Russia witnessed reactionary, antisexual developments.
His disappointments in America were not of the kind to lead him back to his
Marxist political orientation. Thus, he found the American trade union movement very mid-
dle class. He never expressed the fondness for the industrial worker of America that he had
felt for the European proletariat. He did have a positive regard for the rural Maine crafts-
men, but such workers were not radical or even politically active.
Most important to the evolution of his social concepts was the totality of his work.
His investigations of orgone energy permitted him to see more vividly than ever how
blocked the flow of this energy was in human beings. His research on cancer and schizo-
phrenia in the 19405 pointed to an early development of such blocks and highlighted how
difficult they were to remove once they became chronic. His optimism about the average
human being, badly damaged by his disillusionment with the Russian experiment, dimin-
ished still further. Political appeals, right or left, seemed ever more like a pandering to the
public. The government in power, the Jews, the bosses, the Bolsheviks were all to blame, but
never the average citizen with his armoring and his resulting fear of freedom and responsi-
bility. For Reich in the 1940s it was precisely the masses themselves who had become the
chief obstacle to human freedom: “As a result of thousands of years of social and educa-
tional warping,the masses ofthe people have become biologically rigid and incapable of
freedom. They are no longer capable of organizing a peaceful living-together.”^14
The changes in his social thinking led Reich to ponder a good deal before he
brought out The Mass Psychology of Fascismin an American edition in 1946. The original text,
published in German in 1933, brimmed with Socialist fervor. In going over it in 1943, Reich
noted that most of the book had stood the test of time: “I ... found that every word per-
taining to sex-economy was as valid as years previously while every party slogan which had
found its way into the book had become meaningless.”^15 What Reich did was to make rel-
atively minor but significant changes in the text to reflect his current position, which was
becoming evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The words “Communist” and “Socialist”
were replaced by “progressive.” “Class consciousness” became “work consciousness” or
“social responsibility.”
The change in Reich’s social thought represented more than just a shift from a rev-
olutionary outlook. At one level, he had come to despair of politics itself. As he expressed
it: “Put an end to all politics! Turn to the practical tasks of real life!” To replace politics,
Reich introduced the concept of “work democracy” (1946). By work democracy he meant
the “natural process of love, work, and knowledge which has always governed economy and
the social and cultural life ofman and always will, as long as there is a human society. Work
democracy is the sum total of all naturally developed and developing life functions which
organically govern rational human relationships.”^16
As Paul Goodman noted,Reich’s formulation of work democracy had much in
common with anarchism^17. The difference between Reich’s approach and those of anar-
chist groups was that Reich did not advance work democracy as a new political goal or
organize a new political movement around it. He regarded it as the natural form of social
298 Myron SharafFury On Earth