John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Dismissing Freudian theory as “the modern fashion”, Lenin said that “these flourishing sexual theories which are mainly hypothetical, and often quite arbitrary, arise from the personal need to justify personal abnormality or hypertrophy in sexual life before bourgeois morality, and to entreat its patience”. He considered this “a hobby of the intellectuals” and that “There is no place for it in the Party, in the class conscious, fighting proletariat”. 21This kind of attitude became more prevalent after 1921 and Kollontai’s political eclipse. It was led by the puritanical theoreticians of the Young Communist journal Komsomol , most especially the Marxist psychologist Aron Zalkind, founder of the Marxist Society of Psychoneurologists. He decried any hint of “free love” as bourgeois and reactionary and insisted that dedicated communists should sublimate their sexual energies in work for the revolution.

Zalkind led a sexual counter-revolution. He savaged Kollontai for even discussing issues of sex and love. “The collective, the purely revolutionary, is obscured when ‘love’ is too much in the ascendant”, he wrote. His philosophy of “revolutionary sublimation” was expressed in “Zalkind’s Twelve Commandments”. Amongst other sublimations he recommended no sexual experience before marriage at age 20 or 25, and no sex outside marriage at all. He explained that “purely physical sexual desire is impermissible from the revolutionary-proletarian viewpoint”. “Even in marriage”, he admonished, “the sex act should not be enjoyed too frequently and never with perversions”. For women the natural state was monogamy–anything else was clearly nymphomania.

Although Kollontai was condemned for bringing decadent bourgeois notions into the revolution, it was Lenin who demonstrated the controlling, repressive tendency of orthodox psychoanalysis. In analysing and describing, without moral judgment, the role of repressed sexual impulses in personal neuroses, Freud had instigated one of the major intellectual revolutions of Western history. Yet he had also channeled his discoveries into systems of categorisation and control. Freud’s prescription that the sex drive, though it should be sympathetically understood in order that the individual may better function in society, must in many vital respects be sublimated if civilisation was to thrive, fitted neatly the preference of Marxists like Lenin and Zalkind. Freud’s view in The Future of an Illusion that because “the masses are lazy and unintelligent” it was therefore “as impossible to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization” was in complete accord with Lenin’s post-October programme laid out in the “Immediate Tasks”.

Zalkind was one side of a coin. The other was epitomised in the work of Freud’s idiosyncratic disciple Wilhelm Reich. After the First World War Freud became more pessimistic about humanity. He suggested mankind had a “Death Instinct”, Thanatos, that was in constant battle with the sex and life instinct, Eros. In Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929) he argued that humanity not only did but must repress its unconscious urges, must choose the “Reality Principle” over the “Pleasure Principle”. Reich considered this a backward step and a fundamental departure from early Freudianism. He did not believe that the Death Instinct was innate in human beings but rather a symptom of a dysfunctional society.

Reich’s experience of working in the Free Psychoanalytic Clinic of Vienna in the 1920s brought him into contact with traumatised Viennese workers. As a result, he saw how social factors such as poverty, poor housing, education, etc. reinforced sexual neuroses. Reich stayed true to Freud’s core concept of the libido and of repressed sexuality as the cause of neuroses, but he considered that repression centred specifically on the sexual act and the orgasm. In The Function of the Orgasm (1926) he hypothesised that the orgasm was “biological energy” that, if not properly released and experienced, produced harmful psychological effects.

In his greatest work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1934), Reich produced a psychoanalytical theory of fascism which identified sexual repression as one of the drivers of political authoritarianism. He did not overlook the social causes of fascism. “That a fascist movement exists at all”, he wrote, “is undoubtedly the social expression of nationalistic imperialism. However, that this fascist movement could become a mass movement, indeed could seize power […] is to be ascribed to the full backing it received from the middle-class”. 22For Reich the mass appeal of fascism drew on deep impulses of sexual repression and power worship inculcated by the patriarchal family and other forms of authority. “Sexual repression aids political reaction”, Reich explained, “not only through a process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order”. 23

Of the lower-middle-class fascist and his upper-middle-class leader plagued by emotional and social insecurities, Reich found, “In one case it is compensated by the brutalisation of sexuality, in the other by rigid character traits. The compulsion to control one’s sexuality, to maintain sexual repression, leads to the development of pathologic, emotionally tinged notions of honour and duty, bravery and self-control”. 24For orthodox communists, this raised uncomfortable parallels. By 1934 sexual sublimation and the “leader principle” characterised the Soviet Union as much as Nazi Germany.

From 1927 Reich spent ten years trying to reconcile Marxist and psychoanalytical theory. In 1929 he founded the Socialist Society for Sexual Advice and Sexual Research. After an unsatisfying trip to the Soviet Union he moved to Berlin where, he felt, he would have more freedom to develop his own ideas. In the five years in which he was an active member of the German Communist Party (KPD)–1929 to 1934–he produced some of his most radical and provocative work. In 1930 he formed the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics and opened a number of sex clinics in Berlin with the aim of helping German workers deal with sexual repression and neuroses. This work, which was carried out under the auspices of the KPD, became known as the Sex-Political or “Sex-Pol” programme.

Reich conceded that while psychoanalysis could not replace a sociological analysis of capitalism it could be of use as an “auxiliary” of sociology. By this route he identified, in similar fashion to Antonio Gramsci, the means by which capitalist values became “anchored in the psychical structures” of the working class. “The fact, however, that large strata of the oppressed class accept or even support exploitation in one form or another”, he wrote, “must be interpreted directly in terms of psychology and only indirectly in terms of sociology”. 25

This was deeply original thinking (Gramsci’s concept of capitalist cultural “hegemony”, although written in the 1930s, was mostly unknown until the publication of his Prison Notebooks in the 1960s). In “What is Class Consciousness?”, Reich said plainly what German Marxists could not bear to hear–that the Nazis were better at appealing to emotional instincts than the communists, that they has mastered the art of “politics as fetish”, that their reactionary policy for German women was in tune with the patriarchal attitudes of many German men. The only way to combat this was to create a “joining of the consciousness of the revolutionary avant-garde with the consciousness of the average citizen”. And one of the most effective ways to achieve this was to address their most personal and intimate concerns. In his most controversial essay, “Politicising the Sexual Problem of Youth”, which KPD functionaries tried to prevent being published, he discussed issues of sexual ignorance, sexually transmitted diseases, “perversions”, sexual technique and contraception in a fresh and non-judgmental manner.