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The Politicization of Wilhelm Reich: An Introduction to "The Sexual Misery of the Working Masses and the Difficulties of Sexual Reform"

1973; Duke University Press; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/487631

1558-1462

Anson Rabinbach,

German History and Society

When Wilhelm Reich decided to leave Vienna for Berlin in 1930, he had completed a period of intense politicization and political activity culminating in his expulsion from the Austrian Social Democratic Party. The three years from 1927 to 1930 were formative for Reich, not only in his theoretical development and his break with Freud, but also in his political development, which coincided with his theoretical transformation, influenced it, and was also influenced by it. Actual information about Reich's activities in those years is, in contrast to information about other periods in his life, extremely sketchy. Reich's own biographical writings and published interviews dating from his later period in America yield little information and are profoundly colored by his alienation from political activity and his fears of repression-both real and imagined. 1 His biographers have also been unaware of the role Reich played in Austrian socialist politics, and no one has discussed his expulsion from the Social Democratic Party and the events that led to it.2 Reich's political thinking, however, was shaped largely through his experience in Austrian politics, and from his understanding of the practical sexual and political problems he observed and encountered in the Austrian labor movement, he was able to develop the critique of the relationship between sexual and political emancipation that has become his lasting contribution to Marxism. Reich's politicization centered around the Austrian Social Democratic Party, which Emil Vandervelde, Secretary of the Second International, called the Iron Division of the International because unlike all other continental Social Democratic Parties, Austrian Social Democracy had avoided the split which in other countries resulted in strong communist parties with roots in the more militant sectors of the proletariat. Austrian Social Democracy was able to survive the political upheavals of 1918/19 undivided, and by doing little to recognize the importance of the spontaneous workers' councils movement which appeared in the summer of 1919, the party contributed to their degeneration and to the consequent