All Things Are Nothing to Me

by Jacob Blumenfeld

  In The German Ideology, Marx paints Stirner as a modern Don Quixote and a new Saint Paul, a knight errant and militant apostle against the old gods. Saint Max, or Sancho, as Marx trolled him, failed to target the historically specific material relations that animate our modern gods. One way of understanding Marx’s critique is to say that Stirner’s unique individual, the Einzige or I capable of fully developing its own powers, is only possible in fully developed communism, the state of affairs in which material relations are inseparable from individual power and not dependent on the drive for valorization. In a formula, Stirner’s egoism is Marx’s communism seen from the first person singular perspective. It is not the negation but the realization of the individual. Chasing Stirner throughout The German Ideology, Marx echoes him when writing the following description of communism as the free development of individuals:

  We have already shown above that the abolition of a state of affairs in which relations become independent of individuals, in which individuality is subservient to chance and the personal relations of individuals are subordinated to general class relations, etc.—that the abolition of this state of affairs is determined in the final analysis by the abolition of division of labour… Within communist society, the only society in which the genuine and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase, this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces.15

  Communism is the society of free individuals—Marx understood this, and so did many readers of Stirner. In Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine from 1907, the German-American anarchist Max Baginski wrote the following review of the first English translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum: “Communism thus creates a basis for the liberty and Eigenheit of the individual. I am a Communist because I am an Individualist. Fully as heartily the Communists concur with Stirner when he puts the word take in place of demand—that leads to the dissolution of property, to expropriation. Individualism and Communism go hand in hand.”16 In 1974, the American situationist collective For Ourselves published “The Right to Be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything,” a pamphlet affirming the radical synthesis of Marx and Stirner, of communism and egoism:

  ‘Communist egoism’ names the synthesis of individualism and collectivism, just as communist society names the actual, material, sensuous solution to the historical contradiction of the ‘particular’ and the ‘general’ interest, a contradiction engendered especially in the cleavage of society against itself into classes. This ‘solution’ cannot be of the form of a mere idea or abstraction, but only of a concrete form of society. The essence of communism is egoism; the essence of egoism is communism. This is the world-changing secret which the world at large still keeps from itself. The unraveling of this secret as the emergence of radical subjectivity is nothing other than the process of the formation of communist society itself. It already contains the objective process.17

  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the “secret” of communist egoism has not been taken up since—neither by communists nor individualists, Marxists nor anarchists.

  Marx, however, did more than just ground the possibility of Stirner’s individualism in the condition of communism. He ties Stirner’s theoretical criticisms of bourgeois society to the practical, proletarian struggles already occurring in Western Europe. For Marx, criticism does not need to represent such struggles, but rather only express their object in the fullest possible way. This object or target, for which Stirner clears the ground, is capital, and the proletarian insurrections of the 1840s are implicitly if not explicitly against it. Is there a Marx of today, a critic that can situate the critical response to the left in a global field of antagonism against the target of capital? Perhaps this is the need: to connect proletarian revolt to its object in a manner which explains the dynamics of capital and self, property and its negation.

  That said, I can now return to Stirner one last time, from the beginning. First, through an analysis of the borrowed line with which he starts and ends his book, and second, with some final thoughts on the unique, the proletariat, and the creative nothing.

  Ich hab’ Mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt. All things are nothing to me. I have set my affair on nothing. I place my trust in nothing.

  ––That is how it begins, and follows,

  What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost, the good cause, then God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!18

  Stirner steals his opening line from a nihilistic, drinking song-poem from 1806 by Goethe called “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!” It goes like this:

  My trust in nothing now is placed [All things are nothing to me]

  Hurrah!

  So in the world true joy I taste,

  Hurrah!

  Then he who would be a comrade of mine

  Must rattle his glass, and in chorus combine,

  Over these dregs of wine.

  I placed my trust in gold and wealth,

  Hurrah!

  But then I lost all joy and health,

  Ah, ha!

  Both here and there the money roll’d,

  And when I had it here, behold,

  From there had fled the gold!

  I placed my trust in women next,

  Hurrah!

  But there in truth was sorely vex’d,

  Ah, ha!

  The False another portion sought,

  The True with tediousness were fraught,

  The Best could not be bought.

  My trust in travels then I placed,

  Hurrah!

  And left my native land in haste.

  Ah, ha!

  But not a single thing seem’d good,

  The beds were bad, and strange the food,

  And I not understood.

  I placed my trust in rank and fame,

  Hurrah!

  Another put me straight to shame,

  Ah, ha!

  And as I had been prominent,

  All scowl’d upon me as I went,

  I found not one content.

  I placed my trust in war and fight,

  Hurrah!

  We gain’d full many a triumph bright,

  Hurrah!

  Into the foeman’s land we cross’d,

  We put our friends to equal cost,

  And there a leg I lost.

  My trust is placed in nothing now, [All things are nothing to me]

  Hurrah!

  At my command the world must bow,

  Hurrah!

  And as we’ve ended feast and strain,

  The cup we’ll to the bottom drain;

  No dregs must there remain!19

  As with Stirner, Goethe deals with the hopelessness of searching for causes outside oneself. Consuming life in numerous activities such as money, sex, travels, fame, and war, the individual nevertheless fails to identify with any of them. Everything is nothing to them. The protagonist of Goethe’s poem invests various objects, activities and relationships with its own ideal of who it wants to be, and is repeatedly disappointed. Liberation and joy ultimately comes from breaking the inner compulsion to identify with anything at all, and instead, treating the world like property to be consumed in enjoyment with others. For Stirner, Goethe describes the wandering subject of the present, the I without qualities who can only become unique by appropriating their emptiness and using it as fuel for life.

  The title of the poem, “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!”, comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 1 verse 2, which Jerome’s Latin renders as Vanitas vanitatum dixit Ecclesiastes vanitas va
nitatum omnia vanitas. A modern translation reads, “Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher: vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” Vanity here signifies a certain emptiness or meaninglessness, the transitory impermanence of all labor or activity under the sun, under God. The original Hebrew word for vanitas is Hevel, which means breath, or sometimes fog. Hevel is also the name of the first son in the Bible, Abel, the first worker, whose short life of labor is as meaningless as modern life under capital. However, in between the Hebrew and Latin, the Greek Septuagint translated Hevel as mataiotes, “devoid of truth, useless” which comes from the verb masaomai, which means “to chew, eat, devour.”

  This is especially interesting, since Stirner’s main concept of action is consumption, by which he means the taking, seizing, and releasing of things from their sacred sphere to the sphere of free use and abuse. To consume is to use, and if the world is vanity, hevel, masomai, that is, empty, useless, already chewed up, then the task is not to refill it with new abstractions, but to consume it anew, to masticate it ourselves. The world as we know it is dead, consumed labor, it is nothing to me. But this nothing is not a general or empty nothing, it is the particular nothing of capital which confronts the particular nothing of I. These two nothings are distinct: “I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.”20 This creative nothing does not escape the nihilism of capital by retreating into qualities, identities, or properties. Only by expropriating what expropriates me, by making the world into my property, is something like communist egoism possible.

  To Stirner, there is really no difference between saying “the world belongs to everyone” and “the world belongs to me.” Communism and egoism are compatible as long as “everyone” is not reified into a new ruling subject above me, as Stirner notes:

  What the human being can get belongs to him: the world belongs to me. Are you saying anything else with the opposite proposition: ‘The world belongs to all’? All are I and I again, etc. But you make a spook out of the ‘all’ and make it sacred, so that the ‘all’ become the fearful master of the individual. Then the ghost of ‘right’ stands at their side. 21

  To make the world one’s property cannot occur without the dissolution of the bourgeois state and civil society, and replacing it with communes, associations, unions, and councils. “The dissolution of society is intercourse or union,” but such unions are not guaranteed to last, especially if their form predetermines their content. “If a union has crystallized into a society…if it has become a unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is—dead as union, it is the corpse of the union or unification, it is—society, community.”22

  When society or community becomes the privileged form of the individual’s self-relation, then the task of the unique is to desecrate society as much as possible. Capital desecrates history, wastes human labor and squanders the planet. But Stirner’s unique does not retreat in the face of this power, petitioning for some penance. Rather, the free association of individuals desecrates capital, wastes its value, and owns the future. The subject produced through such activity is not some kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, but what Stirner calls an Unmensch or un-man, one who no longer allows themselves to be classified, exploited, or owned.

  In Capital, Marx describes the process by which things take on social relations (the personification of things) and persons take on thingly relations (the reification of persons). Stirner’s “all things are nothing to me” condenses this dual-process all the while pronouncing a strategy beyond it as well. His lesson: one must follow the path of alienation towards its overcoming. To annihilate the world is the purpose of both capital, which negates the content of human activity and replaces it with the form-determined imperatives of value, and communism, which annuls the thinglike quality of the world, and allows free individuals to use, consume and dissolve each other in union. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”—this is the power of capital as Marx and Engels describe it in the Communist Manifesto. For Marx and Stirner, this power to dissolve all “fixed, fast-frozen relations” should not be the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie, but mine and yours as well. Once expropriated from its owners, our disalienated social power can dissolve the present state of things. For Marx, there is only one class of society positioned to do this. “This dissolution of society,” Marx writes, “is the proletariat,” and “by proclaiming the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order, the proletariat merely states the secret of its own existence, for it is in fact the dissolution of that world order.”23

  As noted before, Deleuze praises Stirner for being the “dialectician who reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic.”24 For Deleuze, Stirner demonstrates that “the meaning of history and the dialectic together is not the realization of reason, freedom, or man as species, but nihilism, nothing but nihilism.” If the dialectic, however, is more properly understood as the correlate structure of the systematic logic of capital (which Marx outlines in the Grundrisse and Capital), then what Stirner reveals for Marx is the nothingness of capital, its own particular nihilism. Stirner describes the nothingness of the I as the condition of possibility for becoming unique. From a Marxian perspective, however, this can be read as a description of the nothingness of capital or the negativity of the proletariat––the class which has no particular qualities, but only the generic form of labor power.

  To make sense of this ambiguity of perspective, we can take a hint from the structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and from Marx’s Capital. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, the movement of spirit can be seen from the perspective of substance or the perspective of subject, and the “we” of the text is nothing but the mutual constitution of the two. In Marx’s Capital, the structure of capitalism is seen from both the perspective of capital and labor, and capitalism is nothing but the mutually constitutive relation of the two. For Stirner, the movement of negation occurs between the unique and its properties, or the ego and its own. Communism or egoism is not the privileging of one side over the other, but the abolition of the separation between the two from within the negative potential of one. Hegel’s subject negates and realizes substance, Stirner’s unique negates and realizes property, Marx’s proletariat negates and realizes capital.

  Stirner struggles to express in words the uniqueness of my nothingness, my singularity. This nothingness is not to be taken “in the sense of emptiness,” but rather in the sense of that from which and into which creation creates; but that which creates is—labor. The unique and the proletariat are both creative nothings, productive yet alienated from themselves, seeking to own and consume that which owns and consumes them.

  As nothing, I stand apart, singular. But as a proletarian, my unique nothingness is united with others who, like me, have nothing but want everything. The uniqueness of the proletariat lies in its being the universal negation of society. As Marx says, it is the only class which can defiantly proclaim, in unison with Stirner,

  I am nothing and I should be everything.25

  Notes

  1. Engels (1982), 13

  2. EO, 65

  3. Engels (1982), 12

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. EO, 318–9

  7. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW 5: 49

  8. Feuerbach (1977), 85

  9. Stirner’s Critics (2012), 88

  10. See Stirner’s Critics, 81–2: “Egoism…is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; it is no enemy of intimate warmth, but it is also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It does not exclude any interest. It is directed against only disinterestedness and the uninteresting; not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc. The ‘exclusiveness’ of the egoist, which some want to pass off as
isolation, separation, loneliness, is on the contrary full participation in the interesting by—exclusion of the uninteresting. No one gives Stirner credit for his global intercourse and his association of egoists from the largest section of his book, ‘My Intercourse.’”

  11. Ibid., 80

  12. EO, 279

  13. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW 5: 81. Italics mine.

  14. For more on this reading of Marx, see Postone (1993).

  15. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, MECW 5: 438, 439. Emphasis mine.

  16. Mother Earth, Vol. 2. No. 3. May, 1907 [Accessed: November 24, 2017]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-baginskistirner-the-ego-and-his-own