A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  The other central concept, history, does not of course appear here as a term, but this brief document is permeated by its presence. The essentials deal with processes, new circumstances, and creative actions. This historical interest is not new in Marx’s life; it has, however, been given not only another more central role, but another main emphasis as well. Previously, it was the history of thinking that had a crucial role in Marx’s writings. It is a history that he learned a lot about early on, and which he also would come to master throughout his life. But that concerns only the world of ideas; in the theses on Feuerbach, it is history in a broader and more varied sense that is the centre of his attention. Purely concretely, it was a result of an intensive reading in the French Revolution above all but also, through the economic literature, in more general economic and social history. Here, the relative order of ideas of the Hegelian history of thought, in which ideas encounter other ideas and of philosophers who learn from each other or struggle against each other, does not prevail. Instead, a chaotic multiplicity dominates in which everything can seem important and common people are part of creating history.

  At the same time, this kaleidoscopic multifarious history is a history of change – development, in fact – just as much as the history of philosophy is. However multifarious and however mixed up with small coincidences it may be, at the same time it seems to display a pattern or an aim, even if it is difficult to substantiate its major features in the small details. If you are satisfied with the lives and work of the kings of philosophy, or the kings of music, or the kings of industry, or of even ordinary kings, then the task becomes that much easier. The field to be investigated there is limited, and the teeming world that lies outside the circle of the select few is perceived mostly as unstructured noise.

  It is the history of the multiplicity that Marx wants to bring in focus. It is there that real change occurs, and it is also there that every person can appear both as marked by circumstances they cannot prevail over, and as active and creative. The educators are themselves educated, but as educators they nevertheless achieve something new.

  It is important to remember that Marx wrote his theses long before he and Engels began their work on The German Ideology. For a present-day observer, the theses form a matrix for the greater work. From that matrix, many of the fundamental ideas in the larger manuscript could be developed.

  The Theses did not entail anything completely new at all in the development of their author. In The Holy Family, we can note how, in his polemic, he scoffs at the Bauer brothers’ way of speaking disparagingly about the masses. Instead he calls attention to the individual workers, their diligence in studying, and their consciousness. Society cannot be divided up into the elite and the masses, where the elite go on ahead and the masses trudge after them. It has been made clear to him that even the philosopher must count on many actors – a varied mass, in fact.

  As nearly always with Marx when new insights or theories were concerned, the Theses had already been foreshadowed. Their author had previously simply not gone through the full consequences of what he already thought. Perhaps it was the brutal deportation to Brussels that unleashed a series of insights that would guide him from that moment on. The doctrine of an invariable human essence appeared in that flash of inspiration as an unnecessary, cumbersome fiction.

  He jotted down these new thoughts into his notebook. But it was still just a small draft. It was in order to expunge the remaining questions that, six months later, he was prepared to devote all his time to a demanding collaboration with Engels.

  For his part, Engels had in his own way already described society as a multiplicity that was difficult to take stock of. In his book about the working class in England, he did not presuppose an essence common to all people living their broken lives in the shadow of industry. He had simply not thought through what the things he had so convincingly portrayed meant for his general outlook that had recently been marked by the influence from Feuerbach. He was thus a few steps behind Marx. The positive reaction to Stirner’s thinking that he expressed in his letter to Marx testifies to this. Stirner had given him an insight that he previously lacked.

  Stirner’s book was also the main subject of The German Ideology. The section on Feuerbach, written last but placed first, covers approximately sixty printed pages. The chapter on Bruno Bauer, which follows, is only one-third as long. The entire concluding second part on ‘true socialism’ is a total of ninety pages – but the Stirner polemic, the central section, required more than 330! It is no wonder that many later interpreters saw this as a sign that both authors – Marx in particular – had lost all sense of proportion in an attempt to paper over the significance Stirner’s book had had for them.

  Were they correct in their criticism? That remains to be seen.

  The chapter on Bruno Bauer forms a direct continuation of the polemic in The Holy Family. After Bauer and the other representatives of ‘The Free’ were forced to shut down their periodical, they found refuge in Wigand’s Vierteljahrsschrift. There, Bruno Bauer polemicized against Feuerbach and Stirner as well as against Marx and Engels. Even Hess came in for his share.

  Bauer held fast to his Young Hegelian convictions. Two key phrases in Hegel – consciousness of self and substance – were still at the centre of his philosophy. According to Hegel, substance – or, in simpler terms, objective reality – was pervaded by consciousness of self, that is, by the thinking and acting subject. Bauer radicalized this thinking to the point that consciousness of self was given the dominant role. From that position, he accused Feuerbach of thoroughly being the prisoner of substance. In short, he was a materialist – and, moreover, a communist. He embraces sensualism, which Bauer interpreted in moralistic terms and associated with sin. For his part, Stirner – according to Bauer – did not come up to the mark because he embraced pure egoism. Both he and Feuerbach were dogmatics.

  The authors of The Holy Family also got a response to their criticism of Bauer. Marx and Engels noted that he attacked their book although he thoroughly dwelled upon a review of it – a review that on top of it all abounded with misperceptions. Bauer singled out 1842 as a great year, as liberalism occupied the seat of honour and was embraced by the philosophers. As we remember, Marx was part of that crowd, but according to Bauer he now had taken to worship of ‘common sense’.

  Marx and Engels were annoyed by Bauer’s assertion that Moses Hess had achieved something Marx and Engels were unable to, namely criticizing Stirner’s book. Marx and Engels dismissed this; the accusation was unjust since they had written The Holy Family before Stirner’s book came out. Bauer tried to show that Hess’s key concept was taken directly from Hegel, and he added the accusation even Marx and Engels were latent Hegelians. Marx and Engels indignantly repudiated the assertion.31

  It is clear that the pages on Bauer in The Holy Family were written as a matter of routine. More important for the authors was the enormous section on Stirner, so we must first acquaint ourselves somewhat with him.

  Max Stirner and His Book

  Max Stirner was a pseudonym; he was actually named Johann Caspar Schmidt. He was twelve years older than Marx, and he had been a member of the Doctors’ Club that had played such a great role for both Marx and Engels. When the club adopted the name ‘Die Freien’ (The Free), he was still part of it. He earned his living through occupations such as teaching at a girls’ school; The Ego and His Own was his only significant work and a book that immediately created a big sensation.32 After a short while, it sank into obscurity, but has since come under discussion again and again, above all in anarchist circles where Stirner is regarded as a predecessor alongside Bakunin and Proudhon. He himself lived in ever deeper destitution and died penniless in his fifties. But his book has survived him.

  The two thinkers that Stirner primarily braced against and distances himself from are Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach – more precisely, their image of humanity. His starting point was two aphoristically incisive statements from the
m. Feuerbach: ‘Man is to man the supreme being.’ Bauer: ‘Man has just been discovered.’ Stirner adds, drily: ‘Then let us take a more careful look at this supreme being and this new discovery.’

  Stirner proceeds carefully in his 450-page book. He started with the rudiments of human life: the child’s path towards adulthood, and finally aging and death. After that he a conducts a historical survey of how this life was regarded during different eras: antiquity, in Christianity, and in more modern times. Philosophical idealism was in focus: it also dominated the immediate intellectual environment during his adult life. The text here is full of extraordinary anti-Semitic flourishes that not only concern the religion of the Jews but Jews as people as well. He spoke disparagingly of ‘Jews of the true metal’ and declared that he did not count on having them among his readers. We have no idea how Marx reacted to these very lines. As we know, he himself spoke poorly of the Jewish religion and Jewish business activities, but he was undoubtedly a ‘Jew of the true metal’ in Stirner’s meaning.33

  According to Stirner, pure idealism led to a world of phantoms. Religion made us into fools and clowns; not even Feuerbach, who called himself a materialist, avoided the curse of this world of phantoms. He renounces gods and other great persons, but morals kept their hold on him. He may have let subject and predicate switch places, but when instead of ‘God is love’ he said ‘Love is divine’, it meant that he submitted to love.34

  In his own way, Stirner joined the intellectual development of humanity with the then rather new racial doctrine developed by the biologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach a few decades earlier. According to Stirner, before Christianity there reigned ‘negroidity’, when people related their success to physical events such as the flight of birds, or thunder and lightning. Then everyone became Mongols, when the spiritual became crucial in their lives. Only Stirner could show humanity into the higher, Caucasian stage, when the individual sees herself and her own actions as the only possible guarantee of an independent and thereby perfect life. This person could say, using a famous Goethe quote: ‘Nun hab’ ich mein’ Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.’ That is: I rely on nothing or no one apart from myself.35

  In their reckoning with Stirner, Marx and Engels poked fun at these constant trisections. He reminded them of Schelling, who always used to stuff reality into an enormous abstract construction. But they added that an echo of Hegel could also be felt. Reality was schematized according to a constantly recurring pattern.36

  It is easy to agree with this criticism. Nevertheless, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum is above all a book marked by life and energy. Topic after topic is dealt with in rapid succession; there is not much that does not become the subject of Stirner’s treatment. Even later posterity can understand why so many – Engels among them as well – were impressed. But Marx, as we have seen, was not captivated and brought his co-author along into his antipathy. In The German Ideology, Stirner was not given an ounce of praise.

  One part of the polemic is aimed directly at the author of the book. For example, Marx and Engels said that abstract thinking becomes a welcome expedient for a schoolteacher living a hard, morose life in which the horizon was limited to a few districts in Berlin.37

  Stirner was otherwise seldom called by his pen name. The entire chapter devoted to him is called ‘Saint Max’; part of the polemical fiction is that ‘The Free’ are actually a kind of group of learned church elders. Other more folksy names for him were Jacques le Bonhomme and Sancho. On the contrary, with names like that, their adversary was ascribed a kind of boorish loutishness. Jacques le Bonhomme was the French nobility’s contemptuous term for a member of the underclass, and Sancho is the ordinary, limited voice of would-be wisdom in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The latter, moreover, was a novel that was cited assiduously – in Spanish! – in The German Ideology.

  But, at the same time, this device meant that the main point was easily hidden away. This has certainly contributed to the fact that so many interpreters of Marx exhaustedly put aside the section on Stirner before they managed to reflect on the entire mass of text, thereby missing its points. Even Franz Mehring, the most loyal of his interpreters, found the account of Bauer and Stirner tiring and long-winded. Francis Wheen, less patient when he has no funny anecdotes to relate, argues that 300 unreadable pages are devoted to Stirner’s nonsense. Jonathan Sperber, who would rather dwell on life than letters, speaks about the ‘bizarre length’ of the chapter, arguing that the account slipped ‘completely out of hand’. But, at the same time, he points out that Stirner’s reckoning with Feuerbach’s theses on the species-being of humanity had a positive significance for them. On the latter point Tristram Hunt, Engels’s latest biographer, goes further and asserts that he and Marx both stood in intellectual debt to Stirner and tried to hide it with their excessive polemics. As proof, Hunt cites several lines from the aforementioned letter that Engels wrote to Marx when he had just read Stirner. We must take our starting point from the ego, the individual of flesh and blood, he wrote. Much earlier, in 1975, Paul Thomas had shown that the length of the Stirner chapter was justified, since it meant a decisive step in Marx’s and Engels’s development. At the same time, Thomas certainly exaggerated the positive influence Stirner had had, at least concerning Marx.38

  It is possible that Hunt is correct as regards Engels, but he is not about Marx. In his now-lost response, Marx must have dismissed Engels’s enthusiasm, and we do not need to doubt the reason. It was not the individual man, the ego, that would be the starting point; instead, it was the diversity of concrete people marked by their varied circumstances. That was the idea animating the polemic against Stirner in The German Ideology.

  Right at the beginning of their account, Marx and Engels attack Stirner for not taking the individual’s physical and social life into consideration, thereby consistently ignoring historical epochs, nationalities, and classes. The consequence was that he perceived the image of the world and society that was typical of the class that was closest to normal for him. He would need to rouse himself out of his schoolmaster’s world and see how it related to an office boy, an English factory worker, or a young American, to say nothing of a Kyrgyz.

  In this remark lies the main idea of what would later be called the materialist conception of history. The philosophers since Kant had devoted themselves to searching for the ultimate theoretical conditions for our convictions and values. But that was not enough, Marx and Engels now said. We have to relate our own ideas, just like those of others, to the circumstances under which they arose and are constantly reaffirmed in our everyday life. Otherwise, we are caught up in the ideology that is closest to us.

  The same critical requirements bring the authors to object to Stirner’s way of making all of history the history of philosophy (something that characterized many of their own early works). In his view of humanity’s relation to nature, he had no sense of the significance of industry and the natural sciences, but devoted himself to mere fantasies.39 In his view of political outlooks, he was equally lost. The liberalism he spoke of was typically German. While the French bourgeoisie made a revolution and the English created industry and subjugated India, the Germans had only arrived at Kant’s ‘good will’, which was a true expression of the impotence and wretchedness of the bourgeois class. But now it nonetheless began to awaken, and in its demands for protective duties and a constitution, it would soon be as far along as the French were in 1789. Stirner, unaware of this process, thought that it was the citizen, le citoyen, who came before the bourgeoisie – le bourgeois – when in fact it was quite the reverse.40

  As regards economic relations, it was even worse. Stirner thought ill of money and its rule, and wanted to do away with it. He did not realize that it was necessarily a consequence of certain conditions of production and distribution. Stirner wanted to liberate the workers and their labour. The authors of The German Ideology objected that labour was already free and that it therefore was ‘not a matter of freeing it but abolishing it’.41
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  Here, Marx again uses the word aufheben (‘sublate’, not ‘abolish’), and again, this is worth particular attention. It is, as we have seen, the keyword in the Hegelian dialectic: something disappears, but at the same time is lifted up to a higher level. Work is not to be abolished; it is to be given new content.

  Hegel’s dialectic did not disappear from Marx’s and Engels’s horizon. It was idealism (which at the time was often simply called philosophy) that they abandoned. In a fit of boisterousness, they formulated an aphorism about this exact thing: ‘Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love.’42

  They attacked not only Stirner, but also Feuerbach. Feuerbach showed that religion was actually just a phase, but neither he nor Stirner asked themselves why humanity had to form these false religious notions. Nevertheless, the question itself should pave the way for an empirical study of actual conditions. The authors pointed out both of Marx’s articles, ‘Introduction to a Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right’ and ‘On the Jewish Question’, in which there is at least an insinuation in the right direction.43

  That last remark shows that they wanted to see a certain continuity in their own development. There is, perhaps, something in this: Marx, at least, was already talking about the real foundation of religious faith in his criticism of Hegel but he was then still a good follower of Feuerbach in the field of philosophy.

  Now, both Marx and Engels considered themselves as having sublated philosophy, just as they dreamed that labour someday would be sublated. Their goal was thus not to obliterate philosophy but to raise it to a higher stage in which it would, at the same time, be permeated with and give order and clarity to the tremendous world of experiences that Stirner and Feuerbach and many others had stood on its head. In this upside-down world, it was ideas that seemed to have an independent shape through language. The authors saw the reason for this error in the division of labour itself. The German philosopher was a petty bourgeois and saw his activity in thought as separated from the noise and multifariousness of life. At the same time, he imagined that it was ideas, such as his own and those of others like him, that governed the world.44