Reimut Reiche N LB Sexuality and Class Struggle First published as Sexualität und Klassenkamp by Verlag Neue Kritik, 1968 © Verlag Neue Kritik, 1968 This edition first published 1970 Translated from the German by Susan Bennett Preface and Postscript translated by * David Fembach © NLB, 1970 NLB, 7 Carlisle Street, wi Designed by Gerald Cinamon Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt and printed by Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol S3N 902308 40 8 Author’s note 6 Acknowledgements 6 Preface 7 1. WHAT HAS CLASS STRUGGLE TO DO WITH SEXUALITY ? 13 2. THE CHANGING ROLE OF SEXUAL OPPRESSION 26 Repressive role of sexuality in early and in classic capitalism 37 Manipulative integration of sexuality in late capitalism 44 3. THE ENFORCEMENT OF SEXUAL CONFORMITY 52 Differences in male and female sexual practice 52 Class differences in contemporary sexual practice 54 The class function of sex education 60 4. THE REPRESSIVE CONQUEST OF MODERN NERVOUS ILLNESS 74 Perpetual puberty and free-floating sexuality 84 Narcissism and the genital façade 89 5. EXAMPLES OF LATE-CAPITALIST SEXUAL PRACTICE 99 Promiscuity as the completion of marriage 99 Dating as preparation for marriage 108 Latent homosexuality and the ‘convergence’ of the sexes 115 6. DEFENSIVE ACTION AGAINST REPRESSIVE DESUBLIMATION 121 7. CURRENT PROBLEMS OF DEFENSIVE ACTION I37 ‘Total sexual freedom’ 137 The politics of puberty 141 The Communes 146 Love and fidelity 156 Postscript 1970 167 Author’s note: I would like to thank all the comrades who took part in the seminars on ‘Sexuality and Political Power’ organized by the Argument Club in West Berlin in 1963 and 1964 and by the SDS - the German Socialist Student Movement - elsewhere, as well as all those who participated in the many meetings and discussions of the AUSS - Independent High-School Students’ Action Centre - whose views forced me to think out my own and to write this book. Acknowledgement: Thanks are due to The Hogarth Press for their kind permission to quote from The Standard Edition of the Com­ plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Preface to the English Edition Sexuality and Class Struggle was written in West Germany in the winter of 1967-8 at the time of the great Vietnam demonstra­ tions and the first school strikes, before the wave of university occupations began, and between the first police killing of a student (2 June 1967) and the attempted assassination of Rudi Dutschke (Easter 1968). University occupations, experiments in collective child upbringing, the autonomous organization of study and education, instigation of revolts in the superstructure and actions to expose ‘consumer terrorism5 - all of which formed the main period of ‘self-organization’ - had not yet been crys­ tallized either in our heads or in our practice. This period and its birth-pangs can only be interpreted in retrospect as a first step towards the reconstruction of the revolutionary movement in West Germany. At the time it was no more than a protest move­ ment; this was also true of its temporary leaders and theorists, conscious socialists or highly educated Marxist though they may have been as individuals. We ourselves termed this protest movement the ‘anti-authoritarian movement’. The name APO - extra-parliamentary opposition - was given it (and especially its outer periphery) by the bourgeois press ; it corresponds neither to our theories at that time, nor to our form of organization, nor - so far - to our political aims. To begin with the movement was highly practical and deeply moral; practical, in so far as it broke sharply with the purely theoretical reflections of university Marxists and the Frankfurt School of critical theory, as also with the clandestine revisionism and paper alliances of the Commun­ ist Party; moral, in so far as the movement derived its initial political and emotional force by making people aware of the suppressed promises of bourgeois emancipation. The protest movement was however just as abstract in its practical activist concerns as it was historically necessary. It was necessary, in order to recreate as a general political experience the dimension of a conscious and collective historical process which had been sub­ merged in . the most developed and technologically advanced class societies. 8 Due to fascism and its posthumous effects in the reconstruc­ tion period of capitalist democracy, the tradition of the revolu­ tionary workers’ movement has nowhere been so lastingly destroyed as in Germany. Our movement was abstract as we could find no way of connecting in practice the visible violence of imperialism with the forms of violent social relations within the countries of late capitalism, for the latter were necessarily concealed by morality, law and the rise in standard of living, in a manner which we were impotent to confront. Owing to the his­ toric break in the revolutionary tradition, our hopes of bourgeois emancipation and proletarian revolution, and bourgeois en­ lightenment and proletarian class consciousness, converged in our political theory and separated in our practice to a greater extent than in the period of open class straggle that preceded fascism. Compared with these political problems, particular aspects of which are discussed in Sexuality and Class Struggle, the book’s treatment of sexual theory or psycho-analysis proper is of lesser importance. The work was never conceived as a contribution to sexual theory or psycho-analysis. What nevertheless appears as such in the book is very often the result of my own private observations ~ with all the subjective distortions which affect intellectual products, all the more when they are concerned with psychological processes. But what gives the book the character of a political document is not my private work. Certainly I wrote it myself, but I wrote it in a political situation in which my com­ rades and I were completely absorbed. The book is a direct result of a political experience that was not unique to me, and of theoretical reflections that were still less only my own. So this book is, I believe, not really à document of ‘anti- authoritarian theory’ in the strict sense. I personally am one of the comrades in our movement who developed theoretically and were politically socialized long before the protest movement began, who initiated the movement, became its spokesmen, and, from a certain point on, also its indigenous product. This dis­ tinguished us on the one hand from those of our contemporaries who remained ‘seminar Marxists’ or ‘adepts of critical theory’, and on the other from those comrades for whom the anti­ authoritarian movement played a far more direct and influential role in their own lives and political development. This fact also shows itself at some points in the book (especially, I think, in the treatment of the ‘First Commune’, which is patemalistically sympathetic rather than directly involved). Today the anti­ authoritarian movement is considered as historically terminated Preface g and politically superseded. The stereotype reference to it at all meetings and in all papers of our groups is cthe anti-authoritarian period of the movement’. Historically terminated it certainly is, at least in so far as there simply are no more campaigns or revolts of university or school students which bear the distinguishing features of the action and organization of the anti-authoritarian movement; at most these flare up only sporadically and in backward parts of the country. Whether it has really been superseded in the development of our theory, organization and practice is however still questionable. The protest movement reached a peak in early summer 1968. In summer 1969 for the first time, significant groups came out with the slogans: cWipe out the anti-authoritarian trash’and ‘Liquidate the anti-authoritarian phase’. During this period the anti-authoritarian movement had at first developed consistently. Then it became increasingly blocked by its own limitations until it finally turned into a farce, and for many also a tragedy. The theoretical conceptions and organizational expressions of this development, in their order of appearance, were: dissolution of the whole movement and its reorganization in ‘communes’; self­ organization of study through the setting-up of anti-universities; upbringing of children in anti-authoritarian collectives; re­ organization of the entire private life of all comrades in ‘collec­ tive educational processes’, creation of a ‘counter-milieu’ etc.; forcible demolition of the old university and other exemplary repressive institutions (press monopoly, draft offices, war research centres); reorganization of the movement in clandes­ tine terrorist groups; departure to the hashish underground; and resurrection as class-conscious ‘Marxist-Leninist’ prole­ tarians pledged to the service of the people. Naturally not every group and individual passed through all these stages. However the minority who actually did only epitomized the frantic character which the anti-authoritarian movement indigenously acquired at a specific stage in its development and in which it proceeded to-disintegrate. While Sexuality and Class Struggle was criticized in early 1969 for being not consistent enough in its anti-authoritarianism, already six months later it was classified as an ‘anti-authori­ tarian aberration’. Both criticisms, made at specific phases, have a true and a false aspect. It is correct that I took up a very nebulous, in part even opportunist position on some issues (child education, monogamy). The second criticism is also cor­ rect in so far as the book is not based on any clear class analysis, and the question of the subject of the revolution is answered 10 voluntaristically (viz. the treatment of which class is today com­ batting capitalism, in Chapter i). Also, the way in which capital­ ism affects the organization of instinctual drives was analysed only vis-à-vis consumption, and the effect of the production process itself was scarcely mentioned. However, now that the anti-authoritarian limitations of our movement are ‘superseded’, the reverse danger has arisen of a rigid recantation of all our revolutionary demands, and the con­ sequent decay of our revolutionary legitimacy. Today many comrades and groups seek quite abstractedly to deny the history of their movement, and thereby their own history. This happens in three kinds of way: in a dehumanizing split into theory with­ out practice (‘training’) and practice without theory (work at the ‘base5); in a pragmatic realpolitik bordering dangerously on reformism; in a dogmatic return to the Leninist model of organ­ ization which, in the ahistorical use often made of it among us, becomes an authoritarian and bureaucratic game of strategy, involving ‘a student/workers5 party without workers5. Future political battles and our aim of developing class struggle in the Federal Republic certainly demand an increased degree of organizational discipline. In the anti-authoritarian phase of our movement, we ‘solved5 organizational questions in our characteristic manner of spontaneous voluntarism, by simply failing to distinguish action and organization. We should not now make the reverse errors and ‘solve5 organizational questions by an abstractly dogmatic and rigid voluntarism, by appropri­ ating the ready-made organizational ‘model5 of the Bolshevik party. The devastating consequences that this produces where, as with us, the situation is still not one of real class struggle, can be seen most plainly and most painfully in the acute lack of practical solidarity which now prevails in the movement. During the anti-authoritarian period a permanent ‘emancipation debate5 was carried on which was the spontaneously organized expres­ sion of our cultural revolutionary programme. This demanded of each single comrade a degree of reflection, openness and readiness to change his whole personality which was often so high that many comrades were broken by the psychological pressure. With the end of the anti-authoritarian ‘phase5 this emancipation debate dissolved, on the premiss - in itself correct - that the emancipation debate, as we had conducted it, ex­ pressed our petty-bourgeois class limitations and the psycho­ logizing of political and class questions that followed from this. However the dissolution of the emancipation debate necessarily led to a destruction of our legitimacy, for we did not acquire a Preface ii class and political identity by suddenly acknowledging ourselves Marxist-Leninists. Thus the newly flourishing organizational rigidity and authoritarian allegiance of some ‘Marxist-Leninists’ is only one side, and even a harmless one, of the process through which many comrades hoped to reinforce their class and revolutionary identity. The other side of the same process, much more dangerous for the development of class solidarity and class struggle, is the decay of practical solidarity or, in other words, the collective regression to a petty-bourgeois level of human relations. This regression is a necessary consequence of the mechanistic imitation of the Leninist organizational ‘model’. (I am in no way saying that the Leninist party principle is ‘repres­ sive’ in itself; on the contrary, the Bolshevik party in its time expressed both the tasks and the needs of the revolutionary vanguard. Only because of this could it become the party of the proletariat.) This regression is expressed in the manifold splits which have no real political explanation and hence scarcely any elucidatory function; in the tactical manoeuvres and deceptions within the movement, which we so much detested and which were quite new to us; in the defamation and, most tragically, in the isolation of and damage done to comrades who had earlier found their political and emotional identity ‘in the movement’. The developments just described are only tendencies within a necessary process of clarification for our movement. I interpret them in no way as signalling a decline of the movement. Never­ theless, in view of these tendencies Sexuality and Class Struggle can be said to display a naïve optimism and also a fundamental vagueness, marking both the strength and the intrinsic limits of our movement. Reimut Reiche Frankfurt, May igjo