The Spartacist League

[aeterna91]

I don't know if I'm writing this in the correct subforum, since this is about non-academic but, I think, historically relevant articles.

In the Newgon article about communism (https://wiki.yesmap.net/wiki/Communism), there are two references to the Spartacist League: one is about the Canadian section and the other one about the US section. Well, perhaps not very surprisingly, I've found that the German section also published very interesting things.

I've found up to 4 articles advocating to stop the persecution of MAPs, from 2000 to 2005. I haven't spent many hours searching, so I think there's probably more I haven't found yet (well, some of these articles refer to the fact that they have been defending this position for some time, so it seems clear that there has to be more). But, at least for the moment:

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf (Britannien: Sozialdemokratische Hexenjagd gegen "Sexualverbrecher" entfesselt Bürgerwehr-Terror)
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf (Stoppt die Hexenjagd gegen Michael Jackson!)
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf (SAV: Rostock...)
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf (SAV: Kein Sex, kein Spaß, kein Sparlakist!)

I think some paragraphs in those articles are absolutely brilliant, by the way.

[Jim Burton]

Could you translate them and put them in the footnotes?

[aeterna91]

Do you mean the paragraphs that I found remarkable? I don't know if I'm a good translator, but sure, I guess I could translate some sentences.

[Jim Burton]

Sure, yes, or machine translate them. I can insert the excerpt into the article.

[aeterna91]

I think this will do:

-From https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... rtakist.pd

"Pedophilia" simply means sexual desire for children. Equating this with the murder and rape of children is grotesque and part of the same reactionary bourgeois bigotry that declares any sex outside of heterosexual monogamy to be "abnormal." We oppose the persecution of all those who have consensual sex with members of another generation, we reject the reactionary "underage" laws, and we have long been known to defend organizations such as the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and the British Paedophile Information Exchange, whose leaders were arrested in 1984 for advocating for the right of "underage" youth to have sex with adults.

From https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf

But unlike the countless pastors and rap stars who say that Michael would never commit such a "heinous crime" as having sex with 12-year-old boys, we defend him against state persecution precisely because we fight for the right of people to have consensual sex with whomever they choose. The only guideline that should exist in sexual relationships is the rule of actual mutual consent, regardless of age, gender, or race. Defending Michael Jackson is also a defense of everyone's privacy and sexual freedom.

The capitalist state wants to prohibit all sex for young people in order to prepare them for a life of unfulfilled desires and wishes by promoting abstinence, guilt, and fear of sexual desire. These laws have nothing to do with protecting children; their entire purpose is to reinforce puritan values ​​that religion promotes and to provide a moral justification for government interference in all other aspects of life. As Marxists, we oppose all laws that criminalize consensual sex for young people, whether with or without an adult partner. Down with all reactionary laws about "minors"!

From https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf

Reactionary campaigns and laws against "pedophiles" deliberately fail to distinguish between real crimes—such as the brutal kidnapping, rape, and murder of young girls, as in the case of Mare Dutroux, who was recently convicted in Belgium—and voluntary sexual relations, including with adolescents. Such laws are not designed to protect children, but rather to establish and glorify the repressive institution of the family, which is the essential source of the particular oppression of women and children under capitalism.

From https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/d ... takist.pdf

For the bourgeoisie and its political police in the labor movement, social democracy, it is of course of fundamental importance that workers (and the rest of the population) are regulated by hypocritical bourgeois morality, the church, "ethics" classes in schools, and the family. The family—the central institution of class society for oppressing women and youth—serves to transmit this morality and regulation to the next generation of workers. Therefore, any form of sex that questions the monogamous "norm" is branded as "deviant" and "sinful"—whether homosexuality, pedophilia, or whatever.

And, of course, it is the highest commandment of all social democrats that the capitalist state, as the guardian of the "common good," act as the enforcer of this hypocritical morality. The same state, guardian of private ownership of the means of production and the reactionary family, is the source of all reactionary persecution of gays, lesbians, and minorities in general.

[WavesInEternity]

I had one Marxist Prof. in university. He was nuts. His stance was most definitely very different from the Marxists that wrote those essays. The opposite, in fact. His research focused on the harms of prostitution, and he was very much into the whole CSA mythos. He ascribed the "CSA epidemic" to the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy. I think he supported an age of consent of 18 or something similarly prohibitive... he certainly thought the current laws regarding AMSC weren't restrictive enough.

I once debated with him in class after he asserted that women shaving their pubic hair was "infantilizing", strengthened the patriarchy and promoted prostitution. No kidding.

I'd also point out that Michael Jackson's liaisons wth boys are far from ideal from the perspective of ethical child-love. He resorted to manipulation and deception. T. Rivas in Positive Memories provides a good analysis of Jackson's mistakes.

[Jim Burton]

I did the integration of the material, please confirm I did it correctly.

[aeterna91]

I had one Marxist Prof. in university. He was nuts. His stance was most definitely very different from the Marxists that wrote those essays. The opposite, in fact. His research focused on the harms of prostitution, and he was very much into the whole CSA mythos. He ascribed the "CSA epidemic" to the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy. I think he supported an age of consent of 18 or something similarly prohibitive... he certainly thought the current laws regarding AMSC weren't restrictive enough.

I once debated with him in class after he asserted that women shaving their pubic hair was "infantilizing", strengthened the patriarchy and promoted prostitution. No kidding.

I'd also point out that Michael Jackson's liaisons wth boys are far from ideal from the perspective of ethical child-love. He resorted to manipulation and deception. T. Rivas in Positive Memories provides a good analysis of Jackson's mistakes.

I would say that your professor's opinion is much more popular within Marxism today, yes. I believe the US is primarily responsible for the wave of anti-sex puritanism currently sweeping the world, and that most Marxists have embraced its ideas even though they claim to be fighting against them. I see that with drugs too. There's nothing in the writings of Marx or Engels to suggest that banning certain substances is a good idea. In the early years of the USSR's existence, no drugs were illegal. However, after the US declared a war on drugs, most Marxists defend its illegalization ("coincidentally," their criteria for which drugs should be legal and which drugs should be illegal are exactly the same as those of the US), but the most curious thing is that they think they defend this because they are Marxists.

I did the integration of the material, please confirm I did it correctly.

Perfectly. Thank you!

[WavesInEternity]

I would say that your professor's opinion is much more popular within Marxism today, yes. I believe the US is primarily responsible for the wave of anti-sex puritanism currently sweeping the world, and that most Marxists have embraced its ideas even though they claim to be fighting against them. I see that with drugs too. There's nothing in the writings of Marx or Engels to suggest that banning certain substances is a good idea. In the early years of the USSR's existence, no drugs were illegal. However, after the US declared a war on drugs, most Marxists defend its illegalization ("coincidentally," their criteria for which drugs should be legal and which drugs should be illegal are exactly the same as those of the US), but the most curious thing is that they think they defend this because they are Marxists.

I agree with your overall assessment, yes. The most ironic part of this state of affairs is that my old Prof. and his Marxist comrades (coreligionists?) were always in line for describing the USA in the worst possible terms, going as far as claiming that North Korea and Iran were essentially right as to how absolutely evil it was. I'm far from being fond of US foreign policy, but his caricatural hatred of the country made me defend it in class more than once. Yet, in hindsight, you are quite correct in saying that he often supported moralistic laws that were "popularized" on a global scale by American imperialism.

I don't recall ever discussing drugs with him, but he surely wasn't a Prof. I'd have considered likely to share a joint with me (yes, there were a couple that did). If I were to describe his mentality in a few words, it would be "closed-minded" and "authoritarian". Simply attending his course made me feel tremendously more right-wing (libertarian, to be more specific), even though I'm not by any stretch of the imagination. I understood why Karl Popper gave Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis as paradigmatic examples of pseudoscience: when the guy held a certain opinion, there was strictly nothing that could possibly have changed his mind. For the record, I support rational and evidence-based legislation that reflects the actual, measurable relative harms of each drug.

[MemeticTheory]

I would say that your professor's opinion is much more popular within Marxism today, yes. I believe the US is primarily responsible for the wave of anti-sex puritanism currently sweeping the world, and that most Marxists have embraced its ideas even though they claim to be fighting against them. I see that with drugs too. There's nothing in the writings of Marx or Engels to suggest that banning certain substances is a good idea. In the early years of the USSR's existence, no drugs were illegal. However, after the US declared a war on drugs, most Marxists defend its illegalization ("coincidentally," their criteria for which drugs should be legal and which drugs should be illegal are exactly the same as those of the US), but the most curious thing is that they think they defend this because they are Marxists.

I agree with your overall assessment, yes. The most ironic part of this state of affairs is that my old Prof. and his Marxist comrades (coreligionists?) were always in line for describing the USA in the worst possible terms, going as far as claiming that North Korea and Iran were essentially right as to how absolutely evil it was. I'm far from being fond of US foreign policy, but his caricatural hatred of the country made me defend it in class more than once. Yet, in hindsight, you are quite correct in saying that he often supported moralistic laws that were "popularized" on a global scale by American imperialism.

I don't recall ever discussing drugs with him, but he surely wasn't a Prof. I'd have considered likely to share a joint with me (yes, there were a couple that did). If I were to describe his mentality in a few words, it would be "closed-minded" and "authoritarian". Simply attending his course made me feel tremendously more right-wing (libertarian, to be more specific), even though I'm not by any stretch of the imagination. I understood why Karl Popper gave Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis as paradigmatic examples of pseudoscience: when the guy held a certain opinion, there was strictly nothing that could possibly have changed his mind. For the record, I support rational and evidence-based legislation that reflects the actual, measurable relative harms of each drug.

Reich felt that education and the family were destructive to the establishment of a
healthy, liberated genitality


s. While Reich’s ultimate goal was the destruction of the patriarchical
family and the sexual liberation of youth through education and access to prophylactics,
Sex-pol’s official platform explicitly targeted heterosexual couples and was not unlike
other European sex reform movements such as the World League for Sexual Reform (of
which Reich was a member and lecturer), making it rather difficult to comprehend the
SDAP’s vehement opposition.
The primary tasks of Sex-pol are enumerated by Eustace Chesser as:
(1) Better housing for the masses.
(2) Abolition of laws against abortion and homosexuality.
(3) Reform of marriage and divorce laws.
(4) Free birth control advice and contraception.
(5) Health protection for mothers and children.
(6) Nurseries in factories and other working centres.
(7) Abolition of laws prohibiting sex education.
(8) Home leave for prisoners.43
Reich’s membership in the Social Democratic party would prove to be short
lived—early on he joined a pro-Communist splinter faction called the Komitee
Revolutionärer Sozialdemokraten and began publishing a newspaper critiquing the party
line, leading to his expulsion on 8 January 1930.4 (source: [urlhttps://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/27a8a1e4-85cd-484b-8a8c-c68a96f456c0/content][/url]

he explained that the family is the 'natural antithesis to the collective, whose ever increasing power is increasingly endangering the family's final sphere -Nuclear Families in a Nuclear
Age: Theorising the Family in
1950s West Germany [urlhttps://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/1228e12a-440b-4643-a113-ae42946fc303/content][/url]

eich reminds us that, for the fascist, “the family is the factory of its structure and ideology” and that such an ideology must move in . https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/arti ... o-freudian


Starter kit for ''anti-familalism''/family abolitionism



Sexual repression, exploitation and Fascism
"People fall into such or such madness, complain about this or that, because their bodies are stiff, because they are unable to give love or to enjoy it."
Wilhelm Reich, in Listen, little man!

Sexual repression is one of the main pillars of exploitation. Neuroses and fascistic tendencies are consequences of this same sexual repression.

That's what the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich has showed.

According to him, the body produces a sexual energy which circulates along the longitudinal axis of the body, from the brain towards the sex. The function of the orgasm is to dissipate this energy. However within the individuals victims of sexual repression, obstacles are formed at various levels along this axis, and prevent the effective circulation of this energy. These individuals, unable to completely dissipate their energy in a fully carried out orgasm, are known as "orgastic impotent".
These obstacles are called "character armors", they appear both on the body level, as muscular rigidities, and on the psychic level, as neurotic character features.
Not being able to be completely dissipated by the means of a fully satisfactory sexual activity, sexual energy is then dissipated via derivatives, in particular mysticism ("the mystical ecstasy") or sexual perversions (propensity to take pleasure in dirty jokes is a symptom of orgastic impotence) or sadistic perversions. The disturbance of the circulation of this energy can also lead to cancer.

Seen in another way, one can consider the center of the individual as being the seat of his vital (sexual) energy, allowing him to feel all the emotions associated with psychic features such as generosity, love, exchange with other individuals. This center is enclosed by layers of character armors which were gradually formed during the development of the individual, as his emotions and his sexual instincts have been repressed, by traumas or a continuous repression. These neurotic layers are the seat of feelings of frustration, violence, fear and rejection of the others, of irrational beliefs. Finally, over this one finds a varnish of sociability which makes it possible for the individual to live in society. However when this varnish cracks, in crisis situations, the subjacent impulses are expressed. Thus, for example, in times of war generalized murders, rapes and plunders are being witnessed.

"The suppression of the sexual activity of children and teenagers is the basic mechanism which produces the characterial structures adapted to political, ideological, economic control [... ] The repression of natural sexuality in the child, particularly of the genitality, makes the child apprehensive, timid, obeying, apprehensive in front of the authority, 'nice', 'quiet'; it paralyses its rebellious tendencies, because the rebellion is associated with anguish; by inhibiting the sexual curiosity of the child, it causes a general confusion of its critical sense and of its mental faculties." Wilhelm Reich.

Sexual repression, the essential cause of neuroses, produces armored individuals, generally poorly suited for autonomy and thus supports the submission, the handling and the exploitation of these individuals. Etienne de La Boétie had already noticed this propensity so what he called "voluntary servitude", without being able to explain its origin. It is this characteristic which allows capitalism, a system based on the exploitation of man by man, to thrive.

Sexual repression also involves the development of non respectful sexual behaviors, of fascistic behaviors (the need to yield to a chief), irrational behaviors as well as mystical tendencies.

Thus, capitalism and Fascism having the same root, can not be separated.

It is essentially within the middle-class patriarchal family unit that the process of sexual repression and the learning to obedience to the authority are reproduced.

We invite you to read works of Wilhelm Reich. In accordance to his will to inform the largest audience, the drafting in is easily comprehensible and does not require prior knowledge in psychoanalysis. Discovering this work will change your vision of the world! https://www.ecologielibidinale.org/en/m ... lle-en.htm


Reich: Orgasmic Energy, Sexual Repression and Character Structure
Reich's story of the sexual self that is in need of liberation, is clearly a meta-narrative of some kind. Reich points to the repressive character of the patriarchal family that created the authoritarian, neurotic and submissive personality types, who were unable to experience sexual satisfaction. The production of these authoritarian or submissive personalities served the purposes of capitalism and contributed to the lack of revolutionary fervour among the masses. This version of sexual repression utilises a totalising picture of society as a sex- economic structure, and accepts that the basic core of sexuality is a natural ‘orgasmic energy'. Such a version of the relationship between sex and society undeniably relies on a naturalistic model of sex. Sex and society are seen as two different realms.
Through the process of repression, society shapes and distorts sexual energy into character structures. In this section, I will develop a critique of Reich's naturalistic perspective as insufficiently social and shaped through his normative views of what are the most appropriate forms of sexual expression.
Reich believed that human existence was determined by an amalgam of 'instinctual and socio- economic processes' (Reich, 1972:xxiii - emphasis in original). Reich's analysis of society was a form of Freudo-Marxism and he argued that it was born 'from the effort to harmonize Freud's depth psychology with Marx's economic theory' (Reich, 1972:xxiii). He developed the concept of the sex-economic structure as an attempt to synthesise Freudianism and Marxism into a new theoretical model of society. The key institutional site of sexual repression within this structure was the patriarchal authoritarian family. Reich argued that the family was 'the factory in which the state's structure and ideology are molded' (Reich, 1972:30). The family inhibited the child's 'natural sexuality' so that there is a severe impairment of the child's genital sexuality, [which] makes the child afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, "good", and "docile" in the authoritarian senses of the words' (ibid). This view of the sexual realm as ordered through the workings of the patriarchal family is