SOURCE: An introduction to Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934 by Wilhelm Reich, edited by Lee Baxandall, translated by Anna Bostock, Tom DuBose, and Lee Baxandall, Vintage Books, 1972, pp. xi-xxviii.

Ollman is an American writer and educator whose works include Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971) and Social and Sexual Revolution (1978). In the following essay, he discusses Marxist elements in Reich's writings.

Marx claimed that from the sexual relationship "one can … judge man's whole level of development… the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man's natural behavior has become human" [Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884]. The women's liberation movement has provided ample evidence to show that in our society this relationship is one of inequality, one in which the woman is used as an object, and one which does not bring much...