Cloudbusting with Brinton

"The irrational in politics" by Maurice Brinton is a real underground classic. Originally published in 1970, during the heydays of the sexual revolution, student protests and hippie counter-culture, it's an attempt to combine revolutionary Marxism with the alternative psychoanalysis of Wilhelm Reich.

Brinton wonders why the working class, or people in general, so often act against their real, objective interests, which Brinton takes to be a libertarian socialist program? He reaches the conclusion that people have been socialized into an authoritarian character structure through sexual repression. Therefore, the socialist revolution must go hand in hand with a sexual revolution. Brinton is prescient enough to criticize the phoney "sexual revolution" which simply turns people into consumers of mass produced pornography. However, his text (which is a quite fun read) is nevertheless replete with problems.

For instance, Brinton believes that the phoney sexual revolution is based on sexual repression, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to sell products with titillating pornographic marketing. Today, however, it's safe to assume that at least the younger generation isn't particularly "repressed" anymore (certainly not in Sweden), yet the socialist revolution is nowhere near. Nor can Brinton explain why people acted irrationally in societies where sexuality wasn't completely repressed. For all we know, sexual mores in ancient Egypt or Viking Age Scandinavia were pretty loose, yet these cultures where hardly "libertarian", certainly not Egypt. The author also tends to identify capitalism with hierarchy and authority. This may still have been the case when the pamphlet was written. Today many employers have no problem with "flat organization", yet capitalism remains. Finally, Brinton seems to believe that sexual repression and alienation somehow floats freely, as an independent variable, disconnected from the material conditions. (Presumably, this is more Reich than Marx.)

What Brinton doesn't understand, is that people may behave perfectly "rationally" in the short term, regardless of whether such actions are "irrational" in the long term. Remember: "irrational" to Brinton means that you don't fight for the libertarian socialist program. But why should German workers in 1933 fight for such a program, when they could get a piece of the cake by voting Hitler? Why should poor Hindus fight for libertarian socialism, when their immediate survival depends on joining a Hindu fundamentalist protest, perhaps for money? Why should White workers stop being sexist or racist, since this gives them certain privileges? This kind of analysis is absent from Brinton's booklet. This is no doubt connected to his mushy "anti-authoritarian" perspective, as if the natural state of "the workers" was to rise up against exploitation - as if no worker ever benefited from exploitation, relative privilege, etc.

Humans do act in stunningly irrational ways. Still, a rather large portion of Homo sapiens are eminently practical men. Absent a credible alternative, they tend to bicker for the small crumbs of cash and power that fall from the main table of the establishment. For some reason, Brinton doesn't want to admit that this behaviour is "rational" and might be explained even without reference to the Overself quelling our libido.

Ironically, it feels as if Brinton would have done better studying Marx rather than going cloudbusting with Reich. Just a thought. And no, I'm not a Marxist...