Sex-Pol
섹스폴
The German Reich Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics, set up within the KPD on Wilhelm Reich’s initiative in autumn 1931, and the movement that followed it. It ran sex-counselling centres for workers and demanded new marriage and abortion laws and sex education, teaching that personal sexual misery had its roots in capitalism. Liquidated after opposition within the party in early 1933, it lived on as a loose circle around Reich’s exile journal until 1939.
In depth
Sexpol is short for Sexualpolitik, sexual politics. Its forerunners were the six free sex-counselling clinics for working-class patients that Reich opened in Vienna in 1927. Each was overseen by a physician, with three obstetricians and a lawyer on call; they offered a mixture of psychoanalytic counselling, Marxist advice and contraceptives, and Reich’s argument for sexual permissiveness, including for the young and the unmarried, unsettled other psychoanalysts and the left. A mobile clinic drove to parks and suburbs, and sex-education pamphlets were handed out door to door.
In Vienna he clashed with the Social Democrats around Karl Kautsky junior, who set the “healthy” sexuality of skilled workers against the “brutalised” sexuality of the lumpenproletariat. Reich moved to Berlin in November 1930 and joined the KPD, and in autumn 1931 he brought regional sex-reform and sex-revolutionary associations together on one “platform”. It demanded changes in the laws on marriage and abortion, home leave for prisoners and the elimination of prostitution, and took over the regional paper Die Warte as its organ. Sex-Pol aimed to show apolitical people, or those calling for an authoritarian regime, that their personal, largely psychological and sexual distress had its social cause in capitalism and would be removed step by step under socialism; it opposed jealousy and family structures and taught about masturbation and contraception.
In 1932 Reich’s Verlag für Sexualpolitik in Berlin published his The Imposition of Sexual Morality and The Sexual Struggle of Youth and Annie Reich’s sex-education pamphlets for children and parents. Though it helped the KPD reach apolitical people through everyday problems, it met fierce hostility in the party (“Reich wants to turn our gymnasiums into brothels”); the party first stopped distributing his books and then liquidated the association. After publishing The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933 Reich was expelled from the party that autumn. Sex-Pol within the KPD was an episode of just over a year, built up against strong resistance, that went under in the turmoil of early 1933 and finds no mention in the party’s histories.
From 1934 the Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy, which Reich published in Scandinavian exile under the pseudonym Ernst Parell, became its main activity. In 1933–1939 Sex-Pol was a loose grouping of exiled left-wingers, anarchists, Trotskyists and “proletarian freethinkers” in various European countries who shared Reich’s analysis without forming an organisation, and who sent reports to the journal, including from the Spanish Civil War. Michel Foucault criticised its sexual-repression thesis in The History of Sexuality (1976).