Record of a Friendship

My blessings on you and wife and the kiddie. Let's hope that by the
time he is of military age the war will be against poverty and ignorance
only.
[N eill included with this letter a page of his notes on two issues
of the Journal (of Sex-Economy and Orgone Research), Vol. II,
nos. 2 and 3, which Reich had asked him to comment on.]
Deliberately put off reading it fully in case it should influence the book
I was writing.
You make a splendid case for Work Democracy. Analysis of politics
most masterly; I agree with all you say about them. But I criticise the
style. May be partly the translation, but I feel you are over-explanatory,
using a page to rub in a point that might be tersely put in a sentence.
More important criticism is that you leave it all so vague. You want no
organisation, but when your doctor and plumber and teacher in the
village want to discuss a new water supply you are in danger of bureauc­
racy at once, for some fellow with a gift for talking will get up and
say: "You guys, you leave this to me. I'm a teacher with short hours
and have more time on my hands than you do. I'll take on to organise
the bloody thing." And when you apply that to the State and a new
housing plan is put forward, someone resembling the politician of today
will be commissioned to carry it out, and all your teachers and trades­
men will be too busy at their jobs to watch him and see he does what
they want. The politician today does in his way represent workers ...
You will always require executives to carry out national work and
laws, and the moment they are tempted to serve even secretly a vested
interest they will become politicians. So that your W[ork] Dem[ocrac]y
postulates first the public ownership of all means of production, that is
socialism. True, we see the Soviet abolish co-education, but on the other
hand isn't Russia a country without politics? Yet without its politicians
why does it regress? Because as you say, the people are not ready for
democracy. The men who started the 1917 revolution are now old,
anti-youth, anti-life, and that is a problem not yet faced-the father role
which becomes conservative, timid, safety-firstish against youth.
I can't see any practical Work Demy until schools like S'hill are many
and powerful in influence. Today your electrician after a hard day's
work goes to his local political meeting as a relaxation ... same as I
play golf and you ski, or as I love to talk to an engineer about lathe
work rather than talk to a fellow teacher about kids or psychology. And
are you right in saying that the political man is always against? They are
only against the guys who have another opinion. Politics are only the