MARK SHECHNER
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lay in his putative ability to account for the failures of the Russian
Revolution and of leftism everywhere by fastening upon the sexual
sphere as the missing variable in prior revolutionary calculations,
and therefore, in effect, keeping revolutionary hopes alive. Sex, for
Reich,
was
politics, and the contentious language of his manifestoes,
with its military metaphors of blocks and breakthroughs, made his
system sound less like a retreat from the blows of history than a re–
grouping for a war of liberation against the residual Puritanism and
production-oriented austerities of American life. His rejection of
adjustment in favor of revolutionary assault upon all superegos,
personal and social, and his clinical methods for relaxing muscular
rigidity, dissolving psychic resistance, and storming the barricades
of sexual pleasure appealed to stymied radicals as adjustments down–
wards of the campaign against Wall Street that more conventional
strategies had failed to carry through. "In the gloom of the Cold War
years," Frederick Crews has observed, "intellectuals whose historicism
had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves
to a prosperous anti-Communist society or taking a stand directly on
what Mailer, citing Reich, called 'the rebellious imperatives of the
self.'" Crews, in characteristic fashion, poses the alternatives too
starkly. One could be Irving Howe and vault from Shachtmanism to
social democracy, risking the inevitable isolation and impotence of
social democrats everywhere. Still, he rightly points out that Reich's
ideas had a special cachet for revolutionists without a revolution, for
whom the field of battle had dwindled to the self. It was as a sanction
for individual desublimation that Reich's orgonomy rendered its ap–
peal as an insurrectionary code, as hostile to the fetishes of party and
doctrine in Russia as it was to those of achievement and production
in America. Paul Goodman, in touting the political superiority of
Reich's psychology in the 1940s, spoke contemptuously of the counter–
revolutionary social adjustments demanded by the New Deal and
Stalinism alike. Such cavalier linking of Roosevelt and Stalin seems
sheer madness to us now that the nature of the Soviet state is so plain
and so appalling (though it was anything but a secret in 1945), but it
could seem perfectly plausible to freelance radicals after the war who
saw little more in the struggle between capitalist and communist na–
tions than shadowboxing between yin and yang, alternative expres–
sions of the same deadly statism. Some, like Goodman and Dwight
Macdonald, were anarchists; others, certainly Norman Mailer in
the forties, were lingering Leninists who still smarted, ten years after
the fact, from the Comintern's scuttling of all-out class warfare for a
