between Marxist descriptions of such clashes and what he witnessed. The rhetoric had the
“capitalists” fighting the “workers.” For Reich, on the other hand, there were only workers
in uniforms shooting at workers without uniforms^4.
Reich was exaggerating a little. Marxist theory did not say that capitalists fought
workers; rather, the agentsof capitalists, e.g., the police, fought workers. Reich’s very naivete
allowed him to be impressed by simple facts without the distortion of a highly refined the-
oretical lens. Before July 15, Reich was a man of the political left, although he had not care-
fully studied social theory in general or Marxism in particular. His intense scrutiny of Marx
and Engels came after these events.
When Reich arrived home to tell his wife what was happening, she went with him
to see the events for herself. So Reich and Annie joined the crowd still watching the court-
house fire. A police cordon started to move toward them. When they were a short distance
from the crowd, an officer gave the command to fire. Reich jumped behind a tree and pulled
his wife after him.
The shooting lasted three hours, and left eighty-nine people dead and over a thou-
sand wounded. Vienna had not seen such carnage in the streets since the days of the 1848
revolution.
Reich then describes how it felt to be a demonstrator and how the various factions
looked to an involved and extremely curious participant. Most striking to Reich was his
impression of the police. He emphasized not their brutality but their mechanicalness. Reich
suddenly saw them as rigid automatons. He, too, he realized, had been just such a robot
when he fired on the enemy in World War I^5.
Even though Reich felt a strong desire to throw himself upon the police, he
restrained it. At the time he believed that he had held back out of cowardice. Reich’s atti-
tudes toward the various political factions were charged with feeling. He was indignant at the
vacillation of the Social Democratic leadership, particularly its failure to have the
Schutzbund participate in the demonstration.He was enraged by the Christian Socialist
Party,which he saw as triggering the events through the orders to the police. At the time he
was quite sympathetic to the Communist Party, then a minuscule group with only several
thousand members throughout Austria.He expected the leaders of the party to take an
active role in “leading and organizing” the spontaneous demonstrations of July 15; he
excused their absence from events on the grounds that they were “still preparing them-
selves” And on the same day, Reich enrolled in a medical group affiliated with the
Communist Party^6.
Reich came to recognize that the Communists were far too few to be an effective
lever for change, and placed his more realistic hopes on the “left opposition” group within
the Social Democratic Party, which shared Reich’s views of its weak and vacillating party
leaders.But he did not allow this Social Democratic commitment to stop him from partici-
pating in the Communist Party, even though such action could be grounds for censure, and
possibly expulsion, by the Social Democrats. So, too, could the stringent criticisms Reich
began to make ofthe party leadership. However much he may have regretted or downplayed
122 Myron SharafFury On Earth