Wilhelm Reich; The sexual revolution: toward a self-governing character structure.

"At the end of the Second World War, Wilhelm Reich introduced American readers to some of his earlier writings under the title The Sexual Revolution (1945). Explaining that this revolution went to the "roots" of human emotional, social, and economic existence, he presented himself as a radical (from Latin radix: root), i.e. as a man who examines these roots and who then fearlessly speaks the truth that sets humanity free. when the revolution came to Russia, it expressly included equal rights for women and universal sexual freedom in its program. Thus, for the first time, a "sexual revolution" became official government policy. Unfortunately, as Reich described in his book, after a few years the Russian Revolution betrayed its libertarian goals by becoming sexually oppressive. Reactionary laws were reinstated, and soon, together with many other civil rights, the right to free sexual expression vanished. Reich concluded from this observation that the mere transfer of power from one social class to another was not enough, and that a much more profound transformation was required. Indeed, he felt that such a transformation was already well under way in the United States and other enlightened Western democracies. Therefore, it was no longer a question of wealth or poverty, communism or capitalism, but simply a question of individual autonomy, of a "self-governing character structure". This was an ideal that had to be realized in defiance of all existing political systems with the help of natural science." THE SEX ATLAS Erwin J. Haeberle, Ph.D., Ed.D.

As Reich would write in the Mass Psychology of Fascism anti-sex is anti-freedom. It is used to repress rebellion in the working class and move them towards mysticism, in current terms; reactionary politics and religious fundamentalism Hence the right wing's fetish to deny any value to womens liberation or the sexual revolution,they instead blame these movements for a purported crisis in values. A crisis of their own creation, since their so called family values are a narrow definition of social reality.

" Reich's main, if somewhat eccentric, contribution to the study of collective behavior comes from his Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, first published in German in 1933, later revised, and finally published in English translation in 1946. Here Reich claims to combine the best insights of Freud and Marx to produce a definitive account of the role the masses played, in both economic and psychological terms, in the success of fascism. For Reich, fascism is ultimately the result of the irrational structure of the "mass individual." Any social change depends on mass action: no leader can corrupt an unwilling mass. But the members of the masses do not act in a rational, predictable fashion. Starting from a Marxian concept of the oppressed working class, what Reich finds to be irrational is the fact that starving workers don't strike or steal bread. Mass psychology's task, in Reich's view, is to explain the difference between economic conditions and "characterological" ones-thus accounting for the reactionary nature of some workers, despite their economic repression. He hypothesizes that every social structure creates for itself in the masses of its members the psychological structure which it needs for its main purposes-beyond simple economic inhibition. In modern society, this involves the sexual repression of the working individual. Thus the need for "sex economic" mass psychology, an account of mass behavior which takes into account the various forces that have prohibited the masses from freely expressing their sexual energy and have thus subverted them into betraying their self-interest." From Standford University Humanities Laboratory: Crowds, Theorists.