[lbo-talk] Question on a Work by Marx

[Mike Ballard]

"Most of the first volume of The German Ideology is taken up by a
critical examination of the philosophical and sociological views of Max
Stirner, formulated in his book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The
Unique and His Property). Stirner was a typical exponent of
individualism and one of the first ideologists of anarchism. His views,
reflecting a petty-bourgeois protest against the bourgeois system,
enjoyed a considerable success among petty-bourgeois intellectuals and
to some extent influenced the immature outlook of craftsmen who were
becoming proletarians, while his failure to understand the role of the
proletariat, whom he identified with paupers, and also his attacks on
communism, made a resolute exposure of his views indispensable.

"Marx and Engels demonstrated the artificial and far-fetched character
of Stirner’s philosophical and sociological constructions and the
fallacy of his theory that the way to the liberation of the individual
lay through the destruction of the state and the implementation of
every individual’s egoistic right to self-assertion. They pointed out
that Stirner’s voluntaristic appeals to the rights of the individual
did not in any way affect the existing social relations and their
economic basis, and so, in effect, continued to sanction the
preservation of the bourgeois social conditions which are the main
source of inequality and oppression of the individual. Stirner’s
seemingly revolutionary phrases were in fact a disguise for an apologia
of the bourgeois system."

full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume05/preface.htm

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