Correction (Reich)

In our reply to the letter on Marx and Freud in last month’s Socialist Standard, we stated that Reich had described Russia as state capitalist in his 1945 book Listen Little Man. In fact it was in his 1945 Introduction of the third, English version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Here is what he actually wrote:

“In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition ‘capitalism’ does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific ‘capitalist mode of production’, that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in the wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia and it will continue to exist as long as the masses of the people continue to lack responsibility and crave authority” (Reich’s emphases)