What is Class Consciousness?
PUblished as October 1971 issue of Liberation magazine
Reich, Wilhelm
http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/Docs/CX5592-WhatisClassConsciousness.pdf
http://cyberquebec.ca/libresarchiveswilhelmreich/What%20is%20Class%20Consciousness.pdf
Publisher: Liberation, New York, USA
Year First Published: 1934
Year Published: 1971
Pages: 51pp Resource Type: Pamphlet
Cx Number: CX5592
Critical of what he saw as mainstream Marxism's overly materialistic explanations, Reich proposes the perspectives of psychology and psychotherapy could revitalise radical political thought and the socialist movement.
Abstract:
With socialism under sustained attack by 1934, Wilhelm Reich sets about to explain the way forward for the socialist movement. Critical of what he saw as Marxism's overly materialistic explanations, Reich proposes that new vocabularies of psychology could revitalise the movement: "While we present the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of their emotional being."
He distinguishes between two types of socialists: "that of the leadership and that of the masses." The former is based in technical and theorectical knowledge about revolution and economics. The latter is based in "the trivial problems of everyday life." Only through the forging of a new emotion-based socialist vocabulary can socialism hope to attract the kind ofwide-spread class consciousness it so desires for revolution.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Foreword
Chapter One: Dual Consciousness
Chapter Two: Some Concrete Elements In Class Consciousness And Some Inhibitions Found In The Mass Individual
Chapter Three: Bourgeois and Revolutionary Politics
Chapter Four: The Development of Class Consciousness Out of the Life of the Masses
Appendix: Principles for the Discussion of the Reorganisation of the Workers' Movement
Excerpts:
Later in "The problem of Anxiety" (1926), Freud modified this view and suggested that anxiety was basically a signal of danger from within - from one's impulses or from one's conscience - much as fear is a signal of danger from without.
Freud claimed that neurotics were those whose attempts at sublimation failed and whose channeled sexual energies became self-destructive rather than socially productive. Reich thought that even sublimations were suspect and only the free and unmitigated gratification of genital sexuality could be truly healthy for the individual or for society.
1. Better housing conditions for the masses
2. Abolition of laws against abortion and homosexuality
3. Change of marriage and divorce laws
4. Free birth-control advice and contraceptives
5. Health protection of mothers and children
6. Nurseries in factories and in other large employment centres
7. Abolition of laws prohibiting sex education
8. Home leave for prisoners
a. To incorporate sexual politics into revolutionary politics
b. To instill a new attitude on the part of revolutionary leadership to the masses (starting from the needs of the masses and not from top-down directives)
c. To have the cultural process recognized as a socially determined process based on the transformation of sexual energy
d. To pave the way for theoretical and practical work regarding the nature of education appropriate to a socialist society
In the field of psychoanalysis, Reich began to speak of "character armour" rather then "character structure," by which he meant the chronic physical attitudes (stooped shoulders, stiff posture, etc.) which prohibit people from being free and open.
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