The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure by Wilhelm Reich

Author:Wilhelm Reich [Reich, Wilhelm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2013-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF MARRIAGE

The social function of the institution of marriage is threefold: economic, political, and social. It corresponds exactly to the social function of the authoritarian family structure.

Economic. Just as historically marriage began to develop with the private ownership of the means of production, so it continues to draw its raison d’être from this material basis. This means that as long as there is private ownership of the means of production, marriage is socially necessary and meaningful.3 That classes which have no such economic interests live with the same sexual forms is an unjustified objection, because the prevailing ideologies are the ideologies of the ruling class. Marriage is not only the product of its material basis, it is also sustained by the moral attitudes of the prevailing ideology and by the human structure which is afraid of life. That is why the average person is not conscious of the real foundation of this form of sexual living; he merely develops rationalizations for it. But when the material basis requires it, the ideology is modified. After the Thirty Years’ War, when the population in Central Europe had dwindled, the district council of Nuremberg abolished monogamy with an edict of February 14, 1650: “The urgent needs of the Holy Roman Empire require that the population decimated by sword, illness, and hunger be increased … therefore, for the next ten years every male shall be permitted to marry two women.” (This is quoted from Fuchs, Sittengeschichte: Renaissance [Moral History: Renaissance], p. 40ff.) And this constitutes God-given monogamy.

Political. Since permanent monogamous marriage is the core of the compulsory family, which, in turn, as we have shown, is the ideological breeding ground for every member of authoritarian society, it also has a political raison d’être.

Social. The material dependence of wife and children is characteristic of patriarchal society. Thus, secondarily, marriage becomes a material and moral protection (moral in the sense of patriarchal interests) for wife and children and all phases of patriarchal society must adhere to it. It is not a question of whether marriage is good or bad, but whether it is socially justified and necessary. Hence there can be no desire to eradicate marriage from a society in which it is rooted economically. One can only “reform,” without shaking the fundamentals. For instance, after ten years of debate, “incompatibility” is allowed to replace “guilt” as a ground for divorce.

Reforms of this kind spring from the contradictions in marriage which arise not from economic but from sex-economic factors within the marriage situation. They often have the character of tragi-comic jokes, as in the following report from the Pester Lloyd of January 25, 1929:

Card games as a school subject. Surprising news comes from Cleveland in America. The teachers’ faculty of the municipal school has decided to introduce bridge as a required subject. The reason for this strange innovation, it is stated, is that the American home is doomed because the game of bridge is tapering off. How many marriages have already foundered on

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