longer
characterologically congruent with the needs of capital, and that they
will
be among the first stricken as the developing depression-crisis sweeps
away that periphery.
Proletarian character -- the propensity for self-disowning, the
incapacity for
social responsibility, the habit of submission, etc. is
but another expression of that invariant which characterizes
every aspect
of social reality in fully developed capitalist society -- the law of
value. In the form of this law, totalitarianism exists in even the most
(bourgeois-) "democratic" capitalist republic. Certain character
pathologies are a necessary part of the
use-value of the worker
to capital, are thus part of what the capitalist
pays for in the worker
s/he buys. The character-armor of the proletarian is worked up in
him/her as
s/he
grows up by the labor of the various social authorities whom he
confronts along the way -- by parents, by relatives, by church operatives,
by teachers, by police, and by bosses as well, not to mention by his/her own peer
group, and
himself/herself. The encrustation of character-armor laminated around
his/her also-developing core-self is thus the
objectified labor-time of all of these "[
anti-]social workers"; the
value-added to
his/her exchange-value as a commodity by this
authoritarian labor.
Under capitalism, use-value splits up into use-value to capital (to
exchange-value production maximization) and use-value to use-value (to
use-value production maximization). We have all seen how the use-value
to us of capitalist products is distorted in the interplay of these
two, often contradictory, social imperatives -- cars designed to wear
out faster and faster, throw-away products (like unrefillable pens),
destruction of crops to support prices, production of means of
destruction of real wealth on a massive scale ("military hardware")
-- etc. Proletarian character is the name of the deformation of
our
use-value, to ourselves and to each other; the deformation of our
capacities as human beings, by virtue of we ourselves being products of
capital (that is, of the present mode and level of
our own world-producing -- including
self-producing -- praxis).
The learning of techno-practical skills by workers is necessary to
useful production: it is a necessary part of their use-value to
use-value production, hence of their use-value to themselves. But the
learning by workers of
proletarian character,
on the contrary, is a necessity only to the preservation of the
exchange-value (capital) system of producing use-value, and a direct
fetter on the development
of freely associated, democratically-planned production -- communist production.
Proletarian character is thus the
personal
aspect of that deformation
of use-value which is always necessary to the reproduction of exchange
value; of the exchange-value system. The latter can be negated without
negating, and in fact with the effect of
enhancing -- the former.
The revolutionary project, the project of proletarian revolution, is that of the
abolition of capital; of the
deterrminate negation of the fully-developed exchange-value relation. It thus also contains the project of the
determinate self-negation of the proletariat
as such (
as proletarian) and therefore also of proletarian character. But this project too remains
impossible until it becomes
necessary.
The remainder of this document is devoted to demonstrating that, in the
context of the world-wide depression-crisis now commencing, proletarian
revolution is indeed becoming a
practical necessity, and to demonstrating the
crucial
use-value of the work begun
by Reich, and carried on in the work of those who study and follow him
today, to the success of this necessary process of social revolution.
The handshake seals the deal of self[-less]-colonization
II. The Personal And The Social
"Suppose we had produced things as human beings: in his production each of us would have twice affirmed himself and the
other. (1) In my production [AiD: With my self as among products of my labor] I would have objectified my individuality
and its particularity, and in the course of the activity I would have
enjoyed an individual life; in viewing the object I would have experienced the individual joy of knowing my personality as an
objective, sensuously perceptible, and indubitable power. (2) In your
satisfaction and your use of my product I would have had the direct and
conscious satisfaction that my work satisfied a human need, that it objectified human
nature, and that it created an object appropriate to the need of
another human being. (3) I would have been the mediator between you and
the species and you would have experienced me as a redintegration [AiD: as a complement to and] of
your own nature and a necessary part of your self; I would have been
affirmed in your thought as well as your love [Catalysis: emphasis added]. (4) In my individual
life I would have directly created your life; in my individual activity
I would have immediately confirmed and realized my true human and
social nature. Our productions would be so many mirrors reflecting our
nature." 3 -- Karl Marx in an essay entitled "Free Human Production"
Two cardinal realizations separate revolutionary theory from the
state-capitalist ideologies which seek to recuperate and exploit it: As
a revolutionary, you must start from your own subjective needs and
desires, your own subjective existence. Revolutionary practice must, in
assessing its success or failure, take as its starting and finishing
point the
personal life of each revolutionary --
not some moral principle, some projected ideal, some abstract, impersonal,
mechanical "necessity". BUT, the personal life of each one of us is a
global product. If we don't know ourselves as the historical
and daily product of world-wide human society and, in
particular, of the
labor
of the working-class of the entire world, then we don't know what and
where we are starting from; we simply don't know ourselves.
Some people insist on getting to know themselves the hard way. And that
hard way is right before us: the depression which has just begun will
prove palpably to each of us our present absolute dependence
on world-wide production, precisely by
interrupting that
production. Having the rug pulled out from under one reminds one of
what one was standing on. We want to talk to people who don't so much
need to learn this hard way -- who are ready to confront the tasks
of self-organizing to take over the economy and society as a whole
now,
before it is too late to prevent the burgeoning of state-capitalist
totalitarianism, and perhaps thermo-nuclear war, here and around the
world.
Our very bodies are the products of human labor, through the food we
eat, the clothes we wear, the structures in which we live, the
instrumentalities we use, the practices we learn and the concepts we
incorporate -- the very language in which this passage is formulated.
We are the products of human sensuous activity in the form of the
sexual act itself, the care and uncaring, the treatment and
mistreatment we receive at the hands of other human beings -- parents,
doctors, nurses, peers, etc. -- from infancy. Each of us is the
spiritual
and material
product of the labor of the working-class of the entire planet, and of
our own labor upon ourselves made possible by that labor. The
simplest item of our consumption -- a button on a coat, a cup of
coffee, a pen -- involves in the sources of its raw materials, the
production of the machines which are the means of its
production, the transport of all these, etc. -- labor-processes located
all over the globe; production on a world scale. Ingredient in every
loaf of bread -- seemingly such a simple, self-evident, self-subsistent
thing -- is a world-wide orchestrated movement of human activity which alone makes the existence of that particular thing possible.
And, once again, the alienated "prime mover" loses his/her exchange-value....
Our lives rest upon a global dance of daily production, whose
interruption for even a short time would prove to everyone its
'ingredience' in their most intimately personal lives, through the
disappearance of
its products from the shelves, followed soon thereafter by the
disappearance, or significant disruption and drastic alteration, of
those "personal lives" themselves.
AND THIS INTERRUPTION OF WORLD-PRODUCTION IS ABOUT TO BEGIN. It is what
is known as a "Depression-crisis". This one has been
building up for decades, and it promises to be the worst ever.
4
This world-wide depression-crisis is now in its preliminary stages. A
global chain-reaction cascade of bankruptcies is about to begin. The
fact that most of the Leftist organizations and militants -- who claim
to have appropriated Marx's analysis of
capitalism -- don't know this, and continue to mouth the most insipid
platitudes of modern-day bourgeois ideology about "built-in
stabilizers", and "government controls", doesn't in the least prevent
the majority of
the American working-class who -- in the main to their credit, have
never listened to these state-capitalist hacks and ideologues -- from
knowing it (as witness the latest Gallup Poll, indicating that 52% of
blue collar and 39% of white collar workers expect a depression, and
70% and 82% respectively expect continued economic worsening.
5 )
In the course of this crisis, with the stoppage of vitally necessary
production, the working-class of America and of the world will be faced
with the practical necessity of restarting production under its own
management. Or, in the context of the takeover of all production by the
large banks and the State, with the formation of state-capital on a
hitherto unprecedented scale, accompanied by vastly increased
unemployment,
drastically lowered wages, speed-up and cannibalization of labor-power; the
spread of state-capitalist totalitarianism, dictatorship and terror,
Stalinist and Fascist, on a world scale; inter[-state-]capitalist war
and preparation for war, we will find that the world proletariat --
that is,
we ourselves
-- will be faced with the choice of either ourselves taking over
responsibility for social reproduction, or of passively witnessing, and suffering, the following out of the
developments listed above to their logical conclusions -- immiseration, famine,
perhaps world
war, police-state terror, and finally devolution; the collapse of world
production and world exchange; in short, the descent into barbarism.
The vital question whose answer will decide the outcome is: does the
working-class have the capacity for self-management, or the
capacity to develop that capacity
in the course of the crisis now opening? Do we have the confidence and
competence to seize social power from capital and to hold onto that
power once we have seized it,
or will we dis-own this power, re-alienate it to a bureaucratic party
and a new State, out of incapacity for social responsibility and
incapacity for democratic association itself? This is, in part, a
"psychological"; a
characterological question. And this is where Reich comes in.
The general problem can be stated thusly: how can we, the proletariat,
re-appropriate our own subject-
ivity (subject-
ness; subject-
hood; our
capacity to act the role of the subject, as opposed to the role of the object, in
our own social life-processes). At the heart of capitalism lies an
essential reification; an inversion of subject and object. The
producers reduce themselves to
pseudo-
objects apparently ruled over
by their own product -- capital -- their own alienated (sold) activity which thereby becomes a
pseudo-
subject.
A pseudo-object is a subject whose subjectivity is blocked off by a
layer of frozen subjectivity
surrounding his/her self, and rendering his/her behavior predictable and
manipulable according to certain pseudo-mechanical laws. How can we
invert this inversion -- the process of "revolving" which is the
essence of the communist revolution? We have alienated our subjectivity
not only, collectively, to capital and to the state, but individually,
personally
as well. All of these forms of self-disowning are intimately
interconnected, and together make up the totality of alienation. We
have disowned our subjectivity individually in the form of disowned
memories, emotions,
and (traumatic) experiences (repression; muscle-armor), and in the
form of various psychic totems and fetishes: moralisms, causes, sacred
ideals, ideologies, and other projections. Ideology in general needs to
be looked at from the standpoint of Reich's theory, as a kind of
"intellectual neurosis"; a form of
mental character-armor. That is, the deadening of subjectivity in practice as a whole includes the curtailment of
mental subjectivity as well. Every fetish, every little reification, is a block against coherent and practical
thought, a zone where the thought-process stumbles. Inability to
think subjectively and
timidity in thought is a
mental illness endemic to capitalist society, a
characterological problem, not just a "genetic", organic problem. Bourgeois ideology always attributes to "nature" its
social
problems. There is a connection between blockage in other areas of
practice and blockage
in thought-practice. Incapacity to play the subject role in general
is related to inability to be the subject of ones own thought
processes. People
stop themselves in their thinking just as much as in
their feeling. And fear of thinking can vitiate our revolution
at least as thoroughly as any of the other forms of "fear of freedom" and
"pleasure-anxiety", of which it is one of the most intimate varieties.
Self-disowning, i.e. "projection" in the Gestalt sense, or "alienation"
in the Marxian sense, is the kernel of every ideology. And today it is
ideology above all which fetters revolutionary movement, revolutionary
practice. Every collective projection is a stumbling-block on the way
to the re-owning of society as a whole by its producers. We
need to explore methods capable of stimulating and catalyzing the re-owning of subjectivity on a social scale; the collective
collapse of collective projections. For instance, we know that the
experience of strong emotion welling-up from within is an
armor-dissolving and
subjectivity-liberating experience, and that social upsurges produce
such experiences
intersubjectively,
en masse.
Even certain vivid,
evocative spoken and written formulations can unleash such experiences
in the appropriate experiential context/historical moment. The
problem: how to actively stimulate these experiences and raise their
precipitation to the level of a conscious, deliberate self-power in our
revolutionary agitation?
Sooner or later, with the occurrence of precipitating catastrophic
events which will signal publicly the onset of the crisis, public
discussion-meetings will have to be called in places of work and places
of residence, both "spontaneously" by ad hoc groups of workers, and by
already organized tendencies such as our own as part of a conscious
self-organizing strategy, to discuss the crisis in our lives and what
we are going to do about it. These meetings will have to discuss the
ways and means of the expropriation of capital; of a working-class
takeover of the means of production and of society as a whole, and of
the democratic organization of social life. Out of these
discussion-meetings can emerge the nuclear organizations of a
class-wide
revolutionary movement, embracing proletarians both employed and
unemployed, "blue-collar" and "white-collar", black and white. A
national and very soon international association of these, what we call
pro-council
committees in workplaces and communities can agitate openly for a
program involving the formation of workers' councils, the society-wide
expropriation of state and private capital by the working-class, i.e.,
the takeover of factories, farms, office complexes, etc., their
operation and modification in accord with a democratically produced
global plan, thus the abolition of wage-labor, and the dismantling of the
capitalist state with the appropriation of all functions of social
management by
the world-wide system of workers' councils. (By this, we mean a system
of
unitary bodies,
simultaneously executive, legislative, and judicial, and composed of
base assemblies in workplaces and residential areas at the local level,
bodies of mandated and recallable delegates
emanating
directly from these base assemblies at the regional level,
and a
world council
of directly emanating delegates, again mandated,
rotating, & recallable, at the global level, vested with day-to-day
trusteeship of the global social property,and overall coordination of
the plan, of
course utilizing at all levels the modern means of voice/image
communication, automatic data processing and display, etc. This
expresses in bare outline what we see as that concrete organizational
instantiation of incipient communist society which fulfills the
conception of the "associated producers" put forward by Marx, and which
is
diametrically opposed
to private capitalism and state-capitalism alike; the form of the
internally-democratic anti-state dictatorship of the proletariat and
of the initial social relation of production of communist society. It is
merely a conceptual elaboration of what the historical revolutionary
practice of the proletariat has already produced again and again.
The characterological problems of self-management will make
themselves felt from the very inception of these discussion-meetings.
Confronting the problem of getting fellow workers to participate, and
dealing with attrition of attendance after the first few meetings, will
bring these to the fore. The fact that most workers feel so wrapped-up
in their own "simple reproduction", and in their "personal" problems --
sexual, familial, financial, etc. -- that they don't have time or
energy for "social" problems, the fact that these social problems are
now visibly exacerbating their "personal" problems notwithstanding, will for the
first time itself be confronted as a
social problem. This is, in part,
what could set the stage for a re-disowning of social power and the
formation of a managerial bureaucracy in the aftermath of a social
revolution. The problems of managing the discussions and conducting the
work of these meetings democratically and efficiently will pose these
problems concretely and immediately. All the resources of Gestalt
therapy, Transactional Analysis, and Reichian theory that can
be critically pillaged from these ideologies in dealing with the
characterological problems of democratic association can be crucial to their
success as revolutionary formations.
The useful developments contained in Reich's theory and practice and
its development since his death by his followers must be appropriated
by and pass into the stream of revolutionary theory-practice. A
revolutionary
social psycho-therapy is a necessity of revolutionary
practice today. Such a
social psychotherapeutic process was always
there
in-itself in the revolutionary process. Today, if we are to win, it must be there
for-itself. Reich's concept of work-democracy needs to be criticized in terms of its ahistorical idealism (Reich's
attitude to it as an
ever present reality),
and elaborated into a full theory of generalized
self-management and of its historically-produced possibility only at
and after a definite moment and stage in cumulative human-species
historical social development.
We propose the formation of a task-force of
socio-therapeutic workers, of
specialists in the process of overcoming the fetters of specialism
and of de-specializing their knowledge; a task-force aiming at the
formulation of such a revolutionary
socio-psychotherapy, flowing into
the general theory of revolutionary practice. We are willing to help
facilitate the founding of such a task force. Besides what we have
already mentioned, we propose it concentrate on the following projects:
- A critique of Sex-Pol, with proposals for its supersession.
- Psycho-social
analysis of contemporary ideological trends such as the "new"
mysticism, neo-Christianity, and Leftist currents (Maoism, NCLC, etc.);
also of developments such as the Zero-Growth/anti-population, the
Black-racist, and the co-management (co-participation) ideologies now
massively financed
by the Rockefeller foundations and other big
capitalist foundations, with development of strategies for their
practical critique within our class.
- Surveillance and analysis of contemporary social trends such as the disintegration of the old-style nuclear family, compulsive
promiscuity, etc. from the point of view of their implications for revolutionary practice.
- Specification of body-therapies, if any, for the individual bio-energetic treatment of authoritarian structure in terms of the
location of specific muscular centers and armor-formations if such in fact exist.
- Reichian
techniques for enhancing the moment of "simple reproduction" for revolutionaries, including
body-techniques by which revolutionaries can watch out for and take
care of themselves and one another. Since the notion of the abstract
negation of character-armor (as expressed,
for example, in the slogan "smash character!") stands convicted on the
grounds of manifest imbecility, the maintenance of "revolutionary" or
non-authoritarian character-structure once produced must depend on the
transformation of unconscious, involuntary armoring into conscious arming of the self. Techniques for this.
There is much in Reich that remains to be criticized from the point of view of the theory of praxis, of the historical
self-production of man -- of the theory most closely associated with the
name of Marx. Reich's anti-dialectical functionalism, which expressed his failure to locate self-development as the "meaning"
6 (content) of the life-process was also related to his failure to locate his insights historically
in terms of the self-development of human society as an historical
totality; his failure to relate clinical discoveries
regarding
character to the critique of political economy in a rigorous manner,
as expressions of the current level of the cultural and technical
composition of capital; of the demands that capital makes upon the proletariat
at a definite stage of its development, etc. Reich's failure to locate
the problem of authoritarian structure concretely in terms of the
historical development of the productive forces (of the social
individuals) led, for example, to ahistorical abstractions like
his concept of the "emotional plague", which obscures the real base of
observation and insight.
But while some tendencies on the Left would today be capable of making
such a critique of Reich, their own tradition-boundedness
would prevent them from coming to grips with Reich's later
developments, specifically, the orgone theory, which they would thus be
forced to dismiss out of hand as the work of a madman. The recent
developments in Kirlian photography, acupuncture, pyramidology, etc.
which may turn out to confirm, empiracally and experimentally, elements of Reich's orgone theory, and the
manifest connection of these with the ancient theories and practices
of, for example, yoga, will remain a cause of scorn, masking fear, on
the part of the epigones and hacks of the Left. Genuine revolutionaries
must not be so narrow or so ungreedy. It may well be that in the
conscious development of the higher self-powers bespoken by these
discoveries
lays the only hope for the success of generalized self-management and
communist society.
CATALYSIS
Committee For Working-Class Self-Organizing
Berkeley, California, USA
1 T.B. Bottomore;
Karl Marx, Early Writings; McGraw-Hill (New York: 1963); pages 162-163.
2 Wilhelm Reich;
The Mass Psychology of Fascism; Albion
Press (1970); reprint of 1946 Third Edition; Chapter IX, Section 7, pages
237-239
et. passim.
3 Easton and Guddat;
Writings Of The Young Marx On Philosophy And Society; Doubleday (Garden City: 1967); page 281.
4 The theory we have used in our efforts to comprehend capitalist crisis is the theory of the accumulation of
fictitious capital.
We hope to offer a full exposition of this
theory as it applies to the present crisis soon, in the form of a
pamphlet. What suffices to establish the validity of this theory is the
following: (i) that accumulation of fictitious capital is an
unavoidable process for a capitalist economy; (ii) that, in the later
stages, this accumulation expresses itself empirically as
accelerating inflation and exponential expansion of debt, and finally;
(iii) that the only solution to the crisis is the destruction of
fictitious capital through depressionary deflation, inter-capitalist
war, or expropriation of capital, either by the state or by the
associated workers.
5 San Francisco Chronicle; Monday, August 19, 1974; page 10.
6 "
The living simply functions,
it has no 'meaning'." Wilhelm Reich;
The Function Of The Orgasm: The Discovery of the Orgone; World Publishing (New York: 1971); page 235.
Release History
Release
|
Date
|
Released By
|
Format and Features
|
v1.0
|
1974
|
Catalysis
(Berkeley, CA USA)
|
Original in printed text.
|
v2.0
|
September 21, 2006
|
Adventures in Dialectics |
In HTML format; on internet for the first time. A few modifications were made by the original author.
|
Contact Information
Adventures in Dialectics
http://www.Point-of-Departure.org
rasputin@Point-of-Departure.org