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848 Community Space is a manifestation of the sexual liberation movement. But most of us act as if our personal pleasure is its source and goal. We act this way while the liberation movement dies out and authoritarians retake control of the country. We aren't aware that this sexual liberation movement was built for us by our predecessors to counteract these authoritarians. We hardly even know where our movement came from.
Very widely read pro-sex theorists of the '60s era, Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm, had been part of a school in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s. There they learned an approach to combating Fascism. After moving to America they termed it Authoritarianism, and they termed their anarchist response Anti-Authoritarianism. With Paul Goodman, the main theorist of Gestalt, they successfully infiltrated all of the universities in the US, carrying the idea that sexual satisfaction is healthy, increases intelligence and compassion, and is central to human culture. They succeeded in gashing huge holes in the Puritan blue-blood culture which had dominated this country since its original, God-granted invasion.
Their teacher and primary inspiration in Frankfurt had been Wilhelm Reich. To our credit, most of us have heard of Reich, but to read him, and to understand how he saw Fascism taking control, and what he did to combat it, can give us great perspective on the issues we face in this born-again Republican dementia. And this perspective may inspire us to different actions than our swelling genitals and their excretions.
Reich may be the only author whose books were actually banned and burned in 1950s America. He died in an American prison, and his research laboratory, including lab notes and inventions, was burned and destroyed by US government agents. it is still not easy to find out about this history.
Prior to World War I, the dominant empire in central Europe had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The defeat of this feudal empire, the most powerful in Europe for hundreds of years, provided rich spoils for the new capitalist powers of England, France, and the US. The ruling classes of these national-states took over large portions of Germany, Poland, Hungary, even Italy, that had all been part of Austro-Hungary. This capitalist takeover displaced and humiliated the old regime's military and religious administrative class. huge numbers of educated gentry, expecting to be rulers, found themselves without estates, serfs, or in some
cases income of any kind. They found themselves without authority and perhaps most upsetting, they no longer had an authority to obey. This feeling of loss and victimization was the fundamental glue of Fascism which emerged, amongst this displaced class of people. Conceived in Vienna, by the returned and humiliated gentry of the old regime, the Fascist reaction proposed to undo the conquest of North Europe by Romans, Christians, and
Jews. Obeying an authoritarian, Pagan-identified leader, Fascism revived the so-called Pagan spirit of the pre-Christian great Motherland as the source of all power.
Thousands of these reactionary gentry organized in Vienna, the capital city of the old empire, a city that was also the center of Social Democracy. In 1928 a General Strike engulfed that city. The strike had been triggered by a court verdict convicting labor leaders to death. The town, the fallen capital, the center of the new Fascist ideology, went to war with itself for ten days. The Justice building was burned to the ground, and the state armies were shooting and bayoneting strikers in the old capital's streets. The workers had organized their own armies with funds from their unions and from the socialist parties. With guns and barracks, the unions had prepared to fight for control against the state and the Fascists.
Wilhelm Reich was a young doctor who had gone to aid the wounded. He witnessed the workers' army turning away from the conflict, seemingly unable to stand firm on their own behalf. He watched the working class in uniforms murdering the working class in street clothes over the ideas of their respective leaders. Reich saw the careful plans and rational expectations of a workers' self-defense army retreating at the moment of greatest need. Seeing them unable to act directly in their own interests despite foreknowledge, Reich concluded that working-class people needed more than organization and planning to win their freedom...
Reich had already opened the first public mental health clinic in the world, taking poor and working people as patients. He had already been the first Western mental health practitioner to touch his patients' bodies, and to see life energy struggling in those bodies for expression.
He used heavy breathing as a way of increasing that life. He moved energy and he got patients to scream and cry and release and he saw the life inside them...
Soon after the General Strike, Reich moved to Frankfurt, Germany, and there he organized a response. He called it the Sexual Freedom League. Sexual freedom became his strategy for combating Fascism. He saw that the youth yearned for self-expression, and that the Socialist and Communist Parties offered them only intellectual abstractions for identities. Corporal punishment in schools and at home was the rule. The Fascists attracted most of the city's youth by engaging their longing for prideful rebellion and mystical union, while the leftists lost them by offering the rational and mechanical alternative of a workers' state.
The Sexual Freedom League grew to hundreds of thousands of members. It advocated sexual choice, taught contraception, provided forums for discussion of intimate and public matters as the domain of choice and expression. It advocated women's sexual choice as well as men's. Soon the leftist parties that had endorsed and allied with the Sexual Freedom league became frightened and abandoned it. In his book of that period,
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich proposed workplace autonomy and self-management rather than Party control. But even this sexual liberation was too isolated, perhaps too late. Hitler took over the city, and soon thereafter, the nation. Many of Reich's students left Frankfurt and emigrated to the US, and became luminaries of our liberation here...
It is too easy to think this all happened so far away that it has no impact. I think it is one of our most important tasks to discuss this history. Our lives, our sexuality, our liberation are bound up with it.
-- Neil MacLean
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