Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Individualism and individuality

We have seen that according to Marx the capitalist division of labour
entails an unprecedented ‘fixation’ of occupational roles; these roles




become ‘material forces’ oppressing their individual occupants, whose
personal attributes and aptitudes they are not designed to express or
fulfil. Because occupational categories in modern capitalist society are
a denial, not an expression, of whatever particular features might
characterize an individual occupant, Stirner’s stress on the ‘unique’,
‘peculiar’ or ‘egoistic’ character of labour and the labourer is misplaced
and inappropriate. Marx’s perception, of course, has a wider and
deeper application; to give but one prominent example, it is radically
at variance with the point of view expressed in Durkheim’s The Division
of Labour in Society that ‘the activity of every individual becomes
more personalized to the degree that it is more specialized’⁵⁸ in mod-
ern society. Marx claimed, on the contrary, that specialization and
‘personalization’ of labour are not of a piece, and that capitalism
should be seen as having separated the social determinations of men’s
lives from the individual qualities and characteristics of men themselves.

As the result of this separation, indeed as part of its meaning, ‘the
individual’ might well be seen as being ranged against ‘society’ in certain
senses, as Stirner in his own singular manner had perceived. Yet ‘the
individual’ and ‘society’ are categories that can with an almost alarming
ease turn into abstractions, which is what had happened according to
Marx in the course of Stirner’s exposition. There is what might be
termed in Hegelian language a ‘bad infinite’ involved in Stirner’s argu-
ment; and while it might be unsurprising to find Marx excoriating
solipsism, the way in which he does so in the course of his attack on
Stirner is instructive. Marx asks how Stirner’s assertive, asocial ‘ego’ is
ultimately to be characterized. In posing the question Marx hoists
Stirner on his own petard: because ‘the ego of Stirner’s is not a “cor-
poreal individual’” but ‘a category constructed on the Hegelian method’,
Stirner in effect undermines his own argument. Marx proceeds to
indicate why:

Since every individual is altogether different from every other, it
is by no means necessary that what is foreign, holy for one
individual should be so for another individual; it even cannot be
so . . . Saint Sancho [Stirner] could at most have said: for me,

Saint Sancho, the state, religion, etc. are the alien, the Holy.

Instead of this, he has to make them the absolutely Holy, the
Holy for all individuals. . . How little it occurs to him to make
each ‘unique’ the measure of his own uniqueness, how much he
uses his own uniqueness as a measure, a moral norm to be applied
to other individuals, like a true moralist, forcing them into his
Procrustean bed ... is already evident.⁵⁹

Stirner’s mistake in Marx’s view was that of taking opposition
between a postulated but ultimately undefined ‘individual’ and an




unspecified ‘society’ of no determinate type as a datum to be applied,
categorically and across the board, to the necessary relationship of all
individuals to all societies, which are said to operate, by definition, at
their expense and to their detriment. The trouble with this approach,
as Marx indicated with some glee, is that individuality or uniqueness
then becomes an essence that is in no way dissimilar to those Stirner
had set out to attack in the first place. Marx, early in ‘Saint Max’,
reminds the reader of the opening paragraph of The Individual and his
Own where Stirner had declaimed with a flourish that just as God is
said to be by definition His own cause, causa Sui, so ‘the individual’
should be his ‘own cause’. ‘We see’, says Marx,

what holy motives guide Saint Max in his transition to
egoism . .. had [he] looked a little more closely at these
various ‘causes’ and the ‘owners’ of the causes, e.g. God,
mankind, truth, he would have arrived at the opposite
conclusion: that egoism, based on the egoistic mode of
action of these persons, must be just as imaginary as those
persons themselves.⁶⁰

Nor is this all. Since Stirner’s historical stages and conditions are
nothing more than the mock-Hegelian embodiments of successive idees
fixes, the success of his egoist according to Marx is reduced to consisting
in the ‘overcoming’ of ‘ideas’, and his victories can take no more than a
hollow, conceptual form. Marx insists that ‘for Stirner, right does not
arise from the material conditions of people and the resulting antagon-
ism of people against one another but from their struggle against their
own concept which they should “get out of their heads”¹⁶¹ - without
ever touching the world itself. Stirner, that is to say, canonizes history
(hence his ‘sainthood’ according to Marx), transforms historical con-
ditions into ideas, ‘seizes everything by its philosophical tail’ and takes

as literal truth all the illusions of German speculative philosophy:
indeed, he has made them still more speculative. . . For him, there
exists only the history of religion and philosophy - and this exists
for him only through the medium of Hegel, who with the passage
of time has become the universal crib, the reference source for all
the latest German speculators about principles and manufacturers
of systems.⁶²

Stirner’s history is in this way, according to Marx, falsified and mystified;
‘individuals are first of all transformed into “consciousness” and the
world into “object”, and thereby the manifold variety of forms of life
and history is reduced to a different attitude of consciousness’. Worse
still, Stirner is ‘a clumsy copier of Hegel’, one who ‘registers ignorance


of what he copies’ in the manner of the worst of amanuenses.⁶³ The
shortcoming in this respect of the successive stages of consciousness
Stirner outlines in ‘The Life of a Man’ and elsewhere in The Individual
and his Own is that each successive stage of what Stirner calls ‘conscious-
ness’ (and what is in reality awareness) confronts a world that owes
nothing to previous confrontations but is to all intents and purposes
ready-made. Such an approach, Marx quite correctly indicated, for all
its Hegelian pretensions, was radically at variance with Hegel’s own
approach, which at least had had the virtue of admitting, and attempt-
ing to account for, historicity. Marx himself, as we shall see, followed
Hegel much more closely when he insisted, not just against Stirner,
that the social world is not something found but something made yet
it was Stirner who had indicated in its most pointed and exaggerated
form the danger that arises from all Young Hegelian attempts to account
for historical change by ascribing constitutive power to consciousness.
Because for Stirner

the holy is something alien, everything alien is transformed into
the Holy; and because everything Holy is a bond, a fetter, all
bonds and fetters are transformed into the Holy. By this means
Saint Sancho [Stirner] has already achieved the result that
everything alien becomes for him a mere appearance, a mere
idea, against which he frees himself merely by protesting against
it.⁶⁴

This is precisely the charge Marx levels, mutatis mutandis, against
Feuerbach: that his ersatz notion of alienation, from which Marx was
no less concerned to dissociate himself, invites no more than a supine,
contemplative response. While Stirner was justified in criticizing, sans
phrase, Feuerbach’s dependence on generalities with no meaning, like
‘man’, Marx indicates that Stimer was nevertheless himself dependent
upon such abstractions in very much the same way. Stirner, that is to say,

constantly foists ‘man’ on history as the sole dramatis persona
and believes that ‘man’ has made history. Now we shall find the
same thing recurring in Feuerbach, whose illusions Stirner
faithfully accepts in order to build further on their foundation.

... If Stirner reproaches Feuerbach for reaching no result because
he makes the predicate into the subject and vice versa, he himself
is far less capable of arriving at anything, for he faithfully accepts
these Feuerbachian predicates, transformed into subjects, as real
personalities robbing the world ... he actually believes in the
domination of the abstract ideas of ideology in the modern world,
he believes that in this struggle . .. against conceptions he is no
longer attacking an illusion but the real forces that rule the world.




Stirner, in other words, like the Sancho Panza to whom Marx likens
him, believes ‘Don Quixote’s assurances that by a mere moral injunction
he can, without further ado, convert the material forces arising from
the division of labour into personal forces’; ‘the practical moral content
of the whole trick’, as Marx indignantly puts it, ‘is merely an apology
for the vocation forced on every individual’ by the division of labour .^6S
Stirner’s belief, moreover, is not Hegelian but a typically Young Hegel-
ian debasement of Hegelian doctrine.

Hegel himself had believed that selfhood is not given to the individual
as an automatic or definitional attribute but that it must be created by
that individual. The importance of Hegel’s concept of selfhood as self-
activity was not lost upon Marx, although it does seem to have escaped
the attention of Stirner. Marx believed that Hegel’s concept of self-
activity had as an important part of its meaning not only a notion of
potentiality beyond the given,but also a notion of creative work -work,
moreover, of the very kind that the capitalist division of labour subverts
and denies. Marx meant what he had said in the Economic and Philo-
sophic Manuscripts, in a passage whose implications strike remarkably
deeply into his thought taken as a whole. ‘The outstanding achievement
of Hegel’s Phenomenology', Marx insisted, had been that ‘Hegel grasps
the self-creation of man as a process, . . . and that he therefore grasps
the nature of labour, and conceives objective man (true, because real
man) as the result of his own labour’. Even though labour as a source
or form of self-realization was more important to Marx than it had
been for Hegel, it remains true that the theme of the transformation
of self-consciousness into self-realization that is effected by labour,
labour seen as self-activity, runs through the Phenomenology and
greatly influenced Marx. The idea that ‘by working on the world, a
man gives his own individuality an external, objective and enduring
form’ has as its best-known expression the ‘Master and Slave’ (‘Herr
und Knecht’) section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, but it may be
encountered elsewhere in Hegel’s writings. One illustrative example,
which sounds as Marxist as it is Hegelian, may be found in his Lectures
on Aesthetics '.

Man is realized for himself [fur sich] by practical activity,
inasmuch as he has the impulse, in the medium which is directly
given to him, to produce himself, and therein at the same time
to recognize himself. This purpose he achieves by the modification
of external things upon which he impresses the seal of his inner
being, and then finds repeated in them his own characteristics.

Man does this in order as a free subject to strip the outer world
of its stubborn foreignness, and to enjoy in the shape and fashion
of things a[n] ... external reality of himself.⁶⁵




This means that the individual according to Hegel can attain self-
knowledge only in and through what he has done and what he has made.
Selfhood is a process, a capacity, not a Stirnerian datum; it is a develop-
ment, not a state or a stage; and it validates itself over time. What this
means is that selfhood implies self-activity and involves the mind’s
capacity to situate itself according to its own activity. The process in
question is largely (but not entirely) retrospective; selfhood arises from
the mind’s ability to comprehend itself in its own emergence and
development, along the path that it itself has taken. But the self can no
more be reduced to this itinerary than it can be accounted for by
whatever happens to surround and impinge upon it; it cannot be
reduced to its social setting. The one aspect of the philosophy of the
Enlightenment that Hegel rejected completely and unreservedly was
Lockean sensationalism and its various materialist offshoots, all of
which share a static, constricting conception of human nature, together
with a tendency to dwell upon what is least significant to selfhood, its
susceptibility to outside influence. As Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach were
also to recognize, to see men as passive, supine products of their environ-
ment is to fail to do justice to their creative capacities and potential
and to fail to take into account anything that characterizes anyone -
whatever, in Stirner’s lexicon, is peculiar or unique to any particular
person. People in Hegel’s view are their experiences, deeds, thoughts,
actions and potential combined; each person makes something different
out of the situation in which all persons find themselves. Each person
is an indissoluble ensemble, and all persons are their own creators,
actualities and potentialities combined. They are not at all the objects
of external necessity; and this, indeed, is why only a retrospective
teleology can encompass and contemplate men’s completed lives.

These Hegelian ideas form the background to Stirner’s The Individual
and his Own and to Marx’s thought alike; both Stirner and Marx in
their very different ways perceived that what had been in principle
indissoluble to Hegel was in fact dissolved. Here, however, the resem-
blances between the two (resemblances which are in the nature of an
overlap, not a convergence) end; if we ask what is the nature of the
ensemble that is dissolved, when its dissolution takes effect, and by
which agency, differences of some substances are quick to emerge.

To Stirner, what was in principle indissoluble had yet to make its
appearance, since individual uniqueness had been obscured and oc-
cluded throughout human history by successive systems of thought
and morality, of organization and self-denial, all of which had worked,
seriatim, to devastating effect. In present-day society, according to
Stirner, we meet with nothing more than hints and suggestions of
individual uniqueness, and these are encountered only among society’s
outcasts and marginalia - the dispossessed: paupers, criminals, labourers.
Stirner regarded these figures as exceptions to a general rule, to his




trans-historical maxim of the denial of individual uniqueness. Marx’s
approach was very different; he admitted that ‘individuals have always
started out from themselves, and could not do otherwise’;⁶⁷ he had
admitted (in his 1844 Notebooks) that ‘the greater and more articu-
lated the social power is within the relationship of private property,
the more egoistic and asocial man becomes’, a point with which Stirner,
mutatis mutandis, might have agreed (and which he would have cel-
ebrated). Stirner, however, would have found outrageous the clause
Marx immediately added: the more egoistic and asocial man becomes,
‘the more he becomes alienated from his own nature’.⁶⁸ For while
Marx could write, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, that
‘man is a unique individual - and it is just his particularity that makes
him an individual’, his conception of what it means to be an individual
differs radically from that held by Stirner. To be an individual, Marx
continues in the same passage, is to be ‘a really individual communal
being [Gemeinwesen] \⁶⁹ Marx saw no contradiction in using the
word Gemeinwesen to refer both to the individual and to society
(though not to capitalist society). It is not hard to imagine what Stirner
would have made of some of Marx’s characteristic utterances (which
are not all from his earlier writings): ‘The individual is the social being
[gesellschaftliches Wesen] ’; ‘individual human life and species-life are
not different things’; man ‘is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon,
not only a social animal but an animal that can develop into an indi-
vidual only in society’.⁷⁰ We may presume that the Aristotelian refer-
ence in this statement, with its familiar implications of purposiveness
and teleology, was quite intentional (and, of course, for this very
reason would have been no less horrifying to Stirner).

These statements, and statements like them, demand some expla-
nation, coming as they do from a theorist who is commonly supposed
- not least by Stirner, but also by more reputable opponents - to have
been the enemy of the individual or to have subsumed ‘the individual’
beneath ‘the collective’ or ‘the class’. Advocates of this commonly
held view have never been characterized by their reticence; yet its
advocacy should at least be tempered by a recognition that Marx
derived, most proximately from Hegel, a more complex position than
is generally ascribed to him. The hinge of Marx’s argument is a distinc-
tion between individualism and individuality that he used most dramati-
cally and forcefully in his polemic against Stirner. The neglect of
‘Saint Max’ has had the untoward effect of obscuring our understanding
of Marx’s position, a position which, while it is unlikely to still or
conclude discussion of the issues surrounding individualism, individuality
and society, deserves to be better known by those who might take up
the cudgels for or against Marx in future. As an example - there are
many more - of what needs to be overcome in future discussion, refer-
ence might be made to one recent commentator who regards Stirner’s




book, ‘the testament of a dissenting intellectual’, as ‘a sociological
document of the first order’, and who ventures the opinion that ‘Marx,
who was well aware that “revolution begins in the mind of intellectuals”,
did not accord this credit to Stirner because at the time [1845-6] he
was already thinking in terms of classes and not of individuals’.⁷¹ In
fact, Marx, who did not think that revolution begins in the mind of
anyone, far from neglecting ‘the individual’ for ‘the class’, was attempt-
ing throughout The German Ideology to examine their relationship in
capitalist society - thanks in no small measure to Stirner himself.

What this means is that Marx, far from evading the issue of the
individual versus the collectivity that had been raised, pointedly, bv
Stirner, knew perfectly well how important it was; it means that Marx
met Stirner’s extreme presentation of the issue point by point, and
dealt with it by re-casting Stirner’s polarization in terms that clearly
recall Hegel. Individualism, said Marx, is one thing, individuality another;
the difference is akin to the distinction in Hegel between self-assertion
(in civil society and its ‘system of needs’) and self-determination (which
is political, and takes place only at the more elevated level of the
state). Individualism and individuality are conceptually distinct, and
historically they have come to work at cross-purposes. Individualism
animates capitalist society and by the same token does violence to
individuality; indeed it cannot do otherwise, since the distinguishing
feature of labour in capitalist society is its negation and discounting
of self-activity, properly so-called. Not only is this denial of self-activity
fertile soil for alienation; alienation is alienation o/self-activity, and, as
we have seen in the last chapter, it takes two forms that reinforce each
other. The domination of the product over the producer in the process
of production - with all the monstrous paradoxes this implies - is one
of them; the way in which men’s social relations and communal potential
take on an alien existence independent of men themselves is the other.
One of the consequences of alien politics is that the division between
civil society and state is reproduced in microcosm within the individual,
whose powers, whether we consider them productively or politically,
are expressed as something alien; because the outcome of activity in
either realm stands opposed to the actor, the system is enabled to
reproduce and reinforce itself at the expense of the individual.

Marx’s use of the term Gemeinwesen to refer to the individual
(ein Gemeinwesen) and society (das Gemeinwesen) indicates that
quite unlike Stirner, he refused to separate individual and society
categorically at all. As we have seen, Marx had insisted against Bruno
Bauer, in ‘On the Jewish Question’, that the separation of bourgeois
and citoyen entailed by ‘political emancipation’ was a denial, an alien-
ation, of man’s quintessentially social character; Marx insisted, in the
same year, against Hegel that ‘the nature of the particular person is not
his beard,his blood, his abstract p/rysz's, but rather his social quality .. ,’.⁷²




It is a point of some importance that these claims are linked. To get the
full sense of the links we need to examine ‘Saint Max’; yet some of the
main features of Marx’s position have been well outlined by Joseph
O’Malley in his ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right'.

What governs these discussions [Marx’s 1842 and 1843 critiques]
is a special notion of the relationship between the individual
social being on the one hand, and society on the other: society
is the sine qua non for the humanization of the individual man;
and the character of the individual member of society will be a
function of the character of society itself. At the same time,
however, the character of society will be an expression of the
character of its members, for society itself is the actual social or
communal nature of its members. Such a conception of the
nature of the relationship of the individual and society underlies
Marx’s use, in the Critique, of the term Gemeinwesen (communal
being) to signify both the individual and . . . the social complex
within which he lives and acts . . ,⁷³

-unless of course this ‘social complex’ is a capitalist one. The double-
edged use of the term Gemeinwesen implies that the denial of one
meaning is ipso facto the denial of the other; or to put the same point
another way, that when the social and individual qualities of men have
not yet been separated, man is both an individual and a social represen-
tative of the human species. The modern capitalist division of labour
offends against both meanings of the word Gemeinwesen and sunders
what had been a substantial unity.

In discussing representativeness in the Critique, Marx had observed
that ‘every function’ in society can be regarded, prima facie, as a
representative function, provided that the unity between individual
and community, itself a prima facie unity, has itself not been broken.

For example, the shoemaker is my representative in so far as he
fulfils a social need, just as every definite social activity, because
it is a species-activity, represents only the species; that is to say,
represents a determination of my own essence the way every man
is the representative of the other. Here, he is representative not
by virtue of something other than himself which he represents,
but by virtue of what he is and does.⁷⁴

It is striking that by the time Marx investigated the modern division of
labour in The German Ideology he recognized that in modern society it
is manifestly no longer the case that every function in society can be
taken as being representative in anything like the same sense. This


means that while individual and society for Marx are not categorically
separable, they are separated in capitalist society in a way that does
violence to man’s human, social character. What Hegel in his discussion
of civil society had called ‘the system of needs’ - the realm of production,
distribution and exchange - was to Marx as well as to Hegel the anti-
thesis of community. Marx had expressed this belief prior to The
German Ideology, in a rather less pointed form; in a passage whose
argument strikingly recalls that of ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx had
indicated that

[as] human nature is the true communal nature or communal
being of man, men through the activation of their nature create
and produce a human communal being, a social being which is
no abstractly universal power opposed to the single individual
but is the nature or being of every single individual, his own
activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth.. . Men as
actual, living particular individuals, not men considered in
abstraction, constitute this being. It is, therefore, what they are.

To say that man alienates himself is to say that the society of
this alienated man is the caricature of his actual common life,
of his true generic life. His activity, therefore, appears as a
torment, his own creation as a force alien to him, his wealth
as poverty, the essential bond connecting him with other men
as something unessential so that the separation from other
men appears as his true essence.^7S

That ‘separation from other men’ takes on the aspect of an ‘essence’
is precisely Marx’s accusation against Stirner in The German Ideology,
as we have seen. Marx consequently indicated that Stirner’s truculent
‘ego’ enjoyed but a hollow, conceptual existence; that the egoism
Stirner asserted led him into solipsism, solipsism of a peculiarly Young
Hegelian kind according to which the vaunted principle of ‘peculiarity’
could not avoid becoming one more ‘essence’ of the sort Stirner had
taken it upon himself to attack; that his insistence on the egoistic
character of labour overlooked the fact that in modern society prolet-
arians, and individuals in general, ‘are entirely subordinated to the
division of labour and hence are brought into the most complete
dependence on one another’,⁷⁶ a dependence they could, and would
have to, turn to good account in revolutionary organization.

What lies at the heart of Marx’s attack on Stirner also lies at the
centre of The German Ideology taken as a whole: the analysis of the
division of labour and of the consequent need for emancipation, by
means of revolution, from its disastrous effects. The forces of pro-
duction (Produktionskrafte) were no longer in any significant sense
the forces of the individual but forces of private property that were




chillingly indifferent, or actively hostile, to the individual; and th<
individual in question has nothing in common with Stirner’s egoist
since his life-activity has nothing distinctive or personal about it; hi
exists as the producer of products over which he has no control, pro
ducts which are made, distributed and used without any regard to an)
‘peculiarities’ the individual involved in their manufacture or use ma;
possess or embody. The individual in this sense is - and here the Hegeliai
language Marx uses is appropriate - an ‘abstract individual’; the onh
attributes he may possess that are relevant, or that ‘count’, are thosi
each man has in common with others. These amount to a kind o
lowest common denominator, one to which men and their labour were
daily, being reduced; all that matters is that which can be measured, ai
alienation indeed - their generalizable labour, their buying power, thei
selling power, and not what gives or could give them any individuality

Self-activity and communism

Capitalism in Marx’s opinion offends against community, individuals
and selfhood alike; owing to the character of its division of labour a
the exploitation, rather than the expression, of the diversity of huma
activity, capitalism subordinates individuals to production, whic
comes to exist ‘externally to them, as a kind of fate, but social prc
duction is not [on the other hand] subordinated to individuals. . . Thei
own production [stands] in opposition to individuals as a thing-lik
relationship which is independent of them’. Under its dominatio
‘labour itself can only exist on the premise of [the] fragmentation’ c
society and of the individuals of which it is composed.

The productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite
independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the
individuals; the reason for this is that the individuals, whose
forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another. . .
Thus we have a totality of productive forces which have taken
on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the
forces of the individuals but of private property. . . Never in
any earlier period, have the productive forces taken on a form
so indifferent to the intercourse of individuals as individuals,
because their intercourse itself was previously a restricted one. . .
Standing over against these productive forces we have the
majority of the individuals from whom these forces have been
wrested away and who, robbed in this way of all real life-content,
have become abstract individuals. . . The only connection which
still links them with the productive forces and with their own
existence - labour - has lost all semblance of life-activity and only
sustains their life by stunting it.⁷⁷




The axis of Marx’s discussion is self-activity, the emergence of a
‘totality of powers’ within each and every individual as opposed to the
playing out of a restrictive and exclusive role. It is the notion of self-
activity that links together Marx’s sustained critique of the capitalist
division of labour, in The German Ideology and elsewhere, for the
narrowness and ‘fixation of social activity’ it brings forth and requires,
on the one hand, and his fervent espousal of revolutionary communism
on the other; and it is the notion of self-activity that undergirds the
concept of individuality that Marx, prompted by Stirner, distinguished
forcefully from the individualism that animates capitalist society.
Individuality and self-activity are linked, and offended against by the
capitalist division of labour; individuality, according to Marx, is thus
not at all what Stirner had made of it, a raw datum, or a kind of core
or heart existing beneath (but not within) successive layers of con-
sciousness and ‘vocations’. It is not something that is found or un-
covered in this way - by peeling away layers - at all; it is something
that is made, and something that cannot, or can but rarely, emerge
under capitalist conditions. Only if individuality were to be seen in
this way, as a potential or an expansive capacity, would it not turn
into yet another Young Hegelian ‘essence’, as had Stirner’s ‘ego’. The
implications of this point are directly political ones. Stirner, says
Marx,

believes that the communists were only waiting for ‘society’ to
‘give’ them something, whereas at most they only want to give
themselves a society... He transforms society, even before it
exists, into an instrument from which he wants to derive benefit,
without him and other people by their mutual social relations
creating a society and hence this ‘instrument’... He believes that
in communist society there can be a question of ‘duties’ and
‘interests,’ of two complementary aspects of opposites that
exist only in bourgeois society (under the guise of interest the
reflective bourgeois always inserts a third thing between himself
and his mode of action - a habit seen in truly classic form in
Bentham, whose nose would have to have some interest before
deciding to smell anything).. . [Stirner] believes that the
communists want to ‘make sacrifices’ to ‘society’ when they
want at most to sacrifice existing society; in this case he should
have described their consciousness that their struggle is the
common cause of all people who have outgrown the bourgeois
system as a sacrifice that they make to themselves.⁷⁸

Stirner’s analysis of the threats to individuality was in Marx’s opinion
vitiated by his ignorance of economics which had led him to overlook
the most important, self-sustaining threat of all: the capitalist division




of labour. Marx’s criticism of Stirner on this particular score did not
stop at this point, however; nor indeed could it have stopped here, in
view of the other side of Stirner’s argument, which raised an issue of
considerable importance.

Whatever the shortcomings of Stirner’s discussion - shortcomings
to which Marx was in no way blind, as we have seen - it did raise the
issue of the supposed threat to the individual posed by the communists,
whom Stirner included prominently among the moralists and task-
masters he was concerned to attack. The crucial point here is not only
that Stirner had forced this issue on to Marx’s attention; it is also that
Marx need have framed his arguments - not only about the division of
labour, individualism and individuality, but also about communism and
revolution - only in response to Stirner. It is Stirner’s presentation of
individuality - a theme central to the argumentation of The German
Ideology - that Marx was meeting. Private property and the division of
labour, according to Marx,

can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development
of individuals, because the existing character of intercourse and
productive forces is an all-round one, and only individuals who
are developing in an all round way can . . . turn them into the
manifestations of their lives.

It is a point of some importance that ‘abstract individuals ... are by
this very fact [i.e. the fact of their “abstraction”] put into a position to
enter into relations with one another as individuals’. Stirner

believes that communist proletarians who revolutionize society
and put the relations of production and the form of intercourse
on a new basis -i.e. on themselves as new people, on their new
mode of life - that these proletarians remain ‘as of old.’ The
tireless propaganda carried on by these proletarians, their daily
discussions among themselves, sufficiently prove how little they
want to remain ‘as of old,’ and how little they want people to
remain ‘as of old’... They know too well that only under changed
circumstances will they cease to be ‘as of old’ and therefore they
are determined to change these circumstances at the first
opportunity. In revolutionary activity the changing of self
coincides with the changing of circumstances.

What this means is that, far from being fundamentally similar or re-
ducible to them,

[communism] differs from all previous movements in that it
overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and




intercourse and for the first time treats all natural premises as the
creatures of hitherto existing men . . . and subjects them to the
power of united individuals. . . The reality which communism
is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible
that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar
as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of
individuals themselves.⁷⁹

It is for this reason that Marx insisted that the communists’ revolution-
ary injunctions and calls to action are in no way reducible to or com-
parable with moralistic imperatives and tasks of the kind that Stirner
had set out to attack. Instead, they were, according to Marx, in the
fullest sense of the word historical imperatives, the need for the realiz-
ation of which was based not only upon the observably debilitated
condition of individuals under capitalism but also upon the where-
withal for emancipation capitalism nevertheless provides. As Marx
puts it,

Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust
itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes
the present state of things. The conditions of this movement
result from the premises now in existence.⁸⁰

What is distinctive about, and crucial to, Marx’s depictions of capitalism
is his awareness of its double-edged character, his perception that the
dependence it produces, if complete, is also and by the same token
universal or general (allgemein). ‘All-round dependence’, which Marx
defined in The German Ideology as ‘this natural form of the world-
historical cooperation of individuals’, will be transformed by ‘com-
munist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these
powers which, born of the actions of men on one another, have till
now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them’.⁸¹
Men’s actions in capitalist society are not self-directed because they are
no more than reactions to externa] necessity; yet they are universal
in scope and scale, and this universality, Marx was to insist against
many of his more past-oriented contemporaries - including, as we shall
see, Proudhon - did denote progress, progress of a radically unsubstan-
tiated kind, but which by virtue of its unsubstantiated character could
be turned to good account. As Marx was to put it in the Grundrisse:

Universally-developed individuals, whose social relationships
are subject, as their own communal relationships, to their own
collective control, are the product not of nature but of history.

The extent and universality of the development of capacities




that make possible this individuality presuppose precisely
production on the basis of exchange-values. The universal nature
of this production creates an alienation of the individual from
himself and others, but also for the first time the general and
universal nature of his relationships and capacities. At early
stages of this development, the single individual appears to be
more complete since he has not yet elaborated the abundance
of his relationships, and has not yet established them as powers
and autonomous relationships that are opposed to himself. It is
as ridiculous to wish to return to that primitive abundance as it is
to believe in the continuing necessity of its complete depletion.⁸²

Marx went on to argue, fatefully, that the individual, as a member of
the revolutionary proletariat properly so-called, would in no way have
his individuality diminished, since the collectivity in question becomes
the sine qua non for individual freedom and self-activity alike.

Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals
. . . only when controlled by all. . . Only at this stage [at the
stage of the organization of the revolutionary proletariat] does
self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to
the development of individuals into complete individuals. . .

The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to
the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into
the intercourse of individuals as such.⁸³

It is for this reason that Marx insists against Stirner that the com-
munists ‘do not put egoism against self-sacrifice, nor do they express
this contradiction theoretically’. Instead, ‘they demonstrate the material
basis engendering’ this contradiction, ‘with which it disappears of
itself. The communists, again, ‘by no means want to do away with the
“private individual” for the sake of the “self-sacrificing man’”; and the
communists ‘do not preach morality at all, such as Stirner preaches so
extensively’.⁸⁴ The ‘individual’ and the ‘collectivity’ are exclusive and
opposed categories, as Stirner considered they were, only if the indi-
vidual is considered mystically, as ‘man’ or as ‘ego’, and history as the
record of his self-estrangement, conceived spiritually.

Marx does not rest content, then, with painting an entirely negative
picture of capitalism, its division of labour and the alienation it brings
forth; it is when we ask how individuals, reduced as they are according
to Marx to such a debilitated state, are to emancipate themselves that
(to put matters mildly) doubt is cast on the entire Young Hegelian
perspective. Many lines of discussion are brought together in Marx’s
argument; his direct references to Stirner’s fervent objections to revol-
utionary communism enabled Marx not only to place ‘Saint Max’




firmly within his Young Hegelian context, indeed to attack Stirner
as the surrogate of the Young Hegelian outlook in general, but also
to advance an argument about freedom - not, to be sure, the negative,
individualistic freedom ‘to buy, sell and otherwise contract’ that is
associated with capitalism, but the positive freedom associated with
self-activity that is not bought by some and paid for by others, the
freedom that is not antithetical to, but expressive of, community
properly so-called. Marx’s argument, finally, is as political as Stirner’s
is anti-political; and for good reason. For the proletarians, Marx insists
against ‘Saint Max’, ‘owing to the frequent opposition of interests
among them arising out of the division of labour ... no other “agree-
ment” is possible but a political one directed against the whole present
system’.⁸⁵ Marx had already indicated that while, ‘in imagination,
individuals seem freer under the domination of the bourgeoisie than
before ... in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more
subjected to the violence of things’.⁸⁶ This, indeed, is the reason why

the transformation through the division of labour of personal
powers into material powers cannot be dispelled by dismissing
the general idea of it from one’s mind but can only be abolished
by the individuals’ again subjecting these material powers to
themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not
possible without the community. Only in community with others
has the individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions;
only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. . .

In the real community, the individuals obtain their freedom in
and through their association. . . The [earlier kind of] communal
relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and
which was determined by their common interests over against
a third party, was always a community to which these individuals
belonged only as average individuals, only in so far as they lived
within the conditions of existence of their class. .. With the
community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand,
who take their conditions of existence and those of all members
of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as
individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this
combination of individuals which puts the conditions of the free
development of individuals under their control - conditions which
were previously abandoned to chance and which won an indepen-
dent existence over against individuals just because of their
separation as individuals. Combination up till now . .. was an
agreement upon these conditions, within which the individuals
were free to enjoy the freaks of fortune. . . This right, to the
undisturbed enjoyment, within certain conditions, of fortuity
and chance has up till now been called personal freedom.⁸⁷




Marx’s argument, however problematic it may be, is a powerful one,
and has long been so regarded; yet most evaluations have been advanced
in the absence of any adequate understanding of why he made it, and
whose points he was meeting. A re-examination and re-evaluation of
Stirner’s argument has proved to be in order, since the significance of
his egoistic anarchism - which itself proved to have few and isolated
adherents - in provoking and shaping a detailed and theoretically
significant response from Marx has for too long been overlooked. A
more detailed examination of the evidence amply bears out Nicolas
Lobkowicz’s point that it was Stirner who impelled Marx to take
the position he did in The German Ideology against Feuerbach and
against the entire Young Hegelian school (whose worst faults are
according to Marx embodied in and exemplified by Stirner’s poaching
of ‘snipe existing only in the mind’).⁸⁸ Yet in one way Lobkowicz
goes too far, in another he goes not far enough. The point that needs
to be stressed about Marx’s response, a direct and extended series of
rejoinders, to Stirner is not that Marx had occasion to regard Stirner
as a threat.⁸⁹ Too much can be made of such an interpretation; we
need consider not only Stirner’s theoretical incoherence (not necess-
arily a setback to the influence of an anarchist theoretician), but also
the justice of Marx’s successive accusations that Stirner’s entire argu-
ment, inconsistencies and all, remains entrapped within a purely theor-
etical framework (like Hobbes’s ‘bird in lime twigs’ - ‘the more he
struggles, the more belimed’) and makes no effort to ensure his maxims’
translatability into a practice that would have to be political. Stirner’s
hostility to social or revolutionary movements and his disdain for
political concerns were no news to Marx. Whether or not the growth
of a mass anarchist movement in an uncertain future would have
surprised Marx in 1845, Marx, one suspects, would not have been
surprised one whit to learn that this movement was to play a far greater