In the beginning, the Freudo-Marxist venture seemed fairly straightforward to me. Wilhelm Reich laid it all out: sexuality is repressed, the family is to blame! Seeming faithful to Freud, the focus on the libido settled well with my materialist ethos. Primarily, though, Reich got me thinking about the problem of fascism. After I read him, myself at the time a Trotskyist, a lingering problem stuck with me. If the masses desired fascism, why? Is it enough to blame the German Communist Party? Surely the CP bears complicity, but what factors stopped it from reaching its revolutionary potential? In short, why did the Communists not seize power before the Nazis? The questions Reich raised were very salient ones.
Still, the orgone dovetail threw me a loop, as if a psychotic shell of The Mass Psychology of Fascism was all that was left since Reich’s 1930s Freudo-Marxist glory days. Something is deeply…
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