Why haven't workers in the advanced capitalist countries become class conscious? The ability of workers to grasp their interests and to act upon them is central to Marxist theory. Yet crisis after crisis has come and gone and it is hard to see any great advance in class consciousness as a result. Social and Sexual Revolution is a collection of essays written over the last ten years. In these essays Bertell Ollman takes a fresh look at Marx's central concepts of class, class consciousness and communism; argues for the absorption of Reich's insights about the social function of sexual repression in maintaining capitalist relations; and discusses the various problems involved in trying to teach 'Marxism' in an academic context without destroying its revolutionary purpose.

1. Toward Class consciousness Next Time: Marx and the Working Class
2. Marx's Use of 'Class'
3. Marx's Vision of Communism: A Reconstruction
4. Marxism and Political Science: Prolegomenon to a Debate on Marx's Method
5. On Teaching Marxism
6. The Marxism of Wilhelm Reich or the Social Function of Sexual Repression
7. Social and Sexual revolution

Bertell Ollman teaches Marxism in the Department of Political Science at New York University, and is the author of Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, and is editor of Studies in Socialist Pedagogy. He is also creator of Class Struggle, a Marxist board game for home and school. He recently ran for the presidency of the American Political Science Association and lost, and for the chairpersonship of the Government and Political Science Department of the University of Maryland and won—only to be rejected at the last minute by the president of the University, setting the stage for one of the major academic freedom controversies of the decade.