Maurice Brinton
The Irrational in Politics
1975Let us consider for a moment - and not through rose-tinted spectacles - the average middle-aged working-class voter today (it matters little in this respect whether he votes "Conservative" or "Labour"). He is probably hierarchy-conscious, xenophobic, racially-prejudiced, pro-monarchy, pro-capital-punishment, pro-law-and-order, anti-demonstrator, anti-longhaired students and anti-dropout. He is almost certainly sexually repressed (and hence an avid, if vicarious, consumer of the distorted sexuality endlessly depicted in the pages of the News of the World). No "practical" Party (aiming at power through the ballot-box) would ever dream of appealing to him through the advocacy of wage equality, workers' management of production, racial integration, penal reform, abolition of the monarchy, dissolution of the police, sexual freedom for adolescents or the legalization of pot. Anyone proclaiming this kind of "transitional programme" would not only fail to get support but would probably be considered some kind of a nut.
But there is an even more important fact. Anyone trying to discuss matters of this kind will almost certainly meet not only with disbelief but also that positive hostility that often denotes latent anxiety.[6] One doesn't meet this kind of response if one argues various meaningless or downright ludicrous propositions. Certain subjects are clearly emotionally loaded. Discussing them generates peculiar resistances that are hardly amenable to rational argument.
It is the purpose of this pamphlet to explore the nature and cause of these resistances and to point out that they are not innate but socially determined. (If they were innate, there would be no rational or socialist perspective whatsoever.) We will be led to conclude that these resistances are the result of a long-standing conditioning, going back to earliest childhood, and that this conditioning is mediated through the whole institution of the patriarchal family. The net result is a powerful reinforcement and perpetuation of the dominant ideology and the mass production of individuals with slavery built into them, individuals ready at a later stage to accept the authority of schoolteacher, priest, employer and politician (and to endorse the prevailing pattern of "rationality"). Understanding this collective character structure gives one new insight into the frequently "irrational" behaviour of individuals or social groups and into the "irrational in politics". It might also provide mankind with new means of transcending these obstacles.
3. The Ignored Area and the Traditional LeftThis whole area has been largely ignored by Marxist revolutionaries. The appropriate tool for understanding this aspect of human behaviour - namely psychoanalysis - was only developed in the first two decades of this century. Freud's major contribution to knowledge (the investigation of causality in psychological life, the description of infantile and juvenile sexuality, the honest statement of fact that there was more to sex than procreation, the recognition of the influence of unconscious instinctual drives - and of their repression - in determining behaviour patterns, the description of how such drives are repressed in accordance with the prevailing social dictates, the analysis of the consequences of this repression in terms of symptoms, and in general "the consideration of the unofficial and unacknowledged sides of human life")[7] only became part of our social heritage several decades after Marx's death. Certain reactionary aspects of classical psychoanalysis (the "necessary" adaptation of the instinctual life to the requirements of a society whose class nature was never explicitly proclaimed, the "necessary" sublimation of "undisciplined" sexuality in order to maintain "social stability", "civilization" and the cultural life of society,[8] the theory of the death instinct, etc.) were only to be transcended later still by the revolutionary psychoanalysis of Wilhelm Reich[9] and others.
Reich set out to elaborate a social psychology based on both Marxism and psychoanalysis. His aim was to explain how ideas arose in men's minds, in relation to the real condition of their lives, and how in turn such ideas influenced human behaviour. There was clearly a discrepancy between the material conditions of the masses and their conservative outlook. No appeal to psychology was necessary to understand why a hungry man stole bread or why workers, fed up with being pushed around, decided to down tools. What social psychology had to explain, however, "is not why the starving individual steals or why the exploited individual strikes, but why the majority of starving individuals do not steal, and the majority of exploited individuals do not strike". Classical sociology could "satisfactorily explain a social phenomenon when human thinking and acting serve a rational purpose, when they serve the satisfaction of needs and directly express the economic situation. It fails, however, when human thinking and acting contradict the economic situation, when, in other words, they are irrational".[10]
What was new, at the level of revolutionary theory, in this kind of concern? Traditional Marxists had always underestimated - and still underestimate - the effect of ideas on the material structure of society. Like parrots, they repeat that economic infrastructure and ideological superstructures mutually interact. But then they proceed to look upon what is essentially a dialectical, two-way relationship as an almost exclusively one-sided process (economic "base" determining what goes on in the realm of ideas). They have never sought concretely to explain how a reactionary political doctrine could gain a mass foothold and later set a whole nation in motion (how, for instance, in the early 1930s, Nazi ideology rapidly spread throughout all layers of German society, the process including the now well documented massive desertion of thousands of Communist militants to the ranks of the Nazis).[11] In the words of a "heretical" Marxist, Daniel Guérin, author of one of the most sophisticated social, economic and psychological interpretations of the fascist phenomenon:
"Some people believe themselves very 'Marxist' and very 'materialist' when they neglect human factors and only concern themselves with material and economic facts. They accumulate figures, statistics, percentages. They study with extreme precision the deep causes of social phenomena. But because they don't follow with similar precision how these causes are reflected in human consciousness, living reality eludes them. Because they are only interested in material factors, they understand absolutely nothing about how the deprivations endured by the masses are converted into aspirations of a religious type."[12]
Neglecting this subjective factor in history, such "Marxists" - and they constitute today the overwhelming majority of the species - cannot explain the lack of correlation between the economic frustrations of the working class and its lack of will to put an end to the system which engenders them. They do not grasp the fact that when certain beliefs become anchored in the thinking (and influence the behaviour) of the masses, they become themselves material facts of history.
What was it therefore, Reich asked, which in the real life of the oppressed limited their will to revolution? His answer was that the working class was readily influenced by reactionary and irrational ideas because such ideas fell on fertile soil.[13] For the average Marxist, workers were adults who hired their labour power to capitalists and were exploited by them. This was correct as far as it went. But one had to take into account all aspects of working class life if one wanted to understand the political attitudes of the working class. This meant one had to recognize some obvious facts, namely that the worker had a childhood, that he was brought up by parents themselves conditioned by the society in which they lived, that he had a wife and children, sexual needs, frustrations, and family conflicts. Overcrowding, physical fatigue, financial insecurity, and back-street abortions rendered these problems particularly acute in working-class circles. Why should such factors be neglected in seeking to explain working-class behaviour? Reich sought to develop a total analysis which would incorporate such facts and attach the appropriate importance to them.
4. The Process of ConditioningIn learning to obey their parents, children learn obedience in general. This deference learned in the family setting will manifest itself whenever the child faces a "superior" in later life. Sexual repression - by the already sexually repressed parents[14] - is an integral part of the conditioning process.
Rigid and obsessional parents start by imposing rigid feeding times on the newborn. They then seek to impose regular potting habits on infants scarcely capable of maintaining the sitting posture. They are obsessed by food, bowels, and the "inculcating of good eating habits". A little later they will start scolding and punishing their masturbating five-year-old. At times they will even threaten their male children with physical mutilation.[15] (They cannot accept that children at that [age] - or any other age for that matter - should derive pleasure from sex.) They are horrified at their discovery of sexual exhibitionism between consenting juniors in private. Later still, they will warn their twelve-year-old boys of the dire dangers of "real masturbation". They will watch the clock to see what time their fifteen-year-old daughters get home, or search their son's pockets for contraceptives. For most parents, the child-rearing years are one long, anti-sexual saga.
How does the child react to this? He adapts by trial and error. He is scolded when he masturbates. He adapts by repressing his sexuality. Attempted affirmation of sexual needs then takes the form of revolt against parental authority. But this revolt is again punished. Obedience is achieved through punishment. Punishment also ensures that forbidden activities are invested with feelings of guilt[16] which may be (but more often aren't) sufficient to inhibit them.[17]
The anxiety associated with the fulfilment of sexual needs becomes part of the anxiety associated with all rebellious thoughts or actions (sexuality and all manifestations of rebelliousness are both indiscriminately curbed by the "educators"). The child gradually comes to suppress needs whose acting out would incur parental displeasure or result in punishment, and ends up afraid of his sexual drives and of his tendencies to revolt. At a later stage another kind of equilibrium is achieved which has been described as "being torn between desires that are repugnant to my conscience and a conscience repugnant to my desires".[18] The individual is "marked like a road map from head to toes by his repressions".[19]
In the little boy, early repression is associated with an identification with the paternal image. In a sense, this is a prefiguration of the later "country or party". The father, in this sense, is the representative of the state and of authority in the family nucleus.
To neutralize his sexual needs and his rebellion against his parents, the child develops "overcompensations". The unconscious revolt against the father engenders servility. The fear of sexuality engenders prudery. We all know those old maids of both sexes, ever on the alert against any hint of sexuality among children. Their preoccupations are obviously determined by deep fears of their own sexuality. The reluctance of most revolutionaries to discuss these topics is similarly motivated.
Another frequent by-product of sexual repression is to split sexuality into its component parts. Tenderness is given a positive value, whereas sensuality is condemned. A dissociation between affection and sexual pleasure is seen in many male adolescents and leads them to adopt double sexual standards. They idealize some girl on a pedestal while seeking to satisfy their sexual needs with other girls whom they openly or subconsciously despise.
The road to a healthy sex life for adolescents is blocked by both external and internal obstacles. The external obstacles (difficulty in finding an undisturbed place, difficulty in escaping from family surveillance, etc.) are obvious enough. The internal (psychological) obstacles may, at times, be severe enough to influence the perception of the sexual need. The two kinds of obstacles (internal and external) mutually reinforce one another. External factors consolidate sexual repression and the sexual repression predisposes to the influence of the external factors. The family is the hub of this vicious circle.
However apparently successful the repression, the repressed material is, of course, still there. But it is now running in subterranean channels. Having accepted a given set of "cultural" values, the individual must now defend himself against anything that might disrupt the painfully established equilibrium. He has constantly to mobilize part of his psychological potentialities against the "disturbing" influences. In addition to neuroses and psychoses the "energy" expended in this constant repression results in difficulties in thought and concentration, in a diminution of awareness and probably in some impairment of mental capacity. "Inability to concentrate" is perhaps the most common of neurotic symptoms.
According to Reich, the
"suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, 'good' and 'adjusted' in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation ... The result is fear of freedom, and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order."[20]
When a child's upbringing has been completed the individual has acquired something more complex and harmful than a simple obedience response to those in authority. He has developed a whole system of reactions, regressions, thoughts, rationalizations, which form a character structure adapted to the authoritarian social system. The purpose of education - both East and West - is the mass production of robots of this kind who have so internalized social constraints that they submit to them automatically.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have written pages about the medical effects of sexual repression.[21] Reich however constantly reiterated its social function, exercised through the family. The purpose of sexual repression was to anchor submission to authority and the fear of freedom into people's "character armour". The net result was the reproduction, generation after generation, of the basic conditions necessary for the manipulation and enslavement of the masses.
