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Re: Some Wilhelm Reich

Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-July-23 06:02:37, Tuesday
In reply to Re: Some Wilhelm Reich posted by diogenes on 2024-July-18 12:06:51, Thursday
What I like about the passage from Reich is that he links three things:

(1) The authoritarian state
(2) Nationalism
(3) Denial/repression of child and adolescent sexuality

However ingrained either tribalism or nationalism may be (and setting aside the question of how nationalism functions to support imperialism), it seems clear that the authoritarian state regularly employs the rhetoric of nationalism to justify both its intrusions into the sexual life of citizens in particular, and its restrictions on their liberty in general. These intrusions and restrictions should be intolerable and provoke resistance. Why don't they?

Reich seems to claim that the state's "fight against the sexuality of children and adolescents" has the specific purpose of producing a citizenry that will be neutered in this particular way. His characterization of the sexual impulse as naturally outgoing and supportive of expanding sociality seems to me sound -- think, for example, of AF/YF. Insofar as the family teaches sexual guilt and enforces a regime of sexual repression upon kids and teens, it is habituating young people to accept the normality of having their agency subject to the incomprehensible whims of higher authority. It is easy to understand why an authoritarian state would find advantage in encouraging such habituation.

Recognizing that family can function in this anti-social way does not seem to me to involve any "notion that parents have no natural emotional tie to their own offspring." It is possible to distinguish family in the broader sense of such emotional ties from the specific dysfunctional form family takes under capitalism. (For example, with productive labor now centered outside the home, it can no longer be conveniently combined with the task of raising children.)

You write:

The kind of family I would ideally like to see is one that is embedded in wider social networks, but this would require economics to be subordinate to society, rather than (as under capitalism) vice versa.


To which I can only respond: Exactly!

hugzu ;-p


Pharmakon
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