else could be described as artificial, excessive,and degenerate.“How does one
recognize the character traits of the true revolutionary?”Reich asked in 1934,
soundingalmostlike aparty functionary:“Plain outer composure,abilityto en-
gage directlywith people, simple, natural demeanor in sexual matters, plain, no
posing orranting,not onlyanemotional but primarilyarational commitment to
socialism, no calcification of the party apparatus, no patriarchal attitude toward
women and children.”²⁴
The difficulties of reconcilingReich’soriginal program ofatransgressive
proletarian sexuality with this normative description of the truerevolutionary
as communist ascetic cannot be explainedthrough the different political situa-
tions in RedVienna and Reich’sCopenhagen exile or through the changingpri-
orities of an international antifascistPopularFront.Instead both positions will
be used hereto reveal continuities in Reich’sthought from earlyobservations
about the unbounded sexuality of the modern masses to laterreflections on
the protoplasmic flows that represent the somatic sourceoflife itself.Translated
into Marxist terms,these life energies are the main concern of what Reich,during
theWeimaryears, calls the sex economy, the system of libidinal blockagesand
ossifications that organizes sexual repression underconditions of monopolycap-
italism. Manyofthese ideas werefirst presented inDie Funktiondes Orgasmus
(1928,TheFunction of the Orgasm), an influential pamphlet about the impor-
tance of orgasmic potencyfor emotional health and the transformative quality
of what he calls full-body genital orgasm. His bioenergetic approach allows
Reichto combine the politics of sex and the economics of desire in what,at
the time, appearedasthe most compellingmodel of explanation for their shared
sources and energies–namely Freudo-Marxism; it also accounts for his main
disagreements with the psychoanalytic concept of(bourgeois) subjectivity.The
theoretical program of sexual economyacknowledgesthe close connection be-
tween the historicallydetermined structure of the drives, beyond the given
amount of somaticenergy,and the social and economic conditions of work-
ing-class life, includingemotional life, undercapitalism.Yethis heavy use of
economyasametaphor eventuallyshifts the argument to another model of bio-
energetic flows and exchanges thatextends the analysisto precapitalisttimes
and includes,rather surprisingly,acritique of patriarchy. Hissurprising turn
to anthropological perspectivesreflects the recognition that the problem of
what he calls self-subjugation is older thancapitalism and must in fact be locat-
Ernst Parell [i.e.,Wilhelm Reich],Wasist Klassenbewußtsein?Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion über
die Neuformierung der Arbeiterbewegung(Copenhagen: Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 1934), 68–69.
The treatise was first published inZeitschriftfürpolitischePsychologie und Sexualökonomie,
the journal of the Sex-Polmovement.
WilhelmReichand the Politics of Proletarian Sexuality 297