Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Pauperism, criminality and labour

Stirner’s solution to the denigration of the individual by the collectivity
and its various forms of consciousness was that of pinning his hopes
not on political man in any of his forms but on the man held most in
contempt by the respectable, upright citizen, the man despised because
he ‘lacks settlement’ and has ‘nothing to lose’: the pauper. Whether or
not pauperism is to some degree inevitable in modern society, as Hegel
had thought it was, state and citizen according to Stirner regard the
pauper as shiftless, immoral and at least potentially criminal; and these
are precisely the reasons why Stirner positively values the pauper as
exemplar of what man, freed from ties and guarantees, might be.
Although Stirner in the course of his advancement of the pauper as
paradigm uses the (French) word proletariat to designate the pauper,
his pauper has nothing in common with Marx’s proletarian, which is
one reason why the idea that ‘the theory of the alienation of the
proletarians was enunciated by Stirner at least one year before Marx’⁴³
is an exaggeration. Stirner included criminals and free-wheeling intel-
lectuals among his proletariat of paupers which, in the indignant but
accurate words of Marx, ‘consists of ruined bourgeois and impoverished
proletarians, a collection of ragamuffins, who had existed in every




epoch. . . Our Saint [Stirner] Marx continues, ‘has exactly the same
notion of the proletariat as the “good comfortable burghers”^,44 - that
they may be despised as riff-raff (canaille). Stirner, however, admired
his paupers for this very reason; he thought that they alone could be
free of the adverse, debilitating effects of Christianity. While Marx, for
his part, agreed that ‘the social principles of Christianity preach coward-
ice, self-contempt, debasement, subjugation [and] humility’, he insisted
against Stirner that these various indices of demoralization were ‘proper-
ties of the canaille' and that the proletariat properly so-called ‘which
does not want to be treated as canaille, needs its courage, its conscious-
ness of self, its pride and its independence far more than its bread’.⁴⁵

Stirner, it is true, fails to distinguish the pauper from the proletarian
just as he fails to distinguish the citoyen from the bourgeois; the
opposition he specifies between the proletarian-pauper on the one hand
and the citizen-bourgeois on the other is drawn largely according to the
principles each confused composite is supposed to represent or embody:
the principle of criminality as opposed to that of respectability. This
polarization is the setting for Stirner’s celebrated defence of crime, a
defence which emphasizes not the acquisition of external goods so
much as the assertion of the individual self of the criminal against the
legal code of the state. This defence of crime makes sense only if we
assume with Stirner - and without most other people, including Marx -
that the law has binding force as a matter of fact largely because men
believe it to be binding. Paul Eltzbacher points out that Stirner’s
constant preoccupation was with undermining such beliefs by spelling
out their implications; in this he is quite correct, although his ex-
planation neglects Stirner’s own markedly Young Hegelian belief in
the material power of thought, of conceptual schemes, of belief-
systems. Another commentator, Henri Arvon, who by contrast with
Eltzbacher is well aware of the Young Hegelian context of Stirner’s
thought, puts forward the argument that ordinary criminal activity
undertaken in ignorance of the need to assert individuality against
established moral and legal codes is not necessarily covered by Stirner’s
defence of crime; the trouble with Arvon’s argument is, however,
that nowhere does Stirner disapprove of any crime undertaken for any
reason.⁴⁶ What he took to be important is what all crimes share, the
assertion - however informed or conscious this assertion may be - of
the self against a system of rules.

Stirner believed that paupers (and criminals) were in effect main-
tained by the ‘respectable classes’; the continued existence of pauperism
and criminality serves as a backhanded but prima facie justification of
the socially and morally superior position of the ‘good, comfortable
burghers’, a position typified by Stirner’s phrase, a characteristic play
upon words, ‘das Gelt gibt Geltung’. (What he means is that the bour-
geoisie, like the property and the money that defines it as such, rests on a




legal title given by the state, and that ‘the bourgeois is what he is by the
grace of the state’; to Marx, the state, by contrast, rests on a legal title
given by the bourgeoisie.) As far as Stirner was concerned, the corollary
of the proposition that the state exists (inter alia) in order to repress
paupers, should these become unruly, is that the pauper has no need of
the state; since he has nothing to lose, ‘he does not need the protection
of the state for his nothing’. The denial of individuality that is the
principle of the state is epitomized by the state’s inability or refusal
- here Stirner follows Hegel - to alter the condition of the pauper.
Pauperism, as we have had occasion to see, confronted even the Hegelian
state in all its majesty with an impasse; but the conclusions Stirner
draws from this are once again all his own. ‘Pauperism’, he declaims

is the valuelessness of me, the phenomenon that [sic] I cannot
realize value [Geltung] from myself. For this reason state and
pauperism are one and the same. The state does not let me come
to my value, and continues in existence only through my
valuelessness; it is forever intent upon getting value from me,
i.e. exploiting me, turning me to account, using me up, even if
the only use it gets from me consists in my supplying a proles.

It wants me to be its creature.⁴⁷

One of the faults of Stirner’s argument at this juncture is that it
slides from this set of propositions to the completely different idea
that because labour is exploited (ausgebeutet) as a spoil (Kriegsbeute)
of the enemy, the possessing classes, ‘if labour becomes free, the state
is lost’. The least that can be said about the abruptness and incoherence
of this shift - and Marx’s criticism is not characterized by restraint - is
that because pauper and proletarian are not distinguished from each
other, neither are poverty and labour. The ellipses in his argument,
which on any reckoning (let alone Marx’s) emerges as less than firm,
enable Stirner to conclude, at least to his own satisfaction, that labour
has an egoistic character and as such points the way to freedom. This
made Marx indignant. ‘Freedom of labour’, he insisted with some
archness, means ‘free competition of workers among themselves.
Saint Max is very unfortunate in political economy, as in all other
spheres. Labour is free in all civilized countries; it is not a matter of
freeing labour but of abolishing it’⁴⁸ - an injunction which raises prob-
lems all of its own.

These to one side, however (for the moment), the point remains
that for Stirner the labourer too had become the egoist, even - for he
does not shrink from this claim - the prototypical egoist. Marx was
not slow to criticize, in this and other instances, the way in which
Stirner’s fervent and uncritical belief in the material power of reflective
categories all too frequently led him to suppose that various disparate


elements of social reality - paupers, after all, lack labour as well as
‘settlement’ - are intrinsically linked because they express some ‘prin-
ciple’ or other. ‘The road to the unique’, said Marx, ‘is paved with bad
concluding clauses.’ He criticized Stirner’s notion of the egoistic character
of labour on these very grounds; but it is significant, as we are about to
see, that Marx’s criticism of Stirner on this particular point goes very
much further.

The division of labour

One of the most important themes of The German Ideology is one
that points forward to the Grundrisse and Capital, the analysis of the
division of labour in capitalist society. Marx in The German Ideology
was concerned to extend the discussion of the labour process he had
begun in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts by linking it with
the discussion of individualism and individuality we may find in his
earlier Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. To see that Marx was
concerned to outline and identify the fetters on selfhood and self-
activity that were germane and specific to capitalist society is to see
that Stirner played a much more important part than has generally
been recognized in impelling Marx to construct the argument of The
German Ideology in the way he did. Stirner’s rather forced portrayal
of labour as egoistic had overlooked the fact that labour, with the
development of capitalism, had undergone certain well-marked changes:
Stirner thought labour was egoistic at a time when according to Marx it
could no longer even be personal.

The critical point that has been neglected in previous discussions
of The German Ideology is not only that it was Stirner who had forced
the issues of labour, individualism and individuality on to Marx’s
attention, but also that Marx need have framed his argument in the
way he did only in response to Stirner. To Feuerbach, who has often
been taken to be Marx’s only important target in The German Ideology,
but who tended to cast his arguments in terms of large-scale abstractions
(‘species’, ‘consciousness’, ‘nature’), labour, individualism and indi-
viduality were not important issues; Stirner alone among the Young
Hegelians had attempted, however incoherently and wrongheadedly,
to connect them. Marx’s analysis in The German Ideology of the
division of labour and its destructive effects on the individual in capi-
talist society is a barbed, pointed analysis; it is pointed, in the first
instance, fairly and squarely at Stirner, for it was Stirner who had
fatally misprized the obstacles to the emergence of the individual as
he could be.

To give one prominent example, the passage in The German Ideology
outlining Marx’s belief that ‘in communist society, where nobody has




one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in
any branch he wishes’ so that the individual would be able to ‘hunt in
the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize
after dinner, just as [he has] a mind’, is well enough known. But what
is not well enough known is whose points this passage is designed to
meet. It may be found in the ‘Feuerbach’ section of The German
Ideology but has no real reference to Feuerbach; nevertheless the
notion which has recently gained currency that Marx intended this
passage as a ‘parody of Stirner’⁴⁹ is wide of the mark indeed. It has
nothing of parody about it; Marx, for better or for worse, took this
passage, which comes in the middle of a sustained critique of the
capitalist division of labour, with the utmost seriousness.

This passage is nevertheless often singled out-by virtue, one suspects,
of its attractiveness - for ridicule on the grounds of its supposedly
‘utopian’ character. To write it off as utopian serves the additional
function of making Marx’s criticisms of utopian socialism appear
disingenuous. But this is too easy. Accusations of visionary tendencies
and of the unrealizability of the vision in question need to be tempered
by a recognition that any utopian elements in this picture - elements
that in Marx’s opinion do not lend themselves to a derogatory con-
struction - derive not from the agrarian character of the categories
Marx used, for he used them illustratively, but from their expansive
and forward looking implications. (Their source is probably Fourier,
whose imaginative presentiment of a new society Marx admired, and
whom he carefully distinguished from those he called ‘philistine
Utopians’.) Marx of all people had no interest in putting the clock back. In
this passage he is not at all advocating a reactionary rustic arcadia but
instead predicating his prescription for future society on the emergence
of new needs for the individual and on what is another expression of
the same thing, an expansion of social wealth. The passage advocates
an unprecedented expansion in the scope and scale of individual life-
activity - the back-reference to Fourier is in this sense clear - which
means that more people would be able to experience fuller and more
varied forms of activity in their everyday life, forms of activity that
heretofore had been not so much unreal or utopian as restricted to
certain well-placed, favoured individuals in society, who were not
reluctant to describe them.*

Marx’s passage in The German Ideology was concerned to point
up the existence, and to outline the ominous consequences of what
he called the ‘fixation of social activity’ that is engendered and re-
quired by the division of labour in capitalist society, and its ‘consolidation

•Witness, for instance, one of many possible examples, from the diary of John
Adams, aged twenty-three ‘Rose about sun rise. Unpitched a load of Hay. Trans-
lated two Leaves more of Justinian, and in the afternoon walked to Deacon
Webbs, then round by Millpond Home. Smoaked a pipe with Webb at the Drs
and am now again about reading over Gilberts section of feudal tenures.’⁵⁰




of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, grow-
ing out of our control and thwarting our expectations’.^S1 Marx intended
his passage about exclusive spheres of activity to indicate a decisive
shift in the nature of the division of labour that had been inaugurated
and was being maintained by the capitalist mode of production - a
shift which, together with its implications, had passed unnoticed by
Stirner. Stirner was not alone in his blindness, which was shared by
the entire Young Hegelian circle; but Stirner was alone in his curious
insistence on the ‘egoistic’ character of labour and the labourer, an
insistence he put forward at a time when, according to Marx, ‘the
domination of material conditions over individuals and the suppression
of individuality by chance [had] assumed its sharpest and most universal
form’, at a time when the division of labour required by the capitalist
mode of production had come to entail the most complete dependence
of worker upon worker as well as his dependence upon the objects and
conditions of production. Labour, that is to say, had become anything
but ‘egoistic’: it had ‘lost all semblance of life activity and only sustains
life by stunting it’. Marx insists that individuals

must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces not
only to achieve self-activity but also merely to safeguard their
very existence... The appropriation of the totality of the
instruments of production is, for this very reason, the
development of a totality of capacities in the individuals
themselves.⁵²

These are ambitious claims, and Marx’s reasons for advancing them
need to be examined. We need to ask what the relationship is between
the modern capitalist division of labour and what Marx calls ‘self-
activity’; and we must ask why Marx insists, against Stirner in the
first instance, that the forms taken by labour in capitalist society deny
and do not express this same ‘self-activity’. These questions are compli-
cated; to answer them we must stand back briefly from Stirner.

The pronounced shift in the character of the division of labour
inaugurated by capitalism to which Marx wishes to draw our attention
may best be appreciated by means of a comparison, admittedly a rough
one, between Adam Smith and Plato (a comparison touched upon
briefly in Chapter 1). Speculation about the division of labour in
society - about who should do what tasks - was by no means unknown
to pre-capitalist societies (although the actual expression ‘division of
labour’ was not used before Mandeville); but the character of the
division of labour that was outlined in pre-capitalist writings differed
dramatically from the kind of division of labour that came to be
defended, often eloquently, in the course of the eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century discussions. To enter properly into the history of the




concept would take us too far afield here. Instead, Plato has been
selected - as Marx himself selected him - as a foil to Adam Smith for
illustrative purposes. Their juxtaposition has the effect of highlighting
something quite extraordinary. The shift in the character of the division
of labour, and in the character of speculation about the division of
labour, to which Marx and others wished to draw our attention, has
been so marked that it might seem odd to consider Plato’s Republic as
containing an argument about the division of labour at all. Yet it
could plausibly be argued that if we take a broader view, the Republic
not only advances such an argument but actually is such an argument.

The Republic is concerned to prescribe the assignment 01 deploy-
ment of necessary tasks among various categories of the members of
society in such a way that each member might best carry out the task
(not ‘perform’ the ‘role’) that is best suited to his nature. Plato, that
is to say, outlines a social division of labour that assigns different
tasks to different people on the basis of their intrinsic differences
one from another; his division of labour is in this way an expression
and development of the particular talents, gifts, aptitudes, needs and
other characteristics of the individuals concerned. Social harmony and
political justice, he believed, could have no other foundation. It may be
that Plato considers these needs and talents, gifts and aptitudes in a
one-sided manner, but the point remains that the division of tasks the
Republic outlines is devised as a means of putting to good effect
specifiable human attributes that vary, often markedly, from one
individual to another. What this means is that the individualized labour
of each and every constituent member of Plato’s Republic is deployed
for the sake of satisfying human needs; it amounts (in the language of
the economic theory Marx was to develop after completing The German
Ideology) to production for use, not production for exchange. ‘Use-
value’, we might say, completely displaces ‘exchange-value’.

To use these categories of Marxian economics to point up the
essential character of the Platonic division of labour is to point up how
very different it is from the Smithian. According to eighteenth- (and
nineteenth-) century arguments the division of labour in society has as
its object something very different from, and quite irreducible to,
what Plato had had in mind. The division of labour was seen as a
mechanism for the production of wealth, as a means for increasing
the quantity of goods produced and of expediting the accumulation
of capital. The axis of the modern division of labour, if again we may
use the language of Marxist economics, is not production for use but
production for exchange. Adam Smith meant by ‘the division of
labour’ not only the separation of different tasks, trades, and employ-
ments throughout society at large (or what Marx was to call ‘the
division of labour in society’) but also the splitting up of a particular
process of manufacture into minute, and if possible regularizable,


operations (or Marx’s ‘division of labour in the workshop’).

What underlies both meanings was a view of the nature not just of
labour but also of the labourer, a view which in at least one crucial
respect was radically at variance with Plato’s conception; Smith had to
assume as his point d’appui an equalizing, non-specific and ‘abstract’
conception of the nature of the worker. From the point of view of
production, that is to say, similarities among workers must come to
outweigh their individual differences one from another; whereas Plato,
for all his evident disdain for manual labour, at least thought of it (and
its products, which did not admit of reduction to the abstraction
‘wealth’) in specific, particular, terms.

While Plato believed that the particular characteristics of the indi-
vidual qua individual (his attributes, aptitudes, gifts, talents, inclinations
and needs) were qualities worthy of immediate social expression, of
realization in, by and through the division of labour in society, Smith
did not. While Plato believed that the carrying out of society’s most
necessary tasks, the production of objects and services that would
maintain it in existence as a just society, should in some way express
the individual characteristics of each and every one of society’s con-
stituent members, Smith did not. Adam Smith’s concept of labour is
a generalization; labour considered (as Smith manifestly did consider
it) as an economic category is in no way reducible to, and may not be
explained by reference to, the characteristics or qualities of the indi-
vidual labourer. What concerns Smith in his ‘science’ of the ‘production’
of ‘wealth’ is what all men share; and what his invariant conception
of human nature implies, in this particular respect, is that what men
share is likely to be very basic indeed. Smith, unlike Marx for example,
saw little reason to lament this development (at least not in The Wealth
of Nations)', indeed, it was the hard-boiled view of most of the early
theorists and practitioners of ‘political economy’ that if what all men
considered as labourers (or ‘hands’) share is very basic indeed, if, that
is, what they share is in the nature of a lowest common denominator,
so much the better; at least their ‘output’ - the outcome of the expendi-
ture of their energies - will be measurable and quantifiable.⁵³ (Marx was
later to call this expenditure ‘labour-power’, a category which tells us
no more about any individual labourer than ‘horse-power’ would tell
us about any particular horse.)

There is a world of difference between the creation by a particular
person of a particular object (or the provision of a particular service)
that will express and tell us something about that person’s qualities
and characteristics, on the one hand, and the subjugation of the pro-
ducer to the imperatives of the productive process on the other. For
what the latter is likely to involve is precisely what Smith found him-
self forced to advocate: that individuals who are likely to be very
differently endowed in a variety of ways should none the less all do




the same thing, all perform the same kind of role, as part of the pro-
duction process of a commodity.

The difference between these two kinds of division of labour was to
Marx less of a conceptual distinction than an historical fact.⁵⁴ The shift
to the Smithian division of labour had by 1845 long been taking place,
even if people like Stirner failed to notice. Stirner, we have seen,
regarded labour as ‘egoistic’; but what such a view overlooks is that the
concept of ‘labour’ abstracted from any particular kind of labour
presupposes that the placement of individual workers in the productive
process that employs them is no longer considered to be connected
with or expressive of any personal qualities the individual worker
himself might possess. Stirner, in other words, could not be more
wrong. As Marx puts it in The German Ideology.

Through the inevitable fact that within the division of labour
social relationships take on an independent existence, there
appears a division within the life of each individual, in so far
as it is persona) and in so far as it is determined by some branch
of labour and the conditions pertaining to it. .. In the estate,
this [division] is as yet concealed; for instance, a nobleman
always remains a nobleman, a commoner always remains a
commoner, apart from his other relationships, a quality
inseparable from their individuality. The division between the
personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the
conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the
emergence of the class, which is a product of the bourgeoisie.⁵⁵

It is important to see that the ‘impersonal character’ of labour which
Marx was concerned in passages like this one to outline has not existed
from time immemorial; it is specific to capitalism. Slaves in ancient
society were regarded as slavish, churls in feudal society as churlish;
nobles in medieval times were regarded (and regarded themselves) as
noble. Prior to capitalism, that is to say, a person’s place within the
overall social division of labour appeared as an intrinsic personal quality;
people were held to relate to one another as the bearers of various
social and personal qualities, various productive and individual charac-
teristics. More is involved here than nomenclature alone; the actual
assignment of characteristics to individuals in pre-capitalist epochs on
the basis of presumed occupational skills, and vice versa, was no doubt
unjust in the extreme - yet these characteristics, and their congruence
within the individual concerned, were supposed to exist, and to matter.
Under modern capitalist conditions, by contrast, standardization and
homogenization, not only of the commodities that are produced but
also in a real sense of the people producing them, takes place; and from
the point of view of production - sooner or later we have to personify




production - this is no mere metaphor. Differences in individual gifts,
aptitudes, talents and inclinations that might once have been put to
good use in the production of goods (and which might be again) do not
cease to exist; but they do cease -pace Stirner-to matter. The distinc-
tions that characterize individuals, the qualities that distinguish indiv-
iduals one from another - what Stirner designated as the ‘peculiarity’
(Eigenheit) of each individual - may once have found expression of a
sort; they can do so no longer.

Small wonder, then, that Marx in The German Ideology was so
concerned to excoriate and ridicule Stirner’s ‘egoistic’ view of labour
and the labourer. What Stirner improvidently failed to see was that
‘the individual’ in all his irreducible uniqueness, the emergent egoist
on whom he built all his hopes, had undergone and was still undergoing
a decisive and momentous shift - a shift that applied to the powerful
as well as the powerless, to the capitalist as well as the proletarian. If
capital is - as Marx by 1845 believed - the controlling power over
labour and labour’s products, the capitalist possesses this power not at
all by virtue of his personal human qualities which are of little, if any,
account; he possesses it by virtue of the capital he owns. His power -
even, if we are to believe the Manuscripts, his personality - is reducible
to the purchasing power of his capital, and in this sense (though cer-
tainly not in any other) it is illusory and devoid of content. The empti-
ness of even the capitalist’s power in this respect may point back to a
certain emptiness in the power of the master in Hegel’s ‘master-slave’
dialectic in The Phenomenology of Mind, as well as to Saint-Simon’s
mistaken inclusion of the capitalists among les industriels rather than
les oisifs\ but these back-references are not our main concern here.
What is of central importance to Marx’s critique of Stirner, however, is
something that in turn makes Marx’s critique of Stirner of central
importance to Marx’s thought in general: his perception that ‘the
individual’, in the sense that Stirner had extolled him, has but a purely
conceptual existence.

It is important at this juncture that we get the sense of Marx’s
argument, which is that in modern capitalist society some occupational
categories, let us say the most important, crucial, central or typical
ones, take the form of slots into which the individual -any individual,
no matter who he is or what features he may possess-may in principle
be inserted. Marx is not suggesting that all occupational categories take
this form to the same extent; but he is suggesting that even those that
are less standardized, and depend instead apparently directly on the
creativity or gifts of the individual occupant, are in reality in no way
exempt from the effects of the general social process. Even the gifted-
ness of the individual artist, the exemplar of the Romantic stress on
individuality, is expressed in a kind of forced contradistinction to the
social division of labour and its restrictive effects upon everyone else.


Marx insists in The German Ideology that

The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular
individuals and its repression in the broad masses is the result
of the division of labour.. . With a communist organization
of society there disappears the subordination of the artist to
local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from [the]
division of labour, and also the subordination of the artist to
some definite art, thanks to which he is exclusively painter,
sculptor, etc., the very name of his activity adequately
expressing the narrowness of his professional development and
his dependence on the division of labour. In a communist
organization of society there are no painters but at most
people who engage in painting among other activities.⁵⁶

Because the division of labour in its modern form had transformed
what were personal powers into material powers, the history of the
development of the productive forces of individuals could no longer
be equated with the history of these individuals themselves. Only in
Germany, a country which was according to Marx industrially under-
developed and where ideologues inhabited their own peculiar world
of airy fantasy, would this development not be obvious. Labour, if
we are to believe Marx, who has Stirner in mind, can become the
reappropriated power of the individual, the expression and outgrowth
of his individuality; but not under capitalism.

The all-round development of the individual will only cease to
be conceived as ideal, as vocation etc. when the impact of the
world which stimulates the real development of the abilities of
the individual comes under the control of the individuals them-
selves, as the communists desire.⁵⁷

It is important that we recognize that in this passage and passages like
it - The German Ideology is peppered with them - Marx is not dismissing
individuality as a principle but defending it against Stirner’s miscon-
ceptions about its character and likelihood. One of the most important
features of The German Ideology, indeed, is Marx’s attempt to demon-
strate that communism and individuality, properly understood, are not
at all incompatible, despite Stirner’s blunt conviction that the two
were necessarily incommensurate.