Introduction (The Irrational in Politics)

The introduction to Chris Pallis' 1970 book The Irrational in Politics. It is followed by the first chapter, 'Some examples'.

Introduction

This pamphlet is an attempt to analyze the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its wage (and house) slaves into accepting their slavery and - at least in the short term - seems to succeed. It does not deal with "police" and "jails" as ordinarily conceived but with those internalized patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the "mass individual" is today entrapped.

The pamphlet starts by giving a few examples of the irrational behaviour - at the level of politics - of classes, groups and individuals. It proceeds to reject certain facile "interpretations" put forward to explain these phenomena. It probes the various ways in which the soil (the individual psyche of modern man) has been rendered fertile (receptive) for an authoritarian, hierarchical and class-dominated culture. It looks at the family as the locus of reproduction of the dominant ideology, and at sexual repression as an important determinant of social conditioning, resulting in the mass production of individuals perpetually craving authority and leadership and forever afraid of walking on their own or of thinking for themselves. Some of the problems of the developing sexual revolution are then discussed. The pamphlet concludes by exploring a new dimension in the failure of the Russian Revolution. Throughout the aim is to help people acquire additional insight into their own psychic structure. The fundamental desires and aspirations of the ordinary individual, so long distorted and repressed, are in deep harmony with an objective such as the libertarian reconstruction of society. The revolutionary "ideal" must therefore be made less remote and abstract. It must be shown to be the fulfilment - starting here and now - of peoples' own independent lives.

The pamphlet consists of two main essays: 'The Irrational in Politics' and 'The Russian Experience'. These can be read independently. The subject matter does not overlap although the main arguments interlock at several levels. The essays are followed by an appendix: an excerpt from Clara Zetkin's Reminiscences of Lenin, which illustrates an aspect of Lenin's thinking little known - or desirably forgotten - by all those Leninists now jumping on the bandwagon of women's liberation.

Frequent references will be found to the works of Wilhelm Reich. This should not be taken to imply that we subscribe to all that Reich wrote - a point spelt out in fuller and more specific detail later on. In the area that concerns us Reich's most relevant works were written in the early 1930s. At that time, although critical of developments in Russia (and more critical still of the policy of the German Communist Party) Reich still subscribed to many of their common fundamental assumptions. Even later he still spoke of the "basic socialism of the Soviet Union" and muted his criticisms of the Bolshevik leaders to an extent that is no longer possible for us, writing four decades later. Moreover such is the influence of authoritarian conditioning that even those who have achieved the deepest insight into its mechanisms cannot fully escape its effects. There is an undoubted authoritarian strand in Reich.

A final point concerns the section on the historical roots of sexual repression. The author (who is neither a historian nor an anthropologist) found this difficult to write. There seems little doubt, on the evidence available, that sexual repression arose at a specific point in time and fulfilled a specific social function - although experts differ as to many of the details. The difficulty here has been to steer a middle course between the great system builders of the nineteenth century - who tended to "tidy up reality" in order to make it conform to their grandiose generalizations - and the theoretical nihilism of many contemporary social scientists who refuse to see the forest for the trees. For instance the reluctance of Establishment anthropologists to envisage their subject from a cultural-evolutionary viewpoint often stems, one suspects, from fear of the revolutionary implications of such an approach and of its implicit threat to contemporary institutions. We share none of these fears and can therefore look into this area without anxiety.

Introduction to the 1975 Edition

We first published this text in June 1970. A great deal has happened since then. The works of Wilhelm Reich have become available in many cheap editions and his ideas are widely known among revolutionaries. The rise of the Women's Liberation Movement has ensured that many of the notions rather tentatively put forward in this pamphlet are now widely accepted. The debate about "sexual liberation" and about "sexual politics" in general has in fact gone a lot further than was envisaged in these pages.

What is striking, however, is the disparity between radical attitudes in this area (now shared by many) and the continued acceptance by most so-called revolutionaries (Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc.) of authoritarian practices and institutions. Whether we like it or not these groups and the ideas they peddle still dominate the political scene. We hope our pamphlet may contribute to subverting their orthodoxies and incidentally help some of them come to libertarian politics.

The author has two main criticisms of the original text. The first is that it was insufficiently critical of Reich's concept of the centrality of sexual repression in the genesis of authoritarian conditioning. Reich undoubtedly achieved many valid insights in this field, but other factors are also clearly involved and an overwhelmingly unidimensional approach (such as Reich's) in the long run creates more problems (both practical and theoretical) than it solves.

Secondly, the original text, while correctly stressing the social dimension of the problem of sexual liberation, was probably too optimistic in its hopes that it would prove easy for individuals to break with a process of conditioning as old as class society itself, and to live as rational, emancipated human beings, free of sexual inhibitions, yet considerate of the feelings of others.

These two considerations do not detract, however, from the relevance of this area. They should, on the contrary, be seen as a spur to further investigation into the roots of human belief and behaviour. If socialism is, in the phrase of the young Marx, "man's positive self-consciousness", then all endeavours to deepen our understanding of how people think, and why they think and feel certain things, seem both worthwhile and necessary.