Turning On for Freedom
Kohák, Erazim V.
The Curious Love Affair of Sex and Socialism MY TITLE is not a misprint. The liaison between sex and socialism, though of long standing, has always been more an affair than a marriage....
...Its initial dramatic impact might be considerable, but its dramatic possibilities would rapidly be exhausted...
...And since the commune-ist ideal of complete nakedness, metaphoric as well as literal, proposes nothing short of a Kingdom of Heaven on earth, angelological projection becomes singularly appropriate...
...It creates opportunities, but opportunities for destruction and death as well as for love and life...
...A return to "nature" would impoverish the stage and society alike...
...Since by definition they are completely free, secure, and good, they need hold nothing back...
...Hate remained after the sexual passions it aroused spent themselves in the Night of Long Knives, and once aroused, hate is unselective...
...Yet in the past, sex has usually come out of its excursions into Social Significance somewhat battered—though still a favorite...
...August Bebel's The Woman and Socialism turns out to be anything but a ribald classic...
...We need not assume that they are evil, actively seeking to do harm one to another, though what we have called Todestrieb-sex suggests that they are also that, at least per accidens...
...Perhaps they have found something...
...Radical opennesscommuneism, if you wish—must remain as a perennial, insubstantial hope: the glimpse of the Kingdom...
...so are the limitations, not imposed but formalized by society, on where, when, and with whom one can be radically open—and expect radical openness in return...
...Commune-ist visionaries will, to be sure, insist that their communes will change just that and produce a "new socialist man" who will be secure and free of fear...
...Socialism for men rather than for angels, socialism with a human face, is finally the art and the science of creating barriers between man and man which offer the maximum opportunity for communication while providing the maximum protection against human ignorance and ill will...
...Still, the choice between not-quite-living and living-unto-death is at best a desperate TURNING ON FOR FREEDOM choice...
...but in the same journal the editor proclaims —quite seriously—that a silly bit of sadistic burlesque called Che...
...It is socially relevant because it is a social act, and as such, it shares the ambiguity of all distinctly human acts...
...It was intense, passionate, thoroughly turned-on and existential, enough so as to satisfy Sartre's German alter ego, Martin Heidegger...
...If it becomes a basis for a rational restructuring of social and sexual conventions in the service of men, it offers hope...
...Society is too complex a construct for that...
...their purpose was to protect society from passion, to restrict sex to the clinical function of assuring survival of the species...
...Socialism and commune-ism are a response to the breakdown of community between man and man...
...This finally is the significance of the sexual conventions with which the young, unaware of their own capacity for hurting, are so impatient...
...The label has no doctrinal significance...
...The result is the same...
...Bebel concludes that individual workers can never create enough value to bring the marvels of modern technology within their reach...
...Plato was something of a puritan, both in his preoccupation with the passions and in his distrust of their effect on society...
...In this sense, the young are right—sex is the experimental working model for socialism...
...The ideal they are acting out is an ideal, not a blueprint for society...
...The U.S.S.R., Cuba, or the People's Republic of China aspire to match and surpass the capitalists in steel production, but none has the least intention of matching and surpassing even so modest a target as the Playboy foldout...
...Perhaps three or four couples, sometimes married, sometimes not, share a house, incomes, children, troubles, pleasures, bodies...
...The sexual revolution seems to bring few of the boons promised by early pioneers who fought for progress in the darkest fifties by adopting gutter language in their classrooms...
...For angels, love-ins may be the modus operandi...
...Its appeal is its promise of radical communeion...
...Nor is Plato so unusual...
...ODDLY ENOUGH, in considering the validity of the commune-ist ideal angelology can be more useful than economics...
...they fitted their women into ill-shaped overalls and banned such lures of the devil as cosmetics...
...His communal mating arrangements were certainly not designed to foster sensuous enjoyment or sexual freedom...
...Freedom is a product of art, not of nature...
...This is what gives an air of urgency and social significance to the quest for what, in our version of pop nomenclature, we could call "commune-ist" sex...
...How valid is the communeist ideal, not as vision, but as blueprint for progress...
...But there is a long and doubtful step between symbol and program...
...Masochism and sadism are the obvious counterinstance...
...and its journalistic counterparts have nothing to do with socialism, even though, like socialism, they are antipuritanical...
...There is no possibility for good which does not entail the possibility of evil as well...
...Budding radical historians regularly supply their over-35 teachers with term papers presenting Plato's Republic as an institutionalized sex orgy...
...P P RECISELY BECAUSE sex can become a vehicle of death as well as of life, we can no longer sustain the simplistic liberal illusion that drew a simple line between repression (bad) and expression (good) of the sexual impulse...
...Far more frequently, it is a rather unhappy choice of men who may not regard the tepid, lifeless propriety of bourgeois quasisexuality as a positive good, but who still see it as a lesser evil to the death-sex orgy of Der Sturmer or Che...
...But aphrodisiacs have a way of surviving the passions they arouse...
...The liaison between sex and socialism, though of long standing, has always been more an affair than a marriage...
...Against the grim background of an outdated puritanism, it may be rather easy to regard every removal of sexual restrictions as a victory for freedom, brotherhood, and enlightenment...
...For possibilities are always complex, and ambiguous...
...Let us accept for the moment the personal ideal of the commune of men completely "naked," completely open with each other...
...The opposite phenomenon, the commonlaw marriage of sex and socialism, is a converse of the Platonic considerations...
...Not ERAZIM V. KOHAK by accident are love and death the two great aphrodisiacs of human sexuality...
...If it becomes a basis for destruction of social and sexual conventions, it no longer matters whether the ideal it invokes is love or death...
...He is indignant, and like his detractors he, too, suspects the class enemy is having far more fun in bed than is decent, seducing not only the poor working girl but each others' wives as well...
...They are convinced they have found the freedom their contemporaries grope for, and present their love-in—or, to give it its older name, agape—with their ability to lock loins where most men can at best touch fingertips...
...That deafness is what puritanism is all about, and it is death...
...Men can hurt one another quite unwillingly, and hurt deeply...
...Being totally evil, devils become incapable of sex, for sex demands a degree of mutual trust of which devils are by definition incapable...
...What is natural is good, sex is natural, QED...
...True believers may speak of these episodes as "deformations," but they are quite inevitable, a strict con TURNING ON FOR FREEDOM sequence of removing barriers which may bar men from perfect communion but also protect them from their own lack of omniscience...
...Man requires the protection of "clothes," barriers which not only bar but also protect...
...They are not totally evil, and so are able to trust each other enough to lock loins and meet in love...
...The tone is quite grim—the only thing gay about Plato was his attitude to male homosexuality...
...Plato included community of women among his proposals for a commune-ist society...
...Yet the intuitive association of sex and socialism survives all disclaimers...
...But that is a generous misreading of the text...
...But even if men are not evil, they are weak, and weakness is the Urmutter of cruelty...
...I SUPPOSE we would all enjoy seeing an allnude production of, say, Shakespeare's Tempest...
...They are at least half in earnest, but anyone who has ever borne arms can attest that the two activities are by no means exclusive...
...Though willing to utilize whatever unrests are present in society, including sexual frustration, they are committed not simply to fostering change but to guiding and controlling it...
...Theirs is a rather idyllic vision, easy to sneer at, vulnerable to ridicule...
...This, finally, applies to sexual as well as to social revolution...
...With the coming of the revolution, matters changed little...
...They are certainly convinced of it, convinced that they are acting out the perennial dream of a Peaceable Kingdom...
...but the freedom, richness, and imagination it offers its audience or its citizens are a product of art, the conventional elaboration of the natural minimum...
...There are other straws in the wind...
...Not only protection against ill will, but protection against folly...
...But I would hesitate to join them...
...Not only the Jews, but all of Europe, including Germany, fell victim to the sadomasochistic orgy of destruction...
...The "system" sustains it, but it can sustain it only because a great many Americans choose it...
...At the same time, men are not angels, per essentiam and not merely per accidens as the Marxists would have us believe...
...Repression can, of course, become a vehicle for Todestrieb, for the kill-joy impulse— one look at the hateful expressions in the faces of the defenders of decency is proof enough...
...I would have passed it over with a chuckle...
...But I am not a communist because I know that men are not angels, and cannot be trusted implicitly, not even in love...
...To the extent that sexual freedom is equated with a "return to nature," it is as poverty-stricken and antihumanistic as primitivism...
...An embrace leaves one's back exposed— and devils could not resist the opportunity...
...They oppose puritanism with an orgy of sex as death, not with a celebration of sex as life...
...But it is costuming which is basic and makes the richness and variety of the stage possible...
...But would it be progress...
...Not only love but death can be a great aphrodisiac...
...Costuming offers a far richer range of creative possibilities...
...The editors of Der Sturmer were convinced that the orgy of destruction was justified by the nobility of the cause, an awakening, radicalizing of the German people—turning on—and that the object of its intended destruction, the German Jewry, was eminently worthy of destruction...
...The communes Bebel foresees are incredibly bourgeois, cooperative arrangements of proper Victorian couples, designed to bring household technology to working-class families...
...A play or, for that matter, a society may well have its roots in "nature...
...Historical analogies are not an argument, but our experience with Das Kapital suggests that it is never wise to pin social progress to any one blueprint, and it might be well to ask what the effect would be if that blueprint came from The Amorous Drawings of the Marquis von Bayros...
...They are very young, though not always in years, and very earnest, and they will tell you, pleadingly, that people are never as free and together as when all clothes and inhibitions come off and that people who share common work and life share common love as well...
...A proper Victorian, Marx disapproves...
...The sheer physical act of copulation may well be said to be natural, but it is also socially irrelevant...
...Marx is no exception...
...A naked Tempest might be fun, but an all-nude repertory theater would soon prove monotonous...
...God help the revolution and, for that matter, sex...
...As with Plato and Marx, not individual sexual freedom but socioeconomic necessity is the basis for his commune-ism...
...It may not make life free and full, but it makes it possible for the children who can laugh and play rather than die in gas chambers...
...Nor is their choice attributable merely to sloth or cowardice...
...They are committed to building the perfect society and, among men, perfection is never spontaneous...
...The Nazi movement fairly reeked of sex...
...Alienation, as Milovan Djilas pointed out recently, is not only a source of frustration, but also the barrier which protects individual freedom...
...If the heightening of intensity in sexual passion comes to seem equivalent to a celebration of destruction, then even the choice of bourgeois propriety is not dishonorable...
...And even that was due less to any regard for sexual freedom than to his acceptance of the mores common to the Athens of his day...
...There have been sexual revolutions before, as in England under the Regency or in Germany under Weimar...
...Finally, skin is skin...
...Marx, we find, does not advocate sexual communism...
...Often they share a project as well, tutoring underprivileged children, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry...
...Its excursions into ecstacy have been followed by Queen Victoria in one case, by Adolf Hitler in another...
...I am a socialist and 'a democrat because I know that a radical ideal can serve men only if it can create conventions which do this...
...The commune-ist (and communist) vision of a society in which all "clothes" and barriers—the "bourgeois" freedoms and civil rights, the limitations of "formal" democracy —are removed and men are left entirely naked to each other is a perennial vision...
...As such, sex is clearly socially relevant—but it can no longer claim the innocence and simplicity of a natural phenomenon...
...I am not a fascist because I am not a devil, and because I believe that men can communicate and meet one another...
...and it requires explanation...
...Among men, clothes and inhibitions are not only barriers to communication, but also very necessary means of protection...
...But the freedom and reality of the men and women I know who have adopted this life-style is impressive...
...It takes a radical trust to be radically open, and among men there are severe limitations on trusting—not because men are unwilling to trust, but most of all because, not being omniscient, men are not unlimitedly trustworthy...
...Much as in the underground journals of our time, its aphrodisiacs were hate and death, and its pleasure was pain...
...Even when socialist writers and rulers chose not to use that symbol, their hearers invariably supplied it, and not without reason...
...The continuing hold of puritanism on American society cannot be explained simply as an arbitrary imposition on a healthy, happy society by a few vindictive puritans...
...A A T MOMENTS, I can hear an echo of the different drummer whom my younger comrades hear in their communes...
...Those of us who have lived a little longer and learned how much men can cheat with their bodies, how independent the barriers among men are of their clothes, might find the symbolism apt but the hope a little naive...
...They must get their kicks by reading de Sade and by torturing each other...
...Lack of omniscience survives even in Walden II or a Soviet Socialist Republic...
...Not for fear of being hurt, but for fear of hurting, because I am not all good and all wise...
...Let us assume that men can in fact meet, with all barriers gone, once their clothes and sexual inhibitions are down...
...The puritanism of the Bolsheviks is notorious...
...If its program is simply sex as a physical act and its aim no more than quantitative increase in the number of individual acts of copulation per annum, then it is clear, unambiguous, but also socially irrelevant...
...The American left, by and large, has yielded to this temptation...
...The Todestrieb-sex of sadism and fascism does have a common basis in passion with the Lebenstrieb-sex of freedom and communion...
...If, on the other hand, it claims to free and foster human sexuality, it becomes socially relevant but also ethically ambiguous, a vehicle of destruction as well as of creativity...
...This is the dilemma of any sexual revolution...
...The relationship between sex and socialism may range from legal separation to sodomy, but it is still very much with us...
...But how natural is sex...
...I hope they keep the echo alive, and that we will not lose all ability to hear it...
...Accepting Marx's rather primitive version of the labor theory of value, Bebel is convinced that actual muscular exertion is the only source of value...
...PRAZIM V. KOHAK Now as any angelologist can tell us, men are neither devils nor angels...
...Yet such considerations are out of order now...
...is "the Communist Manifesto of the now revolution...
...This is why, though a commune may be a symbol of a hope and even a tangible achievement of a few men and women for a very limited time, it is not an adequate model for restructuring society...
...The Bible tells us that the blessed in God's presence "neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven"—presumably live in a continuous love-in, completely open, completely available, and able to meet each other without the limitations of formalized sexuality...
...So do his followers, if they speak of the matter at all...
...For myself, I would prefer to examine the basic premise—how valid is sex, not as personal pleasure or social symbol, but as a blueprint for progress...
...This places a rigid upper limit on the possible increase in the productivity of labor in value terms—a man can only work so hard...
...He accuses the bourgeoisie of having inflicted it upon the wives and daughters of the proletariat...
...In their everyday attitudes, socialist writers have regularly taken over the prevailing mores of whatever group in society was most receptive to their ERAZIM V. KOHAK doctrines...
...But that minimal common basis does not make it any less antihumanistic, antisocial, and antisocialist...
...By contrast, "nature" might offer few possibilities for genuine humanity, for freedom and imagination, but it does offer simplicity...
...for men they are at best a rather ambiguous desideratum precisely because in the case of men, being naked, literally and figuratively, means not only being wide open to communion but also being wide open to hurt...
...It is at best a strained attempt to affirm the conviction that not only death but also love can be a great aphrodisiac, that intensification of sexuality does not have to mean only destruction of others, but can also mean a communion with others, a meeting of people where they live, in their bodies, a radical and free encounter...
...Anyone who doubted it had sold out to the Jews...
...Men's bodies can be naked but their souls fully clad and their daggers drawn...
...The commune-ist sexual revolution can be found in the communes, rather reminiscent of the religious Utopias, which form in the eddies of the rat race...
...Philosopher kings are puritans virtually ex officio...
...Freedom of sexual contact provides a rather facile symbol for overcoming alienation among men...
...His Victorian contemporaries may have picked out "sexual communism" as by far the most intriguing feature of The Communist Manifesto and accused the Communists of having a more varied sex life than they themselves could manage but, again, the text tells a different story...
...it needs occasional sparkling with a Cause...
...Nudity is a possible form of costuming, and it was rather ludicrous to single it out for the Lord Chamberlain's special attention...
...The sexuality it dished out in issue after issue was of the sadistic/masochistic variety...
...It is not particularly difficult to explain the sex phobia of some socialist theoreticians— and Communist dictators...
...Not all sexual expression is necessarily the outcome of the impulse to freedom and joy...
...Starting with Feuerbach's Gesamtmensch, radicals have sought to end TURNING ON FOR FREEDOM the vicious isolation of individuals—caught in the productive process, joined and separated only by a cash nexus—and to establish a genuine human community...
...I am not at all sure, however, that the same can be said of social progress...
...Frightened men will hurt each other, even without evil intent, simply out of fear...
...Marriage is one such convention...
...Russian revolutionaries regarded sex as reactionary...
...Nor does he thank them for it as a blessing in disguise...
...Angelology is of little value as a descriptive science: there is a dearth of empirical evidence...
...The appeal of nudity on stage and primitivism in society is not a function of any creative possibilities it offers, but rather of its apparent simplicity...
...I doubt it...
...I see a historical justification for this pop terminology...
...Since presumably neither angels nor devils exist, angelology offers a unique opportunity for projection...
...In a fully-clad world, naked bodies do create a peculiar illusion of freedom, and it would be rather novel...
...It becomes a deeply antihumanistic nightmare when it mistakes men for angels, and sees its sole task in removing all barriers among them...
...The Curious Love Affair of Sex and Socialism MY TITLE is not a misprint...
...In their prescriptions for the new society, however, they have usually shared Plato's distrust of passion...
...But even if, per impossibile, a commune were able to give its members such security that none would feel the need to strike out at the other, its members, unlike angels, would still not be omniscient...
...I am a socialist because I believe that conventions can be replaced, that they do not have to be strained and straining relics of an irrational past but can be molded and shaped rationally, in the service of human security and human freedom...
...Radicalization, social or sexual, is not an unmitigated good...
...When sex becomes a symbol or is no longer a physical act but a relation between two human beings, it is no longer "natural" sex but human sexuality...
...Sex, it seems, is good, wholesome fun but a bit monotonous...
...Except for occasional outbursts of passion, neither partner has been particularly eager to acknowledge the relationship...
...Among angels, we can say, the ideal of a complete communion, a communal existence in which all clothes and barriers to human contact are removed, would be extremely appealing...
...But for that very reason, it has many uses as a science of pure possibilities...
...There was certainly nothing tepid or lifeless about the early Nazi movement...
...I wish them well, they are achieving something precious...
...Yet in practice the destruction of formal limitations has never created a society which could give its people bread, freedom, and justice...
...It can become a vehicle for Todestrieb as well as for Leben strieb, for the desire to dominate and destroy as well as to meet and love the other...
...Like his Soviet successors, he was careful to banish all art that might arouse the passions, reserving a grudging place only for early versions of Socialist Realism and Lawrence Welk...
...Human sexuality, like all human activities, is highly conventional...
...A joyless, brutal travesty like Che...
...Recently I came across an ad in an "underground" journal, in which a self-confessed Portnoy advertised for an "uninhibited F companion interested in Zen, astrology, existentialism, socialism or anything mod...
...In the terminology of pop revolutionism, sex can be "fascist...
...Dedicated pioneers at Berkeley or at the Grove Press may assure us that more of the same will produce something different, but their assurances grow daily less convincing...
...I am not thinking simply of minirevolutionaries whose buttons proclaim MAKE LOVE NOT WAR...
...But so can sexual expression...
...The Nazi hate sheet, Der Sturmer, was consummately pornographic, as crudely, openly, and inarticulately pornographic as the most underground publications of our time—and in rather the same way...
...Perfection, as Plato already recognized, must be guided and guarded, and passions are notoriously hard to control...
...By the same token, I suppose, devils never have sex...
...In every instance it has created a nightmare of men and societies broken and destroyed by well-meaning leaders who, even had they been all good, still were not omniscient...
...Primitivism—the "return to nature"—in sex and society alike is an admission of inability to cope with the complexity of both society and costuming...
...But while sexual freedom might seem an apt symbol of social freedom, it is not at all obvious that it is an adequate program for social action...
Vol. 16 • September 1969 • No. 5
