SEXUALITY AND CLASS STRUGGLE

by Reimut Reiche ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1971

An analysis of sexual repression and liberation in ""late monopoly capitalist society"" which borrows heavily from Freud's work and sexual categories and Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation. Reiche synipathizes with those who profess knowledge of the road to sexual liberation and seek to destroy the bourgeois nuclear family, but views their sexual experiments, as in the Berlin First Commune, as still deformed by the old society's repression, and he hints that they might even be counter-revolutionary: ""What do I care about the Vietnam war,"" declared a Commune proponent, ""if I have orgasm troubles?"" Reiche rejects the advocates of ordinary desublimation techniques like pornography, brothels, and other forms of immediate gratification; instead, he sketches the development of a ""collective ego ideal"" for workers, which he says Wilhehm Reich was working toward in the sexual-politics clinics of the late '20's. The emphasis remains on ego, superego, and id, while the link with class struggle is tenuous throughout, and the admittedly petit-bourgeois new left is viewed as a substitute for mass organization of working-class sectors until the latter catch up. Written in the heat of the ""anti-authoritarian phase"" of the German student movement, the book frequently lapses into Marcusean obscurity and obtuseness; this may deter some of its potential audience but the sexand-politics appeal seems reliable.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Praeger

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION