The Essential Ellen Willis

Introduction

473 Shortly after the publication of her essay collection Don’t Think, Smile! in 2000, my partner, Ellen Willis, began working on a book-length project tentatively called “The Cultural Unconscious in American Politics.” The central argument was that our understanding of cultural and political crises would be incomplete without a psychoanalytic dimension. The three draft chapters she wrote integrate many of these elements with a nuanced and persuasive account of the salience of radical psychoanalytic thought. Freud’s ideas about the force of the unconscious on human behavior, especially the compelling power of libido, is her starting point. But she also found the basis for her claims about radical psychoanalysis in Erich Fromm’s early work, Herbert Marcuse’s seminal Eros and Civilization, and especially in the many writings of Wilhelm Reich. As well as being a legendary radical feminist, she turned to her cultural radicalism as the most comprehensive framework of her thought. In these excerpts from her unfinished project, Ellen takes unfashionable positions : that biology is ultimately the basis of character structure and human relations , and that there is a cultural unconscious—as opposed to purely economic or political forces—that illuminates the striking ability of the right to mount a successful counterrevolution against the most important gains of the sixties. She focuses on the sixties youth generation’s important attitudinal shift about sex, its critique of the numbing and exhausting nature of much paid work, the beginning of a massive skepticism about marriage, and a Second Wave feminist movement that challenged the role of women in society by insisting that the personal is the political. Freed from Freud’s insistence that humans must tolerate their inescapable subordination to the imperatives of labor, we were at the brink of a qualitatively new moment in history when pleasure could, for the first time, INTRODUCTION Stanley Aronowitz 474 CODA be realized in everyday life. She acknowledges the importance of the fight for women’s economic equality with men, but stresses the potentially life-changing demands for sexual equality in the bedroom and in child rearing. Ellen reminds us that the sixties decade was marked by a new passion for politics produced by raised consciousness of the radical possibilities of a postscarcity epoch. But as she points out, the passion didn’t last: the conservative ripple throughout the white middle class seemed to occur “overnight.” The astounding rise of the right—its attack on abortion, its pro-family conservatism, its resolute and successful campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, its implosion of conventional sexual morality—was greeted by many liberals and leftists with submission rather than scorn and opposition. Rejecting the good/evil mantra ascriptions that rely on concepts such as cowardice, Ellen instead invokes her category of the cultural unconscious. Many left and liberal folks were still ensconced in the old ways, and their recently adopted cultural radicalism was still too fragile to withstand the withering assault from the right. And many were aware of their backtracking. Some argued, as Ellen once reminded us, that “we can’t let the conservatives capture family values.” Others who drifted to the center or to the right held on to support for the social welfare benefits of the New Deal yet fell into the trap of blaming the victim for their distress, a moral argument that is often the last refuge of bad faith. Above all, Ellen analyzes the perfidy of the liberal feminists who, in order to “rescue the women’s moment from the stigma of cultural radicalism,” concentrated their efforts on economic issues and embraced many of the right’s signature values. Ellen’s treatment of the defeat of cultural radicalism is not a rant against its detractors. In these pages, the reader will find a cool, levelheaded genealogy that traces the key events and attitudes conditioning the retreat from a bold feminism and, more broadly, radicalism. Among her claims is that the left has become prone to its own isolation by refusing to confront the essence of the right’s appeal, even as its social justice program is virtually irrefutable. The heart of the right’s attack was the reinsertion of conventional sexual morality. In this respect, she devotes some space to the contributions of Reich. She cites his efforts, first in Austria and later in Germany, to arouse the interest of Communists and Socialists to the imperatives of the sexual question— especially among youth and the necessity for the left parties to address their...