The Sexual Politics of Wilhelm Reich (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

What has prevented the growth of Socialist consciousness amongst the working class even though the material conditions for the immediate establishment of Socialism have been in existence for at least three-quarters of a century? Why, when Socialism is so obviously in their interest, do workers continue to support and maintain capitalism? Why is the political behaviour of the working class so irrational?

For Wilhelm Reich the answer could be summed up in two words: sexual repression. In his view, the restrictions on sexual activity imposed through the father-dominated family structure produced people dependent on authority and incapable of independent thought and action.

Reich was born in Dobrzynica in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1897, the son of German-speaking Jewish parents. As a medical student in Vienna after the first world war he became interested first in the physiology and then in the psychology of sex. He joined the circle around Freud, the psychoanalyst, and became one of his close disciples.

Instinct and Energy

Freud had been teaching since before the turn of the century that most mental illness was caused by “sexual repression” dating from early childhood; and that every human being was born with a “sexual instinct” which had to be tamed before he could become a fit member of society and that in fact this is what, from the psychological point of view, growing up and becoming socialized meant. “Instinct” is a notoriously vague word, but for Freud it was more than just a description of how people do in fact behave; he speculated that it did have a real physical basis in the human body and that sooner or later science would discover the precise chemical formula for “sexual energy”. For Freud was, in principle, a materialist who believed that men’s thoughts, conscious and “unconscious”, could ultimately be explained in terms of some chemical change in the human body. So when Freud spoke of “sexual energy” he meant the word “energy” to be understood literally. For him sexual repression was not just the psychological process of mentally suppressing sexual ideas but was also a real physical process of suppressing or diverting real bodily energy of some sort.

Or so Freud speculated, though nothing resembling any such “sexual energy” has yet been discovered, a fact which must reflect adversely on his theories generally — and also of course on those derived from them such as Reich’s. Reich was particularly interested in this aspect of Freudian psychology and clinically investigated bodily tensions associated with sex. Later, in 1939, he was to claim — without any scientifically acceptable evidence — to have actually discovered what “sexual energy” really was: apparently it wasn’t chemical after all but electrical!

Communist Party

But it is not the years of Reich’s pathetic decline into a charlatan claiming to be able to cure cancer by means of his “orgone box” (he died in 1957 in an American jail) that are of interest to Socialists. For, while working with Freud in the 1920’s, he came to the conclusion that all the Freudian psychoanalysts were doing was to patch up mentally sick individuals and send them back into the society whose sexual code had originally made them sick. He felt that the real solution to the problem of mental illness caused by sexual misery lay in transforming society. To this end in 1928 he joined the Austrian Communist Party. In 1930 he moved to Berlin and joined the German Communist Party (KPD). At the same time he was active in groups which combined sex education and calls for an end to legal restrictions on sex with anti-capitalist agitation. Not surprisingly really, his views on sex were not always to the liking of the leaders of the KPD, partly because they regarded the struggle for sexual reform as a diversion from their struggle for political power and partly because they themselves probably harboured certain prejudices about sex. Eventually in 1932 Reich was expelled.

Reich was not simply a fellow-travelling Communist Party sympathizer but an active member during a period when the Party was violently denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists”. He was, and re­mained for some years after his expulsion, a thorough­ going Leninist firmly believing in the need for a “revo­lutionary leadership” to lead the masses in a violent assault on the capitalist State. His criticism of the German Communist Party for its failure to prevent the rise of Hitler, as expressed in the original version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and his pam­phlet What is Class Consciousness? amounts to a charge that because of their attitude to sex they left the way clear for Hitler to exploit the sexual misery of the masses for political ends; whereas, says Reich, this is what the KPD should have been doing and would have been doing if they had followed his advice.

To lead the Masses

It is the same with his explanation for the failure of the Russian revolution given in the later versions of The Sexual Revolution. (It is important to realize that Reich changed successive editions of his works in line with his changing views and that the English translation of this work and of The Mass Psychology of Fascism date from 1945 and so were considerably different from the original German versions of 1930 and 1933 respectively). According to Reich, Russia went off the rails because the Bolshevik government had failed to carry out properly the sexual liberation of the Russian people. As a result the Russian masses remained dependent on authority and incapable of democratic self-management so making a dictatorship inevitable.

This argument still accepts Lenin’s view that under capitalism the workers are incapable of reaching a full Socialist consciousness and so have to be led by a vanguard party and that the task of Socialist education of the majority cannot begin until after the seizure of power by the vanguard party. Reich’s criticism was essentially only that the Bolsheviks failed because they had not carried out their own theories properly — with the implication that if they had Russia would not have “degenerated” into the Stalinist dic­tatorship.

But it was Bolshevik theory itself that was wrong not its application. The vast majority of workers will have to become conscious Socialists before their political party (a mass democratic party rather than a vanguard of would-be leaders, of course) wins power. In the absence of such a Socialist majority, any minority which seizes power, no matter how sincerely they may desire Socialism, cannot but become a new ruling class because they would have no alternative but to run, or as in Russia in 1917 to develop, capitalism. The Bolsheviks’ coup was doomed, even before it was carried out, both by the economic backwardness of Russia and by the lack of Socialist consciousness (as opposed to mere mass discontent with the old order) of the Russian workers. It would not have been saved by a more liberal sex policy.

Change of Mind

Reich’s belief that Leninist tactics (which, after all, involve authoritarian leadership) could lead to a free society in which people would be able to manage their affairs without leaders was a glaring contradiction. For how, on his own theory, could people still psychologically dependent on leaders come to establish a society without leaders? When Reich was in the Communist Party and for some years after he clearly thought that after the revolutionary leaders had power it would be up to them to take steps to the masses’ psychological dependence on them by pursuing a liberal sex policy. In other words, the workers were not to emancipate themselves, but were to he emancipated by their leaders. A view quite in accord with Leninism, but equally quite opposed to Marxism. To be fair, Reich later, when in exile in America, came to see this contradiction. It led him to abandon Leninism (which he imagined to be Marxism) as the way to establish a free society. Instead he came to think that before such a society (which he now called “work-democracy” rather than “socialism”) could be established people must have ceased to be psychologically dependent on leaders and have become capable of the democratic self-management of their own affairs. In fact he even argued that, in the absence of this any attempt to establish a free society would lead rather to state capitalism. This is how he characterised Russia in his 1945 Introduction to the Third, English version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

“In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition ‘capitalism’ does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific ‘capitalist mode of production’; that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system con­tinues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack respon­sibility and to crave authority.” (His emphasis).

Repression or Indoctrination ?

By this time Reich had become something of a gradualist, believing that the free society he wished to see would come when sufficient individuals had cone to liberate themselves sexually. This is probably why his ideas are so popular in certain circles today: they provide a seemingly satisfactory ideology for the current rebellion within capitalism against out-dated sexual codes. However, these same people — the sexual rebels — find some of his views on sex itself embarrassing. For, as a Freudian, Reich believed that there was a biologically natural form of sexual behaviour, even though distorted by class society. He labelled homosexuality as “unnatural” (though harm­less) and argued that women needed men in order to experience full sexual pleasure — views highly embarrassing to both gay liberation and women’s liberation.

But it is precisely because Freud’s theories posit a fixed “human nature”, at least in relation to sexual behaviour, that Marxists have been doubtful about their validity. Sexual behaviour is but one kind of social behaviour and, as such, socially not biologically deter­mined. So no one form of sexual behaviour can be said to be more “natural” than any other. Ironically then, it is Marx rather than Freud who provides the better argument for sexual tolerance! But then the Socialist tradition, before even Freud was born, championed sexual freedom and “free love”, i.e., a society in which people would be free to have sex without first having to get a licence from the Church or State. The struggle for Socialism has always been, among other things of course, a struggle for a rational attitude to sex and part of Socialist consciousness is being free from prejudices about sex (the inferiority of women, discrimination against homosexuals, etc).

But what about Reich’s, or rather his followers’, explanation for the irrational behaviour of the working class in keeping capitalism going? Is it really because workers are sexually repressed by the father-dominated families they grew up in? Many uncritically accept that it is, but for this to be true so would Freud’s speculations about the existence of some measurable “sexual energy”. The whole theory of sexual repression stands or falls on the existence of such energy, even more for Reich than for Freud since all his psychological theories depend on it. Yet there is no scientifically acceptable evidence whatsoever for the existence of any such thing, only Reich’s experiments which deceived nobody but himself. Sexual restrictions are bad for people’s health but they cannot be blamed also for the lack of Socialist consciousness any more than they can be blamed for the rise of fascism or the failure of the Russian revolution. Nor is there any reason to suppose that their removal would be in any way incompatible with capitalism. The most that can be said for Reich is that he did argue a good case for a rational attitude to sex; most of his book The Sexual Revolution is well worth reading just for this.

The explanation is much simpler: the success of the ruling class in directly (as opposed to indirectly via sexual repression) inculcating their ideas into the minds of the workers through the process of learning. The workers’ acceptance of capitalist political and social ideas, like their other ideas, is learned from other people — their parents, their schoolteachers, their workmates, the press, television — and so derived from society and is not a reflection of the suppression of some biologically natural behaviour as Reich claims. It follows therefore that the struggle against capitalist ideology must be a struggle to spread Socialist ideas as such and not a campaign for sexual reform.

Adam Buick

A New Cure for an Old Disease. (1914)

Book Review from the March 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

"The Great Scourge and How to End it,” by Christabel Pankhurst, (LL.B. London : E. Pankhurst, Lincoln’s Inn House, Kingsway.)

The average person in the street, if sounded upon, the agitation conducted by the "Peths" and the "Panks" would be found to entertain the idea that the end and object of it all is the obtaining of Parliamentary suffrage for women. To be told that the vote for women is anything but an end in itself; that the agitation for the vote is but a part of a wide feminist movement, would cause these inestimable persons considerable surprise. For this the propaganda is no doubt to be blamed. At any rate, Miss Christabel Pankhurst's book, "The Great Scourge and How to End it," will do little to dispel the idea, for from cover to cover it bears the obvious impress of having been produced, not with the object of contributing to the suppression of the "Great Scourge," but for the purpose of providing another peg whereon to hang the lying legend : "Votes for Women."

For the purposes of this review Miss Pankhurst's book may be divided into two portions— her facts, and her "arguments." Regarding the former, our author tells us that "men's favourite method of arguing against women is to deny their statements of fact." Thus is the present scribe disarmed on the very point of denying the "statement of fact" set forth in the words (p. 77): "as the Bible tells us, the sins of the fathers are visited in the form of syphilitic maladies upon their children and their children's children." If it were not that it would be "so like a man," I would have suggested that when the Lord promised to "visit, the sins of the fathers upon the children," he did not, according to the Bible, indicate syphilis as the means.

However, I am not going to deny Miss Pankhurst's statements of fact. On the contrary, I cheerfully admit that they are gruesome enough to be worth the price of the book. But then the "arguments" fully justify one in demanding one's shilling back.

The "Great Scourge," of course, is sexual disease, concerning the widespread prevalence of which Miss Pankhurst adduces much authoritative evidence. But when she says in the introduction, "in the following pages will be found a proposed cure for the great evil in question," one knows from experience what to expect. In the Suffragist eye the cure for every ill is "Votes for Women" (occasionally in conjunction with something else just about as pertinent).

"The cause of sexual disease," says Miss Pankhurst (p. 13), "is the subjection of women," and (p. 21) "the only cure is Votes for Women." In between these two statements she manages, very incautiously, to squeeze another, which makes it a very easy matter to tumble the whole sophistic fabric of her argument about her ears. The statement is (p. 19) referring to the sufferings of women due to sexual disease, "so long as the subjection of women endures and is confirmed by law and custom, so long will the race be injured and degraded." To show, then, that the enfranchisement of women of itself will make no difference to their position of subjection (to use Miss Pankhurst's term without admitting any special subjection of women), is to dispose of the author's argument that "Votes for Women " is a cure for the evils she embraces within the title of the "Great Scourge."

Let us take, first of all, Miss Pankhurst's statement on page VIII (Introduction) : "Votes for Women will strike at the Great Scourge in many ways. When they are citizens women will have the power to secure the enactment of laws for their protection, and to strengthen their economic position." The arguments on pages 116-117 give to the latter portion of this statement the meaning that the vote is necessary to enable women to work for wages, and will have the effect of enabling them to do so. The claim on page 22 that "the weapon of the vote will enable them [women] to break down existing barriers to honest livelihood" confirms this view. Other passages in the book also show that it is contended that the enfranchisement of women is going to give them such a measure of economic freedom as will obviate the need for any of them to resort to prostitution. Out of a bewildering jumble this appears to be the way of the cure of the "Great Scourge."

Now this is sheer nonsense. Nobody but the Suffragist requires to be told that, as far as it can materially affect the question of prostitution, wage-slavery is open to women to-day. In one or two directions, aspirants to which are hardly the women whom economic pressure forces into selling themselves upon the streets (the law and professional politics may be instanced) women are debarred by law. All other careers, such as they are, are legally open to women, hence, whatever the reason they fail to establish themselves in certain avocations filled exclusively by men, it is not due to any legal barrier, and for that reason is not to be affected by votes for women.

Of course, it may be argued that the enfranchisement of women will enable them to secure such reforms in the customary matrimonial arrangements as will set married women free for the labour market. Indeed, this line of argument is foreshadowed on page 115, where our author tells us that "a great bulwark of sex subjection" (which we have already been told is the cause of prostitution), is that "a married woman must derive her livelihood from her husband—must eat out of his hand, as it were."

Unfortunately for the success of this argument, it cannot be denied thnt prostitution by no means depends for its votaries upon married women. On the contrary, the ranks of the "unfortunate class" are composed for the most part of women who have never had the opportunity of eating out of a husband's hand. They have needed no women's franchise to make them "economically independent" (in Miss Pankhurst's sense of the term). The labour market has been as freely open to them as to men. They have had the same prerogative that male wage-workers have—the prerogative of selling their labour power when there is a demand for it.

Women, both married and unmarried, have not had to wait for votes for women in order to achieve this "economic freedom." It has been thrust upon them by the development of the capitalist system of production. It is therefore absurd to claim that Votes for Women are going to abolish prostitution by "breaking down the barrier to honest livelihood." That barrier, as far almost as it can be broken down under the conditions resolutely clung to by the eminently capitalistic W.S.P.U., is so broken down. The law stands in the way in the case of but one or two professions which, if they loom large with importance in the eyes of certain ambitious, axe-grinding "blue-stockings," can hardly affect the general conditions which drive women into the horrors of prostitution.

As a matter of fact, nothing has contributed more largely to the increase of prostitution than the widespread entry of women into industry. Household service, at all events, yielded a fairly secure subsistence, and the woman who did "eat from her husband's hand," had not, so long as she could do so, to take the desperate step of an unemployed and despairing bread-winner. But when the development of machinery dragged girls and women into the factory (which in Miss Pankhurst's view was giving them economic independence), it placed not only their labour-power, but also their sexual attributes, at the service and disposal of the master class.

It has been admitted by "captains of industry" that prostitution is a pillar of their system. It has been admitted that the low wages they pay their female workers are rendered possible only by the latter laying their virtue on the altar of their employers' balance sheet—by them selling their bodies in order that they may get strength to do their employers' work. This is what the so-called economic independence of women has done for the race. That it is humiliating for a married woman to ''eat out of her husband's hand" may be granted. No doubt it comes especially hard to those "spiritually developed" women Miss Pankhurst is so fond of babbling about, who think they need but opportunity to shine in the legislature, the bar, or the pulpit. But speaking of the bulk of women, is it less humiliating to bring even their sex attributes into competition with the labour-power of their fathers, brothers, and husbands ?

The claim that to "break down the barriers to honest livelihood," (meaning to throw open to women every avenue of gaining a living) gives women "economic independence," is rubbish. The proof of this lies in the fact that the barriers are imaginary. The world of industry is open to women, and they find it so little to their liking that they are glad to seek refuge from it in marriage. Just as men who must sell their labour-power must necessarily be in a position of dependence, so also must the women of the same class be economically dependent so long as class distinctions exist. Votes for Women cannot alter this fact, any more than votes for men have altered it in their case. Talk to the miner, driven into the death-trap pit for four or five shillings a day, about his economic independence, or to the locked-out carman or the striking teacher, or the unemployed worker in any trade, and see what the reply will be.

Miss Pankhurst shows her bias when she says (p. 44): "where women are economically dependent upon men, they more readily become the victims of vice." This is utterly false. The truth is that it is where women become more directly dependent upon capitalist exploitation that they more readily become the victims of vice. This exploitation is carried on by the capitalist class —by women as well as men. The hollowness and hypocrisy of all this frothy bluster about curing the ''Great Scourge" are clearly shown by this incontestable fact. For the W.S.P.U. is essentially a rich women's organisation. We know, therefore, that it has no intention of finding a cure for prostitution, since the only cure lies through the overthrow of the class these rich women belong to and the establishment of Socialism.

All the wild words of the Suffragists about the "Great Scourge" being a "women's question" strike mocking echoes from this solid fact. To judge from the vapourings of the Suffragists one would imagine that all social ills are the outcome of male control of society, and that all that is needed to abolish every social evil—at least as far as they affect women and children— is that women shall have the vote. According to these mentally lop-sided cranks all the goodwill, all the tenderness, all the humanity, are resident in the female breast. If one did not know that women of the capitalist class spurned with their dainty shoes the living entrails of the disembowelled heroines of the working class, as they lay on the .pavements of the Paris boulevards in the red days after the Commune!

Just as the men of the master class would run all the risks inseparable from prostitution, even were they multiplied ten-fold, rather than abolish them in the only way in which they can be abolished—that is, at the cost of their social domination—so also would the women of the capitalist class—who are the financial bulwarks of the W.S.P.U.

To sum up, it is a lie to say that the "Great Scourge" is a woman's question : it is a class question ; it is a lie to say that sexual disease is due to the subjection of women : it is due to the subjection of the working class ; it is a lie to say that women's franchise can cure the "Great Scourge" : only the emancipation of the working claas can do that.

A. E. Jacomb

The joy of sex? (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you remember The Joy of Sex? — a best-selling book published a few years ago that aimed to tell people how to get the most out of their sex lives, on the assumption that they didn’t and would pay to find out how to. The assumption seems to have been correct. People did pay so much so that The Joy of Sex was quickly followed by More Joy of Sex.

What’s doubtful, however, is that many people’s sex lives improved after reading these books. In fact most must have come away feeling more joyless than ever, with sexual fulfilment still way out of their reach. Most resigned themselves to regarding sex as a bind, a symbol of failure, a source of fear, frustration or disappointment.

Anyone who doubts that sex is one or more of these things for many people need only look at the amount of problem solving literature about sex on bookshop shelves, the deluge of articles on sex in newspapers and magazines; and most people’s morbid curiosity, profitably exploited by the media, about how others “do it”. Further evidence is the number of people actively seeking help with their sex lives through channels ranging from agony columns and marriage counsellors to group therapy, yoga and ginseng aphrodisiacs.

The emotional turmoil that goes hand in hand with failed sexual relations can often be seen in the divorce rate, wife-battering and the popularity of vicarious sex through pornography. From America the recent Hite Report on Male Sexuality gives a picture of gargantuan sexual frustration and mixed-up emotions among both sexes as well as of immense difficulty experienced by men and women in communicating their feelings and problems to one another.

Why should a natural human function like sex be such a problem for so many people? Why is emotional and sexual harmony among partners so rare? Is it all part of being human? Or is it caused by the way we live at present, by the way society is organised?

Poverty and Pressures
The sex difficulties caused by basic material need are those most clearly attributable to the nature of society. Lack of money to feed a family, poor living conditions or anxiety about employment can only have a negative effect on a relationship. The most important sexual organ is the mind, and minds full of the tension and worry generated by poverty militate strongly against happy sex lives.

Yet even when the bread line or unemployment aren’t an immediate threat, few people seem to get sex right. One reason for this is that most people, even when they’ve no worries about the next meal, live their lives under various kinds of socially-induced pressures. Stress at work, the strain and fatigue of having to rush about or behave in ways that may be desirable for reasons of appearance but don’t really suit you as an individual, the harassment of looking after more children than you really wanted: all these things cause anxieties and tensions that can't be shaken off at will and can only inhibit the relaxation and emotional harmony needed to achieve togetherness.

Compounding this is the system of legal marriage which can make women financially dependent on their husbands and lays strong moral and social obligations on both partners. The feeling of being trapped for life can lead in many cases to resentment, mutual recriminations and worse. Divorce is a way out but a difficult (and for many women a financially impossible) one, in a society which posits monogamy as an ideal.

Artwork by George Meddemmen.

Family Life
But poverty and pressures are only part of the story. If they make a good sex life difficult once we become adults, the basis for sexual frustration is laid at an early age by the oppressive role that today’s society has assigned to the family.

The family under modern capitalism has in common with the family in previous forms of society the function of producing and rearing offspring to continue the species and of equipping them with the skills required for survival. Here however the capitalist family parts company with its predecessors. For, in a society based on wage labour, being equipped for survival means being equipped to sell one’s energies to an employer for a wage or salary. The acquisition of the skills that will enable children to do this is what the family must ensure takes place. If these skills aren’t acquired, a family is considered to have failed. We can see the drive towards this goal through the strong emphasis put on the question of what job children will do when they become adults. One of the most frequent questions children, even very young ones, hear from adults is: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

This helps to explain why the environment in which most children and adolescents grow up is one that frowns on pleasure. It’s not for nothing that the word children most often hear from their parents when they first become mobile is “No!” The imperative of preparing children for the job market and the non-enjoyment adults associate with work, make parents view with suspicion or hostility a child’s tendency to behave as though life were something to be enjoyed rather than suffered. They often make their children miserable and resentful by imposing upon them seemingly irrational rules that restrict their pleasure. These include rules about sex. Young children are discouraged if they are seen to touch or take an interest in “naughty” parts of the body. When they reach adolescence, the rule of the system transmitted through the family is that they keep their sexual feelings under wraps for the time being and only take the wraps off later when they’re more “mature” and “responsible”—when they’ve found a job and resigned themselves to it.

After being denied the natural sexual outlet with the other sex that their newly-awakened feelings dictate, most young people, when they reach the social socially approved age for sex, lack the knowledge and confidence that earlier experience should have given them. They’ve not been able to experiment freely, openly and without guilt with a number of different partners and gain experience in this aspect of growing up as they may have gained it in others. Having also been denied, for the first fifteen or twenty years of their lives, the right to make decisions about so many aspects of their own lives (parents and teachers have done most of their thinking and taken most of their responsibility for them), they inevitably lack practice in making independent and responsible choices about things.

This makes for anything but the mutual consideration, give-and-take and sense of imagination necessary for happy sexual and emotional relationships. It makes rather for feelings of jealousy, lack of trust and honesty, and a profound incapacity to know your own and your partner’s needs.

Is it surprising then that, when people become adults physically, they often remain children sexually and emotionally? They haven’t been given the chance to sort themselves out in this field and, when they reach adulthood, this leads them into all kinds of tangles and frustrations. How many people —even the most apparently responsible and politically and socially aware among us — don't suffer from being stuck somewhere way back in their emotional and sexual development?

This is not to suggest that if society allowed us to live out our early sexual needs when we felt them we would all, as adults, be suited by a single contented relationship for the rest of our lives. Monogamy is no more or less a “natural” form of human behaviour than many others. It’s a mental mould that present-day property-owning society tries to force people into. The needs of individuals, in the sexual field as in others, vary enormously and while, in conditions of genuinely free choice, monogamy might truly suit some people, there is little doubt that it would not suit others. The point is not that monogamy could or should be the norm, but that the emotional confusion and irresponsibility of so many adults is rooted in the sexually repressed upbringing dictated by the needs of the wages system.

Sex and Profit
The problem is compounded by the fact that, while frowning on the practice of sexuality by young people, capitalism bombards them with sexual spectacle of all kinds. This contradiction arises from its seeking to make profit out of anything, even people’s problems — and indeed even to create problems out of which profit can be made. Cinema, advertising and books emphasise and inflate the importance of sex. They also often give a distorted view of what we should expect from it. The beautiful, sexually potent men and women flaunted by the media create in both young people and adults unjustified feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, a false idea of where sexual fulfilment comes from and unhealthy obsessions about sex in general.

Sex is of course an important part of life. But the whole point about it is that it needs to be integrated into the wider spectrum of human activities, not to stand obsessively above or apart from them.

In this respect many primitive communities not based on the sale of human energies for money have a much healthier attitude towards sex than more “advanced” societies. In communities such as described by Margaret Mead in her classic study, Coming of Age in Samoa, sex is practised much more openly and unashamedly by adults. Children see it as a natural part of life, and begin to learn about it and experience it much earlier, without the taboos and interdictions most of us take for granted. The “facts of life” don’t have to be told to children by their parents. They’re picked up naturally through living. They’re not half-learned at school through dirty stories or through the misleading suggestions of commercialised sex. The consequence is that people in such communities grow up with a less inhibited, less secretive attitude towards sex. Sex fits into their lives like other natural human activities. They don’t need guide books to tell them how to practise sex or what they’re missing in it any more than they need to be instructed on how to get the best out of eating, drinking, sleeping, working or playing. Sex isn’t an over-central preoccupation. It doesn’t — as it shouldn’t — come into a special, mystifying, frustrating category of its own.

Common Ownership
This is not to say that to get sex right we’ve got to go back to primitive society. It’s just to show that the evidence of sexual attitudes in primitive societies indicates that sexual problems, to the degree they’re experienced today, arise not from our nature as human beings but from the social conditions we live in. And there’s clearly something wrong with conditions that turn an essential natural function and a potentially pleasurable experience into a widespread source of misery, anger, guilt and frustration. Removing the conditions will remove the straitjacket on people’s emotions and make it unlikely that we will arrive at adulthood with little knowledge of how to enter into a mutually satisfying relationship with another person. New social arrangements based on common ownership, voluntary co-operation and economic and social equality will remove the conditions and create new ones that will offer free rein, as capitalism never can, to the development — mental, physical and emotional — of each individual’s potential. They will help sex to find a more secure, harmonious place among the whole range of activities that are natural to men and women.

Howard Moss

Africa: Who gains from female circumcision? (1999)

From the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Female circumcision, like male circumcision, is a practice that dates back to the remotest of times in history. Today, however, the former has come under fire by feminists and other concerned groups and individuals. Why male circumcision is not touched is not clear. Perhaps the whole issue is still part of the male chauvinistic nature of contemporary society since it may not be plausible to claim that male circumcision is harmful as there are no statistics regarding the casualties the practice has caused or how it has affected fertility.

I am not holding brief for this custom but some of those against it fail to situate the practice in its right perspective and thus fail to find the right solution. This myopic attitude is reminiscent of similar haughty attempts to characterise traditional African religion as “barbaric” and “uncivilised” (when in fact all religions are the same).

Like other customary practices, female circumcision is a tool in the control and manipulation of society by the elders and leaders who in traditional society were the owners of wealth. In the case of female circumcision, a group of individuals (including vocal and influential women) soon emerged who specialised in the art of operation. In many areas, these “doctors and paramedical staff” introduced mysticism into the act in order to gain a monopoly over their “profession”. As religion and spiritualism are part and parcel of their life, it is always easy to weave the supernatural element into anything that is done. This mystification is usually intensified if there are some material gains attached.

It is common knowledge that not all those who are involved in collecting girls for the ritual nor those who carry out the operation do so for a fee. Yet they get more than if they were charging fees. It is the same with traditional healers. They charge no fees but you give what you feel like giving—and the gift/payment is usually more than a mouthful.

Those who organise female circumcision get a lot of material gains from the parents, relatives and well-wishers of the girls. For instance, the food requirements, drinks, kolanuts, tobacco, etc., of both girls and organisers are provided for by the girls’ parents. And here we are talking about a period which could last as long as six months though these days the period may be just about two months in some areas. But the organisers actually make their money during the “passing out” of the circumcised girls. In most cases, each chief organiser (who is always an influential woman) becomes a social, political and spiritual “mother” to all girls circumcised under her authority—they all join her camp. Such women constitute the ideologues of the practice of female circumcision and they concoct all myths to perpetuate the custom. Those girls who do not go through it are stigmatised and derided and may even find it difficult getting a husband.

Perhaps started by men to control family property relations, female circumcision is strongly encouraged today by some females for the sake of material gains.

One other prominent feature in the whole affair is the intervention of non-governmental organisations. Needless to say, much credit goes to these NGOs for “sensitising the international community” to this “evil custom”. But it is equally important to point out that, far from helping solve problems, NGOs are themselves an offshoot of the profit system. In fact, the ideology of NGOs enhances the money system and perpetuates its evil practices through the half-baked and inadequate measures they put forward for solving the world’s problems.

I know very well that there are genuine individuals who are doing their best to ameliorate the deplorable state of mankind. However, I do not think they can make any meaningful headway by targeting isolated issues like discrimination against women or, to be specific, here female circumcision.

What I therefore put forth as a lasting solution to these undesired customary practices and to the gender problem is a holistic and all-round approach. This entails a complete rejection of the status quo. Production of goods and services should be organised for the sake of satisfying needs and not for profits. Therefore money in all its forms (cheques, treasury bills, tickets, etc) should go. But as this cannot be wished away, people will have to come together and through concerted effort push towards the realisation of the objective in a world socialist movement.

Suhuyibi Nbang-Ba (Gambia)

Kissing, Embracing and Caressing (1995)

Theatre Review from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spring Awakening  by Frank Wedekind, The Pit Theatre,  Barbican Centre
, London.

Watching Spring Awakening and listening to the comments of people sitting near me, I was struck once again by the way in which audiences in the late twentieth century can recognise the absurd beliefs which previous generations held dear whilst being unaware of the ideological prejudices which colour their own views of the world.

Spring Awakening is described by its author, the German dramatist Frank Wedekind, as "a children’s tragedy". The play is about adolescence and the repression of sexual feelings. But it is also about power. Wedekind, who lived at the turn of the century, was much concerned with such matters. His most famous play, Lulu, follows the story of a latter-day courtesan whose liaisons with powerful members of the bourgeoisie end tragically when she is murdered, nominally by Jack the Ripper.

In Spring Awakening Wedekind captures the steamy uncertainties of a group of young people whose natural curiosity about their emerging sexuality is powerfully repressed by the worst excesses of Lutheranism. The school which they attend requires the translation of arguably obtuse Greek and Latin texts and the memorisation of antique verse, but it fails to acknowledge their human physiology. A mother continues to tell her daughter, an emerging woman, that the stork delivers children, the results are dramatically predictable: The daughter dies in childbirth; a young man commits suicide.

Given the ideological beliefs which held sway in the early years of the century it is hardly surprising that contemporary performances of the play were surrounded by controversy. It was banned in Prussia in 1908, and a single performance on Broadway in 1917 was almost prevented by the New York City Commissioner. The play was first performed in Britain as recently as 1963, and only then after the Lord Chamberlain had insisted that:

 "there is no kissing, embracing or caressing between the two boys in the vineyard scene, the words penis and vagina are omitted, and an alternative is found to the masturbation game in the reformatory".

The play is astonishingly well performed by a splendid cast, many of whom are still at school or at drama school. It makes for an enlightening if sad evening, but one from which the audience seemed to take comfort. As someone remarked near me. “Thank goodness our kids don't suffer these hangs-ups."

True, but the opinions I heard seemed far too smugly sanguine. Most people may have removed one set of scales from the eyes, but they are still victims of myopia, and they have countless other blind spots. Whilst sexual repression is no longer over, children are still victims of arrangements in schools which both repress and suppress. What they learn and how they learn is controlled by others without any reference to their real needs. They are directed and manipulated and, like objects in an industrial process, commonly referred to as "the products of the education system". Their humanity must take second place to the needs of capitalism.

Socialism is characterised by economic emancipation, with people determining—in full consciousness of the consequences of their choice—their own needs, and freely satisfying these. In like manner a socialist society will be concerned with educational emancipation or, to paraphrase Sheila Grundy, "with people finding their own voice”.

Socialists watching this fine production of Spring Awakening will probably delight in the experience and in the evidence of prejudices abandoned. But unlike other members of the audience they will recognise that the battle to emancipate the population from ideological conditioning and false consciousness has barely begun.

Michael Gill

Much Ado About Monogamy— The Kinsey Report (1953)

From the October 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who has not heard of Dr. Kinsey? The question brings to mind one of those Bateman cartoons in which the unfortunate ignoramus or faux-passant trembles before a collection of gazes incredulous, horrified, contemptuous and pitying. Of course, everyone has heard of Dr. Kinsey. He is the Indiana professor who has heard 5,940 true confessions; the man with a load of light, the saviour of the Sunday press in a wet summer.

"Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female" has not yet been published in Britain, but the papers have run riot over its American publication, taking attitudes of unctuous righteousness or playing the thing for all it is worth in order, as Dr. Comfort would say, to startle the Citizens. Either way, the Kinsey Report has had more publicity than any other book in a generation. Kinsey himself is said to be making nothing financially from it; the profits will go to the Research Committee with which he is concerned. Some commentators have given this as exclusive evidence to free Kinsey from the charge of "cashing-in on sex." It is not so certain. The first American printing has been a quarter of a million copies—a figure to make the bestselling novelists envious and to suggest that the sponsors are well aware of the market value of their work. Whoever the beneficiaries may be, the Report obviously is providing—and was meant to provide—an outsize jackpot prize.

Enough has been related, quoted and discussed (mostly under huge, spicy headlines) to make some evaluation of Kinsey's findings possible. The information in the Report relates principally to the incidence of departures from the orthodox monogamous pattern. Dr. Marie Stopes is, of course, quite right when she says: “All the different types of sex behaviour and abnormality were fully described, with numerous long detailed cases, by Dr. Havelock Ellis in his six-volumed work forty years ago." That is not Kinsey's point; the aim of his Report is to establish, on a statistical basis, what are the sexual behaviour-patterns of women in present-day society. The information was gathered from thousands of interviews with members of women's societies who volunteered, and the statistics take in 5,940 case-histories. The danger of drawing conclusions from sample investigations is obvious, but it must be said that their technique has been highly developed in America, where sample polls are taken about anything and everything. In this case, however, there are factors which cast additional doubts on the value of the sample.

The greater number of the women interviewed were of better-than-average education and income, Presumably, therefore, they could express themselves more fluently and were more likely to have come in contact with the possibilities of sexual variation than most working-class women. And they were volunteers—in other words, they were willing to recount their sexual experience. One does not have to agree with the Sunday Express that such volunteers must be “a collection of oddities and exhibitionists” to make reservations about them. It is clear enough that the women with respectable histories of chaste courtship and faithful marriage are the least likely to offer their reminiscences. They wouldn’t have much to tell, for one thing.

Kinsey’s 5,940 cannot be considered as a cross-section or anything like one, and certainly not as a basis for conclusions about the "human female.” But if that were not so, the major issues would be unaffected. What makes such a survey necessary and gives it so compelling an interest? The Kinsey Report is an attempt to establish the communality of habits and attitudes which in urban society are “private,” i.e., highly individualized. In healthier, less complex social groups the pattern of sexual behaviour is part of the general social pattern. The accounts by Malinowski and Margaret Mead of sexual life among the Melanesians and Polynesians are not based on card-indexed interviews with anonymous “guinea-pigs,” but describe the observed behaviour-patterns of communities. In Kinsey’s world (which is our world) sexual life is observed by peeping into bedrooms. That is why so many people are so avidly interested in the Kinsey Report; it offers a peephole and gives a basis for comparison, which is the foundation of approval (or otherwise). And it is probably true that the Report will help sexual unorthodoxy to spread, or “make immorality rife,” as they say. The assurance that “everybody's doing it” is usually enough encouragement for the others.

The monogamous family system has always needed the support of complex legal and moral codes. Kinsey’s most shocking “revelation” is that a great many people do not adhere to those. He says that America’s sex laws are “unrealistic, unenforceable and incapable of providing the protection needed.” He finds—if it needed finding—that for a lot of women the white wedding dress is only conventional and not representative of the true state of affairs. He hears that American wives do not always fall in with the requirements of the Hays Office. Plenty of other investigators have confirmed that chastity and fidelity are not prized as they used to be. (It is doubtful, though, if they were ever prized as much as that. One is reminded of the classic conversation between villagers: “Old George bain’t the man 'e used to be.”—“ No. and never was.”)

The truth is that morally and legally compulsive monogamy has never really worked. It would be rather surprising if it had, considering its demands; for example, that a woman can discipline herself to be restrained and chaste before marriage and automatically become yielding and responsive after it. Whether or not monogamy is natural is beside the point, which is that the property-based (and therefore compulsive) monogamy of our society imposes conditions which have never been fully accepted and are less and less accepted to-day. Nevertheless, the property basis is there, and almost the whole vocabulary and imagery of sex and marriage carries the property implication. Outside medical text-books, a man never enters a sex relationship with a woman: he “takes her” or “possesses her,” she “becomes his” or "gives herself” to him. (If anyone doubts, by the way, that society still regards women as inferior chattels, listen to “Housewives’ Choice” in the mornings, the announcers address their audience in the tone which most of us would use to speak to an imbecile child.)

Kinsey claims, in effect, to find that the principle of exclusive possessiveness does not always apply in modem sexual behaviour, and that is what has made his book “shocking.” He advances several propositions to account for what he finds, but—as reported, at any rate—they all are deduced from assumed physiological and psychological incompatibilities between men and women: for example, his claim that their highest sexual capacities occur at irreconcilably different stages in adult life. Women, he says, do not reach their sexual zenith until the thirties and then retain it until quite late in life; men attain it in adolescence and thereafter decline (though most sexologists have recorded noteworthy cases of good tunes on old fiddles). Kinsey appears not to take into account, however, the influences of industrial and urban environment. Britain's Royal Commission on Population suggested in 1949 that these have a considerable effect on sexual function

  It is indeed arguable that modern urban life— whether because of the greater worry and nervous strain it brings with it, or merely because of the greatly increased number of alternative outlets for free time and energy—tends to cause a reduction in sexual activity from the level associated with the predominantly rural life of earlier times. There have, in fact, been investigations which showed a lower frequency of intercourse among men engaged in urban than among those in rural occupations.

A satisfactory sexual life is not a case of merely making the most of maximum desire; more than anything, it is dependent on privacy, understanding, and freedom from tiredness and worry.

There remains the question of why departures from the orthodox monogamous pattern have become more and more frequent in the past thirty years or so; the family is breaking up, say the bishops—and so it is. The life of a family in this country seldom exceeds two generations, and its members tend to break away as soon as they reach maturity. The stability of the family was part of pre-industrial, pre-urban society, in which each group was bound by tenure or dependence to its land or its small community. To-day, in the teeming agglomeration of town life, there is no chain of secure subsistence, and the experience of one generation has little significance for the next. The economic ties which gave the family its durability and coherence have largely gone; in consequence, there has been a sharp change in the traditional attitude to sexual morality.

Probably the strongest, and the most relevant to Kinsey’s theme, of the broken moral traditions was that sex was something for men to enjoy and women to endure. The endurance was real enough and related to the consequences rather than to the sex act itself, and the developed techniques of birth control have been the decisive factor in doing away with this astonishingly unwholesome attitude: they have also made extramarital sex possible for women. Society has never really thought it half so bad—a joke for seaside postcards, in fact—for men to have sexual adventures, chiefly because men don’t have babies. Now women needn't have babies either, and that fact alone has provided a good deal of Dr. Kinsey’s material.

To sum up, then. The Kinsey Report may be an accurate analysis and it may be hokum; this writer is disposed to think that it was prepared with an eye on its market potentialities and that its statistics are misleading. It has nothing new to tell, except possibly— and this cannot be substantiated—that the incidence of sexual misbehaviour in the human female is higher than was suspected. The general propositions (many of which were made in Kinsey’s earlier work on the human male) about sex are based on assumptions of physical and mental make-up, and leave out of consideration the effects of environment on capacities and inclinations.

Nevertheless, the publication of—and the necessity for—a study which claims to find a high incidence of frailty in the female flesh points to the current instability of the property-based monogamous marriage system. The family as it is traditionally imagined is disintegrating in capitalism, and the morality which upheld it is relaxing consequently. Some people are shocked by Kinsey’s findings because they think women ought to be men’s property; others, because they fear that imperfect people will make an imperfect world. Never fear; the world got like it first.

Robert Barltrop

About Books (1954)

Book Reviews from the March 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even in these days of scientific research, men cling to some very peculiar superstitions. Some of the beliefs and superstitions held by man in his less enlightened past now appear to be downright ridiculous. Worship flows from superstition and Mr. H. Cutner in his book,“A Short History of Sex-Worship" portrays for us some of the queer ideas, customs and forms of worship of bygone days.

For primitive man fertility was something to worship. Good crops and plentiful cattle meant an adequate food supply. Large families ensured many hands to sow and till and hunt and work. Famine and barrenness were things to dread. Small wonder that in his imaginings he conceived gods of fertility who had power to make or mar his existence. Such gods would need to receive sacrifices and to be worshipped in order to induce them to cast a favourable eye in the direction of the worshipper.

From such superstitions arose many religious cults and practices. The sun and the seasons came in for a good share of worship; so also did the human sex organs. This worship of man’s generative powers is known as phallic worship and has played a great part in the ideas and practices of many religious cults.

Mr. Cutner traces the history of phallic worship from earliest times, through the days of ancient Egypt, biblical times, the ancient Far East, Rome and India and shows us how many of the old-time phallic practices have passed into modem religions in a disguised form. He quotes from many sources but we think that the ideas of some of the authorities are a little far-fetched. It appears to us that some of them have seen a phallus around every corner and have mistaken everything that even remotely resembles a male or female sex organ for a sex symbol. We get the impression that some completely irrelevant factors have been viewed solely from an angle suitable to the investigator’s foregone conclusions.

Nevertheless, Mr. Cutner, in presenting this material to us in a concise and easily readable form, has done good work. Collected into his 215 pages is more useful material on the subject than is usually found in far weightier tomes.

The book is published by Watts and Co. in paper cover for 2s. 6d. and is available to members of the S.P.G.B. from Head Office book department.

From Australia comes a novel by a certain Frank J. Hardy entitled “Power without Glory.” The theme of the story is expressed in a quotation from Charles Kingsley that precedes part one of the book,

“A working man who deserts his own class, tries to get on and rise above it, enters into a lie.”

The story opens in 1890 and leads us through a series of Australian political events up to very recent years. It tells of a young working class man who, by unscrupulous and callous methods, rises out of his class to become a millionaire. Our knowledge of Australian political history is not sufficiently detailed for us to distinguish if all the political events narrated are completely factual. The names of a number of prominent and well-known Australian politicians appear in the story with very little said to their credit.

The author tells us in his concluding note that his book, and others to follow, will not advocate the class struggle but will recognise its existence; that Capitalism, having served its purpose, is convulsively passing, to be replaced by a higher social order. Socialism. Mr. Hardy's sympathies obviously lie with the Australian communists.

The book is illustrated but not well produced having a paper cover and poor quality print, which leads us to suppose that the author had some difficulty in finding a publisher.

We referred recently to books by Jack London and one by Irving Stone. We have recently read Irving Stone's story of Jack London entitled, "Sailor on Horse Back.” This is an earlier book of Mr. Stone’s and the style is not so mature as in “Darrow for the Defence.”

Jack London was undoubtedly a sincere, well loved and exceptional man. An illegitimate child, reared in poverty, he became a news-boy, a pirate, a laundry worker, a seal hunter, a tramp, a gold prospector, a lecturer, a farmer and, after many other things, one of the world's foremost novelists and short story writers. As a writer he earned fabulous sums, every penny of which, Mr. Stone tells us, was mortgaged before London received it because of his super-generosity and harebrained schemes to build boats, houses and farms.

Jack London was called a socialist. Some of his writings, such as his small booklet, “The Strength of the Strong” are masterpieces of educational propaganda dressed in story form. We would classify him as a “Rebel Labourite ” but much of his writing was useful in helping workers to an appreciation of their class status in capitalist society. His life was a series of sensations culminating in suicide in November, 1916. The story of his life makes interesting reading.

W. Waters

Lethal Young Ladies: The New Zealand Murder Trial (1954)

From the October 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few topics excite more interest and become stale more quickly than a spicy, spectacular murder. Everyone knows the facts, makes his summing-up and pronounces his verdict; justice is done, and everyone talks of something else. There is rarely much reason for recalling it, except the sorts of reason that prompt “True Crime Stories,” waxwork shows and retired detectives’ memoirs. The case of the two New Zealand schoolgirls is no longer news, but it raised questions which need considering from points of view other than the self-righteous tribalism of the Sunday papers.

Briefly to recapitulate, one girl was 15 and the other was 16, and they killed the older girl’s mother. They had well-to-do homes and were described as highly intelligent; the murder was the culmination of a daydream-world, sex-heated friendship which the mother had threatened to end. The trial revolved round a diary, which recounted their extravagant fantasies and their amorous experiments; they were “insane, incurable and certifiable,” said the defence, “dirty-minded and incurably bad,” said the prosecution. After six days’ trial, the girls were found guilty and, too young for the gallows, sentenced to be detained indefinitely.

It is horrifying enough that two adolescents, through belief in a manufactured world of ideas, should kill another human being in cold blood. But a good deal of the revulsion aroused by murders is in the nature of a conditioned response; for those who are unsure of the amount of horror required, the Press provides helpful guides in the form of denunciatory comments. There is not much indignation over adolescent boys being trained to kill; a particularly lethal air-gunner of 18 is more likely to be decorated than declared either mad or bad, until his own turn comes and they wash him out of the turret with a hose. The writer recalls, too, seeing a war-time booklet on unarmed combat for 15-year-old Boy Scouts and reading what can be done with the rim of a steel helmet. On balance, it seems almost to the diarist’s credit that she felt “very keyed up ” the night before the murder.

Paranoia is the clinical name for the alleged condition of mind of the two girls; it is a form of insanity characterized by delusions of grandeur, persecution and so on. Many of the things tut-tutted over in the reports were not paranoiac at all, of course; plenty of schoolgirls—and schoolboys—keep lurid diaries, create fantasy-worlds and make sexual explorations. The most interesting thing about paranoia is that it can lead to glory as well as the condemned cell. All that was said about these girls can equally be said of some of the most illustrious. For example, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who according to a magazine article was " . . . libidinous as a goat and meaner than a spider . . .  he believed wholeheartedly in witchcraft, magic, spells, the whole bag of tricks, and more than once employed 'necromancers’ to make wax images of his Wall Street enemies."

There is the case, too, of Salvador Dali (“avida dollars,** a Spanish anagrammist called him—“avida" meaning “ he's hungry for them.**) His autobiography is a lot more surprising than the reports of the Christchurch trial. As well as art, it brings in putrefaction, cruelty and coprophilia and accounts of his solitary sexual acts, his morbid fetishes and his desire to kill.

Journalists are free with the word “paranoiac” when writing up Dali; George Orwell in “Benefit of Clergy," commented shrewdly enough on the peculiarities which have made him a lion and a wealthy one, too.

Mental conditions like the one in question can and do lead to inhuman and anti-social acts. It is all too easy, however, to about: “Paranoiacs! Lock 'em away!" and overlook the honour which society accords to other paranoiacs. Easier still, to forget—or not to know at all—that even anti-social actions have social causes, and to believe that some people are simply "incurably bad." Let us dispose of that last piece of nonsense before going any farther. Leave out “bad"—it can be “good, according to the time and the place and the morality; apart from some who have diseased or disordered brains, there are no incorrigibly anti-social people.

Man is a social being, fending always towards co-operation and order. Each man is dependent on other men for existence, for fee satisfaction of his physical needs, and his emotional and mental ones, too (it has been suggested that even his fear of death is the fear of isolation); he has an interest in good relationships wife his fellow-men. The human concord that is churned as the heart of almost every religion and philosophy in the world is no more, and no less, than what human beings have tried to attain from the beginnings of social life. It is true that the property structures man has erected in his social development have continually frustrated his striving; the fact of the striving remains. All men are social by nature—that is, by the fact of being men.

There is a good deal to be said about the disordered brains, too. The incidence and causes of mental deficiency were investigated by the Wood Committee in 1929 and the Departmental Committee on Sterilization in 1933. Their strongest conclusion was that environment—poverty, ignorance, bad conditions—had more than anything else to do with producing minds “incapable of independent social adaptation." It seems obvious that a feeble-minded person cannot be called anti-social, even though he lacks responsibility; it is truer that society has not much use for the feeble-minded, because they are “inefficient."

Mental disorder is a different thing from mental deficiency—it happens much more frequently, too. Modern living creates a host of anxieties, tensions and frustrations (including, in fact, the frustration of man's social instinct). That is why mental and nervous disorders have spread so rapidly in recent years; it is also why the chief task of psychologists is to alter (if they can) the immediate circumstances which have led to strain. Mental disorders are curable, in the sense of treating and relieving individual cases; in the wider social sense they are not being cured at all because their causes are intensifying.

Anti-social behavior, when it is not the product of a disordered brain, is the reaction of a person to a situation. Not everybody has the same reaction because the circumstances that shape behaviour are not exactly the same in all of us; whatever the reaction, however, it is something learned from society. Jealousy and its resultant crimes can only happen in an environment where possession is important; malice, only where society engenders conflict. The social body, indignant over somebody's wickedness, is too often Caliban enraged with his own face in fee glass. The two girls in New Zealand were said to be morbidly obsessed with sex: has anybody enquired the state of mind of the people who packed the court to hear, or crowded the street for a glimpse of their faces?

There is no more virtue in whitewashing crimes than in condemning them. The important thing is to see them in the right perspective, understanding why such things happen to people. Some crimes are directly economic, because anything is done for money—and has to be—in our world; men and women steal, cheat and kill because they need it or think they do. The matter is not always so simple; more often crime involves emotions which are the responses of people, as society has made them, to situations, in which society has put them. Even the hard-boiled criminals—where are they boiled so hard but in the rancid social stewpan? The logical answer is to establish a social situation which does not promote anti-social reactions. Marx put it best by speaking of “human society" instead of “civil society."

The environmental nature of crime is recognized to quite a large extent by those who deal with it (leaving out Justices of fee Peace, who are required to have no knowledge at all of what they are dealing with). The reports of counsels' speeches in the News of the World show that plenty of them are aware that a prisoner’s life history— his education, housing, wages, health—stands with him in the dock. The fact remains that fee treatment of criminals is based mainly on retribution. The only example of an organized attempt at rehabilitation is the Borstal training of young offenders, which has a certain amount of success —because youth is easily moulded—in disciplining them to society’s requirements.

More humane and rational attitudes to many things have become established since the days of public hangings. Nevertheless, most people still accept that it is right or necessary to inflict retributive punishment on those who break the laws. The popular Press, which butters up public opinion so as to guide it all the more firmly, supports the view that retribution is the only socially practicable answer. Probably under this system it is—even though it doesn't really work; the main effect of prolonged or repeated imprisonment is to make its victim unfit for any life except one of crime. It is worth remarking also that punishment degrades those who inflict it, as well as those at the receiving end.

It is true that there has been talk at various times about reforming fee criminal law to “humanize" it and provide that unfortunates like the two schoolgirls should be rehabilitated instead of punished. The sentiment is admirable, but most of those who want to rehabilitate criminals never question the sort of world into which they would be rehabilitated. And many of them—presumably, at any rate—object to retribution for crime but agree to it when it is the motive for war.

Why are there crime and delinquency, and the states of mind which lead to them? Crimes against property and its coercive morality are inevitable while private property exists; crimes against people, too, are part of an unhealthy condition of society. There can be little solution of these problems in the social order which breeds them: "human society" is the only real answer. Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme may have been mad or just malicious. Either way, the diagnosis is of the world of which they are part, and underlines the need for speedy, efficient cure.

Robert Barltrop

Politics and homosexual liberation (1978)

From the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 1967 sexual offences Act decriminalized homosexual acts in England and Wales conducted in “private” (no third person present) between consenting males over 21 with the exception of members of the armed forces, merchant navy or police. Since then several homophile organizations, notably the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), have campaigned for further reform to “gain the rights and opportunities heterosexuals take for granted”, e.g. lowering the age of consent to 16.

Implementation of CHE’s demands, bringing Britain in line with other European countries like Holland, is a possibility though in June 1977 the House of Lords, fearful of “corruption of youth” and “debasement of morals”, refused a second reading to the Earl of Arran’s Bill seeking to lower the age of consent to 18.

Yet if CHE’s demands are met it must be realized that the securing of such “rights” in no way guarantees liberation from social discrimination. Homosexual liberation, like that of women or black people, requires a change in social structure that cannot be achieved by law reform. The failure of legislation to stop discrimination against both women and black people shows the futility of this when social attitudes are based on myth and prejudice. Furthermore legal rights can be revoked, as was seen in Miami, America last June. Anita Bryant headed a “bible-toting” campaign for a referendum to vote on repealing a bill, passed in January, protecting homosexuals from discrimination in housing and employment. As a result of a two-thirds majority the bill was revoked. One of Bryant’s claims was that a recent drought had been inflicted as punishment by God for increasing tolerance of homosexuals! whilst one of the slogans used by her supporters was “kill a queer for Christ” (Gay News No. 121).

Sex as Sin

Whilst homosexuality appears to be a “natural” aspect of human behaviour, occurring as it does throughout history, hostility to it has only been evident since the development of the Judaeo-Christian religion with its sex-as-sin-except-for-procreation moral code in general and thus its outright condemnation of homosexuality in particular. Despite the decline in formal religious practice, the sexual repressions resulting from religious teaching continue to inhibit most people's sexual attitudes.

This becomes apparent when people object to homosexuality by claiming it is “unnatural”. Sexual behaviour, like most other behaviour, is learnt and dependent upon social custom. Use of such phrases reflects the influence of religious teaching.

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly. (Romans 1:27. Our emphasis)

Moral codes are not “God-given” but arise out of material conditions in accordance with social needs.

In primitive societies—with dirt, disease and death all round them—the overwhelming need was for people to propagate, reproduce their kind for society to survive. Any habits that impeded or frustrated this end were apt to be disapproved of—sometimes savagely, as in the case of the ferocious Old Testament Jews, exceptionally hard put to it to survive and naturally doubly keen on survival.
(Homosexuals in History. A Study of Ambivalence in Society. Literature and the Arts, A. L. Rowse, 1977, p. 2)

It is this same “sex for procreation only” morality that lies behind Catholic opposition to other sexual issues such as contraception and abortion.

But knowing that religion is the origin of homophobic attitudes does not explain their perpetuation at a time when the idea of “sinfulness” is declining

Intellectual Voyeurs

Psychiatry, which for many has supplanted religion as the definer of what is socially acceptable, has replaced the doctrine of “sin” with the doctrine of “sickness”, since psychiatry developed on the basis of accepting prevailing assumptions. Thus what was illegal (the law itself being a reflection of prevailing moral assumptions), e.g., sodomy, oral-genital contacts, homosexuality, became “neurotic” or “perverted” (Society and the Healthy Homosexual, Dr. George Weinberg, 1975. pp. 23-24). This idea was reinforced by the fact that early investigation depended upon “case-histories” from prisons and mental institutions.

Sociological studies—“intellectual voyeurism” as Altman calls it—also take a moral attitude to homosexuality; for if their definition of deviancy was based merely on “lack of adherence to a statistical norm”, then the sexuality of priests and nuns would also be “deviant behaviour” since their celibacy is even further from the statistical norm than homosexuality. (Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, Dennis Altman, 1974. p.62.).

D. J. West in Homosexuality Re-examined, p. 320, points out that no “single, predominant cause for all cases of homosexual orientation is ever likely to be found”, yet the search for the “cause” continues, revealing the underlying moral attitude of homosexuality as a “problem”. The problem, as Altman notes,

ceases to be of great concern once one is prepared to accept homosexuality as neither a sin nor a pathology but rather as one way of ordering one’s sexual drive, intrinsically no better nor worse than the heterosexual and with the same potential for love and hate, fulfilment or disappointment. (Altman, ibid, p. 19)

But how much does the perpetuation of homophobic attitudes owe to capitalism and will socialism remove them?

Myths about Socialism

For homosexuals, many myths surround the subject of Socialism. Many point to the inconsistency of the left’s claim that Socialism will overcome oppression and evidence to the contrary in “socialist” countries. But confusion is dispelled when it is realised that Socialism does not and never has existed anywhere in the world. Socialism is a world concept like capitalism and could not exist in isolation. Countries that are labelled socialist or communist are based on state capitalism and it is this that the “left” advocate.

In “Gays and the Backlash” (Gay News No. 121) the Socialist Workers’ Party sees the nuclear family as “essential for transmitting the traditional concepts of male authority and female inferiority”. Yet such “concepts” depend on their acceptance and not on familial forms. The view that the nuclear family is the agent of repression implies the need to abolish it. How do the SWP propose to do this? Reform legislation? Nor are the concepts of “male authority and female inferiority” solely responsible for society’s attitude towards homosexuality. The ancient Greeks “extolled both bisexuality and the supremacy of men” while the Arabs have the custom of “addressing love songs to boys because women are regarded as too inferior to be objects of such praise”. (Altman, op. cit., pp. 82-3.).

Capitalism hinders the development of new attitudes in two ways. Firstly, power to exercise personal prejudice is possible with a social system based on private ownership. Gay News, in their submission to the Royal Commission on the Press (issue No. 124), described how it is “virtually impossible for a gay publication to be distributed” if a wholesaler has “very strong views against homosexuality”. This applies also to landlords, employers, newspaper editors, policemen, etc., whose authority derives from private (including state) ownership.

Secondly, capitalism’s profit priority inhibits circulation of ideas. Gay News found that W. H. Smith’s reluctance to handle their publication was due to purely “commercial considerations”, their impression being that there was “no great market for Gay News”.

“Commercial considerations” help to transmit conventional social values via advertising. The article “Gays and the Persuasion Industry” (Gay News No. 123) shows how advertising sells the idea of the desirability of heterosexuality by depicting “the family, role playing and gender identification”. This it does because in selling a product the advertiser appeals to the largest market, that being composed of heterosexuals, since homosexuals comprise only about ten per cent, of the population.

But advertising is necessary in a society where goods are produced for sale. Different attitudes will come not from featuring “gays in one in ten of their ads” but from changing the economic basis of society to one of common ownership where people have free access to goods produced for use not profit, thus making advertising unnecessary. This does not mean homosexuals, or any other minority, have to wait until after the “revolution” before people’s attitudes start changing, as is implied by the left wing.

Revolution in Ideas

A change in people’s attitudes toward minorities will be part of the revolution in ideas that is the necessary prerequisite of Socialism. This is something that the left wing cannot offer. Their ideology is geared to an “enlightened” minority leading the majority. Here they are no different from CHE who, in their pamphlet No offence (Bob Sturgess, 1975. p.2) see parliamentarians as “guardians of liberty”. Implicit in this or the “enlightened minority” idea is the notion that “they knew best”, that they are somehow superior to the rest of us. The Socialist Party of Great Britain rejects this leadership concept for, like the “blind faith” demanded by religion, it requires people to suspend their reasoning ability and replace it with “trusting belief”.

Until people stop putting their faith in leaders and start using their own reasoning abilities, the only liberation that can be expected is “tolerance”, i.e., pity extended to something regrettable, the result of an “ideological position overriding an emotional attitude (of hostility)”. (Altman, ibid., p. 55, our emphasis.)

It is the superficiality of such tolerance, the “smug liberalism” which one left-winger claims can make “life impossible for gay people inside organizations of the left” (The Politics of Homosexuality, Don Milligan, Pluto Press, 1973, p. 15). But the real danger of tolerance within capitalism is that economic frustrations such as housing problems, unemployment, etc., which are the direct outcome of production for profit, can cause the underlying emotional attitude to override the ideological and direct hostility towards scapegoat minorities like homosexuals.

The SPGB, in requiring an understanding of capitalist society, sees through the myths which it perpetuates and recognizes the validity of a homosexual life-style, not from any “moral obligation” but from knowledge gained by rational investigation of facts. The difference between tolerance and acceptance was made clear in the recent interview of Jeremy Thorpe. If the Liberal Party accepted homosexuality rather than “tolerated” it, it would not have mattered whether he had “ever had a homosexual experience”.

It is possible that ideas about homosexuality will change within capitalism but what is evident is that any liberalization will be superficial in character and subject to reversal. Only Socialism can provide a lasting liberation. Though the majority of people are heterosexual they, like the majority of homosexuals, are dependent upon working for a wage or salary in order to live; they are members of the working class whose common interest lies in establishing Socialism regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It is when members of the working class recognize this common interest that they will reject the myths and prejudices that surround homosexuals and other minorities.

Paul Moody