Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 21:34:09 -0600
Subject: Re: Lenin, Zetkin, Marx on sex?


PBurns-AT-lmumail.lmu.edu wrote:

>  Is there a distinctive Marxist/socialist position
>  on questions of sex?  (no double entendre
>  intended.)  I mean as a theoretical, not a
>  practical, matter?  I know there was something of
>  a custom among many earlier generations of
>  socialist theorists and activists to denigrate
>  marriage, and to support "free love" both as a
>  moral principle and as a personal lifestyle.  But
>  did that have any solid basis in Marxist or more
>  broadly socialist principles, or was it done
>  simply "epater la bourgeoisie", with no necessary
>  connection to socialism as such?

Hi Peter, good to see you on m2....  Things have been a little dull
over here although, compared with The End Times on m1, it's sort
of a relief.

There are at least two currents of Marxist thought on that were at one
time a big deal, both of which now seem to greater or lesser degrees
discredited.  I don't know an awfully lot about these, or about others
that are probably out there, but I thought I would sketch out a few things
for the sake of discussion.

One thread, going back to the roots, involves anthropological works
mostly associated with Engels, notably "The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State."  Crudely, this involved the idea that
sex, as instantiated in formalized "marriage" and "the family," was a type
of property relation.  This was based on a somewhat speculative interpretation
of the first wave of "scientific" ethnography, most notably the work of
Lewis Henry Morgan.  "Origin" reads a little strangely today, although
it's not uninteresting.  Marx also did some ethnographic interpretations,
unpublished in his lifetime, about which I should know something,
since my esteemed advisor, David N. Smith, just finished editing a
collection of them.  But I was unable to attend the one public talk he's
given recently on the subject, and am kind of in the dark.

These views of pre-capitalist property aspects of sex seem at least somewhat
separate from the more common depiction of sexual and family relations
as dominated and deformed by class structure:  Engels on the familial
degradation of "the Working Class in England," and big chunks of Marx,
including, one would think, those parts of the Paris Manuscripts in which
"the most human functions become animal, and the most animal, human"
or however it goes.  (Which is surely Marx at his most Catholic....)

I have a sense, not well formed nor well *in*formed, that these lines of
thought were washed out in the early 20th century by Malinowskian
anthropology and its successors, and by Freudian psychology, both of
which made the Engels-Marx viewpoints seem naive.

I was wondering if there was a Marxist take on, say, sexual technique,
sexual practices, sexual positions, etc., when I remembered *Reich*,
which brings up the whole second current of Freudian-influenced
Frankfurtishness.  So far as Reich is concerned, besides _The Function
of the Orgasm_ and his later (even crazier) works [check out _Listen,
Little Man!_, recently re-issued along with a lot of other Reich material
by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux's Noonday Press], there's a book of his
early essays called _Sex-Pol_ (Vintage, 1972, probably out of print),
>from his days as a Frankfurt School semi-insider.  (A lot of Marcuse,
Fromm, etc., had an explicit sexual dimension, too.)  Bertell Ollman's
introduction to _Sex-Pol_ attempts to knit together the "anthropological"
thread I mentioned above with the Reichian currents, and along the
way comes up with more Marx-Engels sexual references.  People
interested in this topic would benefit from this introduction, even
if they don't want to dig too deeply into Reich.

Reich, of course, flipped out, discovering along the way that even
paranoids have real enemies, and Marcuse and Fromm became so
psychologistic in the '50s and '60s (to the point where you could buy
_The Art of Loving_ in airport gift shops in 1968, next to _Letters to
Karen_ and similar weak-kneed self-help).  It's too bad this stuff
is in relative eclipse, such that people think Frankfurt School and
Critical Theory are Adorno and Horkheimer being old Mandarins,
Habermas doing a neo-Kantian number, etc.  These guys were a *lot*
better back when they were *Communists.*  (I even like Reich in
rave mode.  _Listen, Little Man!_ with the William Steig illustrations
is great stuff, even though, at heart, it boils down to a kind of atomistic
self-emancipation of the sort Marx skewered in _The German Ideology_.)

Kit Gunn, Univ. of Kansas



Christopher Gunn                Molecular Graphics and Modeling Laboratory
1k1mgm-AT-kuhub.cc.ukans.edu       University of Kansas
Phone: 913-864-4428 or -4495    Malott Hall
                                Lawrence, KS  66045




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