Work Democracy Quotes

“Ungratified sexuality is readily transformed into rage. "Prison explosions" are outbreaks of sadism resulting from the absence of sexual gratification. Hence, when 33,000 workers leave their employment site all at once precisely in spring, there can be no doubt that the unsatisfying sex-economic conditions in the Soviet Union are the cause. By "sex-economic conditions" we mean more than just the possibility of a regulated and satisfying love life; over and above this we mean everything that is related to pleasure and the joy of life in one's work.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“The fascist dictator declares that the masses of people are biologically inferior and crave authority, that basically, they are slaves by nature. Hence, a totalitarian authoritarian regime is the only possible form of government for such people. It is significant that all dictators who today plunge the world into misery stem from the suppressed masses of people. They are intimately familiar with this sickness on the part of masses of people. What they lack is an insight into natural processes and development, the will to truth and research, so that they are never moved by a desire to want to change these facts.

On the other hand, the formal democratic leaders made the mistake of assuming that the masses of people were automatically capable of freedom and thereby precluded every possibility of establishing freedom and self-responsibility in masses of people as long as they were in power. They were engulfed in the catastrophe and will never reappear.

Our answer is scientific and rational. It is based on the fact that masses of people are indeed incapable of freedom, but it does not—as racial mysticism does—look upon this incapacity as absolute, innate, and eternal. It regards this incapacity as the result of former social conditions of life and, therefore, as changeable.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Work democracy cannot be imposed on people as a political system. It depends on the consciousness on the part of the working people in all professions of their responsibility for the social process. This consciousness may be present or it may grow in an organic manner, like a tree or an animal organism. The growth of this consciousness of social responsibility is the most important prerequisite for the prevention of the cancer-like growth of political systems in the social organism. If they are allowed to grow, they will sooner or later bring about social chaos. Furthermore, such consciousness of responsibility alone will, in the course of time, bring the institutions of human society into harmony with the natural functions of work democracy. Political systems come and go without stopping or fundamentally changing the social process. But the pulse of human society would stop
and not return should the natural life functions of love, work and knowledge cease for only one day. Natural love, vitally necessary work and scientific search are rational life functions. They can inherently be nothing but rational. Consequently, they are diametrically opposed to any kind of irrationalism. Political irrationalism which infests, deforms and destroys our lives, is — in the strictly psychiatric sense—a perversion of social life, caused by the ostracizing of the natural life functions and by their exclusion from the determination of social life.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism