Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

444 / ANARCHISM
The machine, as a saviour of man, is also associated with the hatred toward toil
now prevailing everywhere. But this is another error wrongly placed. Toil fo r one's
own needs gives one self-expression and joy. It is the exploitation of toil that is the
only curse that mankind suffers from.
The machine to me is an attempt to mechanize life. As an Anarchist I oppose
such an unnatural anti-Anarchist approach towards the solution of our present enslavement.
I am struggling and hoping for the dawn of that day when man shall at last
come into his own: a natural, self-reliant, intuitive, colourful, handicraft creator of all
those needs and things that will give us joy-the joy ofthe free life in a liberated society.
(Vol. 2, No. 3, March 1934)
1 19. Wilhelm Reich and the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1935)
Thc [()llowing excerpts are takellfrom "The Crisis of /lltemational Socialism. New Trellds ill
Marxism " by H.R., originally published in t!Je Spanish anarcllist publication, La Revista
Blanca, November IS, 1935 (Parts /v-V). "H.R. " was probably Helmut Rudiger (1903- 1 966),
a German anarcllO-syndicalist t!Jen living in Spain. The part of his article reproduced here
deals with Wilhelm Reich 's groundbreaking work, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New
York: Farrar, StraLis & Giroux, 1970; originally published 1933). The translation by Richard
M. C/el11inson of the University of Leeds is published here with his kind permission.
PSYCHOANALYSIS, REICH SAYS, REVEALS to us the mechanism of sexual repression
which acts in human psychology and he describes the negative consequences that
this can have for an individual. Sex-economic analysis asks: What is the sociological
n1 ctiv1tion behind the fepn:ssioii of sexuality dllti why does the individuai carry out
that repression The Church tells us this is necessary for the health of the soul for a
better world. Freud himself believes that sexual repression is necessary in order to
guarantee human society and the tasks of civilization. For Reich, however, the problem
lies elsewhere. According to him, sexual repression is not a question of civilization
but is explained by the needs of the social regime, that is, by the political
interest that the ruling classes harbour. By studying the history of sexual repression
we see that this does not begin in the first stages of civilization as such and that this
repression is not an inevitable condition of human progress, but that instead it appears
much later in the period of the formation of the private property of the means
of production and at the same time ofthe division of society into classes. Sexual ideology
is placed at the service of the material interests of the ruling class and the interests
of exploitation to serve a social minority which has in its power the land and the
instruments oflabour. This state ofthings has its organic expression in monogamous