New Left Review I/64, November-December 1970

David Fernbach

Sexual Aggression and Political Practice

The problematic of Reimut Reiche’s Sexuality and Class Struggle [*] R. Reiche: Sexuality and Class Struggle, published by NLB, 1970. is still largely foreign to socialist thought in Britain. In Germany, however, the necessity for Marxists to supplement their revolutionary theory in the light of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was already made clear by the rise of Hitlerism. Besides other mistakes, the kpd failed completely to understand the psychological reservoirs that the Nazi movement drew on, despite the warnings of such Marxist intellectuals as Ernst Bloch, who wrote in 1930 that ‘the vulgar Marxists are not keeping watch on what is happening to primitive and utopian trends. The Nazis are already occupying this territory, and it will be an important one’ (Inheritance of Our Time). In the ’thirties and ’forties the theorists of the Frankfurt School attempted to use both Marx and Freud to interpret the Nazi phenomenon, but works such as their Studies in Authority and the Family (Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse et al.), despite their undoubted value, completely lack a political and strategic dimension. In the advanced capitalist countries today, the necessity of integrating Freud into revolutionary theory has been far more widely accepted in the new student-based anticapitalist movements than it ever was in the old Communist Parties. This is particularly so in Germany, where the work of the Frankfurt School was rediscovered by the student movement in the early ’sixties, and in North America, where the later works of Marcuse, distinguished from his Frankfurt colleagues by a far firmer political commitment, have been most influential. In both countries the following assumptions are now widely accepted:

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