#marx

Féminicide d’Hélène Rytmann-Legotien : comment Louis Althusser a tué sa femme et “inventé” le masculinisme | Francesca Barca
▻https://voxeurop.eu/fr/feminicide-helene-rytmann-legotien-louis-althusser-masculinisme

Cette histoire, à la fois banale et terrible, ressemble à celle de tant de femmes assassinées par leur partenaire : elle, la sociologue Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, voulait quitter son mari ; lui était violent et abusif. Il l’a tuée. Le meurtrier est Louis Althusser, philosophe marxiste célèbre et respecté du siècle dernier, qui a utilisé le mot “masculinisme” plusieurs décennies avant qu’il ne soit identifié comme un mouvement dangereux. Source : Vox Europ

Kritische Theorie
▻https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/526549.kritische-theorie.html

https://www.jungewelt.de/img/2200/225160.jpg

Au fond c’est une discussion de dinausaures, mais il ne faut pas l’ignorer parce que la « théorie critique », le « marxisme occidental » et les autres chevaux de bataille historiques ont servi et servent toujours à désunir les exploités et leurs tentatives de création de mouvements libérateurs.

Le côté esthétique de la question m’intrigue : les textes théoriques de la gauche d’avant 1989 sont souvent d’une profondeur intellectuelle et d’une qualité littéraire introuvable dans les excrétions numériques des épigones aux multiples « ismes ».

22.7.2026 von Marc Püschel - Am Anfang war die Niederlage. Infolge der niedergeschlagenen Revolutionen in Deutschland und Ungarn sei, wie es Perry Anderson in »Considerations on Western Marxism« (1976) beschrieb, nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg eine besondere Spielart des Marxismus entstanden. Charakteristisch für sie seien die Loslösung von der politischen Praxis und die Orientierung auf akademische Karrieren.

Eine solche Verortung – so korrekt sie auch ist – bleibt äußerlich. Sie sagt noch nichts über die inhaltlich-theoretischen Gründe, aus denen der »westliche Marxismus« und mit ihm die Denkschule, die man später als Kritische Theorie bezeichnen sollte, entstand. Den Ausgangspunkt bildete schlicht eine gründlichere Analyse des Kapitalismus in Georg Lukács’ »Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein« (1923). Dessen Entwicklungsrichtung gehe dahin, »rationell verdinglichte Beziehungen an Stelle der urwüchsigen, die menschlichen Verhältnissen unverhüllter zeigenden zu setzen«. Der Kapitalist handelt nicht, er »wird gehandelt«, seine Tätigkeit erschöpfe sich in der »richtigen Beobachtung und Kalkulation der objektiven Auswirkung der gesellschaftlichen Naturgesetze«. Diese Zweckrationalität, mit der alles quantifiziert und auf Warenwerte heruntergebrochen wird, dringe in alle menschlichen Beziehungen ein. Für Lukács steht jedoch fest, dass das Proletariat aus dieser Versachlichung aller Verhältnisse ausbrechen könne. Nicht ganz klar ist allerdings, wie sich die Arbeiter bewußtseinsmäßig aus diesen Verhältnissen befreien können. Dies wäre aber die Voraussetzung, damit es zum politischen Ausbruch, der Revolution, kommen kann.

Mit gewissem Recht treibt die Kritische Theorie diese Kritik weiter. Für sie bildet aber »die Situation des Proletariats (…) in dieser Gesellschaft keine Garantie der richtigen Erkenntnis« mehr, wie Max Horkheimer 1937 schreibt. Die instrumentelle Vernunft, die Lukács innerhalb des Rahmens der kapitalistischen Verhältnisse verortet, wird für ihn und Theodor Adorno zu einem allgemeinen Wesenszug der Aufklärung und der ganzen Menschheitsgeschichte. Aufklärung strebe nach der »Unterwerfung alles Natürlichen unter das selbstherrliche Subjekt«, müsse sich dazu aber dem Objektiven anpassen. »Jeder Versuch, den Naturzwang zu brechen, indem Natur gebrochen wird, gerät nur um so tiefer in den Naturzwang hinein«, heißt es in der »Dialektik der Aufklärung« (1944).

Verloren geht dabei – so kapitalismuskritisch die Vorreiter der Kritischen Theorie ihr Leben lang auch blieben – die Analyse eines konkreten Gesellschaftszustands. Eine solche könne gar nicht gelingen, da jede Darstellung der Gesellschaft diese selbst begrifflich zu identifizieren versuche und sie damit einer pervertierten Form der Rationalität unterwerfe. Unabwendbar sei man also in einem universellen Verblendungszusammenhang – funktionell ein Pendant zu Heideggers Seinsvergessenheit – gefangen. »Es gibt aus der Verstricktheit keinen Ausweg«, heißt es pessimistisch in Adornos »Minima Moralia«, bis heute das Lieblingsvademecum des studierenden Bürgertums.

Das Wahre kann für Adorno und Horkheimer nie dargestellt werden, es kann immer nur durch Verneinungen darauf hingedeutet werden. Wie genau das funktionieren soll, wenn man für alles, womit man hindeutet, wieder Begriffe verwenden muss, bleibt bis heute ungeklärt. Dass man die Wahrheitsfrage und damit letztlich den Anspruch auf konkrete Veränderung der Gesellschaft aufgibt, wird in der Kritischen Theorie durch eine extrem manieristische Sprache übertüncht. Zur Distinktion reicht das hin, methodisch bleibt es platt: Dinge schlagen immerzu dialektisch ineinander um, ein Drittes oder eine Höherentwicklung gibt es aber nicht. Kluge Beobachtungen etwa zum Antisemitismus und Faschismus stehen recht unvermittelt neben belanglosen Aphorismen in der Tradition Nietzsches (»Pantoffeln sind Denkmale des Hasses gegen das sich Bücken«).

In einer befreiten Gesellschaft könne man »ohne Angst verschieden sein«, verkündete Adorno, und das bleibt dann so abstrakt, dass die Kritische Theorie problemlos integraler Bestandteil einer Gesellschaft werden konnte, die Differenz zulässt, solange sie marktförmig hergestellt wird. Darauf können sich heute alle einigen, von Ulf Poschardt bis zum Autonomen Zentrum.

#théorie_politique #gauche #marxisme

Karl Marx : Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01/me01_378.htm

Voilà les arguments qui illustrent la célèbre phrase de l’opium du peuple.

Seitenzahlen verweisen auf: Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels - Werke. (Karl) Dietz Verlag, Berlin. Band 1. Berlin/DDR. 1976. S. 378-391.

Erstellt am 30.08.1999

Geschrieben Ende 1843 - Januar 1844

»Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher«, Paris 1844

|378|Für Deutschland ist die Kritik der Religion im wesentlichen beendigt, und die Kritik der Religion ist die Voraussetzung aller Kritik.

Die profane Existenz des Irrtums ist kompromittiert, nachdem seine himmlische oratio pro aris et focis |Gebet für Altar und Haushalt| widerlegt ist. Der Mensch, der in der phantastischen Wirklichkeit des Himmels, wo er einen Übermenschen suchte, nur den Widerschein seiner selbst gefunden hat, wird nicht mehr geneigt sein, nur den Schein seiner selbst, nur den Unmenschen zu finden, wo er seine Wirklichkeit sucht und suchen muß.

Das Fundament der irreligiösen Kritik ist: Der Mensch macht die Religion, die Religion macht nicht den Menschen. Und zwar ist die Religion das Selbstbewußtsein und das Selbstgefühl des Menschen, der sich selbst entweder noch nicht erworben oder schon wieder verloren hat. Aber der Mensch, das ist kein abstraktes, außer der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mensch, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Sozietät. Dieser Staat, diese Sozietät produzieren die Religion, ein verkehrtes Weltbewußtsein, weil sie eine verkehrte Welt sind. Die Religion ist die allgemeine Theorie dieser Welt, ihr enzyklopädisches Kompendium, ihre Logik in populärer Form, ihr spiritualistischer Point-d’honneur |Ehrenpunkt|, ihr Enthusiasmus, ihre moralische Sanktion, ihre feierliche Ergänzung, ihr allgemeiner Trost- und Rechtfertigungsgrund. Sie ist die phantastische Verwirklichung des menschlichen Wesens, weil das menschliche Wesen keine wahre Wirklichkeit besitzt. Der Kampf gegen die Religion ist also mittelbar der Kampf gegen jene Welt, deren geistiges Aroma die Religion ist.

Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volkes.

|379|Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks. Die Forderung, die Illusionen über seinen Zustand aufzugeben, ist die Forderung, einen Zustand aufzugeben, der der Illusionen bedarf. Die Kritik der Religion ist also im Keim die Kritik des Jammertales, dessen Heiligenschein die Religion ist.

Die Kritik hat die imaginären Blumen an der Kette zerpflückt, nicht damit der Mensch die phantasielose, trostlose Kette trage, sondern damit er die Kette abwerfe und die lebendige Blume breche. Die Kritik der Religion enttäuscht den Menschen, damit er denke, handle, seine Wirklichkeit gestalte wie ein enttäuschter, zu Verstand gekommener Mensch, damit er sich um sich selbst und damit um seine wirkliche Sonne bewege. Die Religion ist nur die illusorische Sonne, die sich um den Menschen bewegt, solange er sich nicht um sich selbst bewegt.

Es ist also die Aufgabe der Geschichte, nachdem das Jenseits der Wahrheit verschwunden ist, die Wahrheit des Diesseits zu etablieren. Es ist zunächst die Aufgabe der Philosophie, die im Dienste der Geschichte steht, nachdem die Heiligengestalt der menschlichen Selbstentfremdung entlarvt ist, die Selbstentfremdung in ihren unheiligen Gestalten zu entlarven. Die Kritik des Himmels verwandelt sich damit in die Kritik der Erde, die Kritik der Religion in die Kritik des Rechts, die Kritik der Theologie in die Kritik der Politik.

Die nachfolgende Ausführung - ein Beitrag zu dieser Arbeit - schließt sich zunächst nicht an das Original, sondern an eine Kopie, an die deutsche Staats- und Rechts-Philosophie an, aus keinem andern Grund, als weil sie sich an Deutschland anschließt.

Wollte man an den deutschen status quo selbst anknüpfen, wenn auch in einzig angemessener Weise, d.h. negativ, immer bliebe das Resultat ein Anachronismus. Selbst die Verneinung unserer politischen Gegenwart findet sich schon als bestaubte Tatsache in der historischen Rumpelkammer der modernen Völker. Wenn ich die gepuderten Zöpfe verneine, habe ich immer noch die ungepuderten Zöpfe. Wenn ich die deutschen Zustände von 1843 verneine, stehe ich, nach französischer Zeitrechnung, kaum im Jahre 1789, noch weniger im Brennpunkt der Gegenwart.

Ja, die deutsche Geschichte schmeichelt sich einer Bewegung, welche ihr kein Volk am historischen Himmel weder vorgemacht hat noch nachmachen wird. Wir haben nämlich die Restaurationen der modernen Völker geteilt, ohne ihre Revolutionen zu teilen. Wir wurden restauriert, erstens, weil andere Völker eine Revolution wagten, und zweitens, weil andere Völker eine Konterrevolution litten, das eine Mal, weil unsere Herren Furcht hatten, und das andere Mal, weil unsere Herren keine Furcht hatten. Wir, unsere Hirten|380|an der Spitze, befanden uns immer nur einmal in der Gesellschaft der Freiheit, am Tag ihrer Beerdigung.

Eine Schule, welche die Niederträchtigkeit von heute durch die Niederträchtigkeit von gestern legitimiert, eine Schule, die jeden Schrei des Leibeigenen gegen die Knute für rebellisch erklärt, sobald die Knute eine bejahrte, eine angestammte, eine historische Knute ist, eine Schule, der die Geschichte, wie der Gott Israels seinem Diener Moses nur ihr a posteriori |Hinterteil| zeigt, die historische Rechtsschule, sie hätte daher die deutsche Geschichte erfunden, wäre sie nicht eine Erfindung der deutschen Geschichte. Shylock, aber Shylock der Bediente, schwört sie jedes Pfund Fleisch, welches aus dem Volksherzen geschnitten wird, auf ihren Schein, auf ihren historischen Schein, auf ihren christlich-germanischen Schein.

Gutmütige Enthusiasten dagegen, Deutschtümler von Blut und Freisinnige von Reflexion, suchen unsere Geschichte der Freiheit jenseits unserer Geschichte in den teutonischen Urwäldern. Wodurch unterscheidet sich aber unsere Freiheitsgeschichte von der Freiheitsgeschichte des Ebers, wenn sie nur in den Wäldern zu finden ist? Zudem ist bekannt: Wie man hineinschreit in den Wald, schallt es heraus aus dem Wald. Also Friede den teutonischen Urwäldern!

Krieg den deutschen Zuständen! Allerdings! Sie stehn unter dem Niveau der Geschichte, sie sind unter aller Kritik, aber sie bleiben ein Gegenstand der Kritik, wie der Verbrecher, der unter dem Niveau der Humanität steht, ein Gegenstand des Scharfrichters bleibt. Mit ihnen im Kampf ist die Kritik keine Leidenschaft des Kopfs, sie ist der Kopf der Leidenschaft. Sie ist kein anatomisches Messer, sie ist eine Waffe. Ihr Gegenstand ist ihr Feind, den sie nicht widerlegen, sondern vernichten will. Denn der Geist jener Zustände ist widerlegt. An und für sich sind sie keine denkwürdigen Objekte, sondern ebenso verächtliche, als verachtete Existenzen. Die Kritik für sich bedarf nicht der Selbstverständigung mit diesem Gegenstand, denn sie ist mit ihm im reinen. Sie gibt sich nicht mehr als Selbstzweck, sondern nur noch als Mittel. Ihr wesentliches Pathos ist die Indignation, ihre wesentliche Arbeit die Denunziation.

Es gilt die Schilderung eines wechselseitigen dumpfen Drucks aller sozialen Sphären aufeinander, einer allgemeinen, tatlosen Verstimmung, einer sich ebensosehr anerkennenden als verkennenden Beschränktheit, eingefaßt in den Rahmen eines Regierungssystems, welches, von der Konservation aller Erbärmlichkeiten lebend, selbst nichts ist als die Erbärmlichkeit an der Regierung.

|381|Welch ein Schauspiel! Die ins unendliche fortgehende Teilung der Gesellschaft in die mannigfaltigsten Rassen, welche mit kleinen Antipathien, schlechten Gewissen und brutaler Mittelmäßigkeit sich gegenüberstehen, welche eben um ihrer wechselseitigen zweideutigen und argwöhnischen Stellung willen alle ohne Unterschied, wenn auch mit verschiedenen Formalitäten, als konzessionierte Existenzen von ihren Herren behandelt werden. Und selbst dies, daß sie beherrscht, regiert, besessen sind, müssen sie als eine Konzession des Himmels anerkennen und bekennen! Andererseits jene Herrscher selbst, deren Größe in umgekehrtem Verhältnis zu ihrer Zahl steht!

Die Kritik, die sich mit diesem Inhalt befaßt, ist die Kritik im Handgemenge, und im Handgemenge handelt es sich nicht darum, ob der Gegner ein edler, ebenbürtiger, ein interessanter Gegner ist, es handelt sich darum, ihn zu treffen. Es handelt sich darum, den Deutschen keinen Augenblick der Selbsttäuschung und der Resignation zu gönnen. Man muß den wirklichen Druck noch drückender machen, indem man ihm das Bewußtsein des Drucks hinzufügt, die Schmach noch schmachvoller, indem man sie publiziert. Man muß jede Sphäre der deutschen Gesellschaft als die partie honteuse |den Schandfleck| der deutschen Gesellschaft schildern, man muß diese versteinerten Verhältnisse dadurch zum Tanzen zwingen, daß man ihnen ihre eigne Melodie vorsingt! Man muß das Volk vor sich selbst erschrecken lehren, um ihm Courage zu machen. Man erfüllt damit ein unabweisbares Bedürfnis des deutschen Volks, und die Bedürfnisse der Völker sind in eigner Person die letzten Gründe ihrer Befriedigung.

Und selbst für die modernen Völker kann dieser Kampf gegen den bornierten Inhalt des deutschen status quo nicht ohne Interesse sein, denn der deutsche status quo ist die offenherzige Vollendung des ancien régime, und das ancien régime ist der versteckte Mangel des modernen Staates. Der Kampf gegen die deutsche politische Gegenwart ist der Kampf gegen die Vergangenheit der modernen Völker, und von den Reminiszenzen dieser Vergangenheit werden sie noch immer belästigt. Es ist lehrreich für sie, das ancien régime, das bei ihnen seine Tragödie erlebt, als deutschen Revenant eine Komödie spielen zu sehen. Tragisch war seine Geschichte, solange es die präexistierende Gewalt der Welt, die Freiheit dagegen ein persönlicher Einfall war, mit einem Wort, solange es selbst an seine Berechtigung glaubte und glauben mußte. Solange das ancien régime als vorhandene Weltordnung mit einer erst werdenden Welt kämpfte, stand auf seiner Seite ein weltgeschichtlicher Irrtum, aber kein persönlicher. Sein Untergang war daher tragisch.

|382|Das jetzige deutsche Regime dagegen, ein Anachronismus, ein flagranter Widerspruch gegen allgemein anerkannte Axiome, die zur Weltschau ausgestellte Nichtigkeit des ancien régime, bildet sich nur noch ein, an sich selbst zu glauben, und verlangt von der Welt dieselbe Einbildung. Wenn es an sein eignes Wesen glaubt, würde es dasselbe unter dem Schein eines fremden Wesens zu verstecken und seine Rettung in der Heuchelei und dem Sophisma suchen? Das moderne ancien régime ist nur mehr der Komödiant einer Weltordnung, deren wirkliche Helden gestorben sind. Die Geschichte ist gründlich und macht viele Phasen durch, wenn sie eine alte Gestalt zu Grabe trägt. Die letzte Phase einer weltgeschichtlichen Gestalt ist ihre Komödie. Die Götter Griechenlands, die schon einmal tragisch zu Tode verwundet waren im gefesselten Prometheus des Äschylus, mußten noch einmal komisch sterben in den Gesprächen Lucians. Warum dieser Gang der Geschichte? Damit die Menschheit heiter von ihrer Vergangenheit scheide. Diese heitere geschichtliche Bestimmung vindizieren wir den politischen Mächten Deutschlands.

Sobald indes die moderne politisch-soziale Wirklichkeit selbst der Kritik unterworfen wird, sobald also die Kritik zu wahrhaft menschlichen Problemen sich erhebt, befindet sie sich außerhalb des deutschen status quo, oder sie würde ihren Gegenstand unter ihrem Gegenstand greifen. Ein Beispiel! Das Verhältnis der Industrie, überhaupt der Welt des Reichtums, zu der politischen Welt ist ein Hauptproblem der modernen Zeit. Unter welcher Form fängt dieses Problem an, die Deutschen zu beschäftigen? Unter der Form der Schutzzölle, des Prohibitivsystems, der Nationalökonomie. Die Deutschtümelei ist aus dem Menschen in die Materie gefahren, und so sahen sich eines morgens unsere Baumwollritter und Eisenhelden in Patrioten verwandelt. Man beginnt also in Deutschland die Souveränität des Monopols nach innen anzuerkennen, dadurch daß man ihm die Souveränität nach außen verleiht. Man beginnt also jetzt in Deutschland anzufangen, womit man in Frankreich und England zu enden beginnt. Der alte faule Zustand, gegen den diese Länder theoretisch im Aufruhr sind und den sie nur noch ertragen, wie man die Ketten erträgt, wird in Deutschland als die aufgehende Morgenröte einer schönen Zukunft begrüßt, die kaum noch wagt, aus der listigen Theorie in die schonungslose Praxis überzugehen. Während das Problem in Frankreich und Endland lautet: Politische Ökonomie oder Herrschaft der Sozietät über den Reichtum, lautet es in Deutschland: National-Ökonomie oder Herrschaft des Privateigentums über die Nationalität. Es gilt also in Frankreich|383|und England, das Monopol, das bis zu seinen letzten Konsequenzen fortgegangen ist, aufzuheben; es gilt in Deutschland, bis zu den letzten Konsequenzen des Monopols fortzugehen. Dort handelt es sich um die Lösung, und hier handelt es sich erst um die Kollision. Ein zureichendes Beispiel der deutschen Form der modernen Probleme, ein Beispiel, wie unsere Geschichte, gleich einem ungeschickten Rekruten, bisher nur die Aufgabe hatte, abgedroschene Geschichte nachzuexerzieren.

Ginge also die gesamte deutsche Entwicklung nicht über die politische deutsche Entwicklung hinaus, ein Deutscher könnte sich höchstens an den Problemen der Gegenwart beteiligen, wie sich ein Russe daran beteiligen kann. Allein wenn das einzelne Individuum nicht gebunden ist durch die Schranken der Nation, ist die gesamte Nation noch weniger befreit durch die Befreiung eines Individuums. Die Skythen haben keinen Schritt zur griechischen Kultur vorwärts getan, weil Griechenland einen Skythen unter seine Philosophen zählt.

Zum Glück sind wir Deutsche keine Skythen.

Wie die alten Völker ihre Vorgeschichte in der Imagination erlebten, in der Mythologie, so haben wir Deutsche unsere Nachgeschichte im Gedanken erlebt, in der Philosophie. Wir sind philosophische Zeitgenossen der Gegenwart, ohne ihre historischen Zeitgenossen zu sein. Die deutsche Philosophie ist die ideale Verlängerung der deutschen Geschichte. Wenn wir also statt die oevres incomplètes |unvollendeten Werke| unserer reellen Geschichte die oevres posthumes |nachgelassenen Werke| unserer ideellen Geschichte, die Philosophie, kritisieren, so steht unsere Kritik mitten unter den Fragen, von denen die Gegenwart sagt: That is the question. Was bei den fortgeschrittenen Völkern praktischer Zerfall mit den modernen Staatszuständen ist, das ist in Deutschland, wo diese Zustände selbst noch nicht existieren, zunächst kritischer Zerfall mit der philosophischen Spiegelung dieser Zustände.

Die deutsche Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie ist die einzige mit der offiziellen modernen Gegenwart al pari stehende deutsche Geschichte. Das deutsche Volk muß daher diese seine Traumgeschichte mit zu seinen bestehenden Zuständen schlagen und nicht nur diese bestehenden Zustände, sondern zugleich ihre abstrakte Fortsetzung der Kritik unterwerfen. Seine Zukunft kann sich weder auf die unmittelbare Verneinung seiner reellen noch auf die unmittelbare Vollziehung seiner ideellen Staats- und Rechtszustände beschränken, denn die unmittelbare Verneinung seiner reellen Zustände besitzt es in seinen ideellen Zuständen, und die unmittelbare Vollziehung|384|seiner ideellen Zustände hat es in der Anschauung der Nachbarvölker beinah schon wieder überlebt. Mit Recht fordert daher die praktische politische Partei in Deutschland die Negation der Philosophie. Ihr Unrecht besteht nicht in der Forderung, sondern in dem Stehnbleiben bei der Forderung, die sie ernstlich weder vollzieht noch vollziehen kann. Sie glaubt, jene Negation dadurch zu vollbringen, daß sie der Philosophie den Rücken kehrt und abgewandten Hauptes - einige ärgerliche und banale Phrasen über sie hermurmelt. Die Beschränktheit ihres Gesichtskreises zählt die Philosophie nicht ebenfalls in den Bering der deutschen Wirklichkeit oder wähnt sie gar unter der deutschen Praxis und den ihr dienenden Theorien. Ihr verlangt, daß man an wirkliche Lebenskeime anknüpfen soll, aber ihr vergeßt, daß der wirkliche Lebenskeim des deutschen Volkes bisher nur in seinem Hirnschädel gewuchert hat. Mit einem Worte: Ihr könnt die Philosophie nicht aufheben, ohne sie zu verwirklichen.

Dasselbe Unrecht, nur mit umgekehrten Faktoren, beging die theoretische, von der Philosophie her datierende politische Partei.

Sie erblickte in dem jetzigen Kampf nur den kritischen Kampf der Philosophie mit der deutschen Welt, sie bedachte nicht, daß die seitherige Philosophie selbst zu dieser Welt gehört und ihre, wenn auch ideelle, Ergänzung ist. Kritisch gegen ihren Widerpart, verhielt sie sich unkritisch zu sich selbst, indem sie von den Voraussetzungen der Philosophie ausging und bei ihren gegebenen Resultaten entweder stehenblieb oder anderweitig hergeholte Forderungen und Resultate für unmittelbare Forderungen und Resultate der Philosophie ausgab, obgleich dieselben - ihre Berechtigung vorausgesetzt - im Gegenteil nur durch die Negation der seitherigen Philosophie, der Philosophie als Philosophie, zu erhalten sind. Eine näher eingehende Schilderung dieser Partei behalten wir uns vor. Ihr Grundmangel läßt sich dahin reduzieren: Sie glaubte, die Philosophie verwirklichen zu können, ohne sie aufzuheben.

Die Kritik der deutschen Staats- und Rechtsphilosophie, welche durch Hegel ihre konsequenteste, reichste, letzte Fassung erhalten hat, ist beides, sowohl die kritische Analyse des modernen Staats und der mit ihm zusammenhängenden Wirklichkeit als auch die entschiedene Verneinung der ganzen bisherigen Weise des deutschen politischen und rechtlichen Bewußtseins, dessen vornehmster, universellster, zur Wissenschaft erhobener Ausdruck eben die spekulative Rechtsphilosophie selbst ist. War nur in Deutschland die spekulative Rechtsphilosophie möglich, dies abstrakte überschwengliche Denken des modernen Staats, dessen Wirklichkeit ein Jenseits bleibt, mag dieses Jenseits auch nur jenseits des Rheins liegen: so war ebensosehr umgekehrt das deutsche, vom wirklichen Menschen abstrahierte Gedankenbild des modernen|385|Staats nur möglich, weil und insofern der moderne Staat selbst vom wirklichen Menschen abstrahiert oder den ganzen Menschen auf eine nur imaginäre Weise befriedigt. Die Deutschen haben in der Politik gedacht, was die anderen Völker getan haben. Deutschland war ihr theoretisches Gewissen. Die Abstraktion und Überhebung seines Denkens hielt immer gleichen Schritt mit der Einseitigkeit und Untersetztheit ihrer Wirklichkeit. Wenn also der status quo des deutschen Staatswesens die Vollendung des ancien régime ausdrückt, die Vollendung des Pfahls im Fleische des modernen Staats, so drückt der status quo des deutschen Staatswissens die Unvollendung des modernen Staats aus, die Schadhaftigkeit seines Fleisches selbst.

Schon als entschiedner Widerpart der bisherigen Weise des deutschen politischen Bewußtseins verläuft sich die Kritik der spekulativen Rechtsphilosophie nicht in sich selbst, sondern in Aufgaben, für deren Lösung es nur ein Mittel gibt: die Praxis.

Es fragt sich: Kann Deutschland zu einer Praxis à la hauteur des principes |die sich auf die Höhe der Prinzipien erhebt| gelangen, d.h. zu einer Revolution, die es nicht nur auf das offizielle Niveau der modernen Völker erhebt, sondern auf die menschliche Höhe, welche die nähere Zukunft dieser Völker sein wird?

Die Waffe der Kritik kann allerdings die Kritik der Waffen nicht ersetzen, die materielle Gewalt muß gestürzt werden durch materielle Gewalt, allein auch die Theorie wird zur materiellen Gewalt, sobald sie die Massen ergreift. Die Theorie ist fähig, die Massen zu ergreifen, sobald sie ad hominem |am Menschen| demonstriert, und sie demonstriert ad hominem, sobald sie radikal wird. Radikal sein ist die Sache an der Wurzel fassen. Die Wurzel für den Menschen ist aber der Mensch selbst. Der evidente Beweis für den Radikalismus der deutschen Theorie, also für ihre praktische Energie, ist ihr Ausgang von der entschiedenen positiven Aufhebung der Religion. Die Kritik der Religion endet mit der Lehre, daß der Mensch das höchste Wesen für den Menschen sei, also mit dem kategorischen Imperativ, alle Verhältnisse umzuwerfen, in denen der Mensch ein erniedrigtes, ein geknechtetes, ein verlassenes, ein verächtliches Wesen ist. Verhältnisse, die man nicht besser schildern kann als durch den Ausruf eines Franzosen bei einer projektierten Hundesteuer: Arme Hunde! Man will euch wie Menschen behandeln!

Selbst historisch hat die theoretische Emanzipation eine spezifisch praktische Bedeutung für Deutschland. Deutschlands revolutionäre Vergangenheit ist nämlich theoretisch, es ist die Reformation. Wie damals der Mönch, so ist es jetzt der Philosoph, in dessen Hirn die Revolution beginnt.

|386|Luther hat allerdings die Knechtschaft aus Devotion besiegt, weil er die Knechtschaft aus Überzeugung an ihre Stelle gesetzt hat. Er hat den Glauben an die Autorität gebrochen, weil er die Autorität des Glaubens restauriert hat. Er hat die Pfaffen in Laien verwandelt, weil er die Laien in Pfaffen verwandelt hat. Er hat den Menschen von der äußeren Religiosität befreit, weil er die Religiosität zum inneren Menschen gemacht hat. Er hat den Leib von der Kette emanzipiert, weil er das Herz an die Kette gelegt.

Aber, wenn der Protestantismus nicht die wahre Lösung, so war er die wahre Stellung der Aufgabe. Es galt nun nicht mehr den Kampf des Laien mit dem Pfaffen außer ihm, es galt den Kampf mit seinen eigenen innern Pfaffen, seiner pfäffischen Natur. Und wenn die protestantische Verwandlung der deutschen Laien in Pfaffen die Laienpäpste, die Fürsten samt ihrer Klerisei, den Privilegierten und den Philistern, emanzipiert, so wird die philosophische Verwandlung der pfäffischen Deutschen in Menschen das Volk emanzipieren. Sowenig aber die Emanzipation bei den Fürsten, sowenig wird aber die Säkularisation der Güter bei dem Kirchenraub stehenbleiben, den vor allem das heuchlerische Preußen ins Werk setzte. Damals scheiterte der Bauernkrieg, die radikalste Tatsache der deutschen Geschichte, an der Theologie. Heute, wo die Theologie selbst gescheitert ist, wird die unfreieste Tatsache der deutschen Geschichte, unser status quo, an der Philosophie zerschellen. Den Tag vor der Reformation war das offizielle Deutschland der unbedingteste Knecht von Rom. Den Tag vor seiner Revolution ist es der unbedingte Knecht von weniger als Rom, von Preußen und Österreich, von Krautjunkern und Philistern.

Einer radikalen deutschen Revolution scheint indessen eine Hauptschwierigkeit entgegenzustehen.

Die Revolutionen bedürfen nämlich eines passiven Elementes, einer materiellen Grundlage. Die Theorie wird in einem Volke immer nur so weit verwirklicht, als sie die Verwirklichung seiner Bedürfnisse ist. Wird nun dem ungeheuren Zwiespalt zwischen den Forderungen des deutschen Gedankens und den Antworten der deutschen Wirklichkeit derselbe Zwiespalt der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft mit dem Staat und mit sich selbst entsprechen? Werden die theoretischen Bedürfnisse unmittelbar praktische Bedürfnisse sein? Es genügt nicht, daß der Gedanke zur Verwirklichung drängt, die Wirklichkeit muß sich selbst zum Gedanken drängen.

Aber Deutschland hat die Mittelstufen der politischen Emanzipation nicht gleichzeitig mit den modernen Völkern erklettert. Selbst die Stufen, die es theoretisch überwunden, hat es praktisch noch nicht erreicht. Wie sollte es mit einem salto mortale nicht nur über seine eigenen Schranken hinwegsetzen|387|, sondern zugleich über die Schranken der modernen Völker, über Schranken, die es in der Wirklichkeit als Befreiung von seinen wirklichen Schranken empfinden und erstreben muß? Eine radikale Revolution kann nur die Revolution radikaler Bedürfnisse sein, deren Voraussetzungen und Geburtsstätten eben fehlen.

Allein wenn Deutschland nur mit der abstrakten Tätigkeit des Denkens die Entwicklung der modernen Völker begleitet hat, ohne werktätige Partei an den wirklichen Kämpfen dieser Entwicklung zu ergreifen, so hat es andererseits die Leiden dieser Entwicklung geteilt, ohne ihre Genüsse, ohne ihre partielle Befriedigung zu teilen. Der abstrakten Tätigkeit einerseits entspricht das abstrakte Leiden andererseits. Deutschland wird sich daher eines Morgens auf dem Niveau des europäischen Verfalls befinden, bevor es jemals auf dem Niveau der europäischen Emanzipation gestanden hat. Man wird es einem Fetischdiener vergleichen können, der an den Krankheiten des Christentums siecht.

Betrachtet man zunächst die deutschen Regierungen, und man findet sie durch die Zeitverhältnisse, durch die Lage Deutschlands, durch den Standpunkt der deutschen Bildung, endlich durch den eignen glücklichen Instinkt getrieben, die zivilisierten Mängel der modernen Staatswelt, deren Vorteile wir nicht besitzen, zu kombinieren mit den barbarischen Mängeln des ancien régime, dessen wir uns in vollem Maße erfreuen, so daß Deutschland, wenn nicht am Verstand, wenigstens am Unverstand auch der über seinen status quo hinausliegenden Staatsbildungen immer mehr partizipieren muß. Gibt es z.B. ein Land in der Welt, welches so naiv alle Institutionen des konstitutionellen Staatswesens teilt, ohne seine Realitäten zu teilen, als das sogenannte konstitutionelle Deutschland? Oder war es nicht notwendig ein deutscher Regierungseinfall, die Qualen der Zensur mit den Qualen der französischen Septembergesetze, welche die Preßfreiheit voraussetzen, zu verbinden! Wie man im römischen Pantheon die Götter aller Nationen fand, so wird man im heiligen römischen deutschen Reich die Sünden aller Staatsformen finden. Daß dieser Eklektizismus eine bisher nicht geahnte Höhe erreichen wird, dafür bürgt namentlich die politisch-ästhetische Gourmanderie eines deutschen Königs, der alle Rollen des Königtums, des feudalen wie des bürokratischen, des absoluten wie des konstitutionellen, des autokratischen wie des demokratischen, wenn nicht durch die Person des Volkes, so doch in eigener Person, wenn nicht für das Volk so doch für sich selbst zu spielen gedenkt. Deutschland als der zu einer eigenen Welt konstituierte |388|Mangel der politischen Gegenwart wird die spezifisch deutschen Schranken nicht niederwerfen können, ohne die allgemeine Schranke der politischen Gegenwart niederzuwerfen.

Nicht die radikale Revolution ist utopischer Traum für Deutschland, nicht die allgemein menschliche Emanzipation, sondern vielmehr die teilweise, die nur politische Revolution, die Revolution, welche die Pfeiler des Hauses stehenläßt. Worauf beruht eine teilweise, eine nur politische Revolution? Darauf, daß ein Teil der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft sich emanzipiert und zur allgemeinen Herrschaft gelangt, darauf, daß eine bestimmte Klasse von ihrer besonderen Situation aus die allgemeine Emanzipation der Gesellschaft unternimmt. Diese Klasse befreit die ganze Gesellschaft, aber nur unter der Voraussetzung, daß die ganze Gesellschaft sich in der Situation dieser Klasse befindet, also z.B. Geld und Bildung besitzt oder beliebig erwerben kann.

Keine Klasse der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft kann diese Rolle spielen, ohne ein Moment des Enthusiasmus in sich und in der Masse hervorzurufen, ein Moment, worin sie mit der Gesellschaft im allgemeinen fraternisiert und zusammenfließt, mit ihr verwechselt und als deren allgemeiner Repräsentant empfunden und anerkannt wird, ein Moment, worin ihre Ansprüche und Rechte in Wahrheit die Rechte und Ansprüche der Gesellschaft selbst sind, worin sie wirklich der soziale Kopf und das soziale Herz ist. Nur im Namen der allgemeinen Rechte der Gesellschaft kann eine besondere Klasse sich die allgemeine Herrschaft vindizieren. Zur Erstürmung dieser emanzipatorischen Stellung und damit zur politischen Ausbeutung aller Sphären der Gesellschaft im Interesse der eigenen Sphäre reichen revolutionäre Energie und geistiges Selbstgefühl allein nicht aus. Damit die Revolution eines Volkes und die Emanzipation einer besonderen Klasse der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft zusammenfallen, damit ein Stand für den Stand der ganzen Gesellschaft gelte, dazu müssen umgekehrt alle Mängel der Gesellschaft in einer anderen Klasse konzentriert, dazu muß ein bestimmter Stand der Stand des allgemeinen Anstoßes, die Inkorporation der allgemeinen Schranke sein, dazu muß eine besondre soziale Sphäre für das notorische Verbrechen der ganzen Sozietät gelten, so daß die Befreiung von dieser Sphäre als die allgemeine Selbstbefreiung erscheint. Damit ein Stand par excellence der Stand der Befreiung, dazu muß umgekehrt ein anderer Stand der offenbare Stand der Unterjochung sein. Die negativ-allgemeine Bedeutung des französischen Adels und der französischen Klerisei bedingte die positiv-allgemeine Bedeutung der zunächst angrenzenden und entgegenstehenden Klasse der Bourgeoisie.

|389|Es fehlt aber jeder besondern Klasse in Deutschland nicht nur die Konsequenz, die Schärfe, der Mut, die Rücksichtslosigkeit, die sie zum negativen Repräsentanten der Gesellschaft stempeln könnte. Es fehlt ebensosehr jedem Stande jene Breite der Seele, die sich mit der Volksseele, wenn auch nur momentan, identifiziert, jene Genialität, welche die materielle Macht zur politischen Gewalt begeistert, jene revolutionäre Kühnheit, welche dem Gegner die trotzige Parole zuschleudert: Ich bin nichts, und ich müßte alles sein. Den Hauptstock der deutschen Moral und Ehrlichkeit, nicht nur der Individuen, sondern auch der Klassen, bildet vielmehr jener bescheidene Egoismus, welcher seine Beschränktheit geltend macht und gegen sich geltend machen läßt. Das Verhältnis der verschiedenen Sphären der deutschen Gesellschaft ist daher nicht dramatisch, sondern episch. Jede derselben beginnt sich zu empfinden und neben die andern mit ihren besondern Ansprüchen sich hinzulagern, nicht sobald sie gedrückt wird, sondern sobald ohne ihr Zutun die Zeitverhältnisse eine gesellige Unterlage schaffen, auf die sie ihrerseits Druck ausüben kann. Sogar das moralische Selbstgefühl der deutschen Mittelklasse beruht nur auf dem Bewußtsein, die allgemeine Repräsentantin von der philisterhaften Mittelmäßigkeit aller übrigen Klassen zu sein. Es sind daher nicht nur die deutschen Könige, die mal-à-propos |zur Unzeit| auf den Thron gelangen, es ist jede Sphäre der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, die ihre Niederlage erlebt, bevor sie ihren Sieg gefeiert, ihre eigene Schranke entwickelt, bevor sie die ihr gegenüberstehende Schranke überwunden, ihr engherziges Wesen geltend macht, bevor sie ihr großmütiges Wesen geltend machen konnte, so das selbst die Gelegenheit einer großen Rolle immer vorüber ist, bevor sie vorhanden war, so daß jede Klasse, sobald sie den Kampf mit der über ihr stehenden Klasse beginnt, in den Kampf mit der unter ihr stehenden verwickelt ist. Daher befindet sich das Fürstentum im Kampf gegen das Königtum, der Bürokrat im Kampf gegen den Adel, der Bourgeois im Kampf gegen sie alle, während der Proletarier schon beginnt, sich im Kampf gegen die Bourgeois zu befinden. Die Mittelklasse wagt kaum von ihrem Standpunkt aus den Gedanken der Emanzipation zu fassen, und schon erklärt die Entwicklung der sozialen Zustände wie der Fortschritt der politischen Theorie diesen Standpunkt selbst für antiquiert oder wenigstens für problematisch.

In Frankreich genügt es, daß einer etwas sei, damit er alles sein wolle. In Deutschland darf einer nichts sein, wenn er nicht auf alles verzichten soll. In Frankreich ist die partielle Emanzipation der Grund der universellen. In |390|Deutschland ist die universelle Emanzipation conditio sine qua non jeder partiellen. In Frankreich muß die Wirklichkeit, in Deutschland muß die Unmöglichkeit der stufenweisen Befreiung die ganze Freiheit gebären. In Frankreich ist jede Volksklasse politischer Idealist und empfindet sich zunächst nicht als besondere Klasse, sondern als Repräsentant der sozialen Bedürfnisse überhaupt. Die Rolle des Emanzipators geht also der Reihe nach in dramatischer Bewegung an die verschiedenen Klassen des französischen Volkes über, bis sie endlich bei der Klasse anlangt, welche die soziale Freiheit nicht mehr unter der Voraussetzung gewisser, außerhalb der Menschen liegender und doch von der menschlichen Gesellschaft geschaffener Bedingungen verwirklicht, sondern vielmehr alle Bedingungen der menschlichen Existenz unter der Voraussetzung der sozialen Freiheit organisiert. In Deutschland dagegen, wo das praktische Leben ebenso geistlos als das geistige Leben unpraktisch ist, hat keine Klasse der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft das Bedürfnis und die Fähigkeit der allgemeinen Emanzipation, bis sie nicht durch ihre unmittelbare Lage, durch die materielle Notwendigkeit, durch ihre Ketten selbst dazu gezwungen wird.

Wo also die positive Möglichkeit der Deutschen Emanzipation?

Antwort: In der Bildung einer Klasse mit radikalen Ketten, einer Klasse der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, welche keine Klasse der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ist, eines Standes, welcher die Auflösung aller Stände ist, einer Sphäre, welche einen universellen Charakter durch ihre universellen Leiden besitzt und kein besondres Recht in Anspruch nimmt, weil kein besondres Unrecht, sondern das Unrecht schlechthin an ihr verübt wird, welche nicht mehr auf einen historischen, sondern nur noch auf den menschlichen Titel provozieren kann, welche in keinem einseitigen Gegensatz zu den Konsequenzen, sondern in einem allseitigen Gegensatz zu den Voraussetzungen des deutschen Staatswesens steht, einer Sphäre endlich, welche sich nicht emanzipieren kann, ohne sich von allen übrigen Sphären der Gesellschaft und damit alle übrigen Sphären der Gesellschaft zu emanzipieren, welche mit einem Wort der völlige Verlust des Menschen ist, also nur durch die völlige Wiedergewinnung des Menschen sich selbst gewinnen kann. Diese Auflösung der Gesellschaft als ein besonderer Stand ist das Proletariat.

Das Proletariat beginnt erst durch die hereinbrechende industrielle Bewegung für Deutschland zu werden, den nicht die naturwüchsig entstandne, sondern die künstlich produzierte Armut, nicht die mechanisch durch die Schwere der Gesellschaft niedergedrückte, sondern die aus ihrer akuten|391|Auflösung, vorzugsweise aus der Auflösung des Mittelstandes, hervorgehende Menschenmasse bildet das Proletariat, obgleich allmählich, wie sich von selbst versteht, auch die naturwüchsige Armut und die christlich-germanische Leibeigenschaft in seine Reihen treten.

Wenn das Proletariat die Auflösung der bisherigen Weltordnung verkündet, so spricht es nur das Geheimnis seines eigenen Daseins aus, denn es ist die faktische Auflösung dieser Weltordnung. Wenn das Proletariat die Negation des Privateigentums verlangt, so erhebt es nur zum Prinzip der Gesellschaft, was die Gesellschaft zu seinem Prinzip erhoben hat, was in ihm als negatives Resultat der Gesellschaft schon ohne sein Zutun verkörpert ist. Der Proletarier befindet sich dann in bezug auf die werdende Welt in demselben Recht, in welchem der deutsche König in bezug auf die gewordene Welt sich befindet, wenn er das Volk sein Volk wie das Pferd sein Pferd nennt. Der König, indem er das Volk für sein Privateigentum erklärt, spricht es nur aus, das der Privateigentümer König ist.

Wie die Philosophie im Proletariat ihre materiellen, so findet das Proletariat in der Philosophie seine geistigen Waffen, und sobald der Blitz des Gedankens gründlich in diesen naiven Volksboden eingeschlagen ist, wird sich die Emanzipation der Deutschen zu Menschen vollziehn.

Resümieren wir das Resultat:

Die einzig praktisch mögliche Befreiung Deutschlands ist die Befreiung auf dem Standpunkt der Theorie, welche den Menschen für das höchste Wesen des Menschen erklärt. In Deutschland ist die Emanzipation von dem Mittelalter nur möglich als die Emanzipation zugleich von den teilweisen Überwindungen des Mittelalters. In Deutschland kann keine Art der Knechtschaft gebrochen werden, ohne jede Art der Knechtschaft zu brechen. Das gründliche Deutschland kann nicht revolutionieren, ohne von Grund aus zu revolutionieren. Die Emanzipation des Deutschen ist die Emanzipation des Menschen. Der Kopf dieser Emanzipation ist die Philosophie, ihr Herz das Proletariat. Die Philosophie kann sich nicht verwirklichen ohne die Aufhebung des Proletariats, das Proletariat kann sich nicht aufheben ohne die Verwirklichung der Philosophie.

Wenn alle innern Bedingungen erfüllt sind, wird der deutsche Auferstehungstag verkündet werden durch das Schmettern des gallischen Hahns.

Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts (§§ 261-313)
Teil 1
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01/me01_203.htm

Teil 2
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01/me01_234.htm

Teil 3
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01/me01_263.htm

Teil 4
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01/me01_288.htm

Teil 5
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01/me01_316.htm

#religion #philosophie #marxisme

MEGAdigital. Online-Angebot der historisch-kritischen Gesamtausgabe von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels - MEGAdigital
►https://megadigital.bbaw.de

https://www.geistes-und-sozialwissenschaften-bmftr.de/img/72_MEGA-Abb-1b-druchbaende-marx-engels-gesamt.jpg

Über diese Edition

Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) präsentiert die Veröffentlichungen, Manuskripte und den Briefwechsel von Marx und Engels in vier Abteilungen. Die I. Abteilung (Werke) erscheint ausschließlich im Druck. Aus der II. Abteilung („‚Das Kapital‘ und Vorarbeiten“) sind die edierten Texte von zehn Bänden mit den wichtigsten Textfassungen und Manuskripten zum „Kapital“ auf MEGAdigital abrufbar. Die III. Abteilung (Briefe) liegt bis zum Jahrgang 1865 in Form von Druckbänden vor. Ab dem Jahrgang 1866 werden die Briefe von und an Marx und Engels ebenfalls auf MEGAdigital dargeboten. Dies gilt auch für einen Großteil der Exzerpte und Notizen (IV. Abteilung).

Depuis la disparition de mlwerke.de il n’existe plus d’éditon en ligne des oeuvres de Marx et Engels qui fait fonction de source quasi officielle des texte fondateurs du marxisme. L’édition critique MEGAdigital ne publie en ligne qu’une partie des textes d’importance secondaire.

Les textes de l’édition Dietz (MEW) qui ont été élaborés par l’Institut de Marxisme Léninisme du Comité Central du P.C.U.S. et l’Institut de Marxisme Léninisme du Comité Central du SED sont actuellement disponibles sous les URLs suivants :

▻https://marx.works/me_mew.htm
et
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/default.htm

À propos de l’édition MEW
▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/MEGA1_MEGA2.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-D0630-0005-001%2C_Berlin%2C_Wallstra%C3%9Fe%2C_Verlagsgeb%C3%A4ude%2C_Dietz-Verlag.jpg

#marxisme #auf_Deutsch #MEW #MEGAdigital

Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) School of Marxism
▻https://en.bfsu.edu.cn/2025/06/27/c_158092.htm

https://cnsubsites.chinadaily.com.cn/bfsu/att/20210825/1629859135525037505.jpg

En Chine on étudie édite les oeuvres de Marx (卡尔·马克思) et Engels (弗里德里希·恩格斯).

Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU) has a rich history dating back to its origins as the Russian Language Unit of the Third Branch of the Anti-Japanese Military-Political University established in 1941, and later the Yan’an School of Foreign Languages. As the first foreign language institution established by the Communist Party of China, BFSU embodies revolutionary heritage and patriotism. The university has a strong tradition of ideological, political and Marxist theoretical education, offering courses in politics and foreign languages as early as the Yan’an period (1935-1948). It established the Marxism-Leninism Teaching and Research Office in 1951 and officially founded the School of Marxism in June 2014.

The School of Marxism places a strong emphasis on discipline development and theoretical research, particularly focusing on the study of Marxist theory. In 2018, BFSU received approval to offer a first-level master’s program in Marxist theory, with specializations including the fundamental principles of Marxism, the adaptation of Marxism to the Chinese context, and ideological and political education. In 2016, the school was designated as the Collaborative Innovation Center on the Global Influence of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for Beijing Universities. In 2018, the school was recognized as one of Beijing’s research bases for Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. Additionally, in 2020, it was designated as a key institution for Marxist studies in Beijing. Building on the history and realities of BFSU, the School of Marxism prioritizes the inheritance of revolutionary ideals and focuses on Marxist research and socialism with Chinese characteristics. By integrating historical and contemporary perspectives, theory and practice, and conducting comparative studies between China and the world, the school is gradually cultivating its unique strengths and fulfilling its role.

The school places great emphasis on faculty development, focusing on overall improvement, collaborative teamwork, and attracting outstanding talents. The school boasts a dynamic team of young teachers, with an average age below 45. These educators are all graduates of leading institutions in China, specializing in Marxist theory and related fields. The school’s faculty members have received prestigious accolades such as National Outstanding Teacher, Distinguished Professor or Teacher of Ideological and Political Theory from Beijing Universities, nomination for the Beijing People’s Teacher Award, Model Worker in Moral Education in Beijing, and Educators with Exceptional Professional Ethics in Beijing.

The school remains dedicated to its mission of instilling knowledge and nurturing virtues, with an emphasis on encouraging critical thinking, producing research papers, and integrating research outcomes into the classroom to enhance the synergy between teaching and research. This approach has significantly improved the quality of ideological and political education, resulting in numerous research achievements. Over the past five years, the school has published over 220 articles and papers in reputable publications such as People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, Economic Daily and Qiushi Journal. Additionally, the school has undertaken 23 national, provincial, and ministerial-level projects, laying a solid foundation for establishing itself as a leading center for Marxist theory teaching, research, dissemination and talent cultivation in Beijing.

#Chine #université #marxisme

Le capitalisme n’est pas un destin
▻https://laviedesidees.fr/Lowy-Guillibert-Marx-Narodnik

Marx reste souvent lu comme un auteur déterministe, théoricien d’un processus historique conduisant au nécessaire dépassement du capitalisme. Une partie de son œuvre tardive invite à nuancer cette lecture.

#Philosophie #Marx

https://laviedesidees.fr/local/cache-vignettes/L644xH451/mrxnrdnk-larg-8b85a.jpg?1781164803

Capitalism Won’t Collapse on Its Own -Interview with Vivek Chibber
▻https://jacobin.com/2026/05/capitalism-crisis-collapse-socialism-determinism

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/90/55/bb/9055bb2310ffef59c2d70cc9b082e9d7.jpg

Je vous ai toujours dit que j’étais content si « la révolution » n’arrivait pas de mon vivant ;-)

Voilà pourquoi.

31.5.2026 by Melissa Naschek - Socialists have long predicted capitalism’s overthrow and replacement by a better system. But do we have any reason to believe capitalism must come to an end?

On the latest episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Melissa Naschek and Vivek Chibber discuss the role of economic and ecological crises in capitalism’s possible demise. Just as it is a mistake to think that capitalism will last forever, it’s also unrealistic to think that it is destined to collapse.

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here.

Melissa Naschek

When I was coming up on the Left, I heard a lot about Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history.” By this, he meant that capitalism was here to stay, and there was nothing anybody could do about it. But I think that changed in the post–Bernie 2016 moment because suddenly there was hope where there hadn’t really been much before. And that brought into play all these other theories that argue the exact opposite: that not only will capitalism end, it actually has to end, that some sort of break is inevitable within capitalism.

Vivek Chibber

When Fukuyama wrote his book, there was a sense that “There is no alternative.” That the Soviet Union is gone and the only existing alternative to capitalism, at least in real life, was no longer there. And it looked like there was no other economic system that was possible.

But we are in a different world today, because even if capitalism’s end is not on the horizon, the form in which capitalism has existed for the last forty years, which is neoliberalism, is in absolute crisis. And certainly once you see that some aspects of the society around you, which seemed unshakable a few years ago, are suddenly up for grabs, and they’re melting and crumbling, it does raise the possibility in your mind that maybe you could be even more ambitious; that maybe you could actually start to think about bringing down capitalism itself.

Melissa Naschek

There’s been a consistent strain within Marxism predicting that the end of capitalism is either just around the corner or is destined by “the laws of historical motion” to end. And Karl Marx has tons of quotes that are often used to support this view, one of them being that capitalism creates “its own gravediggers” in the working class.

Vivek Chibber

Right. And he also said that there’s a kind of a sequence in history where economic systems come and go. And they fall apart and implode when they start impeding technological progress. So in his language, when the class structure, or the relations of production as he called it, become fetters on the forces of production or in technology, at that moment, these economic systems become unstable.

Melissa Naschek

So why do we have any reason to think capitalism might ever come to an end?

Vivek Chibber

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed this idea that it’s not just that capitalism will someday come to an end, but that capitalism is merely the latest economic system in a list of systems that have come to an end. And that there’s a pattern across different economic systems such that when they do fall apart and are followed by a new one, it’s always governed by the same principles. It’s a very powerful theory, right or wrong. It’s one of the most elegant theories social science has ever produced.

What the theory of historical materialism basically said was that, across history, you have not just one economic system. . . Capitalism hasn’t always existed. It’s a very recent economic system. It really came about in the 1500s and 1600s.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And this is an important part of Marx’s theory itself, the fact that capitalism actually has a distinct beginning.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. The idea is it has a birth date and it has an end date as well. And that is an incredibly bracing idea — that it isn’t inevitable. It’s the opposite of Fukuyama. Fukuyama says, “Well, now we are in it for the long run. There was this illusion that there was some alternative to it, but that’s over.”

What Marx and Engels were saying is that, in fact, every system has a time stamp on it and it’s going to come to an end. Roman slavery came to an end, feudalism came to an end, and capitalism, like them, will come to an end. But they also argue that not only will it come to an end, it’ll do so for the same reasons that slavery ended and that feudalism ended.

Melissa Naschek

What does that mean?

Vivek Chibber

The theory of historical materialism argues that there is a logic that governs the ebb and flow of economic history.

So the idea is that there is a continuity in human history, which is that human beings continually develop their technological and economic efficiency. And they do it because it frees them up from labor. It gives them a higher standard of living; they appreciate that higher standard of living, and they appreciate having to work less. Marx and Engels thought this was an inbuilt drive in human nature.

Now, in any given economic system, the institutions of the economy — such as the class structure, the ways in which commerce is carried out, the ways in which banking or money is organized — all of it is governed by this logic: People will abide by an existing set of institutions as long as it feeds their desire to continue to improve their standards of living.

And when it ceases to do so, it unleashes a series of crises in that society because people start pushing against the barriers of the existing institutions saying, “This isn’t really working for us anymore.” So slavery at some point became — Marx is ambiguous on this — either unproductive or not sufficiently productive to make people happy.

Melissa Naschek

This is the notion of fetters. It’s that barrier that you’re describing.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. And what happens is that because economic institutions are no longer promoting growth, the battle between classes intensifies, because the economic pie isn’t expanding. And because the battle now intensifies, during the course of that battle, people start reaching for alternative ways of organizing institutions. And through some mysterious process, maybe trial and error or maybe through warfare, a new economic system comes about that people find is more congenial to their material interests, to their desires. And that creates a stability.

How does it make it stable? Well, the ascendant economic system reduces the amount of conflict in society because the new ruling class can now preside over more productive economies and can, through its exploitation of people, also raise their standards of living.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah. It sounds like a natural selection argument in that there’s this assumption that people want a better, more productive economy because it’s going to provide them with a higher standard of living. Therefore, the institutions that continue to promote that increasing level of quality of life are going to be selected for.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. And Marx had to marry that to his other proposition, which is that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” So if classes and class struggle are the engine that drives this stuff, but at the same time, it’s this individual desire for improved standards of living, how do the two come together?

The way they come together is that the new class that comes into power — let’s say, the feudal nobility which came into power after Roman slavery — that new class is going to exploit peasants, just the way the Roman slave owners exploited slaves. But because the economic pie is now expanding faster than it did during Roman times, the peasants and the laboring classes, even though they’re still being exploited, are going to have higher standards of living than the people of the laboring classes had in the preceding mode of production.

So while exploitation is still going on, the class struggle, through some kind of selectional process, put into place an economic system in which the level of conflict is now reduced. And so you get economic stability. And now this economic system goes on for centuries and centuries until it also starts becoming a kind of a block to further development that unleashes a new intensified cycle of class conflict, at the end of which you stumble into, in some way, a new economic system. And now you have capitalism.

The claim is, at some point, capitalism will also become a system in which class relations, capital and labor, become obstacles to technological progress and economic growth. And that will unleash class struggle. And through that, you will get the onset of, hopefully, socialism. That was Marx’s idea.

So the same logic is governing the transversal from one economic system to another across history. And that, Marx said, makes it inevitable. Because every economic system, at some point, is going to become something that is not developing sufficiently fast to abate and to limit conflict. And when it’s unleashed, you get the conditions for a new economic system coming up.

The generation of Marxists in Marx’s time, in Vladimir Lenin’s time, all the way into the 1940s and ’50s, at least give lip service to the idea that they are aligned with the forward march of history, and therefore they are helping push history faster along these grooves in which it’s already set. That was the idea.

Melissa Naschek

So do you think that this theory actually motivated political action by figures like Lenin and other people who were invested in and researching this theory? Does it relate at all to the Russian Revolution or anything like that?

Vivek Chibber

Well, it’s a funny thing. When you read deeply into the debates they’re having in the early 1900s and going all the way up until 1917, it doesn’t come up very much.

Let’s take a caricatured view of this. Suppose Lenin and [Leon] Trotsky are sitting around and they say, “Look, are we going to have this revolution or not?”

Melissa Naschek

Lenin and Trotsky have a podcast.

Vivek Chibber

Right, so they’re sipping their vodka over the Volga. And in the discussion, Lenin says, “So, Lev, what do you think? Are we going to have this revolution?” And Trotsky says, “I don’t know, sooner or later. I mean, we know it’s going to happen. So why bother so hard? Why do we have to work so hard?”

But when you look at their debates from 1902 onwards, when the Bolshevik faction is formed and they’re debating the Mensheviks and they’re having all these arguments, it’s all in this context of feeling that, if we get this wrong, we won’t recover. If we don’t build the right party, it won’t work. If we don’t have the right strategy, the right tactics, we’ll be decimated. And once we’re decimated, we won’t get this chance again.

You don’t get the sense that anybody’s working with a sense of inevitability, right? So in that sense, you don’t see it very much.

And in fact, what they’re imbued with, I think, is something that’s quite the opposite, which is that here in Russia, we might have a revolution way before we’re supposed to.

Marx’s theory said that revolutions should occur in the more advanced capitalist countries that are ready economically, with an economic foundation that could be the basis for a viable socialism. Russia was in many ways the last country where that should have happened because it was the most backward country in Europe.

Now, Marx understood this in his last years and he tried to figure out how the Russian socialists and the anarchists might be able to build on the institutions of a backward Russia, but he never for a moment thought it would be a cakewalk. He knew that the backwardness of the country would be an obstacle.

What I think was really worrying the Russian Marxists was that, far from being inevitable, they were in a situation where the revolution shouldn’t have happened at all. So if you’re working with a theory of history that says that events are going to move along as predicted, Russia shouldn’t have been in a revolutionary situation to begin with.

Now, they came up with their theories to explain why that was happening. But for our purposes, were they motivated by this sense of inevitability? I don’t see it. I can’t see it.

On the other hand, I do think it mattered in one respect, which is that I think that for the leadership of the party, feeling that even while this or that country at this or that moment might be an exception — like Russia was an exception — and that revolutions might occur out of sequence, they could see these as momentary perturbations. That, in the end, Marx basically had it right; that there is going to be this arc in which all the countries fall into line, but he might have gotten the sequence wrong.

I think that did matter for them to some extent. It didn’t matter in 1917–18. It didn’t matter in 1905, when they were in the throes of revolutions, but it probably mattered to them in between the revolutions.

There was this period from say 1907 to the 1910s when things looked really bleak in Russia. They’d been defeated in the 1905 revolution. They were discouraged. And, I don’t have direct evidence of this, but you get the sense when you read their letters and their correspondence that they’re feeling, “Yeah, things are bad now. It’s bleak, it’s bad, but we are on the side of history, or history is with us and we just have to hang on. We have to marshal our forces because sooner or later things will come back in line again.”

Ironically and oddly, I don’t think it mattered to them much in the revolutionary moments when they’re actually organizing themselves. At that moment, they’re overtaken with minutiae — tactical issues, strategic issues, military issues. I think it did matter in between when they were demoralized and you need something to hang on to.

That, I think, is where a feeling of inevitability to history did have some motivational force for them and probably played a role in their being able to survive through very hard times.

Melissa Naschek

You described the theory as “elegant,” but you’ve also expressed some skepticism about it. What are the components of the theory that you think are strong and then where are your criticisms of it?

Vivek Chibber

Well, if you just take the theory at its most basic level, I think there’s a plausibility to it.

At a very basic level, it’s saying human beings are motivated by their material interests, that once they achieve a certain level of development, they’re going to tend to hang on to it, even with classes and class struggle and all that sort of stuff, that therefore there’s a kind of a direction to history.
Graph representation of total output of the world economy in logarithmic scale.
Total output of the world economy in logarithmic scale. Data sources: Eurostat, OECD, IMF, and World Bank (2026); Bolt and van Zanden — Maddison Project Database 2023; Maddison Database 2010 — with major processing by Our World in Data.

If you played human history over again a hundred times, each time the slope of technological development would be positive. It wouldn’t be this loop the loop or a random walk where it develops and it falls back, then it develops and it goes back to zero, things like that. There might be short periods of decline, like there was after the fall of the Roman Empire, but it picks up again and it starts moving forward again. I think that makes sense.

That’s a very weak thesis, not trivial by any means. But it’s a weak thesis.

On top of that is a stronger thesis, which is that not only that history moves along a kind of a directional line, but that economic systems come and go precisely when they become unable to keep technological dynamism moving at a certain rate.

Melissa Naschek

Right, and this is the part of the theory that really leads to this conclusion that capitalism must have a breaking point.

Vivek Chibber

For that to happen, you need two things. Firstly, you need to have empirical evidence that when the Roman Empire fell, it was for this reason, that when feudalism came to an end, it was for this reason. Secondly, you have to show that whatever replaced it, replaced it for that reason. You have to show that it replaced it because of some role that class and class struggle played in it.

There’s a lot of debate around this. My view is that the evidence for this is very, very weak. I think it’s very hard to show that the Roman Empire fell because it was no longer moving technology forward, or that feudalism fell because it was no longer moving technology forward. It’s also very hard to show that the class conflict that was unleashed at the end of these things was in any way preordained to result in the way that it did. I think it’s perfectly feasible that what replaced the Roman Empire could have been something that kept the same level of economic development for centuries onward.

So among Marxists and non-Marxists who have paid attention to this theory, myself included, the general idea has been that the strict version of Marx’s account of historical change and historical development is probably not sustainable.

Now, when we come to the idea of capitalism breaking down, and socialism replacing it, there’s a particular difficulty, which is: Within this idea that capitalism will come to an end when it’s becoming obsolete or when it’s becoming, as Marx said, a fetter on technological development, what is the mechanism by which it’s going to break down, or by which it’s going to be replaced by socialism?

Melissa Naschek

And, like you said, this theory provides a very logical flowing answer, which is that it will break down when the institutions that support it are no longer promoting technological development.

Vivek Chibber

Right. So now, this is a little bit technical, but let me just lay it out.

Marx and Marxists say that the economic system will become unstable when the existing property relations — the class structure — become blocks on its further development. The language they use is “fettering,” as in when the relations of production fetter the further development of technology and the productive forces.

Now, there are a couple of ways in which you can understand what it means for the economic institutions to fetter the further development of technology. One is an absolute sense and one is a relative sense.

In the absolute sense, technological growth will just stop. This would mean capitalism just kind of breaks down like a car engine breaks down. And when the car engine breaks down, you’ve got no choice but to replace it or rebuild it with something better.

Now, the other way in which you can understand fettering is a relative sense, which is that there is still positive economic growth and technological development, but an alternative system might be able to do it better.

Melissa Naschek

This is sort of like opportunity costs.

Vivek Chibber

Yes, exactly. There’s something better that you could have. The grass is greener on the other side. And so that other system becomes attractive.

Let’s just examine both of these.

If we look at the first one, which is the idea that capitalism will come to an end because economic growth will stop, not only is there no evidence that that’s ever going to happen, we can’t even devise an economic model that would tell us what that might be.

There have been, in Marxist economics, some attempts to build a model that would show this breakdown of capitalism. And ironically, they’re called breakdown theories of capitalism.

A very famous proponent in the 1930s was a guy named Henryk Grossman. And the basic idea was that, for reasons that we don’t have to go into, the amount of surplus and surplus value that economic firms are producing starts being squeezed to the point where the profits that are coming out of production are no longer sufficient to even be reinvestable. And so, capitalists run out of money to reinvest in their production, and at that point, you have the engine breaking down. And workers will essentially say, “Well, listen, the only way to keep this thing going is to, we keep the factories, but under entirely different rules. The rule now is no private property. We’re going to run them under what you might call socialism.”

Very interesting theory, but the model can easily be shown to be based on outlandishly unreasonable assumptions. And so it didn’t really find much traction.

And in our historical experience, we’ve also seen that it’s never happened that an economic crisis leads to freezing of economic growth, zero growth.

In fact, what happens is there are lots of economic crises in capitalism, and those crises are generated by the internal dynamics of capitalism itself. They’re not just accidents. They’re not just exogenous shocks. They’re internal to capitalism.

But Marx was at pains to show, and there are lots of contemporary economic models that also show, that the crisis is like a virus. It’s not a terminal virus. It doesn’t kill the system. What the crisis does is it roots out all the weak elements in the system. And, like a virus, it has an end date out of which the system emerges stronger and at least viable. So crises come and go. And after each crisis, economic accumulation and profitability and economic growth starts again. It commences again.

Melissa Naschek

But listening to you describe this, it does raise the question of why, if capitalism is just going to collapse in on itself, does that mean that it would be replaced by socialism specifically?

Vivek Chibber

That’s a separate question. And we can say that that is a further challenge to the theory. And Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg used to say that in these moments of crisis, you shouldn’t assume that it’s going to be replaced by socialism. It could also be replaced by something worse. Their slogan was “socialism or barbarism,” right? But we haven’t even gotten there yet.

The first question is, is there any reason to think that the system will come to a screeching halt and break down on its own so that you basically are left with an open door to coming up with a new system? And there really isn’t.

Now, let’s look at a second alternative, which is this relative fettering. That’s certainly feasible. It’s certainly feasible that capitalism can keep chugging along crisis after crisis, but growth can be slow — positive, but slow. And if growth is positive, but slow, you can think of an alternative way of organizing your economy where it will be positive, but fast. So it’ll be preferable to capitalism. That kind of fettering is easily imaginable.

Now, does that save the idea that the end of capitalism is inevitable?

I don’t think it does for the following reason: Even if you can imagine a better system, the transition to that system may not be costless.

So suppose when capitalism is chugging along, but at a slow pace, we talk to all the workers in the general population and we say, “Hey, look, a better system is possible.” And that might be attractive to them. But to get to that other system requires decades of bloodshed, huge military battles, failed revolutions, try and try and try again. Sure, the theory says, at the end of all that, you might end up with socialism, but for a rational person, they might say, “Hey, this could involve three generations of conflict or one generation of very bloody conflict, and I might not make it. Or my family may not make it.” So unless you know that you will be among the winners, why would you undertake all these risks?

To give you an example, you could say that under Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973–74, they conceived of socialism as an alternative, but they were beaten by a very bloody counterrevolution organized by the CIA and by Augusto Pinochet. And that was enough to actually demoralize and dissuade two generations of Latin American revolutionaries and socialists, that this is not something we can win.

So even if you can imagine a better system, even if you know that it might be a preferable system, it is by no means clear that the costs of getting there will be such that you’ll find it feasible to take on those costs and to take all those risks. And so there might be this kind of moat that separates your economic system from the alternative one. And you might find that you’re much better off with the certainty of fixing this system, of getting the engine going again, even though it’s not ideal, because at least you’re making ends meet, and at least you’re doing okay for yourself as opposed to being slaughtered or executed or wiped out in a counterrevolutionary coup.

If that’s the case, the mere possibility of an alternative system does not guarantee that you will end up in that alternative system. It comes down to the organizing, the agency, the strategic vision, and the degree of confidence you’ll have that you can actually achieve it with acceptable costs, with costs that you can actually absorb.

And if that’s the case, I don’t think there’s much of an argument for the inevitability of socialism or for the inevitability of capitalism’s end.

All you can say is capitalism becomes vulnerable at certain moments. A door might open up at certain moments, but your ability to take advantage of that vulnerability, your ability to take advantage of the opportunity entirely depends on the balance of forces, on your strategic capacity, on the resources you have available to you. And more often than not, it’s going to be lined up in such a way that it makes more sense not to do it.

Melissa Naschek

You mentioned crisis theory and this kind of subsection of the theory called breakdown theory, which predicted the eventual arrival of a crisis so massive that it will end capitalism as the historic mode of production.

But one of the most important contributions that Marxists have made to political theory is this idea that capitalism is a system that is characterized by recurrent, unavoidable crises. So if we’re rejecting this inevitability thesis about capitalism’s end, are we also challenging that aspect of crisis theory as well?

Vivek Chibber

No, and it’s a very good point. What I’m skeptical about is what’s called breakdown theory. And that had a very specific mechanism that we don’t need to get into. It had to do with the rate of profit falling to the point where it doesn’t generate enough revenue, enough surplus value to even be able to fund capital accumulation. We have to separate the fact of crisis from explanations for why it happens.

One of the great insights that Marxist economics had — and there are versions of Keynesianism and even some versions of mainstream theory that will say this — was to recognize the empirical fact that capitalism systematically has this recurrent vulnerability to economic slowdowns and what we call depressions.

When Marxists talk about crises, what they really mean is what in everyday parlance we call an economic depression. And capitalism has had economic depressions every few decades for all of its history.

So when something happens in a recurrent fashion, and we’ve had seven or eight of these in a three hundred year period, it’s a pretty good indication that there is an internal engine to the system that is propelling it into crises at a regular rhythm. That’s an empirical fact.

Then the question is: Why does it happen? For our purposes in this conversation, we don’t have to land on a particular theory of why it’s happening. What we need to probe is, if it is the case that capitalism does have this tendency toward recurring economic crises, toward depressions, what does it mean for our desire or our ambition toward building socialism?

There’s this tendency among Marxists and among socialists generally to run together two distinct things, which are economic crises and political crises. The idea is that once you have an economic crisis, it unleashes the political crisis. By political crisis, we mean the breakdown of state order, the breakdown of the army, the breakdown of class rule, and the opening of the door to something new: a new political system, a new form of state, a new form of rule.

And what I’m saying is that, not only is breakdown theory wrong, we should also be skeptical that the mere fact that there’s going to be an economic depression is going to lead to an alternative political system like socialism or something like that.

What we’ve seen over the course of capitalist history are two things. Firstly, you’ve had lots and lots of economic crises, and almost never has the economic crisis turned into a deep political crisis. Why? The basic reason is that the crises are always temporary. They last a few years. The longest one has lasted about fifteen years, and that was at the end of the nineteenth century.

Secondly, because capitalism has the resources for recovery from these crises, it gives people two alternatives. One alternative is you take all those huge risks, leap into the dark, and try to overthrow the system. And we already said how that could actually result in catastrophe for them. The other alternative is you try to cobble together a revived capitalism out of the crisis that allows you to get a job again, that allows you to have housing again, that allows you to get some kind of decent life for yourself again. That’s a much less risky proposition than trying to overthrow capitalism.

Because of that, ruling classes find that they are able to ride out the crisis and consolidate a new cycle of growth and accumulation inside the same economic and political system. So the economic crisis occurs, but it doesn’t typically unleash a political crisis.

Well, then what’s the point of having an understanding or recognition of economic crises? Even though the crises don’t automatically open the door to socialism, they do open a door. They do unleash the possibility of intensified conflict, intensified strife. Why? Think of the Great Depression. What happened in the Great Depression? Well, you didn’t really get socialism out of it. What you did get, though, was social democracy.

All across the developed world, the Great Depression led to huge strikes, huge labor mobilization. That labor mobilization a lot of times had the aspirations of socialism, but states didn’t break down. Remember from our discussion of revolutions, I said, you can’t just make a revolution. Largely revolutionary openings happen. And the classes or the political parties that are organized well enough can take advantage of it.

Economic crises don’t even create revolutionary situations. They just create political instability. That political instability though, does create an opening for things to happen.

Typically what’ll happen is you’ll be able to get some kind of advantages for yourself, your labor movement. You’ve been able to set up welfare states. You can set up social democracy, build more unions because people are agitated, they’re angry, and you’re able to take advantage of it. There have been occasions when it went further, like during World War I: there was a deep economic crisis coming out of it, and that did create revolutionary openings.

The point is there’s a common thread here. Economic crises do create political opportunities. What I’m saying is they don’t have to be revolutionary opportunities, but they are opportunities for other things, like building trade unions, like building the welfare state.

So when you compare economic tranquility and lots of growth with economic breakdown and economic crisis, that crisis situation is still important for making political gains for the Left, if it’s organized well enough to take advantage of the situation.

That means that if you’re trying to devise a political theory for yourself, a long-term political strategy, it makes sense to know that there are moments in capitalism’s history when it’s politically weak, and that political weakness arises out of economic weakness. That economic weakness is expressed in moments of crisis.

So having a theory of crisis, or at least having the expectation of crisis, even though you don’t know what’s driving them, knowing that they occur, gives you a motivation to organize yourself politically so that when that opportunity arises, you can take advantage of it. And for that, it turns out crises are important. A recognition of them is important, even though you reject the idea of an ultimate breakdown of capitalism through the crisis.

Melissa Naschek

Has the Left always benefited from economic crises?

Vivek Chibber

No, and this is why I raised the point of organization. I’m glad you brought this up.

Crises create opportunities to change things. Economic crises create opportunities to change things politically. Whoever changes it, though, will be the party, the class, the social force that’s better positioned to do so.

So if the Left and the trade unions are not well organized, in moments of economic crisis, it’s a huge opportunity for the Right. It’s a huge opportunity for capital. Rahm Emanuel famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now, he wasn’t a socialist. He wasn’t saying it from the standpoint of socialism. He was saying it as a representative of the ruling order.

When a crisis comes, for them, it means they can take more away from unions, from redistributive programs, from social programs. They can actually cut them down saying, “Hey, we don’t have the money for anything.”

Melissa Naschek

Right, because as much as it’s a political opportunity, it’s a political opportunity for both sides.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly, for both sides. That’s why for the Left, it’s a bad sign if the crisis is the first time you’ve noticed that we should get our act together, because by that time, it’s too late. What you have to be doing is building your organizational capacity in between the crises.

This is why we’ve been saying, and the current Bernie left has been saying, nothing is going to move forward until you have a well-organized working class, a well-organized labor movement, because those are your cavalry. Those are the forces that are actually going to be able to take advantage of economic opportunities when they present themselves, and if you don’t do it, the other side will.

Melissa Naschek

You’re arguing that crises do not automatically mean the end of capitalism, but for the most part, we’re talking about economic crises. There’s a whole other realm of crisis that we haven’t talked about, which is environmental crisis and the current climate apocalypse that’s hanging over us. Doesn’t that mean that capitalism will have to end in order to stave off the climate crisis?

Vivek Chibber

I don’t think so. I wish. I would like to be able to say that the impending climate crisis will motivate people to reach for another system or to say we’ve had it with capitalism, because capitalism might actually end up undermining humanity itself.

Melissa Naschek

I think there are people who have been radicalized basically on those grounds.

Vivek Chibber

There’s no doubt about it. And let me just say, I think they’re right that capitalism is running humanity into the ground, and it is destroying the environment, and it is generating climate change. But the basic problem still remains. And in many ways, it’s even worse when it comes to the climate crisis.

The first problem is this: If you’re actually going to say, “The climate crisis is so bad that I want to now fight for a different system,” the issue is that it’s a question of time horizons.

Even at its worst, the climate crisis is going to unfold over the course of decades, but a revolutionary upsurge to try to end capitalism will unfold over the course of a few months and years. Now, remember all the costs, all the risks, all the bloodshed that could come with that.

So if you’re going to say, “Well, the climate crisis is the reason I’m going to fight for socialism,” most people are going to say, “Look, if I fight for that socialism now, I’m going to end up dead now. Whereas I know that even if climate change keeps unfolding, it’s going to be generation, two generations, three generations.”

Even if you think it’s just a couple of decades away, it still doesn’t change anything. The one process is unfolding at a much slower pace than the other process — the second process being trying to overthrow capitalism. And so there are two costs. One cost, which is incremental, slow, and potentially absorbable. The other cost that’s immediate and catastrophic. A reasonable person is going to say, “I will opt for the longer, safer route.”

Now comes a second point, which is that even while capitalism is destroying the environment, it is also generating technological change internally that is slowing down the pace of climate change. Or if it’s not now, it could.

Suppose you have something like the green transition. The green transition is not a socialist program. It is a social democratic program that keeps private property intact. But if it’s actually a transition, meaning there’s going to be a transition to an environmentally sustainable capitalism. Well, then there’s even less reason to want socialism.

Consider that people will already say, “I’m not going to put my life at risk or my well-being at risk right now for something like the fight for socialism when the alternative to it involves much slower, absorbable costs.” And then, when you say to them, “Within eight or ten years, we might actually be able to reform capitalism to the point where it becomes environmentally sustainable,” now there’s even less reason for them to opt for the fight for socialism.

Melissa Naschek

I imagine that even if there are capitalists who don’t support any changes [toward a green transition], in theory, everybody would like to be on a habitable planet, right?

Vivek Chibber

Well, capitalists just want to make a profit. And if they can make profits through environmentally sustainable enterprises, they have no problem with that. So the only question is, can capitalist technological change generate the sorts of technologies that will be less destructive of the environment or even neutral with respect to the environment? We don’t know. We honestly don’t know.

And this is why a lot of climate catastrophism turns people off because it’s telling them, “There’s nothing you can do. You’re going to die,” which people kind of shrug and go, “Well, what’s the point then?” They throw up their hands, and say, “Well what can I do?”

And the other thing is that, before our eyes, there are enormous technological changes taking place that are having an effect in slowing down the rate and the pace of climate destruction. And that is going to have an effect on people’s willingness to take up these enormously costly political ventures, like trying to bring about socialism.

So that means then, that I think climate change should be one of the things that goes into a socialist program, but it is not going to be a magic wand. It’s not going to be something that you say, “Look, dude, unless you do this right now, we’re all going to die,” because that catastrophist version of climate change is paralyzing.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah. I think it also ignores a key component of what the Marxist argument has always been for socialism, which is that the reason that a socialist argument can be persuasive in the first place is because people’s daily experience is of being exploited and oppressed, and of their quality of life and their freedom basically being taken away by their boss. So it’s not like you need to add on this other element of, “Oh, by the way, you’re probably going to die in thirty years.” The point is that people are suffering under the system now. People are already in pain now. And so that is the basis for organizing.

Vivek Chibber

One hundred percent. I agree. I don’t think they need an additional motivation. What we need is to take the level of unhappiness and frustration and anxiety they have now already without climate change considerations and turn it into a material force for them.

But my point is, I think climate change . . . of course, we all agree it’s very important. And we probably have to acknowledge that it is motivating a lot of people to become politically active, but it is not going to be this elixir that induces people or persuades them to take the sorts of risks or incur the kinds of costs that normally they would be unwilling to do. And in fact, I really think that because of the pace at which it’s unfolding, everybody’s automatic reaction is, ‘Well, that’s down the road. What I’ve got to worry about is the here and now.’

All of which means that the hard, everyday work of organizing people, getting them together, getting them into unions, getting them to a political party, making them more inclined to fight is something that’ll be aided and abetted by the anxieties around climate change, but it won’t give us a trump card where we can dispense with all this hard work.

Melissa Naschek

I think you’ve put a pretty good nail in the coffin for these “inevitablist” arguments about capitalism. Do you think that this will serve as a call to action or do you think that potentially it’s a bit discouraging to hear that there’s nothing in the system that will end capitalism for us?

Vivek Chibber

Let me go back to what I said about the Russian revolutionaries, although it equally applies the Vietnamese and the Chinese, which is that, when you go back and you look at them in the historical record, you don’t find much evidence that this inevitablist, deterministic account of history really is what kept them going. In moments of despair, I think it did have something for them, as I said earlier, but really what it was, was peasants wanting lower rents, sharecroppers wanting better deals for themselves, workers wanting to take over their factories and lead better lives for themselves. It had to do with the everyday experiences of being exploited, the everyday experiences of being oppressed.

Now, I think for the leadership and the cadre that sit around and think in big ideas and big terms and try to devise strategy, it was there, it was somewhere. But suppose you took it all away and you told them what Marx said in the manifesto: history is just a history of class struggle. That’s all. It’s just class struggle and there’s no guarantees. Maybe you’ll win, maybe you’ll lose. Would that have had the effect of making them go, “Well, now I don’t want to be part of this?” Absolutely not. There’s no reason for that.

So my view is that if you take away the sense of inevitability, the determinism, it probably has an effect around the edges for some people, no doubt about it. But it was always massively outweighed by other considerations anyway, if we’re talking about people’s motivations.

If we’re worried about people losing force, losing their motivation to struggle, if you tell them, “Hey, it’s not guaranteed,” I don’t think that’s much of a concern because when you’re actually in the thick of a social movement, you’re not ever going to say, “I’m immortal. I’m not going to die. I’m going to walk into these bullets because I’m going to win anyway.” You fight the way you fight.

So is it possible that capitalism could go on forever? Well, I don’t know about forever. That’s a long time. But for the next few generations, absolutely.

Capitalism has shown itself to be an incredibly resilient system. There’s no sign whatsoever that it’s losing its dynamism per se. It’s still the most dynamic system we’ve ever seen. It goes through ups and downs. We’ve gone through a particularly sluggish couple of decades recently, but that’s “sluggishness” compared to the previous decades. That sluggishness has still allowed standards of living to still generally go up even though the distribution has been bad. There’s no reason to think that’s going to end anytime soon.

That means that fighting for a transition to socialism is up to us. It comes down to: Can you take advantage of openings? Will you be well-organized when the economic crisis comes? Will you be able to draw people to your program? Will you be able to inspire them and give them a sense that we could win without having these backroom guarantees that the inevitability theories provided?

If you can do that work, if you can organize well enough, if you can inspire people, if you can give them a model of socialism that they find appealing, and you can develop a strategy that they think is a winnable strategy so they won’t all get decimated, then yeah, I think you could win. And I don’t think you need a theory of inevitability to come out on the other end of it.

Melissa Naschek

So what you’re saying is there’s no guarantees?

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. I think what we have is a “Marxism without guarantees” or a “socialism without guarantees.” And that’s fine. That’s what history is.

#capitalisme #crise #économie #marxisme #révolution

L’HISTOIRE OUBLIÉE DE L’ÉCOLOGIE SOVIÉTIQUE - avec Guillaume Suing
▻https://diaspora.psyco.fr/p/12506333

L’HISTOIRE OUBLIÉE DE L’ÉCOLOGIE SOVIÉTIQUE - avec Guillaume Suing

#politique #environnement #marxisme #communisme #écologie

▻https://yewtu.be/watch?v=C3bUwxuxTf4 ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3bUwxuxTf4

MLWerke – Klassiker des Marxismus-Leninismus : Marx, Engels, Lenin
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/index.html

Bravo, ce volontaire anonyme a rétabli la collection de textes effacés de la toile avec la disparition du propriétaire du domaine mlwerke.de . On peut désormais corriger ses liens qui pointent encore vers mlwerke.de en ▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps

Dieses Archiv sammelt und erschließt zentrale Texte der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung: Reden, Schriften, Briefe und wissenschaftliche Studien.
Neuigkeiten:

1. September 2025: Wie einige sicher bemerkt haben, war dieses Archiv in den vergangenen Monaten offli
ne. Die genauen Gründe dafür sind mir selbst nicht bekannt. Ich war bislang nicht an diesem Projekt beteiligt und erfuhr erst im Rahmen einer Nachrecherche, dass nicht nur die Webseite abgeschaltet, sondern inzwischen auch die Domain mlwerke.de gekündigt wurde. Das ist besonders bedauerlich, wenn man bedenkt, dass der Ursprung dieser Seite bis ins Jahr 1998 zurückreicht (und sie bereits im Jahr 2000 einmal aus Archiven wiederhergestellt werden musste). Daher habe ich mich entschlossen, diese Webseite zu erstellen und die Inhalte mithilfe eines Backups aus der Wayback Machine wieder online zu bringen. Je nach Zeit und Muße plane ich außerdem, die Seite behutsam zu überarbeiten und allmählich ins 21. Jahrhundert zu überführen, jedoch ohne die Linkstruktur oder den schlichten Charakter der Seiten, der durchaus seinen eigenen Charme hat, wesentlich zu verändern. Für Fragen, Auskünfte oder sonstige Mitteilungen: archiv@redflag.ps.
Ältere Neuigkeiten im Logbuch
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/ies/log.htm

Les liens ...

Texte von Marx/Engels nach MEW-Bänden

▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me01
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me02
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me03
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me04
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me05
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me06
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me07
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me08
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me09
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me10
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me11
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me12
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me13
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me14
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me15
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me16
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me17
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me18
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me19
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me20
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me21
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me22
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me23
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me24
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me25
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me26
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me27
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me28
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me29
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me30
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me31
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me32
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me33
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me34
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me35
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me36
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me37
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me38
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me39
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me40 (Ergänzungsband 1)
▻https://mlwerke.redflag.ps/me/me42

#marxisme #archive #MEW

Economie : que peut la gauche ? - Nicolas Da Silva

Entretien réalisé avec Nicolas Da Silva le 30 mars 2026.

#Nicolas_Da_Silva est #économiste, spécialiste d’#économie de la #santé et de la #sécurité_sociale.

Questions et interview : Marie Mouline
Captation visuelle et montage : Margot Lopez
Captation sonore et mix son : César Minel

00:00 : Intro
00:38 : Qu’est-ce que signifie l’entrée dans une #économie_de_guerre ?
1:58 : Guns or butter : le faux arbitrage entre #dépenses #militaires et #sociales
7:12 : Quels sont les grands courants critiques a l’économie #néolibérale ?
8:58 : Approches dominantes (néolibérale, #Piketty ou #Zucmann) face aux approches #marxistes
26:24 : Comment debunker le discours du trou de la #Sécu ?
28:24 : Le mythe du « #trou_de_la_Sécu » : un agenda pour la liquider
48:44 : Est-ce que le problème principal n’est pas la #financiarisation de la #dette ?
49:58 : Les gros #capitalistes adorent acheter de la dette française
1:00:00 : Personne ne voudra acheter de la dette si la #gauche arrive au pouvoir..?
1:00:23 : L’#Etat comme organisateur de l’économie
1:12:15 : Sortir de l’#euro ?
1:12:49 : Casser les structures, ça dépend de notre appétit
1:17:44 : L’Etat peut-il être #progressiste ?
1:19:12 : Histoire de la sécu
1:31:30 : Influences du contrôle populaire
1:43:41 : Vers une sécu généralisée ?
1:45:01 : #Démocratie et double #pouvoir

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0i9akCeUXE

The Indian Question — Irish Tenant Right - web.archive.org (https:/...
▻https://diaspora.psyco.fr/p/12429919

The Indian Question — Irish Tenant Right - web.archive.org

@[Protestation (Deutsch)](▻http://diaspora.psyco.fr/people/a0ad54dd-185f-6994-5637-2a1948919521) — 2026-04-26 19:42:05 Karl Marx - Die indische Frage - Das irische Pachtrecht

#ireland #tenancy #privateproperty #land #property #marx #1853

George Orwell × Raoul Peck : 2×-2=-4
Ou comment dissoudre en images le totalitarisme dans la critique du monde occidental

Dès ses premières minutes, le film donne la mesure de son ambition – et de son égarement. Sur un extrait en voix off de The Prevention of Literature , ce texte de 1946 où #George_Orwell décrit une société devenue totalitaire parce que sa classe dirigeante se maintient au pouvoir par la force et la fraude, #Raoul_Peck déploie un carrousel de visages : Orbán, Pinochet, Museveni, Min Aung Hlaing, Poutine, Ferdinand Marcos, et pour finir George W. Bush. Le procédé est visuellement efficace. Il est aussi d’une confondante approximation. Car de tous les dirigeants convoqués dans cette galerie, un seul – Poutine – gouverne un régime totalitaire. Les autres relèvent de catégories certes peu aimables, mais profondément différentes : dictature militaire, kleptocratie, junte, Big Man africain cramponné au pouvoir, démocratie illibérale. Quant à la présence de Bush, elle procède d’un réflexe anti-impérialiste qui n’entretient avec le totalitarisme qu’un rapport de métaphore paresseuse.
Est-ce un défaut de mise en scène ? Plutôt une faute de pensée, qui contamine tout le film, car le totalitarisme n’est pas l’#autoritarisme monté d’un cran ; il en diffère par nature : là où l’un se satisfait du silence, l’autre exige l’adhésion, et entreprend de substituer à la réalité une fiction obligatoire. En alignant sur un même plan une junte birmane, un autocrate ougandais et un président américain élu, le documentaire sert le contraire de ce qu’il prétend : il dilue la pensée orwellienne dans un brouet.
Dans 1984 , Winston Smith posait un axiome sur lequel reposait tout l’édifice de la résistance intérieure : la liberté, c’est la liberté de dire que deux et deux font quatre. Or le film de Peck prend l’équation orwellienne et produit un résultat négatif. Orwell multiplié par Peck, ce n’est pas quatre : c’est moins quatre. Le cinéaste ne manque pas de talent, mais sa grille de lecture – anti-impérialiste, anticapitaliste, héritière d’une tradition marxiste qui n’a jamais admis et compris le concept de #totalitarisme – le conduit à retrancher d’Orwell ce qui en constitue le cœur. Le spectateur en sort plus confus qu’il n’était entré. C’est ce rendez-vous manqué qu’il faut examiner : il dit quelque chose de la difficulté de l’intelligentsia occidentale à nommer le monde dans lequel nous vivons.

#cinéma #documentaire #film #anticapitalisme #marxisme

Simon Leys avait noté avec une ironie tendre qu’Orwell avait toujours fait sereinement face à ses nombreux ennemis, mais qu’on se demandait s’il aurait pu garder son sang-froid devant certains de ses admirateurs. Peck est de ceux-là – un admirateur sincère, un cinéaste de talent, un homme dont l’indignation ne fait aucun doute. Mais l’admiration qui se trompe d’objet peut faire sous les apparences de l’hommage presque autant de dégâts que l’hostilité franche. Orwell nous demandait une seule chose : tenir bon sur le fait que deux et deux font quatre. Peck, en multipliant Orwell par ses certitudes personnelles, arrive à moins quatre.
#Pierre_Raiman,
docteur en Histoire, spécialiste des totalitarismes.

Article publié sur le site Desk Russie le 6 avril 2026.
►https://desk-russie.eu/2026/04/06/george-orwell-x-raoul-peck-2x-2-4.html

Dans un entretien avec Raoul Peck dans Libération du 24 février 2026, il déclare :

Déjà dans les années 1980, Georges Marchais était ridiculisé comme un clown… C’était difficile à supporter - une arme pour ridiculiser les idées de gauche.

▻https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/raoul-peck-cest-un-film-qui-fait-le-catalogue-du-present-comme-orwell-dan

Georges Marchais , secrétaire général du Parti communiste français (PCF) de 1972 à 1994, c’est-à-dire un stalinien : une personne qui prétendait défendre la classe ouvrière et qui dans les faits en a été un des actifs fossoyeurs.
Manifestement, Peck n’a pas très bien compris le sens de La Ferme des animaux d’un certain George Orwell...

#confusionnisme #gauchisme

Ernest Mandel, Initiation à la théorie économique marxiste, 1964
▻https://ernestmandel.org/francais/ecrits/article/initiation-a-la-theorie-economique-marxiste?lang=fr

Pour les débutants c’est une meilleure introduction que Salaire, prix et plus-value de Karl Marx qu’on comprend sans problème après avoir étudié le petit livret d’Ernest Mandel.

Salaire, prix et profit
▻https://www.marxists.org/francais/marx/works/1865/06/km18650626.htm

Introduction au texte allemand (l’original est en anglais) par Thomas Kuczinsky
▻https://www.vsa-verlag.de/uploads/media/www.vsa-verlag.de-Marx-Lohn-Preis-und-Profit.pdf

In der Sprache des Originals wurde der Vortrag erstmals 1898 von seiner Tochter Eleanor veröffentlicht, und zwar unter dem Titel Value, price and profit (Wert, Preis und Profit). Eine historisch-kritische Edition erschien in der Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe sowohl in Band II/4.1, Berlin 1988, S. 385 –432, als auch in Band I/20, Berlin 1992, S. 143 –86.

Ebenfalls 1898, aber schon etwas früher, erschien die erste deutsche Übersetzung des Vortrags unter dem Titel Lohn, Preis und Profit in der Zeitschrift Die Neue Zeit (Stuttgart), Jg. 16, Bd. 2, Nr. 27 –31. Sie wurde ab 1908 auch als selbständige Broschüre mehrfach aufgelegt. Der Vermerk »Übersetzt von E.R. Bernstein« weist nicht allein, wie allgemein behauptet, auf den berühmt-berüchtigten Eduard Bernstein hin, sondern ebenso auf dessen Ehefrau Regina (zu Datierung und Urheberschaft vgl. Der Briefwechsel Eduard Bernsteins mit Karl Kautsky, 1895 –1905. Hrsg. v. Till Schelz-Brandenburg. Frankfurt/M., New York 2003, S. 439, 585 u. 589/90).

Während der von Eleanor Marx gewählte Titel mehr der Logik der
Marx’schen ökonomischen Theorie entspricht, rückt der von den Bernsteins gewählte Titel den eigentlichen Streitpunkt, also Ausgangspunkt und Anlass, in den Vordergrund, ist somit der durchaus zugkräftigere, was wohl auch der von Marx mit dem Vortrag verfolgten Absicht eher entsprochen hätte. Er ist deshalb in der Neuveröffentlichung beibehalten worden.

Karl Marx - Lohn, Preis, Profit
▻http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Marx,+Karl/Lohn,+Preis,+Profit
ou
▻https://marx.works/me16/me16_101.htm
#économie #marxisme

5 avril 1923 naissance d"Ernest Mandel
▻https://ernestmandel.org/?lang=fr

https://ernestmandel.org/squelettes/images/mandel.jpg

Ernest Mandel est né en 1923 à Francfort dans une famille révolutionnaire communiste. Son père était membre du Spartakus Bund qui lutté aux côtés de Rosa Luxemburg et qui, dans les années ’30, s’est activement opposé au stalinisme et à la montée du fascisme. C’est dans cette atmosphère, alors qu’il était « Minuit dans le siècle » que le jeune Mandel a grandi. A 17 ans, ils rejoint les rangs de la Quatrième Internationale en Belgique, où sa famille s’était exilée.

#schience #économie #marxisme #communisme

Hommage au chercheur marxiste #Michael_Parenti – Compilation d’entretiens
▻https://www.les-crises.fr/hommage-au-chercheur-marxiste-michael-parenti-compilation-d-entretiens

Le chercheur marxiste, analyste #Politique, historien et auteur Michael Parenti est décédé à l’âge de 92 ans. Critique virulent du capitalisme, de l’impérialisme et des inégalités de classe, ses travaux intellectuels sont reconnus dans le monde entier. Il est l’auteur de plus de 20 livres, dont « Democracy for the Few » (La démocratie réservée […]

#Capiyalisme #Marxisme #Politique,_Capiyalisme,_Marxisme,_Michael_Parenti

https://www.les-crises.fr/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/michael-parenti-2-760x400.jpg

Système monétaire, Etats-Unis, France. Une discussion avec le collectif Réalité. – Sortir du capitalisme
▻https://sortirducapitalisme.fr/emissions/systeme-monetaire-etats-unis-france-une-discussion-avec-le-colle

Pour cet épisode, nous avons reçu Andrée, Kolia et Luca du collectif Réalité pour une discussion sur le capitalisme contemporain, et notamment son architecture monétaire, la place occupée par les Etats-Unis et la Chine, et les spécificités du capitalisme français.

En détails, l’épisode contient :

une introduction qui revient sur le collectif et ses motivations initiales, notamment ses motifs d’insatisfaction face à une théorie critique qui se situe souvent à des niveaux élevés d’abstraction sans médiations intermédiaires avec la réalité concrète

une discussion autour du système monétaire international (14′), qui aborde entre autres le rôle des monnaies nationales – fortes ou faibles – et leur relation avec la notion d’impérialisme (16′) ; la place particulière et évolutive des Etats Unis (22′) qui aboutit à l’heure actuelle à un « non système monétaire » (31′) remis en cause par des conseillers économiques de Donald Trump tels que Stephen Miran (34′)

une discussion autour d’une formation sociale nationale spécifique (45′), la France, avec un résumé à grands traits de l’histoire du capitalisme français et ses caractéristiques principales (47′), et ses conséquences pour les luttes actuelles et leur traduction dans une forme particulière de réformisme politique (56′)

en conclusion, une présentation des thématiques qui seront abordées par le collectif Réalité dans de futurs articles (1h05)

#audio #marxisme #théorie_critique #impérialisme #monnaie #capitalisme_français

Marx va avoir raison (IA et lutte des classes) | Frédéric Lordon
▻https://blog.mondediplo.net/marx-va-avoir-raison-ia-et-lutte-des-classes

https://blog.mondediplo.net/local/cache-vignettes/L890xH723/gustave-dore-vous-qui-entrez-ici-abandonnez-toute-esperance-planche-n-degres-7-extrait-de-lenfer890-a31b8.jpg?1772281676

On croyait qu’il s’était trompé. Marx va avoir raison. Pas tout à fait comme il pensait dans le détail, mais dans l’idée générale quand même.

L’idée générale : le développement des forces productives engendre une modification des rapports de production qui les accompagnent, jusqu’au point d’une mise en contradiction insoluble dans le cadre du mode de production en place. Annonce d’une crise terminale totalement endogène puisque le capitalisme produit lui-même les tensions internes, qu’il rattrape un temps à coup de remaniements historiques, mais qu’il finit, passé un certain seuil, par ne plus pouvoir accommoder. Dans le long terme, le capitalisme creuse sa propre tombe — on appelle ça « la dialectique ».

Le détail : le passage par les stades successifs de la manufacture, de la fabrique et de la grande industrie conduit à d’énormes concentrations ouvrières dans les lieux de la production. On ne rassemble pas impunément de telles masses exploitées, opprimées, au lieu même de leur oppression. Les ouvriers se parlent, prennent conscience — des choses —, forment une conscience — de classe —, s’organisent. Une force énorme se constitue, qui surmonte la déréliction du travailleur seul sur le « marché du travail » — forcément défait dans le face-à-face inégal avec le capital. Dans le bagne usinier, le capital produit lui-même son ennemi mortel, ses jours sont comptés.

À ceci près qu’un siècle et demi plus tard, on en est toujours à les compter. La première montée révolutionnaire, celle du début du XXe siècle, qui correspond à un degré critique d’organisation ouvrière, est réduite par la répression et le fascisme. La seconde, en sortie de 2e guerre, est anesthésiée par l’entrée dans la consommation de masse : diffusion large du niveau de développement matériel, sortie du prolétariat de l’état de misère — et l’on découvre de nouvelles armes du capitalisme qu’on n’avait pas soupçonnées : les salariés ne sont plus uniquement tenus par l’aiguillon de la faim mais par des voies sucrées autrement pernicieuses. Alors l’aliénation n’en finit plus de s’approfondir. Quelques décennies plus tard : avion, téléphone portable, réseaux sociaux, séries, dans le même temps où le capitalisme restructure en profondeur ses rapports de production après que le succès industriel du fordisme lui a fait entrevoir à nouveau le péril des masses ouvrières concentrées : automatisation, robotisation, délocalisation, précarisation, atomisation.

On pouvait — on devait — continuer à être marxiste, mais pas à croire à cette première dialectique. Il a fallu regarder ailleurs pour discerner de nouvelles potentialités de renversement endogène. Par exemple du côté de l’écocide. Le capitalisme détruit les conditions de la vie humaine sur Terre. Le lien causal ne fait pas encore l’objet d’une conscience très largement partagée, mais ça viendra. Car les effets sont d’une ampleur croissante, impossibles à cacher, et rien ne stimule la production des idées comme l’aiguillon (cette fois) de l’angoisse — et le barrage du capitalisme vert, de la transition et des pistes cyclables aura du mal à l’endiguer.

Mais ça va prendre du temps. Le temps des pistes cyclables donc, celui des intellectuels retardataires et retardateurs aussi, celui des renoncements enfin. Car il va falloir beaucoup renoncer : avion, téléphone portable, réseaux sociaux, séries, donc. Nous ne sommes pas prêts. Jean-Marc Jancovici explique à Léa Salamé qu’il faudra en venir à un quota de trois ou quatre vols long courrier pour toute la vie, Salamé répond que trois-quatre par an, c’est quasiment la dictature — son cerveau n’était pas prêt, n’a pas reçu l’information, ne pouvait pas la recevoir. Bien sûr, c’est Léa Salamé, c’est-à-dire comme un mètre-étalon de la bêtise journalistique, déposé à Radio-France plutôt qu’au Pavillon de Breteuil à Sèvres, mais l’idée est la même — et les conditions de conservation aussi satisfaisantes. Le problème étant ici que, pour l’heure, l’étalon donne assez bien la mesure en vigueur dans la plus grande partie de la population. Faire renoncer, mettre en rapport l’évitement de l’écocide, la nécessité vitale de renoncer et l’impératif de sortir du capitalisme : ce sera la grande tâche politique du futur (commence maintenant). Autant dire que l’issue de la course de vitesse est incertaine — il suffit de se demander ce que sont les vitesses comparées de l’écocide capitaliste et de l’idée renonçante dans les esprits. On a déjà vu des compétitions mieux engagées. Peu importe, on courra quand même, parce qu’on n’a pas le choix de ne pas courir...

How to Understand Nature From a Marxist Perspective
▻https://jacobin.com/2026/02/nature-capitalism-marxism-ecology-freedom

7.2.2026 Interview with Alyssa Battistoni by Hugo de Camps Mora - Nobody today denies that capitalism exploits nature. The disagreement is over why. Political theorist Alyssa Battistoni spoke to Jacobin about capitalism’s complex relationship to what economists once called nature’s “free gifts.”

The rise of capitalism as an economic and social system has also coincided with its rapid transformation of nature. Wage labor and investment in the hope of return has dammed rivers, bored through mountains, flattened landscapes, and even transformed the relationships between parents and children, and between men and women.

In her recent book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, political theorist Alyssa Battistoni sets out to explain how and why capitalism transforms and relates to nature. Jacobin spoke to Battistoni about capitalism’s role in shaping the relationship between the economy and social relations, and how Marxists ought to understand the way capitalism relates to ecology and the domestic sphere.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Many people tend to think of capitalism as a system that seeks to commodify everything. However, in your book, you draw on the notion of a “free gift,” which you describe as something that capital prefers not to commodify or subject to market logic. What do you mean by this?

Alyssa Battistoni

The free gift is not originally my concept. It appears in classical political economy and in Karl Marx’s critique of it. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economists, from David Ricardo to Jean-Baptiste Say, write about the “gratuitous contributions” of natural agents to production — all the things nature gives that enhance productivity.

Marx takes up this idea, but he reframes it. What classical political economy treats as a general feature of production becomes, for Marx, something historically specific to capitalism and its social relations: a social form peculiar to capitalist society rather than a universal fact about wealth production. Marx himself does not develop the concept at length, and although eco-Marxists have made use of it to describe capitalism’s relationship to nature, it has often remained undertheorized.

The “free gift” is therefore a strange but useful category — not only for thinking about nature, but for grasping a wider set of overlooked relations within capitalism. The term itself is telling. “Free gift” sounds redundant, even oxymoronic: gifts are not bought and sold. Yet gifts normally bind people into relations of reciprocity and obligation, which makes the idea of a “free gift” difficult to make sense of outside capitalism.

It becomes intelligible in a society organized around commodity exchange, where usefulness can exist without taking the form of exchange value. This is decisive for understanding nature under capitalism. Nature is productive, but what matters is that its contributions occur “for free” for capital: they are indispensable, yet they do not appear as commodities in the same way as other inputs.

In this sense, the free gift is the shadow of the commodity. It names forms of usefulness that do not appear as exchange value and helps us grasp how capitalism transforms the status of what it depends on but does not, and often cannot, fully commodify. That is why the free gift needs to be treated as a serious category and understood specifically as a capitalist one.

Hugo de Camps Mora

The concept of nature is generally recognized to be hard to get to grips with because its meaning is so ambiguous, and it is used so broadly. Why do you think it still makes sense to use the term “nature” when analyzing capitalism and its relationship to the environment?

Alyssa Battistoni

I have struggled with the terms “nature” and “natural” precisely because they are so vexed. Raymond Williams famously described “nature” as one of the most complex words in the language, and it has been subject to extensive critique and problematization. And yet I have found it difficult to abandon the term altogether. Partly this is for pragmatic reasons: sometimes it is preferable to work with a concept that gestures toward something widely understood, even if imperfectly, rather than inventing new vocabulary that risks obscuring more than it clarifies.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Marx’s views on ecology have been interpreted in sharply different ways. Some read him as a Promethean thinker committed to human mastery over nature while others have argued that his work already contains a productive ecological framework. You also draw on Marx to analyze capitalism and nature — what makes his framework still relevant for ecological thought today?

Alyssa Battistoni

Marx is a controversial figure in ecological debates, and there is textual material that supports both readings. But what I find most useful is not settling the question of whether Marx was “truly ecological.” What matters to me is his method, especially the critique of political economy, and his analysis of capitalism. Marx is centrally concerned with the relationship between the natural and the social — that is, between the physical world and its social forms of appearance. And these are exactly the questions at the heart of critical environmental thought today.

Capitalism has reordered the planet so thoroughly that we cannot think about nature without holding those dimensions together. Marx’s insistence on the dual character of the commodity — i.e., use value and exchange value, natural form and social form — provides a way of doing exactly that. If we take this framework seriously, we gain a clearer grasp of contemporary environmental problems, including how they operate within capitalism, how they are produced by it, and how they unfold through it as a specific form of social organization.

Marx also offers a critical standpoint toward mainstream economic approaches to environmental problems by asking what such frameworks illuminate, what they obscure, and where their limits lie. At bottom, I still think Marx is the best guide we have for understanding capitalism. Since capitalism is what we need to understand to grasp the current condition of the planet, that is why I think that Marx remains so relevant for ecological thought.

Hugo de Camps Mora

In the book, you posit a critique of the “new materialists,” such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing. At the same time, you also argue that many contemporary eco-Marxists present a “moralistic” account of nature. Could you explain what, in your view, are the limits of these two strands?

Alyssa Battistoni

One of the most influential strands of contemporary social theory to take nature seriously has been new materialism. New materialists are right to point out that much social theory has neglected the material and physical world, and in that sense, they identify something important that was missing from many critical frameworks.

At the same time, I think they often overcorrect. New materialist approaches tend to adopt a kind of naive materialism, where the material world is treated as something that can be understood almost on its own. The assumption is that phenomena can be studied as purely material processes — by tracing relations among actors, for example — without offering a sustained account of the social relations that structure a particular society or orient human action within it.

While this can reorient our perspective and draw attention to material activity, it cannot really explain what is happening unless it is paired with an analysis of social dynamics. That is what a Marxist approach provides. In this respect, my critique of new materialism is not unlike Marx’s critique of classical political economy. We can observe the effects of material entities, but to understand what drives those effects we need an account of the specific social form in which they appear. At the same time, I do want to integrate some insights of new materialism into a Marxist framework — especially their insistence on materiality — by holding together the social and the material rather than separating them.

The problem with much eco-Marxism is different. I have learned a great deal from that tradition and see myself as working within it. But there has often been an assumption that showing capitalism to be destructive of nature is, in itself, a sufficient critique. Human activity always transforms nature; that is part of our metabolic relationship with the more-than-human world. The critical question is not whether nature is transformed, but how, and under what social relations.

Much eco-Marxist thought rests — often implicitly — on the idea that the core problem is alienation from nature. What is missing is an account of how specific capitalist social relations organize and compel destructive interactions with the natural world, independently of moral intentions or attitudes. That is the task I take up in the book.

Hugo de Camps Mora

In Chapter 5, you revisit the Wages for Housework campaign and what you call Silvia Federici’s “naturalization thesis.” You argue that this framework has certain limits. Could you explain what you see as those limits, and why you believe your perspective helps us better understand the role of the family in the capitalist economy?

Alyssa Battistoni

The book as a whole is deeply shaped by Marxist feminist thought, and this chapter is an attempt to engage seriously with what we inherited from it, especially from the Wages for Housework campaign, while also diagnosing some of the limits of that framework. A recurring move in Marxist feminist and eco-Marxist thought has been to draw an analogy between unwaged domestic and reproductive labour and what is often described as “unvalued” or “free” nature. We see this both in the Wages for Housework moment and in more recent work, including Jason Moore’s account of capitalism’s “cheap natures” and background conditions. The underlying question is why these forms of labor and nature appear to occupy a similar position under capitalism.

Federici’s answer to what has often been called the “woman question” in Marxism is that women’s oppression under capitalism is rooted in housework, and more specifically in its naturalization. Domestic labor appears as unwaged because it is treated as nature rather than as work. This has been an enormously powerful political argument and has reshaped how domestic labor is understood by making visible forms of exploitation that had long been ignored.

But I see two problems in this account: first, the argument tends to take for granted that nature itself can simply be taken “for free,” rather than interrogating the status of nature as something capital treats as a free gift; second, the naturalization thesis relies heavily on ideological critique — the idea that if we demystify this work and make it visible as labor, its status might change. While consciousness has shifted, the material organization of this labor has changed far less.

What I try to do instead is to treat reproductive labour as a set of concrete labor processes. From this perspective, it becomes clearer why capital often abdicates responsibility for these forms of work: reproductive labor tends to be labor-intensive, difficult to mechanize, and hard to make more efficient, which makes it an unattractive site for value accumulation. Capital invests where profitability is likely; where it is not, responsibility for social reproduction is displaced on to workers and their networks. This provides a more material explanation of why reproductive labor remains external to markets while still being indispensable to capitalism, and it helps bring questions of social reproduction into closer conversation with ecological concerns.

Hugo de Camps Mora

You draw on the work of authors such as Arthur Pigou and Ronald Coase to show that externalities are not signs of market failure but rather integral to how markets function. This perspective leads you to reject the idea of addressing externalities through market mechanisms, and instead to explore Christopher Stone’s proposal of granting legal rights to natural entities as a basis for “multispecies collective bargaining.” Could you elaborate on what you mean by this idea?

Alyssa Battistoni

This chapter looks at pollution and negative externalities through the lens of mainstream economic theory. Carbon pricing and the language of externalities have shaped environmental policy for decades, and Pigou and Coase diagnose something real in identifying effects of economic activity that aren’t captured by market prices. But their frameworks remain confined to analyses of exchange, prices, and “market failure,” assuming that environmental harm can be addressed by better pricing or by creating property rights that allow markets to correct themselves. From a Marxist perspective, this misses the point. Externalities are not accidental deviations from market logic; they are produced within capitalism itself, emerging from production and from capital’s capacity to impose costs on others.

Once the analysis begins from class relations and production, environmental harm appears less as a technical problem and more as a political problem of power. This is why I find the legal scholar Christopher Stone’s proposal to grant legal rights to natural entities compelling. It can be understood not simply as a reflection of nature’s innate value but also as a political mechanism for addressing collective action problems. Pollution disperses harm across a diffuse population, making resistance difficult — much like workers face collective action problems when confronting employers. But Stone argues that if a natural entity such as a lake has standing to sue, harms borne by surrounding communities and nonhuman beings can be aggregated through a single legal subject.

I am therefore less interested in rights as abstract moral recognition than as a concrete institutional tool — one that can help shift the balance of power. In this sense, the rights of nature can be understood as a form of multispecies collective bargaining, situating ecological conflict within political economy rather than reducing it to market adjustment.

Hugo de Camps Mora

In recent years, particularly within Marxist studies, there has been a renewed interest in republicanism as a normative framework for thinking about freedom — understood as the absence of arbitrary domination. Yet in your book, you argue that an existentialist account of freedom that draws on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is better suited than a republican one to confront market rule and the distinctive forms of unfreedom that define capitalist societies. Could you explain why you find the existentialist approach more compelling in this regard?

Alyssa Battistoni

Republicanism has certainly been productive for thinking about labor politics and domination in the workplace. Nondomination is a valuable concept, and it helps diagnose direct forms of domination by bosses and capitalists. Where it becomes less convincing is in relation to what Marxists describe as abstract or social domination — domination by markets, competition, and impersonal imperatives. This is the “mute compulsion” Marx writes about. It is not simply a matter of one will overriding another but of being compelled to act in ways one may not endorse: workers competing against one another, consumers enmeshed in markets, and even capitalists themselves driven by competitive pressures.

Republicanism struggles here because the domination involved is impersonal. There is no identifiable arbitrary will that can be singled out as “the dominator.” Instead, domination emerges from the aggregate effects of individually rational actions that confront people as a coercive social force. Existentialism — especially Sartre’s later work — helps articulate this more precisely. It foregrounds how our capacity to affirm values and commit to projects is undermined not necessarily by a person, but by collective social processes and institutional arrangements that block our ability to act on what we take to matter.

Hugo de Camps Mora

Your book is also quite skeptical about the emancipatory potential of the “commons.” Yet given the current urgency to act against the effects of the Capitalocene, do you not think that the commons could still offer a meaningful starting point for collective action?

Alyssa Battistoni

I am critical of how the commons are sometimes romanticized — as a space outside capitalism, a refuge from it, a way of “building the outside from within.” The existing commons, I argue, have to be understood in relation to capital and the spaces capital has failed to enclose. They are not “outside” in any straightforward sense, and their internal life is subject to broader pressures, such as compulsion and competition.

That said, I do not want to dismiss commons-based projects. We simply need a sober view of what commons are and what they can do. Being outside capitalism is not a necessary condition for building political power. In fact, recognizing that one is operating inside a hostile system is often politically clarifying, because it forces the question of what can be done with the relations that structure life under capitalism.

In that sense, commons are analogous to unions. Nobody claims unions exist outside capitalism, but they can still generate collective power and resistance. Commons-based projects can matter for similar reasons: they can open concrete possibilities for self-organization and self-management and provide room for maneuver. The point is not to idealize them as an “outside,” but to situate them realistically within capitalist social relations.

Hugo de Camps Mora

You critique approaches that focus on changing our attitudes toward nature, arguing that they are often voluntarist, ideological, and limited in explanatory power. These perspectives tend to center on Western culture; yet as you point out, similar patterns have emerged in non-Western contexts as they have undergone capitalist transformation. Could you explain why, in your view, these accounts lack explanatory power?

Alyssa Battistoni

Approaches that explain contemporary environmental problems primarily in terms of attitudes toward nature are extremely widespread in environmental thought. The core claim is that “we” — often identified with Western culture — have developed the wrong way of seeing nature, and that this conceptual or philosophical error ultimately drives ecological destruction. You see this in critiques of Cartesian dualism or in arguments that trace environmental harm back to a worldview that treats nature as inert or merely instrumental. The problem with this approach is that it is fundamentally idealist. It assumes that ideas are the primary drivers of historical action, as if philosophical traditions could explain centuries of capitalist development and industrial transformation. It suggests that if we simply came to see nature differently — through greater ecological awareness or a shift in values — these problems could be resolved.

This is not only theoretically unconvincing but also empirically weak. Once we move beyond Western Europe or North America, the argument breaks down. Capitalism today is most dynamically reproduced in regions such as China or East Asia, which do not share the intellectual traditions often blamed for environmental degradation, and yet similar patterns of ecological harm emerge as these societies undergo capitalist transformation.

Moreover, many people already hold noninstrumental views of nature and care deeply about environmental issues yet remain compelled to act in ways that reproduce the very relations they criticize. This shows that the decisive compulsion does not operate at the level of consciousness or intention, but through material pressures, institutional structures, and forms of social organization. A critique that focuses on those structures is therefore essential if we want to explain the problem adequately and understand what kinds of transformations could actually address it.

Hugo de Camps Mora

After Free Gifts, your next project deals with state theory from a Marxist perspective. To what extent do you see it as a continuation of the first book?

Alyssa Battistoni

In many respects, it is a continuation, because the state appears throughout Free Gifts, albeit around the margins. However, the book does not develop an explicit theory of the state; what the state is doing remains largely implicit. Eco-Marxist work more broadly lacks a sustained account of the capitalist state, despite the central role it plays in structuring access to nature, controlling territory, organizing extraction and expropriation, and managing — or failing to manage — the ecological harms generated by capitalism.

At the same time, the state is repeatedly invoked in climate politics as the actor capable of acting at scale, through decarbonization, infrastructure, or regulation; yet the possibilities and limits of such action remain unclear. The next project grows out of this tension. It shifts the focus from value theory toward a sober Marxist analysis of the state that takes seriously both its centrality and its hostility.

#marxisme #biologie

#Marat : derrière la #Légende_noire, retour sur « l’ami du peuple »
▻https://lvsl.fr/marat-derriere-la-legende-noire-retour-sur-lami-du-peuple

Dans son Ode à Charlotte Corday, le poète André Chénier, après l’assassinat de Marat, témoigne : « le noir serpent, sorti de sa caverne impure, a donc vu rompre enfin sous ta main ferme et sûre, le venimeux tissu de ses jours abhorrés ! Aux entrailles du tigre, tu vins redemander et les membres livides et le sang des humains qu’il avait dévorés ! ». Le portrait de cette bestialité révolutionnaire (Michelet écrit que « sa grande bouche batracienne ne rappelait pas beaucoup que cet être fut un homme ») est passé à la postérité : Marat est demeuré synonyme des excès et des massacres de la Révolution. Contre cette légende noire, Victor #Hugo rappelle qu’il fut aussi « l’ami du peuple » : « Tant qu’il y aura des misérables, il y aura sur l’horizon un nuage qui peut devenir un fantôme, et un fantôme qui peut devenir Marat (...)

#Politique #L'héritage_oublié_des_révolutions_françaises #Jacobins #L'ami_du_peuple #marxisme #Sans-culottes

Warum manche Linke sich an der Seite von Diktatoren wiederfinden
▻https://www.akweb.de/ausgaben/706/campismus-und-antiimperialismus-warum-manche-linke-sich-an-der-seite-von-dikta

https://www.akweb.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/internationalismus-antiimperialismus-campismus-1200x798.jpg

Ce texte d’un auteur étatsunien a paru dans ce qui reste de l’ancien journal Neue Linke tendance d’abord maoïste Arbeiterkampf .
▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analyse_%26_kritik

C’est le résumé d’une partie des développements dans le monde depuis 1917 qui servent aujourd’hui de prétexte pour désunir la gauche. Bref, les ex-membres de sectes politiques disparues essaient de comprendre pourquoi aucune d’elles n’a su guider le monde vers la révolution inévitable selon leur analyses si élaborées.

K-Gruppe
▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Gruppe

C’est lamentable et révélateur en même temps parce que le texte et l’auteur font partie de ce petit monde farfelu de chercheurs d’identité révolutionnaire. A lire si on a envie de rencontrer une variation du western marxism .

Pour aller plus loin on est tenté de se référer à l’article Neue Linke de Wikipedia, mais celui-ci est truffé d’erreurs et de fausses conclusions malintentionnées résultats de la domination de l’édition allemande par des cliques soutenues par les institutions d’état anticommunistes .

Neue Linke
▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Linke
L"article mentionne quelques sources intéressantes.

20.8.2024 von Dan La Botz - Thema in ak 706: Campismus & Befreiungsnationalismus

Internationalismus, Antiimperialismus und die Ursprünge des Campismus

Der Internationalismus entstand in Europa im 19. Jahrhundert, als Demokrat*innen und Sozialist*innen begannen, sich gegenseitig in ihrem Kampf für diese Ideale zu unterstützen. Zunächst nahm dieser Internationalismus die Form der Unterstützung für das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Völker an. Viele Demokrat*innen und Sozialist*innen, darunter Marx und Engels, unterstützten beispielsweise das Recht von Polen – das immer wieder von der Landkarte getilgt und Preußen, Österreich oder Russland einverleibt worden war – auf Selbstbestimmung und einen unabhängigen Staat. Marx unterstützte auch das Recht Irlands auf Unabhängigkeit vom britischen Empire und rief die britischen Arbeiter*innen auf, die irische Unabhängigkeit zu unterstützen. Ebenso unterstützten sich die unterdrückten Völker gegenseitig. In Lateinamerika unterstützte Haiti, das in einem Sklavenaufstand seine Unabhängigkeit von Frankreich errungen hatte, Simón Bolívar im Kampf gegen den europäischen Imperialismus. Der Internationalismus begann mit der Unterstützung von Völkern, die von einer anderen Nation oder einem Imperium unterdrückt wurden.

Als 1848 eine europaweite demokratische Revolution ausbrach, die in Frankreich mit dem Kampf für den Sozialismus verbunden war, schlossen sich überall auf dem Kontinent Demokrat*innen gegen die Autokratie und den Autoritarismus der Monarchen und die Privilegien des Adels zusammen. Demokrat*innen und kleine sozialistische und proletarische Organisationen unterstützten alle den Sturz der Könige und den Kampf für die Republik. Im »Kommunistischen Manifest«, das sich an diese revolutionäre Bewegung richtete, verkündeten Marx und Engels: »Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!« Sie glaubten, dass Arbeiter*innen und Unterdrückte ihre nationalen Grenzen überwinden und sich im Kampf für nationale Selbstbestimmung, für Demokratie und Sozialismus die Hände reichen könnten.

Eine zweite Erscheinungsform des Internationalismus entstand, als Arbeiter*innen eines Landes in ihrem Kampf gegen ihre Arbeitgeber*innen die Arbeiter*innen anderer Länder um Hilfe baten. Es begann in den 1850er und 1860er Jahren als Kampf gegen den Streikbruch, mit dem verhindert werden sollte, dass britische und westeuropäische Arbeiter*innen im jeweils anderen Land als Streikbrecher*innen arbeiteten. Diese Bewegung gegen den Streikbruch entwickelte sich zu einer Kampagne für internationale Arbeiter*innensolidarität und führte zur Gründung der Internationalen Arbeiterassoziation oder Ersten Internationale, deren Leitungsgremium Marx angehörte.
Der Imperialismus und der Kampf dagegen

In verschiedenen Epochen wurden unterschiedliche Imperien zur vorherrschenden Macht. Kritiker*innen verwendeten den Begriff Imperialismus seit dem Aufstieg der modernen kapitalistischen Imperien, um den Kampf zwischen verschiedenen kapitalistischen Mächten um die Weltherrschaft zu bezeichnen. Wenn Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bucharin und Wladimir Lenin von Imperialismus sprachen, meinten sie damit nicht eine Großmacht, sondern den Kampf zwischen den Großmächten. Ausgehend von den Schriften Rudolf Hilferdings sah Lenin eine Konzentration des Kapitalismus in den Händen der Hochfinanz und eine Tendenz des Imperialismus, durch Kapitalexport den Kapitalismus am Leben zu halten. Der Kapitalexport sollte der langfristigen Tendenz einer »steigenden organischen Zusammensetzung des Kapitals« (der zunehmenden Ersetzung von Arbeit durch Kapital in der Produktion) und dem sich daraus ergebenden tendenziellen Fall der Profitrate entgegenwirken. Auf diese Weise verlängerten die Kolonien die Lebensdauer der Imperien.

Die revolutionären Sozialist*innen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts erkannten, dass England, Frankreich, Deutschland, Japan und die Vereinigten Staaten (sowie andere Nationen) imperiale Mächte waren, die alle um die Vorherrschaft kämpften. Während zunächst England die dominierende Nation gewesen war, begannen die Vereinigten Staaten nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, sie an wirtschaftlicher und militärischer Macht zu übertreffen.

Der Zweite Weltkrieg war eine Fortsetzung dieses imperialistischen Kampfes. Doch der Aufstieg des Faschismus in Italien, des Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland und des japanischen Militärstaates (der Achsenmächte) zwang revolutionäre Sozialist*innen, Sozialdemokrat*innen und Kommunist*innen, die Frage der internationalen Bündnisse neu zu überdenken. Um die kommunistische Führungsschicht und die von ihr beherrschte Sowjetunion zu verteidigen, schloss Stalin 1939 einen Pakt mit Hitler, doch als Deutschland im Juni 1941 die Sowjetunion überfiel, ging er ein Bündnis mit den alliierten Mächten ein: Großbritannien, Frankreich und den Vereinigten Staaten – allesamt imperialistische Mächte.

Dieses Bündnis ermöglichte es Stalin, sich am Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs mit Winston Churchill und Franklin Roosevelt zusammenzusetzen und die Nationen Europas buchstäblich aufzuteilen. Auf diese Aufteilung folgte fast unmittelbar der Kalte Krieg, die Schaffung zweier Lager (camps) – des kapitalistischen und des kommunistischen – und der Aufstieg eines alternativen dritten Lagers der Arbeiter*innen und unterdrückten Völker der Welt.
Die Ursprünge des Campismus

Was wir heute als »Campismus« (oder »Lagerdenken«) bezeichnen, hat seinen Ursprung in der Geschichte der Russischen Revolution. Die bolschewistische Partei führte im Oktober 1917 eine Revolution in Russland an, die die Macht den Sowjets übergab, den Räten der Arbeiter*innen, Soldat*innen und Bäuer*innen. Sowjetrussland (später die Union der Sozialistischen Sowjetrepubliken oder UdSSR) gewann die Unterstützung von Millionen Arbeiter*innen auf der ganzen Welt. Für viele war die Sowjetunion ein Ort, an dem die Arbeiter*innen die Macht übernommen hatten und dabei waren, den Sozialismus aufzubauen.

Gleichzeitig erlebte Sowjetrussland eine Reihe von Bürgerkriegen, die Invasion von mehr als einem Dutzend ausländischer Mächte, eine enorme Zerstörung von Landwirtschaft und Industrie und schließlich die wirtschaftliche und politische Isolation aufgrund des Scheiterns der europäischen Revolutionen, insbesondere in Deutschland, einer Revolution, auf die die Bolschewiki gesetzt hatten. Unter diesen Bedingungen, die die Bolschewiki als »Kriegskommunismus« bezeichneten, schwand in den frühen 1920er Jahren die Macht der Arbeiter*innen, da die Sowjets verkümmerten und die Gewerkschaften geschwächt wurden. Gleichzeitig verboten die Bolschewiki, die sich nun Kommunistische Partei nannten, alle anderen Parteien oder schalteten sie auf andere Weise aus. Die Führung der KP schaffte auch die Fraktionen ab und beendete damit jegliche innere Demokratie im kommunistischen Staat. Sowjetrussland wurde zum Einparteienstaat.

Ab Mitte der 1920er Jahre wurde der Begriff der internationalen Solidarität der Arbeiter*innenklasse nach und nach durch das Konzept der Loyalität gegenüber der Sowjetunion und dann gegenüber dem gesamten kommunistischen Lager ersetzt.

Unter diesen Umständen führte Josef Stalin Mitte der 1920er Jahre eine Konterrevolution an und erlangte bis 1929 praktisch diktatorische Macht. Im Laufe des nächsten Jahrzehnts festigte er die Macht seines bürokratischen Regimes, ermordete Zehntausende alter Bolschewiki und verursachte durch die Kollektivierung der Landwirtschaft den Tod von fünf Millionen Bäuer*innen, während die Industrialisierung des Landes einer komprimierten Geschichte des Frühkapitalismus glich. Die Arbeiter*innenklasse wurde in extremer Weise ausgebeutet, um Wasserkraftwerke, Stahlwerke und Fabriken zu bauen.

1919 hatte die Kommunistische Partei die Kommunistische oder Dritte Internationale gegründet, um die Versuche von Arbeiter*innenrevolutionen in aller Welt zu koordinieren. Die Kommunistische Internationale, angeführt von Lenin und der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion, griff in viele Arbeiter*innenparteien und deren Kämpfe in der ganzen Welt ein und versuchte, die ehemaligen sozialistischen Parteien nach bolschewistischem Vorbild zu reorganisieren und sie zu ermutigen, Regierungen nach sowjetischem Vorbild zu errichten. Der Internationalismus war zwar die vorherrschende Tendenz, aber wenn es – wie im Fall der Türkei – um die Interessen Sowjetrusslands ging, zögerten Lenin und die russischen Kommunist*innen nicht, türkische Kommunist*innen zu opfern, um ein strategisches Bündnis mit der türkischen Regierung aufrechtzuerhalten. Nachdem Stalin nicht nur das Kommando in der Sowjetunion, sondern auch in der Kommunistischen Internationale übernommen hatte, wurde alles den Interessen der neuen kommunistischen Führungsschicht und der Verteidigung und Expansion der Sowjetunion untergeordnet. Dennoch genoss die Russische Revolution weiterhin große Wertschätzung, und die kommunistischen Parteien in aller Welt organisierten Arbeiter*innen für die Verteidigung des »Vaterlands aller Werktätigen«.

Mit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs expandierten das kommunistische System und das Sowjetimperium gewaltig. Für Kommunist*innen waren nun nicht nur die Sowjetunion, sondern auch die Staaten Osteuropas das »sozialistische Lager«. Zwischen 1949 und 1959 kamen noch China, Nordkorea, Nordvietnam und Kuba hinzu. Selbst wenn Kommunist*innen die »Verbrechen von Stalin« eingestanden, sahen sie in dieser Entwicklung eine Ausweitung des Sozialismus. Sie unterstützten dieses vergrößerte kommunistische Lager gegen das kapitalistische Lager.

Wir sehen also, wie durch den Mitte der 1920er Jahre eingeleiteten Prozess der Begriff der internationalen Solidarität der Arbeiter*innenklasse durch das Konzept der Loyalität gegenüber der Sowjetunion und dann gegenüber dem gesamten kommunistischen Lager ersetzt wurde. Jegliche Kritik an den Verhältnissen innerhalb der UdSSR wurde in den Köpfen ihrer Anhänger*innen von der Loyalität zum kommunistischen Lager verdrängt. Dies war die Geburtsstunde des ersten Campismus.

Diese Loyalität bedeutete, dass bei einer Arbeiter*innenrevolution gegen den Kommunismus in Ungarn 1956, einer demokratischen Revolution in der Tschechoslowakei 1968 oder einem gewaltigen Arbeiter*innenaufstand in Polen 1980 die kommunistischen Anhänger*innen des Campismus die Sowjetunion oder andere kommunistische Staaten unterstützten, auch wenn ihre Panzer (tanks) einsetzten, um diese Bewegungen zu zerschlagen (daher der Begriff »Tankie«).
Maoismus und Drittweltismus

Der heutige Campismus verdankt sich jedoch wahrscheinlich eher dem Maoismus und dem Drittweltismus. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg begann die kommunistische Bewegung sich aufzuspalten: 1948 wurde Jugoslawien zu einem unabhängigen kommunistischen Staat; noch wichtiger war, dass sich ab Anfang der 1960er Jahre eine Rivalität zwischen Peking und Moskau entwickelte. Der Kommunismus war nicht länger eine einheitliche Weltbewegung. Er wurde polyzentrisch, und rivalisierende kommunistische Nationen versuchten, ihren Einfluss auszuweiten.

Gleichzeitig begann unmittelbar nach dem Krieg eine Bewegung für das Ende der Imperien, für die Unabhängigkeit der Kolonien und für die Freiheit ihrer Völker, die anfangs sowohl von den Vereinigten Staaten (1) als auch von der Sowjetunion (2) unterstützt wurde. Beide Mächte bezeichneten sich als antiimperialistisch und waren aus jeweils eigenen Gründen an der Auflösung der riesigen britischen, französischen und anderen europäischen Imperien interessiert. (3) Als sich der Griff der Imperien lockerte, wurden Dutzende neuer Nationen gegründet, und Hunderte Millionen Menschen wurden Bürger*innen der neuen Länder.

In Asien war der Wandel am dramatischsten: Die Philippinen wurden im Juli 1946 unabhängig, Indien im August 1947, Indonesien im August 1949 und China beendete 1949 seinen halbkolonialen Status – mehr als die Hälfte der Weltbevölkerung. Zwischen 1957 und 1990 wurden praktisch alle afrikanischen Kolonialstaaten unabhängig (einige wenige hatten bereits zuvor die nominelle Unabhängigkeit erlangt). In ähnlicher Weise wurden in der Karibik zwischen den 1950er und 1980er Jahren die ehemaligen britischen kolonialen Inselstaaten unabhängig. Es kam zu einer Wende in der Weltgeschichte: Die Dritte Welt entstand.

Die Ansicht, dass die Befreiungskämpfe der Völker der Dritten Welt die Vorhut der weltweiten revolutionären Bewegung darstellten, beeinflusste in den 1960er Jahren Maoist*innen, Trotzkist*innen und andere radikale Linke.

Die Dritte Welt war eine Tatsache, aber sie wurde auch zu einer Ideologie. Der Begriff der »Dritten Welt«, der erstmals 1952 in Frankreich auftauchte, bezog sich auf die Nationen, die formal weder zur kapitalistischen noch zur kommunistischen Sphäre gehörten. Es handelte sich um jene zwei Drittel der Menschheit, die in Asien, Afrika oder Lateinamerika lebten, die Kolonialismus oder Halbkolonialismus erlebt hatten und die aus People of Colour bestanden, von denen die meisten Bäuer*innen waren. Ihren Ausdruck fand diese Entwicklung in der Konferenz von Bandung im Jahr 1955, auf der 29 asiatische und afrikanische Nationen, darunter auch China, zusammenkamen und den »Imperialismus in all seinen Erscheinungsformen« verurteilten, also den Imperialismus sowohl der westlichen kapitalistischen Länder als auch den der Sowjetunion. Diese ursprünglichen 29 Nationen, denen sich die Länder Lateinamerikas und später zahlreiche andere anschlossen, gründeten die Bewegung der Blockfreien.

Doch sie war nicht wirklich blockfrei. Sie tendierte zum Kommunismus. Sowohl die kommunistische Regierung von Josip Broz Tito in Jugoslawien als auch die von Fidel Castro in Kuba spielten eine Rolle in der Bewegung der Blockfreien. 1966 veranstaltete Kuba in Havanna eine Trikontinentale Konferenz mit 80 Nationen, die erneut versuchte, der Dritten Welt eine politische Form zu geben. Sie brachte ihre Unterstützung für Antiimperialismus und Antikolonialismus zum Ausdruck und gründete die Organisation der Solidarität der Völker Afrikas, Asiens und Lateinamerikas. Die Trikontinentale kritisierte den US-Imperialismus, erwähnte aber nicht den sowjetischen Imperialismus, da Kuba sich gegen die US-Blockade wehrte und mit der Sowjetunion verbündet war.

Während die Vereinigten Staaten sich zunächst für die Auflösung der alten Imperien eingesetzt hatten, unterstützten sie mit der Entfaltung des Kalten Krieges aus politischen und wirtschaftlichen Gründen häufig die europäischen Mächte bei ihren Versuchen, die Kontrolle über ihre Kolonien zu behalten (wie in Vietnam) oder später eine neokoloniale Kontrolle über die neuen, nominell unabhängigen Nationen auszuüben (wie in Ghana und dem Kongo). Die Sowjetunion und China hingegen, die kein wirtschaftliches Interesse an den Kolonien hatten und politisch gegen den kapitalistischen Westen eingestellt waren, unterstützten im Allgemeinen die kolonialen Unabhängigkeitsbewegungen, stimmten in den Vereinten Nationen mit ihnen und halfen ihnen militärisch. (Natürlich duldete die Sowjetunion keine Einwände gegen die Eingliederung Osteuropas in ihr Imperium zwischen 1945 und 1948; auch China wehrte sich gegen jede Kritik an seiner Übernahme Tibets 1951.) Auf jeden Fall hatte die neue Dritte Welt oft Verbindungen zur kommunistischen Welt und wurde mit dem Kampf für den Kommunismus in Verbindung gebracht.

Der Drittweltismus wurde zu einer Ideologie. Sie bestand in der Vorstellung, dass die antiimperialistischen, antikolonialen Bewegungen den Prozess der sozialistischen Revolution fortsetzen würden, der in der Sowjetunion, China oder danach in Kuba begonnen hatte. Die drittweltistische Auffassung von einer in kapitalistische und proletarisch-bäuerliche Nationen geteilten Welt setzte sich in den Köpfen vieler Linker fest. Die Ansicht, dass die Befreiungskämpfe der Völker der Dritten Welt die Vorhut der weltweiten revolutionären Bewegung darstellten, beeinflusste in den 1960er Jahren die radikale Linke, Maoist*innen, Trotzkist*innen und andere. Die Popularität des Maoismus und des Guevarismus (nach Ernesto »Che« Guevara) ist zum Teil auf diese Sichtweise zurückzuführen. Als das Projekt der Dritten Welt Ende der 1970er Jahre eindeutig gescheitert war, verlagerten einige Drittweltist*innen ihre Loyalität von den revolutionären Bewegungen hin zu verschiedenen Regierungen des Globalen Südens, von denen keine sozialistisch war und die fast alle eine neue kapitalistische Klasse repräsentierten, autoritäre Regierungen, oft persönliche Diktaturen, hatten und in keiner Weise fortschrittlich waren.
Lagerdenken heute

Das wichtigste Ereignis, das den Aufstieg des heutigen Campismus auslöste, war der Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion. Welche Kraft konnte im Kampf gegen den Kapitalismus unterstützt werden, nachdem es das sowjetisch-kommunistische Lager nicht mehr gab? Für einige bot die Theorie des Drittweltismus eine Antwort: Wir sollten die armen Nationen des Globalen Südens in ihrem Kampf gegen den Imperialismus der reichen, weißen Nationen des Globalen Nordens unterstützen.

In dieser eindeutig gespaltenen Welt, so argumentierten die Campist*innen, sollten wir auf der Seite der Regierungen der proletarisch-bäuerlichen Welt stehen, einer Welt Schwarzer und Brauner arbeitender Menschen, die gegen die kapitalistischen Mächte der reicheren weißen Welt kämpfen. Die kapitalistischen und imperialistischen Nationen des Globalen Nordens, einschließlich Australien und Neuseeland, die mit Ausnahme von Japan, Südkorea, Singapur und Taiwan alle weiß sind, würden die bäuerlich-proletarischen Nationen des Globalen Südens ausbeuten und unterdrücken, die alle aus People of Color bestehen. Die weißen kapitalistischen Mächte waren per Definition imperialistisch, und die proletarisch-bäuerlichen Nationen, so die Campist*innen, von Natur aus antiimperialistisch. So konnte eine Nation wie der Iran, der nie eine sozialistische Regierung hatte, oder die Diktatur der Familie Assad in Syrien zu den antiimperialistischen Nationen gezählt werden. Natürlich tendierte diese Sichtweise dazu, die Klassenunterschiede sowohl innerhalb der kapitalistischen als auch in der sogenannten proletarisch-bäuerlichen Welt herunterzuspielen oder ganz zu ignorieren. Für die Campist*innen war das Lager wichtiger als die Klasse.

Viele ehemalige Linke, die heute Campist*innen sind, haben diese Denkweise übernommen. Einige dieser politischen Analyst*innen und Aktivist*innen, die sich immer noch als Linke verstehen, neigen dazu, alle Fragen dem Imperialismus unterzuordnen. Wenn ein Staat sich gegen die Vereinigten Staaten stellt, sei er per Definition antiimperialistisch, sodass das politische, wirtschaftliche und soziale System seiner Regierung für den weltweiten Hauptkonflikt, den Imperialismus, irrelevant sei. Darüber hinaus sollten die Probleme der sogenannten antiimperialistischen Staaten nicht untersucht oder kritisiert werden, da dies die Unterstützung für das antiimperialistische Lager und seinen Kampf gegen die Vereinigten Staaten und ihre Verbündeten schwächen könnte.

Daher wollen heutige Campist*innen nicht über die autoritären politischen Mächte oder die ausbeuterischen Wirtschaftssysteme der ihrer Meinung nach »antiimperialistischen Nationen« wie Russland, China oder Kuba, des Iran oder Syriens diskutieren. Noch ablehnender reagieren sie auf die Forderung, den Klassencharakter, das Regierungssystem und die ökonomischen Verhältnisse von bedrängten Nationen wie Venezuela oder Nicaragua zu untersuchen. Diese Regierungen infrage zu stellen, würde ihrer Ansicht nach bedeuten, den US-Imperialismus zu unterstützen.

Campist*innen wollen nicht über die autoritären Systeme der ihrer Meinung nach antiimperialistischen Nationen wie Russland, China oder Syrien diskutieren. Sie infrage zu stellen, würde ihrer Ansicht nach bedeuten, den US-Imperialismus zu unterstützen.

Wer zum Beispiel China dafür kritisiert, dass es 1,5 Millionen Uigur*innen in Konzentrationslager gesteckt oder die demokratische Bewegung in Hongkong niedergeschlagen hat, muss mit der US-Regierung verbündet und objektiv pro-imperialistisch sein. Das ist die Logik der Campist*innen. Der traditionelle Marxismus, der auf der Analyse der politischen Ökonomie, der sozialen Klassen, des Klassenkampfes und der Unterdrückung in einem Land sowie seiner internationalen Beziehungen basiert, wird damit verworfen.

Campist*innen behaupten, dass sich diejenigen, die die sogenannten antiimperialistischen Nationen (Russland, China usw.) kritisieren, auf die Seite des US-Imperialismus stellen. Doch kapitalistische und imperialistische Parteien und Regierungen wechseln häufig die Seiten, worauf wir als Linke derzeit wenig oder gar keinen Einfluss haben. Trump beispielsweise schien ein Anhänger von Wladimir Putin, dem Diktator Russlands, zu werden und brachte seine Bewunderung für Xi Jinping zum Ausdruck, womit er die gleiche Position vertrat wie einige, die sich als Antiimperialist*innen bezeichnen. Doch dieselben Antiimperialist*innen lehnen es ab, wenn Internationalist*innen das uigurische Volk in der Provinz Xinjiang verteidigen, weil sowohl die Trump- als auch die Biden-Administration erklärt haben, dass sie die Uigur*innen unterstützen.

Tatsächlich unterstützen sozialistische Internationalist*innen die Uigur*innen, obwohl sie angeblich von der US-Regierung unterstützt werden. Wir unterstützen sie aus unseren eigenen Gründen und halten trotzdem an unserer Kritik des US-Imperialismus fest. Wir unterstützen sie, weil sie wie die Pol*innen und Ir*innen zur Zeit von Marx ein Recht auf Selbstbestimmung haben und nicht dem autoritären Staat China und seinem Han-Nationalismus unterworfen werden sollten.

Wie kam es zu der Vorstellung, dass die Vereinigten Staaten die einzige imperialistische Macht seien? Auch dies können wir auf den Maoismus zurückführen. Die Maoist*innen sagten, bei der Analyse eines jeden politischen Problems müsse der »Hauptwiderspruch« ausfindig gemacht werden, dem alle anderen Fragen untergeordnet sei. Die Campist*innen griffen diesen Gedanken auf und wandten ihn auf die Weltpolitik an, indem sie behaupteten, der Imperialismus sei das Hauptproblem und die Vereinigten Staaten die dominierende Macht. Der Kampf solle sich also gegen den US-Imperialismus richten und nicht gegen Probleme in anderen Ländern, die mit Demokratie, Wirtschaftsreformen, Frauenrechten oder gar dem Kampf für den Sozialismus zu tun haben. Diese Idee des Hauptwiderspruchs tendiert dazu, den Kampf für den Internationalismus der Arbeiter*innenklasse aufzugeben. Den Campist*innen zufolge sollten wir es nicht riskieren, Menschen zu unterstützen, die für Demokratie kämpfen, Arbeiter*innen, die für Gewerkschaften kämpfen, oder Frauen, die in Ländern wie Iran oder Syrien Gleichberechtigung anstreben. Denn das würde vom Hauptwiderspruch ablenken, der in der Rolle dieser Nationen als antiimperialistische Mächte im Kampf gegen die Vereinigten Staaten bestehe. Wer demokratische oder sozialistische Oppositionen in diesen Ländern unterstütze, würde automatisch die Vereinigten Staaten unterstützen.
Imperialismus, unterstützt von Sozialist*innen?

Nehmen wir den komplexen Fall Syrien: 2011, zur Zeit des Arabischen Frühlings, solidarisierten sich demokratische internationalistische Sozialist*innen mit der ursprünglichen Bewegung von Bäuer*innen und dann einem Teil der städtischen Bevölkerung gegen die Diktatur von Bashar al-Assad – ohne eine Intervention der USA, Europas oder von Staaten des Nahen Ostens zu fordern. Die demokratischen Kräfte in Syrien versuchten, den Kampf gegen das Assad-Regime gewaltfrei zu führen. Assad beschloss jedoch, die Opposition gewaltsam zu unterdrücken und sogar syrische Städte zu bombardieren und praktisch zu zerstören, was zehntausende Menschenleben kostete. Daraufhin wurde der Konflikt von Staaten mit regionalen Machtambitionen – Saudi-Arabien, die Türkei und Katar – weiter angeheizt und militarisiert, indem sie Waffen an ihre lokalen Verbündeten lieferten. Während Russland, der Iran und die libanesische Hisbollah Waffen und militärisches Personal zur Verteidigung des Assad-Regimes lieferten, bekräftigten internationale Sozialist*innen das Recht des syrischen Volkes, sich Waffen zu beschaffen, wo immer es konnte, so wie es andere Nationen während der antikolonialen Bewegungen des 20. Jahrhunderts getan hatten.

Assad hatte faktisch seinem eigenen Volk den Krieg erklärt und deutlich gemacht, dass er bereit war, die Provinzstädte in Schutt und Asche zu legen, um an der Macht zu bleiben. Anfang 2015 lud Assad Russland zu Luftangriffen in Syrien ein. Schon bald bemühten sich syrische Oppositionelle um Unterstützung oder sogar um eine Intervention seitens der US-amerikanischen oder europäischen Regierungen – eine Entwicklung, die wir Internationalist*innen nicht unterstützten. Gleichzeitig begann der Islamische Staat, eine weitere reaktionäre Macht, ihre eigenen Kräfte dort zu sammeln. Die Vereinigten Staaten unterstützten die Syrian Democratic Forces. In der Zwischenzeit flohen 5,6 Millionen Syrer*innen aus dem Land, die Möglichkeit einer demokratischen Revolution stand nicht mehr auf der Tagesordnung. Im weiteren Verlauf verfolgten Russland und Iran, die mit Assad verbündet waren, ihre eigenen regionalen imperialen Interessen.

Obwohl es den Anschein hatte, als würden sowohl die westlichen kapitalistischen Mächte als auch internationalistische Linke die demokratische Revolution in Syrien unterstützten, unterstützten wir in Wirklichkeit andere politische Gruppen, zu anderen Zeitpunkten und andere Kräfte aus anderen Gründen.
Internationalismus ist der wahre Antiimperialismus

Diejenigen, die im Namen des Antiimperialismus autoritäre Regime unterstützen, erweisen nicht nur all jenen Menschen einen Bärendienst, die in Ländern wie Russland, China, Iran, Syrien, Venezuela und Nicaragua für Demokratie und in einigen Fällen auch für Sozialismus kämpfen, sondern schwächen auch den eigentlichen Kampf gegen den US-Imperialismus.

Nehmen wir den Fall China. Heute sind China und die Vereinigten Staaten zwar wirtschaftliche Konkurrenten, aber auch eng miteinander verbunden im kapitalistischen Weltsystem. China hält 1,1 Billionen Dollar der US-Schulden. Während China jährlich Waren im Wert von 443,45 Milliarden US-Dollar in die Vereinigten Staaten exportiert, können die USA lediglich Waren im Wert von 106,4 Milliarden US-Dollar an China verkaufen. Dieses ökonomische Ungleichgewicht gehört zu den größten und einflussreichsten Beziehungen in der Weltwirtschaft, einem System, in dem beide Nationen eine führende Rolle spielen.

Die Grundlage für den Kampf gegen den Imperialismus sollten wir in den vielen sozialen Bewegungen in unzähligen Ländern sehen, egal, ob deren Regierungen sich selbst als kapitalistisch oder sozialistisch bezeichnen.

Linke sollten sich klarmachen, dass ein Sturz des US-Imperialismus nicht vorstellbar ist, ohne zugleich das chinesische Wirtschaftssystem zu zerstören, da beide Länder Teil desselben weltwirtschaftlichen Arrangements sind. Abgesehen von den Beziehungen zu den USA hat China im Rahmen eines durchaus klassischen Imperialismus Billionen US-Dollar in die Erschließung von Kohle- und Mineralienminen, Öl- und Gasvorkommen und anderen Ressourcen in Ländern Asiens, Afrikas und Lateinamerikas investiert sowie in seine »Neue Seidenstraße« oder »Belt and Road Initiative« – Autobahnen, Eisenbahnen und Pipelines, die Europa mit China verbinden und dessen Kontakte zu Afrika und Asien verbessern sollen. Alle diese Maßnahmen zielen auf die Expansion der Industrie, des Finanzwesens und des Handels von China, also dessen wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen des chinesischen Imperialismus.

Wie aus der Geschichte des Imperialismus bekannt ist, wird China diese wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen für den Aufbau einer militärischen Streitmacht zur Sicherung dieser Grundlagen nutzen – eine Entwicklung, die im Südchinesischen Meer bereits zu erkennen ist. In nicht allzu ferner Zukunft dürfte der chinesische Wirtschaftsimperialismus zu einem militärischen Konflikt mit den USA oder ihren asiatischen Verbündeten führen, der sich zu einem Atomkrieg ausweiten und die Menschheit auslöschen könnte.

Widerstand gegen den Imperialismus erfordert die Stärkung der Bewegungen der Arbeiter*innen, der Bäuer*innen, der städtischen Armen sowie der ruinierten unteren Mittelschichten in der ganzen Welt. Die Grundlage für den Kampf gegen den Imperialismus sollten wir daher in den vielen demokratischen sozialen Bewegungen, Arbeiter*innenbewegungen und in einigen Fällen sozialistischen Bewegungen in unzähligen Ländern sehen, die von Regierungen beherrscht werden, die sich selbst als kapitalistisch oder sozialistisch bezeichnen. Als Sozialist*innen sollten wir diese Bewegungen unterstützen – ob in Argentinien oder Venezuela, im Iran oder in Algerien, in Japan oder China, in Frankreich oder der Ukraine, in Deutschland oder Russland –, und gleichzeitig zunächst in der Theorie und dann in der Praxis dazu beitragen, sie alle in einer internationalen Bewegung für die Befreiung zusammenzuführen.

Dan La Botz ist Lehrer, Autor und Aktivist aus Brooklyn und Redakteur der Zeitschrift New Politics .

Anmerkungen:

1) Die Vereinigten Staaten unterstützten beispielsweise Indonesien in seinem Kampf gegen die zunächst japanische und dann niederländische Herrschaft über die Kolonie.

2) Die Sowjetunion unterstützte die Unabhängigkeitsbewegung Vietnams.

3) Sowohl die Vereinigten Staaten als auch die Sowjetunion unterstützten 1944 die Gründung der unabhängigen Staaten Syrien und Libanon, und die USA, die UdSSR und Frankreich unterstützten die Gründung Israels, das aus dem britischen Palästinamandat hervorging.

#marxisme #gauche #maoïsme #western_marxism

George #orwell, l’intemporel - Idées - RFI
▻https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/id%C3%A9es/20260111-george-orwell-l-intemporel

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#injustice #totalitarisme #économie #marx #dystopie #critique #idéologie #sociologie #technologie #surveillance #novlang #vérité #résistance #algorithmes #1984

Stirner and Marx
▻https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-green-stirner-and-marx

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/a-g-alexander-green-stirner-and-marx-1.png

La preuve pourquoi le mythe des beuveries de Marx et Engels avec Stirner à Berlin n’est qu’un mythe. Ils se sont soûles séparément en ce qui concerne Max Stirner.

Author: Alexander Green

Max Stirner: a historiographical sketch
Max Stirner: a historiographical sketch
Chapter I: Context and purpose in The Ego and Its Own.
Chapter II: The crisis of 1845: The Ego and the origins of historical materialism.
Chapter III: Stirner contra Marx: morality, society and liberty.
Conclusion: The divergent perspectives of “intimate” enemies: Marxian history and Stirnerian egoism.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources

The impact of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1844)[1] on the modern European thought has been strangely neglected. Few other figures in the history of philosophy have been as systematically misread, misunderstood, suppressed and pigeonholed as that of Max Stirner. He has been labelled an anarchist, a nihilist, a crude “proto-Nietzsche” and his influence constantly overlooked by both philosophical movements and intellectual historians alike. Whilst there is no direct recipient of Stirner’s version of egoism, it appears to exert a diffuse yet substantial influence on modern philosophical thought. Identifying the ultimate or unintended beneficiaries of Stirner’s ideas is challenging. Recognition of his only major work emerged half a century after its conception when The Egosurfaced in a range of intellectual projects, recently including feminism and postmodernism. What is paradoxical about Stirner’s impact is that his most critical influence – on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, has been obscured from the field of intellectual history. Stirner’s official role in the philosophically fraught period which saw the birth of historical materialism (1844–5) was relegated to more “deviant tributaries” of European philosophy.[2]

Despite its apparent distinctiveness, The Ego was very much a product of the milieu of the eighteen forties and of the Left Hegelian movement in particular. Ironically, it is in this context that some of the most genuine praise for Stirner’s surprising contribution to Left Hegelianism was voiced, despite the critique of the group’s theoretical leaders that had prompted The Ego. “The Free Ones” (hereafter Die Freien) were a group of radical Berlin publicists, poets and philosophers who gathered daily in Hippel’s Weinstube; many of its members were imbued with revolutionary fervour, others were simply inebriated.[3] The group’s leaders were the Bauer brothers, Bruno and Edgar. Marx, Engels and the poets Herwegh and Hoffmann von Fallersleben were occasional visitors.Hence Bauer’s later characterisation of the group as Berlin’s “beer literati”.[4] Ludwig Feuerbach, Moses Hess, Ludwig Bühl, Adolf Rutenberg, Eduard Meyen, and Julius Faucher also frequented Hippel’s. Arnold Ruge, the self-appointed godfather of these Hegelians, carried on nightly debates which were often very bitter.[5] Engels gives a description of Stirner at such a gathering in his comic poem “The Triumph of Faith”:

Look at Stirner, look at him,
the peaceful enemy of all constraint.
For the moment, he is still drinking beer,
soon he will be drinking blood
as though it were water.
When others cry savagely
“down with the kings”
Stirner immediately supplements
“down with the laws also”.
Stirner full of dignity proclaims;
you bend your will power,
and you dare to call yourselves free,
You become accustomed to slavery;
Down with dogmatism, down with law.[6]

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Fig. I: Pencil sketch by Engels, Stirner stands on the middle right, leaning against the table. He is a lonely figure: highbrowed, bespectacled and smoking a cigarette. For Engels illustrated letters see: Zwischen 18 und 25 Jugend Briefe von Friedrich Engels.

Die Freien were the last remnants of Bruno Bauer’s “Doktorklub” – the same club had once counted Marx as a member. Stirner cannot have joined before the end of 1841. At that time the young Marx was leaving for Paris and, as a result, the two were never to meet. Stirner spent most of 1843 completing The Ego; it was published in November of 1844. For English readers, the English-Latin word ego comes constrained by nuances of a possible Freudian or Protestant analysis. However a careful reading suggests that “The Unique One & His Property” (or Own-ness) would better elucidate Stirner’s intentions. “The Unique One” might be best understood as the individual self, not in opposition to later concepts of the Freudian id or libido or even the “spirit” or “soul”, but as a certain kind of absolute. The Ego immediately established Stirner as one of the most formidable opponents of the very people with whom he had seemed to have so much in common. Communists, critical philosophers, humanitarians and reformers of every degree were attacked in Stirner’s philosophy, a philosophy that Engels labelled “Egoism”.[7]) Among the Young Hegelians, Bauer, Ruge, Moses Hess and even the famous Feuerbach joined forces in order to combat what they saw as the menacing nihilism of Stirner’s egoism.

Bruno Bauer and Szeliga both wrote articles, Feuerbach also replied. Hess wrote an essay whilst Marx and Engels wrote the best part of a book.[8] All seemed happy to admit Stirner was an adversary of note. Bauer wrote that Stirner was “the most capable and courageous of all combatants” of his own theory of “pure criticism”,[9] whereas Feuerbach described Stirner as “the most gifted and the freest writer it has been given me to meet”.[10] Arnold Ruge even heralded Stirner as the “theoretical liberator” of German philosophy; The Ego had represented a triumph on behalf of the concrete living individual over abstract generalities. Engels himself, in a letter to Marx, wrote that “among the Freien it is plain that Stirner has the most talent, personality and energy”.[11] S.E. Parker[12] notes that Engels’s initial sympathetic response to Stirner was probably subject to a severe reprimand from Marx. Engels’ views radically changed as we shall see, and deference is made to Marx in dealing with the chimera of Stirner’s egoism. Nevertheless, Stirner enjoyed fleeting and alarming fame, his “conscious egoism” was parodied in a popular novel and he himself had even appeared, thinly disguised, as a philosophical character in another novel.[13]

However, the speculative excitement over The Ego was as frantic as it was transient, and the political events of 1848 obliterated the traces of those philosophical struggles which had preceded them. In that year, along with the revolutionary hopes of German radicals, the Left Hegelian movement “collapsed into itself, becoming insignificant in both intellectual and political life”,[14] emasculated “in the face of an adamant union between a defensive Church and a reactionary Monarchy”.[15] The Ego had sounded the theoretical death knell for the group and Left Hegelianism reached “a final and angry impasse”.[16] Stirner had made a “clean sweep of everything, leaving only naked self-assertion”; with The Ego he had taken the Hegelian system to its dialectical limit “… and transformed it into its opposite”.[17]

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Fig. II: Max Stirner Pencil sketch, inscription reads “Max Stirner. Drawn from memory by Frederick Engels, London, 1892” reproduced in MECW 5:267, (Moscow 1976).

Johann Caspar Schmidt (1806–56), who wrote and was known as Max Stirner, had been a close friend of Engels during the year he spent in Berlin. Engels was evidently impressed by Stirner, who was his senior by a number of years. He was able to render a pencil sketch of Stirner fifty years later, and recalled that they were “great friends” [Duzbrüder].[18] However, it was Engels who helped in obscuring evidence of Stirner’s influence on his colleague and lifelong friend, Karl Marx. After reading The Ego, Engels wrote to Marx explicitly stating his opinion, one which would powerfully colour Stirner’s legacy: “We must not simply cast it [The Ego] aside, but rather use it as the perfect expression of the present-day folly, and, while inverting it, continue to build on it.”[19] Marx responded by burying himself in The Ego, and constructing his reply in The German Ideology.[20] For Marx and Engels, coming to terms with The Ego was a deeply fundamental moment in the development of Communist theory. Marx claimed that the aim of The German Ideology was simply “to settle accounts with our erstwhile philosophical conscience”.[21] First published in 1932, the bulk (three quarters) of the work is a chapter entitled “Sankt Max”, Marx’s epic yet uncomfortable diatribe on The Ego. The unpublished status of The German Ideology did not allow for public discussion of Marx’s criticisms of Stirner, in his own words it was “left to the gnawing criticism of mice”.[22]

Stirner’s legacy suffered yet more interference from Engels’ essay “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” (1886), his account of the development of historical materialism. It attempted to minimise the importance of The German Ideology, and therefore The Ego in Marx’s formative philosophy. Engels claimed Darwin’s theory of evolution had played a critical role in the route to dialectical materialism, though Marx was always more of a Hegelian than Engels would give him credit for. However, Engels at least recognised Feuerbach’s influence whose concept of “species-being”/essence was easily transposed onto Marx’s “social being”, conveniently replacing the old materialism with a new “dialectical” form. There is no mention that Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach’s humanism was only made possible by reading The Ego in 1844. Engels’ account mentions Stirner only in passing: “Stirner remained an oddity, even after Bakunin blended him with Proudhon and labelled the blend ‘anarchism’. Feuerbach alone was of significance as a philosopher”.[23] Engels occluded Stirner’s self-evident “catalytic”[24] contribution to the young Marx’s early philosophic formulations. By labelling him the “prophet of contemporary anarchism”, Engels misaligned Stirner with Proudhon and Bakunin, two thinkers he had openly condemned.

Marxists studying the theoretical development of the young Marx tend to follow Engels and ignore the criticisms of Stirner featured in “Sankt Max”. For the purposes of the “Marxist exegesis”, Marx’s most characteristic aphorisms are to be found in the deceptively short yet lucid chapter on Feuerbach, the most bona fide “Marxist” chapter of The German Ideology. However, as we will learn, Marx’s criticisms of Feuerbach were merely “perspectives” which “had been progressively opened to Marx and Engels in the course of their study of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum”.[25]

At the close of the nineteenth century John Henry Mackay, a Scottish poet turned Germanophile, rediscovered Stirner and initiated what has since been called the “Stirner renaissance”.[26] Mackay happened to find a brief citation regarding Stirner in Lange’s History of Materialism: “The man who in German literature has preached Egoism most recklessly and logically, Max Stirner, finds himself in distinct opposition to Feuerbach”. After finding a copy of The Ego, Mackay immediately became a disciple, and claimed the role of necromancer to the lifeless corpse of Stirner’s thought. Stirner’s revival was also concurrent with the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. As Karl Löwith points out “Stirner has often been compared with Nietzsche, to the point of asserting that Stirner was ‘intellectual arsenal’ from which Nietzsche derived his weapons”.[27] Some went further in this comparison, Eduard von Hartmann claimed “not only is this [The Ego] a brilliant work not inferior in respect of style to Nietzsche’s work, but in respect of philosophical value it surpasses the latter a thousand times”.[28] The spreading of Nietzsche’s celebrity ignited a fresh and sympathetic interest in Stirner’s ethic of self-will and indirectly helped to sustain historians’ interest in The Ego into the twentieth-century.

Few historians have found consensus when discussing Stirner’s place in the history of philosophy, not to suggest that they should. Scholars remain divided in determining the place that The Ego might belong in European thought, or even if it should belong at all. Mackay’s resurrection of Stirner’s book caused a more extensive response; it confirmed Stirner’s identification with his most commonly assigned philosophical genre. For over a century The Ego has maintained a place among the founders and luminaries of modern anarchism. Woodcock states that “of all the libertarian classics [The Ego] remains the expression of a point of view that belongs clearly to one end of the varied spectrum of anarchist theory”.[29] The anarchic elements in Stirner’s thought are even pronounced enough for Avron to declare Stirner “anarchism’s most original and most consistent thinker”.[30] The orthodox Marxist Hans G. Helms has argued that the influence of The Ego has been as much political as philosophical. In his recent study, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft,[31] he argues that Stirner inspired various German groups who were the immediate precursors of fascism. Stirner has even been used by the New Right specifically to evoke the darkness of the “interregnum” and emphasise the need for a total cultural transformation.[32] In the 1963 Libertarian Book Club edition of The Ego, James J. Martin wrote “it is at once a historical document, a pamphlet of the intellectual disturbance of the mid-nineteenth century, and a timeless classic”.

The publication history of The Ego also shows the strength of this initial revival of Stirner. Forty-nine editions appeared between 1900 and 1929. However, after the 1930s, The Ego again slipped into relative obscurity. Even amongst the thinkers who knew Stirner, opinion was radically divided. There were a few during that period who had a better insight into the meaning of Stirner’s thought. In 1939, Sidney Hook indicated that the forgotten debate between Marx and Stirner involved “the fundamental problems of any possible system of ethics or public morality”,[33] and later in 1963 Isaiah Berlin noted that “the theory of the alienation of the proletarians was enunciated by Max Stirner at least one year before Marx.”[34] These voices were in the extreme minority, yet significantly they identified the unresolved nature of the Stirner-Marx relationship, and suggested that Stirner’s influence might not be as negligible as was previously thought. These writers have paved the way for a revaluation of Stirnerian thought.

In 1968 a new German edition of The Ego made its appearance. It had been preceded, two years earlier, by a full study of Stirner’s thought and influence, the first since Henri Avron’s in 1954, which had linked Stirner with existentialism.[35] 1971 saw the publication of the first extensive study of Stirner’s philosophy ever to appear in English: R. W. K. Patterson’s The Nihilistic Egoist. Paterson’s study sought to be the most comprehensively objective treatment of Stirner to date, yet Marx’s accusations against Stirner are restated, minus the vitriol, and Stirner’s vision is described as “frivolous”. The Nihilistic Egoist remains a useful, if dated, springboard for a revisionist perspective aiming to rediscover Stirner’s own intentionality.

In John Carroll’s Break-out from the Crystal Palace, The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky (1974), a sociological approach was applied to Stirner’s thought. Carroll recognised the psychological dimension of anarchism beyond its more familiar appearance as political ideology. Whilst identifying Stirner’s radical individualist psychology, he sees Stirner much like Georges Sorel in considering society as senile, in need of fresh, invigorating passions; a view that appealed to the young Mussolini and to the French fascist aesthete Robert Brasillach (see William Tucker’s The Fascist Ego). Carroll ultimately presents Stirner as a difficult, inspiring, yet flawed champion of rebellion and the unceasing quest for self-understanding, self-realization, and new values.

William Brazill’s recent work, The Young Hegelians (1970) as well as David McLellan’s The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (1980) both direct considerable attention to Stirner’s thought. In addition, John Edward Toews has significantly revised Stirner’s place in the history of philosophy in his recent study Hegelianism, The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–41 (1980), opening the way up for a more historically sensitive, rather than philosophical/ideological interpretation of Stirner’s contribution to the history of philosophy. Toews contextualises Stirner’s position amongst the Left Hegelians, and attacks those who see Stirner’s egoism as “purely subjective”.[36] He identifies the core contradiction that Hegel’s radical heirs had to wrangle with during the 1840s, that self-liberation and self-affirmation required “revolutionary destruction” in order for their “concrete historical actualisation”.[37] However, revolution necessitated “commitment to suprapersonal values” and “a belief in an objective meaning in history”.[38] Such values were a direct denial of the “individual autonomy, self-expression and self-enjoyment” that constituted Stirner’s aim of an inward rebellion which sought to end the “historical pathology of self-alienation”.[39] Toews’ penetrating work indicates that The Ego was deeply rooted in the struggles of Hegelian thought during the 1840s and importantly Stirner is given an independent and original role in disintegration of the Left Hegelian movement. As Lawrence Stepelevich notes hopefully, we may be seeing the “beginning of another cycle of interest in Stirner”.[40] The continued publication of the journal Stirner-Studien since 1994 similarly reflects the renewed academic interest in Stirner in his native Germany.[41]

The debate of 1845 still reverberates in late twentieth-century European intellectual discourse. Indeed, there are many unusual and overlooked parallels between Stirner’s critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and others. Such intellectual affinities have recently prompted Saul Newman to attempt to reconcile classical anarchism with poststructuralist thought (in order to define “postanarchism”) using Stirner to “break out of the Enlightenment humanist paradigm of essentialism … which continues to inform radical political theory”.[42] Stirner’s ideas are also discernible in “primitivism” (John Zerzan), “immediatism” (Hakim Bey) and “insurrectionary anarchism” (Alfredo Bonnano).

This thesis aims to assess the difficult relationship between Marx and Stirner and their respective ideas. It is timely to reconsider Stirner’s place amongst the philosophic heavyweights of the nineteenth century, after years where he has suffered under the suffocating modernity of Marx and Nietzsche and been misconstrued by many as an intellectual oddity. It is high time that the relevance of Stirner’s thought, especially in relation to the development of Marx’s theories, was restored to its correct place in history of philosophy. When we examine Marx’s critique in The German Ideology, it will emerge that Stirner’s legacy is more than that of an “anarcho-existentialist” whose egoism is untenable. Both thinkers will be firmly set against the context of the rise and fall of Left Hegelian humanism. Whilst by 1845 its key luminaries accused each other of retreating to abstract and undialectical positions of either metaphysical idealism or materialism, all (including Marx and Stirner) had laid claim to dialectical inheritance (Hegel). Therefore, it is instructive to see the thinkers on a level playing field, Marx, Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner all sharing this “existential” ontology. We should similarly regard their opposing solutions as embedded in their own context, remembering that the “existential reductions” of 1844–5 were put forward as constructive appropriations of the real content of Hegelian thought. Stirner was no exception as his form of nihilism did not abandon the redemptive core of the Hegelian project. Rather than a simple appendage of Marx’s early formulations, The Ego must be given independent value and seen as serious attempt to tackle the problems facing German philosophy in the 1840s. The main objective of this thesis will be to extricate Stirner from Marx’s rambling, left-handed invective and reinstate him as a thinker who deserves our attention and whose relevance and influence have not been fully appreciated. We cannot simply overlook “Sankt Max” as key evidence of Marx’s formative intellectual development. Marx clearly exerted much cerebral effort to write a critique that ended up being lengthier than The Ego itself. In short, the full effects of The Egoupon the philosophy of the young Marx “have yet to be fully assessed”.[43]

It is relatively easy to grasp the basic contemporary relevance, significance and durability of The Ego in the history of philosophy. Yet we still need to perceive more about Stirner’s complex, often incongruous, relationship with Karl Marx – a figure who seems destined to remain significant, despite the recent interest in Nietzschean thought. What Derrida says of Marx is equally applicable to Stirner: “a ghost never dies” nor can there be any “future” without “the memory and inheritance … of at least one of his spirits”.[44]
Chapter I: Context and purpose in The Ego and Its Own.

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Figure III: Stirner’s birthplace, from John Henry Mackay’s book Max Stirner: Sein Leben und Sein Werk.

Born in 1806, Johann Caspar Schmidt was the son of Albert and Sophia Schmidt who lived in a comfortable house overlooking the Marktplatz in Bayreuth. The Schmidts were a lower-middle-class family of evangelical Lutheran denomination. In 1826 Stirner matriculated in the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Berlin and spent two years studying a range of subjects including logic, Greek literature and geography. Whilst at Berlin, unlike Marx, Strauss or Engels, Stirner attended Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the History of Philosophy, and in the winter of 1827 his lectures on the Philosophy of the Subjective Spirit. In 1832 Stirner returned to Berlin, where he would spend the rest of his life. Continuing his philosophical studies, he attended a two-semester course on Aristotle conducted by the Hegelian philosopher Karl L. Michelet. Stirner’s formal acquaintance with Hegelian philosophy, as well as Hegelian philosophers themselves, far surpassed that obtained by other Left Hegelians. However, Stirner fell short of academic success in his formal examinations in the upper forms of the gymnasium and was awarded a conditional facultas docendi, never realising his ambition to become a Gymnasiallehrer.

In 1839, Stirner obtained regular employment at a Berlin girls’ school. He taught both history and literature with great success, and for next five years enjoyed a relatively stable and ordered life, with a modest income and ample freedom to pursue his philosophical reflections. Ostensibly, this quiet middle-class school teacher hardly seems a likely candidate to produce what has been called the “most revolutionary [book] ever written”.[45] However, 1840’s Berlin was a melting pot of political disaffection and intellectual unrest, whilst the revolution was not being fought for in blood, the clubs and cafes of Berlin formed political hubs in which groups of young radicals could meet and make preparations. Stirner began attending meetings of Die Freien in 1841; his formal education was undoubtedly supplemented by meetings with Hegelians at various clubs and Weinstuben. During long boisterous evenings at their favourite haunt (Hippel’s), Stirner would have had the chance to review the metaphysical exuberance of Berlin’s disaffected and rootless intelligentsia and literati. In the midst of such radical clamour, Stirner met Bruno Bauer, the only member of Die Freien in the Left Hegelian circle with whom he maintained a close relationship until his death. It was through socialising with Die Freien that Stirner also met his second wife (his first wife had died giving birth to a still-born child), Marie Dahnhart. Marie was an uninhibited cigar smoking, beer-drinking 25 year old who was about to enjoy an inheritance of 30,000 thalers. In 1843, Stirner astutely married her.

The years between 1815 and 1848 have been seen as an “era of polarisation”,[46] a conflict between modernity and tradition. However, the post-1815 era of German restoration was not threatened by philosophical trends; neither the moral creeds and entrenched dogmas of rigid conservatives, nor the passionate individualism of the Romantics sought to challenge the feudal complacency that still survived in some German states. The loathed German Confederation soon showed its true colours, with censorship and surveillance laws embodied in the Karslbad Decrees of 1819 and the “Final Act” of 1820. Both ushered in an era of oppression and illiberality for the German states, one that would be strongly attacked by many contemporary thinkers.

During the 1830s the movement known as Junges Deutschland (Young Germany), produced poets, thinkers and journalists, all of whom reacted against the introspection and particularism of Romanticism. The Romantic Movement was seen as apolitical lacking the activism that Germany’s burgeoning intelligentsia required. Decades of compulsory school attendance in German states had resulted in mass literacy and an excess of educated males which the establishment could not subsume. Combined with the advantage of the low cost printing press these factors caused a rush into the so-called “free professions”.

The German states, specifically the Prussian government, had a basic distrust of speculative thought. On occasion the state would sometimes sponsor philosophical teachings that offered an intellectual foundation for the authoritarian organisation of society.[47] Hegelianism was adopted as the academic standard for appointments in 1820s and 30s. To begin with, Hegelianism was regarded as “the staunchest ideological bulwark of Prussian aristocracy”, yet by the 1840s devotion to Hegelian thought had led to a period of readjustment, and the late 1830s and early 1840s resembled more a post-mortem of Hegelianism in which thinkers extended or recast Hegelian phenomenology.[48] One outcome of this method of criticism was the radical Left Hegelianism of the early 1840s, which Stirner found himself heir to. The “Young Hegelians” (hereafter referred to as “Left”) sought to decisively challenge both Church and State, finding resonance with the “Young Germany” of the 1830s; no longer allies of the establishment, they were rejected as intellectual outcasts. The official Hegelianism that was extolled in lecture theatres in Stirner’s undergraduate days had become the “philosophy of disaffection”.[49]

Stirner occupied a unique position among the Left Hegelians, sharing an essentially similar methodology to his closest contemporaries. By using classical Hegelian concepts and modes of argument, the Left Hegelians quickly reached conclusions that in effect nullified the whole upshot of Hegel’s original system. Hegel’s universal synthesis of Being had begun to produce discordant results. By reviving the republican idealism of the eighteenth century, Left Hegelians believed education and political liberties would solve all social problems without changing the system of property on which material production and economic exchanges were based. Stirner’s early work reflected these broad aims.

The False Principle of Our Education is considered the “most valuable and significant of Stirner’s shorter works”.[50] Stirner, for the first time, can be seen in pursuit of the goal of individual self-awareness and an insistence on the primacy of the individual personality. He rejected both humanism and realism as authorities external to the individual that limited his freedom. In formal education, Stirner saw that “the world of antiquity through classics and the Bible rule over us as a mistress”.[51] He went on to stress the importance of personality and the “free-moving ego” in education, insisting bluntly that education is the most important “social question” in the world. Stirner’s surprisingly modern insistence on the primacy of education and knowledge was tied to man’s self-discovery: through “Truth” man discovers himself and experiences “the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness”.[52] However, the Left Hegelians sought in vain to “educate” their fellow countrymen and the 1840s brought disenchantment and schism; political rulers and academics strove uselessly to restore a cultural unity and a national idealism to Germany.

The disintegration of the Left Hegelian movement was born out of the inability to make its philosophy the focus of any political movement, especially one involving the country’s social forces. Mass poverty, economic dislocation and social unrest had been rife in Germany, from the student protests of the 1830s to the “hungry 1840s”. In some areas socialists and communists had taken advantage of this. Yet unlike Marx’s experiences in Britain, industrialization had only made very modest advances in German states by 1848. German society was overwhelmingly rural even during the 1840s; 70% of the population still worked on the land. Within a short space of time the Left Hegelians became static and ineffective, wrecked by their own internal theoretical disputes and confined to Berlin’s bourgeois, pre-industrial world.

Before its disintegration, the Left Hegelian movement underwent a series of “transformations”. The “emanation of divergent positions”, is crucial in regard to Stirner, who inherited and then reacted against the semiotic system or “distinctive” language that Hegelian thinkers created and altered.[53] The period between 1835 and 1843 can be seen as a period in which thinkers attempted to translate the original metaphysical Hegelian language of Absolute Spirit into the language of Hegelian humanism. During this period the concept Absolute Spirit was replaced by “the idea of humanity”, “human species-being” or “human self-consciousness”.[54] This secularisation or humanisation of Hegelian thought was the basis for the radical Left Hegelian movement. Strauss began this trend with his Life of Jesus (1835) where he asserted that religious representation was the objectification of human essence, thus religious consciousness contributed to alienation and kept human beings from their own essential nature. By the time Strauss had cemented his new humanist outlook in 1840–41, Bruno Bauer had developed his own variant of the transformative humanist interpretation of the Hegelian language of Absolute Spirit. For Bauer, Strauss had not gone far enough; the “idea of humanity” itself remained enigmatic unless it actualised itself in human history through its internalisation in the “free activity of human self-consciousness”.[55] In book and articles published in 1840–42, Bauer denounced terms such as “God”, “Absolute Spirit” and “world-spirit” as deceptions implying a supranatural transcendent power realising itself in human self-consciousness. Bauer’s critical theory of human self-consciousness therefore sought to liberate “the I” which “lives, creates, works and is everything” and “is the only power in the world and history, and history has no other meaning than the becoming and development of self-consciousness”.[56]

A third version of the humanist translation of Hegelianism was constructed by Ludwig Feuerbach around 1840. Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit” was a transcendent mystification, a self-alienation of a human process and limitation on human thought. InThe Essence of Christianity (1840–41) Feuerbach claimed religious consciousness and language meant “a projection of humanity’s essential nature as an emotional and sensuous being, governed and made happy only by images”.[57] Whilst the rightful content of Hegelian metaphysics was thus affirmed by Bauer as human self-consciousness, for Feuerbach such essential human content was more a sensuous and emotional “essence”. By 1841, these thinkers were publicly attributed with developing a distinctive theoretical perspective, and Bauer and Feuerbach accepted their roles as the intellectual mentors of radical “Left” Hegelians.

Historical reality ultimately undermined Hegelian humanism when its theoretical practice failed to gain wide appeal. Left Hegelianism was in terminal decline when The Ego was published in 1844. Academic positions were denied to the Left Hegelians in the city that they deemed philosophically and politically the capital of Germany. The constant pressure of governmental censorship and academic rejection meant that even Arnold Ruge’s attempts to rally a political party around the banner of Left Hegelianism soon failed. In 1843, the Deutsche Jahrbücher was prohibited from publication, even in “liberal” Saxony. It was equally a defeat by politics as it was by abstract thought itself. Soon most members of the movement became disillusioned with the idea of a political public as the agent of liberation. The declarations of Feuerbach, Bauer, Hess and Ruge in 1841 had set the Left Hegelians against all prevailing orthodoxy be it religious, philosophical, economic or political; yet all had failed at insurrection of existing institutions or a political association based its ideas.

Such failure was reflected in the thought produced during the period 1843–46, which saw the publication of The Ego. It was a divisive process of mutual criticism, where Stirner and others criticised the “theological” illusions of a movement caught in a language of essence. Stirner inherited the problem that “reality” must be comprehended and described as contingent, concrete, finite “existence” with reason and meaning emerging from actions of individual beings. The “analytic of existence” was self-consciously presented not merely as a translation, but as a step beyond Hegelian thought in some respects, seeking to transcend it.[58] The humanism that had for a short time enjoyed the attention of the movement’s most able thinkers was scoffed at by Stirner: “In our days, … they have not realised that man has killed God in order to become – “sole God on high” … God has had to give place, not to us, but to – humanity”.[59] Stirner specifically condemned Feuerbach and Bauer for creating this new god, “Humanity” to replace the Christian god. For Stirner this was simply a “change of masters”.[60]

Hegelian humanism encountered strong criticism from former disciples and comrades, most significantly in the publication of Stirner’s The Ego and Marx’s The German Ideology. Both thinkers proposed a more radical break with past Left Hegelian positions, and the language that had justified it. Despite accusations of nihilism, Stirner’s “heaven-storming” dismissal of the objectivity, universality, value, truth and meaning still presented a description of individual-centred existence, with the ego as sovereign as a positive appropriation of the true content of his cultural and philosophical inheritance. It is a mistake therefore to see Stirner as an anomaly in the history of philosophy or even as “discordant” in some way.[61] The Ego did not exist in an intellectual vacuum, and the context of Left-Hegelianism reveals how Stirner’s thought was a legitimate product of this movement’s wider discourse, a serious attempt to understand the transition from religion to philosophy. Stirner (as all Left Hegelians did) saw himself as dialectically concluding and fulfilling the Hegelian project. Similarly Marx saw that within Hegelian thought were the means, and even the imperative, to go beyond Hegel. He understood exactly what Stirner was attempting, “a step which leads beyond Hegelian idealism and negates it”;[62] he also knew how potentially damaging this could be to the direction of his own work.

Rather than view The Ego as some wild or “severely mutilated”[63] transformation of Hegel’s characteristic concepts, its construction should be seen as a result of that philosophical paradigm which all Left Hegelians practiced and embraced: dialectical development. There is even room to regard Stirner as a concordant Hegelian par excellence. His intimacy with Hegel has been explored by Stepelevich, who argues that Stirner reinterprets Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with new and improved vision.[64] For Hegel, the “Absolute” is “the power of the negative”;, i.e. that which views and criticises every determinate thought – the Subject. For Stirner, in his critique, this “power of the negative” is the single consciousness – himself, or the ego. Karl Löwith similarly detected a logical connection stating that The Ego “is in reality an ultimate logical consequence of Hegel’s historical system”.[65] Whilst these interpretations elevate Stirner from the often eccentric billing he is given in intellectual history, describing Stirner as the “Last of the Hegelians” implies that The Ego is the “end of a historical series of ever more decadent inheritors of Hegel’s doctrines”.[66] We should recognise that whilst he attacked Hegelianism, Stirner’s thought was still a product of it, bound within its parameters, be they linguistic or logical. Therefore the choice lies between seeing a “terminal orantithetical” relationship, one which could make Stirner, in a sense, “the perfected Hegelian”.[67]
Chapter II: The crisis of 1845: The Ego and the origins of historical materialism.

The dissolution of Left Hegelianism coincided with the early thinking of Marx who grew up among the ruins of their philosophy. Together with Stirner, Marx accepted the philosophical categories and problems of Hegelian thought. Placing Stirner among the many strands and mutations of Hegelian thought highlights his intellectual proximity to the thought of the young Marx. Whilst preparing to demolish German Idealism, Marx entered the metaphysical fray at the same moment as Stirner, and wrestled with the same ontological questions. The publication of The Ego shook the pro-Feuerbachian position Marx found himself in 1844 and perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Marx was to experience the depth and implications of Stirner’s criticism. Marx had originally planned to write a review of The Ego; however he stalled whilst Bauer and Feuerbach fielded their responses. Then, feeling clearly personally provoked, Marx postponed previously commissioned works to pen “Sankt Max”. After completing the work, Marx wavered and the criticism of Stirner remained unprinted. Within this privately led dispute, The German Ideology contained the seeds of a new philosophy, created to be immune to a Stirnerian criticism: historical materialism. The birth of this radical new theory was muted. These ideas were left in a drawer along with “Sankt Max”, whilst Marx, wishing to escape the idealist philosophy of the Left Hegelians, charged into political life, into intellectual feuds with Proundhon and Bakunin.

Between 1844 and 1846 Marx and Engels were busy forging their new revolutionary outlook. The German Ideology was composed in Brussels, where Marx had moved in 1845 following his deportation from Paris by the Guizot government who had been pressured by Prussia to expel the leading collaborators of Vorwärts. During the last three months of 1845, Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology. In early 1846, both men visited London in order to found a network of communist correspondence committees to provide German, French and English socialists with access to each other’s ideas and activities. The backdrop to Marx’s life was one of financial struggle, censorship and political activity and exile. However, the pair had integrated their theoretical and practical aims, revolutionary communist teaching and rallying the progressive elements of the proletariat and revolutionary intelligentsia.

In theoretical terms, this revolutionary outlook was partially created through the intellectual struggle with what Marx saw as bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology of the Left Hegelians, of which Max Stirner was seen as the perfect embodiment. The German Ideology directed criticism against the many apparent failings of Left Hegelianism, many which echo Stirner’s own critique of the movement. For Marx, however, the authority of delusions or Stirner’s “spooks” over human minds was not a result of mental distortion cured by working upon the consciousness, but rather rooted in social conditions. For both Stirner and Marx, Left Hegelian humanism was governed by false ideas where men are enslaved to the creations of their minds. For Marx, the power of philosophy was to expose and destroy these false ideas and revolutionise society. In the Preface of The German Ideology Marx outlined his objections to the Left Hegelians, and saw clearly his task in:

“uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing that their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; that the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany.”[68]

Throughout The German Ideology Marx clearly enjoys making fun of the philosophical pretensions of the Left Hegelians, yet he also levels the serious claim that the movement’s achievements only embodied a corruption of Hegel, i.e. “the putrescence of the absolute spirit”.[69]

Why then compose such a lengthy rebuttal of German post-Hegelian philosophy if all it amounted to was “shadows of reality”?[70] The answer is simple: Stirner. Marxists tend to regard The German Ideology as nothing more than a secondary attack against Left Hegelians, even an enlarged version of The Holy Family. However, The Ego had unsettled Marx; regardless of whether a public debate was to be had, he felt inclined to convince himself at least that Stirner was wrong. Marx realised that Stirner’s position was perfectly concordant with general development of post-Hegelian dialectics in German philosophy and thus an alternative to his profanization of the Hegel. In reading The Ego, Marx came to reject Feuerbachian humanism, of which he had previously thought highly, praising Feuerbach’s “brilliant arguments” in the Essence of Christianity and defending his “real humanism” in The Holy Family. Now revealed as a “pious atheist” by Stirner, Marx could not avoid denunciating Feuerbach, but equally had to avoid an association with the powerful Stirnerian position that had originally prompted the rejection.[71] The German Ideology was less an attack, but more as an angry defence against the theologically inspired and passivist humanism of Feuerbach and the extreme voluntarism and subjectivist individualism of Stirner.[72]

Marx’s familiarity with the aims of Left Hegelianism meant he agreed that the more progressive an idea was, the more it desecrated the quasi-religious status Hegel’s legacy. In The German Ideology Marx attempted to be more radical than both Bauer and Feuerbach in profaning the regions of Hegel’s thought which had been “transfigured”. However whilst Marx believed that, like Stirner, he could fight against illusions and opiates, against religion, political ideals and eventually against Hegelian philosophy itself, he still retained the hidden “eschatological attitude” and “implicit revolutionary drive” underlying Hegelianism in mid-1840s.[73] Unlike Marx, Stirner didn’t retain Hegel’s eschatology and regarded it as simply another “phantom” to be exorcised from the mind, one perhaps essential if Hegelian thought was to be overcome. Marx adhered to Hegel in so far as he chose not to abandon some form of philosophical reconciliation, though not of the speculative sort. For reconciliation to be attained in the materialtransformation of the real world, Marx would have to elaborate and expound one of his most controversial and debated theories: historical materialism.

Rather disingenuously the old Marx considered the birth of historical materialism as simply theoretical analysis eschewing from purely theoretical research.[74] Unfortunately there was no comprehensive or detached study of “socioeconomic realities” that came to support Marx’s theory in 1845; instead he was motivated by his desire to defend the “passion and idealism” emanating from the dissolution of Hegel’s philosophy against Stirner’s noxious philosophy of “total disillusionment”.[75] Stirner, as a minority of commentators have observed, played a decisive role in motivating Marx’s socialist thought in this direction. The subjective origins of the “materialistic conception of history” reflected Marx’s attempt to show that “the putrescence of the absolute spirit” must not go as far as it does in The Ego, yet it was perfectly acceptable to be a Hegelian of “revolutionary” inspiration. It seems paradoxical to think that historical materialism, Marx’s great epistemological “break”, could have emerged from the context described above. Stirner’s impact has been displaced. Regardless of the self-assured position Marx felt he had reached in The German Ideology with regard to the specific criticisms of Left Hegelians, the real gem of the work was clearly the materialist conception of history. For Marx, it provided an ingenious escape route from the all-too parochial problems of Left Hegelianism and German Idealist Philosophy, whilst it also served as a methodological prerequisite for a new political economy. In a letter to German publishers in Leske on August 1 1846, Marx pointed out that the publication of a polemical work against the German philosophers was necessary in order to “prepare readers for his point of view in this field of economic science”. The German Ideology should therefore be seen chiefly as a polemical work; one that Marx felt sure would lift him up and away from the ontological squabbling of the Left Hegelians towards economics, historical analysis and socialism.

For Marx, speculative philosophy had resulted in idealist self-deception epitomised in the work of the Left Hegelians. Marx frequently attacked the sterile and static nature of his milieu, stating “German critique has, right up to its latest efforts, never left the realm of philosophy”.[76] The movement’s ignorance of both of the need to specify an agent for revolutionary change and of the nature of social and historical explanation had meant their philosophy failed. Despite the decline of Left Hegelian humanism, Marx’s complaint was essentially methodological.[77] The Left Hegelians, like Descartes, thought that the illusions of social life could be left behind if one takes the standpoint of “self-consciousness”, “species” or the “ego”. For Marx, this was a truly insulated standpoint. However, Stirner too had attacked the Archimedean standpoint or standpoint “outside the world” in 1844: “This foreign standpoint is the world of mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences; it is heaven”.[78] In concordance with Marx, Stirner attacked the Left Hegelians with similar gusto, identifying the same weaknesses:

“Now nothing but mind rules in the world. An innumerable multitude of concepts buzz about in people’s heads, and what are those doing who endeavour to get further? They are negating these concepts to put new ones in their place! … Thus the confusion of concepts moves forward.”[79]

In recognising the force of Stirner’s criticism and the implications for Left Hegelian modes of thought, Marx had to be just as “hard-line” on idealism as Stirner had been. He had to adopt a position in which all ideas were divested of their independence and autonomy. For a moment at least, Marx was allied with Stirner’s heaven-storming nihilism, but only in order to escape it:

“Morality, religion, metaphysics … have no history, no development; but human beings, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their reality; also their thinking and the products of their thinking.”[80]

Marx’s response, that the “material world” takes primacy over the ideal, consciousness or thought itself, was not merely a major development in terms of his thinking, but was the “thermo-nuclear” antidote to Stirnerian egoism he desperately needed.[81]

Hegel had maintained that the ideal determined the material; Marx’s supposed modernism was finding the Hegelian dialectic “standing on its head” and turning it “right side up again”.[82] Quite what Marx means is not readily apparent. He inverted the primacy of the ideal found in German Idealist, Hegelian and post-Hegelian philosophy by replacing it with an older form of materialism. The materialist conception of consciousness can be summed up Marx’s famous axiom “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (1846). Marx’s paradigmatic shift invoked eighteenth-century materialism, which took matter as primary and regarded consciousness, thought and sensation as secondary. The French materialists of the eighteenth century provided Marx with the simple mechanical categories that constituted the terms in which the origin and history of man were to be explained. The “newness” of Marxian materialism, the idea of conceiving of matter dialectically, highlights Marx’s innate debt to Hegelian thought. Yet historical materialism was also a backwards step. Marx wanted to reassert the fundamental principle of eighteenth-century historical naturalism; that historical events have natural causes. Hegel had broken away from naturalism but had not demanded an autonomous history, “Marx went back on this demand and swept Hegel away; he subjected history to dominion by natural science which Hegel had freed it from”.[83] Thus Marx took a “retrograde step”, which was simultaneously also prelude to an advance in terms of political economy.[84] Despite cryptic statements such as “standing Hegel on his feet instead of his head”, Marx’s “conjuring trick” essentially took over the idea, inherited from both Kant and Hegel, in which history culminated in the complete unity of man, the identification of existence with essence and the abolition of contingency in human life. For Marx, humanity was not doomed to contingency, as Stirner maintained.[85]

As his response to Stirner suggests, Marx’s theory had no real scientific basis, and its genesis appears in a somewhat dubious light. Whilst it allowed Marx to condemn the present world order in terms of the immanent laws of history itself, as a solution it was both “ingenious and disingenuous”.[86] Stirner’s nihilism meant Marx had to defend the basic claim to seek meaning in an ideal, rather than giving up the whole conception of a salvation of man. Marx was of course keen to emphasise that he was not really pursuing an ideal at all; his presuppositions were “not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real presuppositions from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination”.[87] Marx saw them as empirical facts. Stirner, on the other hand claimed “I presuppose only myself – and since it is I who presuppose myself, I have no presuppositions”.[88] Marx painstakingly insists Stirner himself does have ideals and even his own morality. Yet, the materialistic reduction of ideals to historical necessities very closely resembles a Stirnerian abandoning of ideals; nihilism was inherent in both positions. How can Marx’s thought retain its revolutionary aspect if economic patterns and laws thoroughly determine man’s historical existence? Yet far from relinquishing his revolutionary ideals, Marx believed he had succeeded in preserving by integrating them into real history. This was the core of both Marx’s defence against Stirner and the essence of the materialistic conception of history: the ideals pursued by the Left Hegelians were declared to be the “immanent telos of history itself”.[89] The Left Hegelian revolutionary force became an immanent law of objective history. In other words, Marx turned an ought into an is.

It has not been properly acknowledged just how much The Ego is responsible for pushing Marx into this epistemological corner. By attempting to incorporate ideals into actual history, Marx went as far as it is possible to rationalise the Left Hegelian revolutionary drive without abandoning the “basic Left Hegelian insight”.[90] Marx had reached an impossible dilemma, one which has haunted his more intelligent disciples until today. As such, Marx could no longer encourage action as he now predicted change; history did not depend upon man’s conscious intentions; it depended on what humans do. This seems incompatible with Marx’s dismissal of ideals and represents the basic ambiguity of his thought, a blind spot which he left for Marxists to excuse or explain. The contradictory nature of Marx’s position reflected how “almost against his will” Marx was forced into dismissal by Stirner.[91] On the one hand we have Marx the determinist, who will later refer to laws and tendencies that work “with iron necessity towards inevitable results”,[92] on the other we have Marx the voluntarist, keen to incite the proletariat to rebellion. However, the materialist conception of history was, in itself, a change of consciousness, merely a new theory of reality and thus “recognition of the existing order by means of another interpretation”.[93] The real difference between Marx and the Left Hegelians was that instead of pretending to save the world by changing their ideas, Marx arrived at an idea that couldn’t be changed, a theory in which humanity saves itself, regardless of philosophical speculations.

Historical materialism was the result of an attempt to preserve the Left Hegelian humanist heritage in spite of Stirner’s challenge. Stirner’s exposure of quasi-religious basis of Man undermined the idiom developed by Marx in his pre-1845 writings. To escape the neo-Christian ethics of humanism it was not enough to simply discard the legitimacy of the humanist or socialist goal. In a totalitarian fashion, Marx divested all ideas of any “autonomous” role whatsoever. Many commentators have argued that the doctrine of historical materialism provided Marx with his most powerful weapon against idealist philosophy. It did not – despite how much Marx may have convinced himself – deal sufficiently with Stirnerian thought. Like Marx, Stirner’s project was destructive. The Ego sought to simply abolish philosophy in general by affirming that it was all nonsense, summed in Stirner’s famous aphorisms “I have set my cause upon nothing” and “Nothing is more to me than myself”.[94] Stirner’s modernity resides in this progressive leap beyond Marx, beyond a revolutionary mentality which required “moral postulates” or an ought. For Stirner, uniqueness and creativity begin only when a person goes beyond social identity and roles. He had shocked Marx into revising the ethical and humanistic assumptions of a socialist agenda. At the same time Stirner indirectly contributed to the creation and evolution of the distinctive and classical “Marxist” doctrines.

In short, The Ego moved Marx from a passionately moral, even sentimental, commitment to communism as a humanitarian creed, to a sociological affirmation of communism as the historical outcome of objective economic forces. During the mid-1840s Marx and Engels saw themselves at a decisive stage in working out the philosophical principles of scientific communism or “the scientific world outlook of the revolutionary proletariat”.[95] Marx must have been painfully aware, therefore, of the need to qualify his own action in theory. This crisis for Marx reached its height in 1845, when The German Ideologyindicated Marx’s final abandonment of the speculative abstractions of Feuerbach and others; the very abstractions which had served as the metaphysical foundations of his socialism. The unresolved nature of Marx’s uncomfortable encounter with Stirner is also evident in the development of the materialist conception of history. Historical materialism’s more inconvenient implications and thus the spectre of The Ego haunted Marx; burdening him with the “self-defeating task of reconciling a “voluntarist movement” in an “economically determined historical process”.[96]

By revealing “the hollowness of slogans which appealed to humanity, country, or abstract freedom…” Stirner had “prepared the way for a realistic analysis of the issues these phrases were used to conceal”.[97] Despite Stirner’s nascent influence on the thought of the young Marx, Marx came to dominate the historical era, his solution to the crises of Hegelian ontology emerged as legitimate, whilst the history and intentionality of Stirner’s thought were “excluded” in a Foucauldian sense. However, as I have demonstrated by studying of the genesis of historical materialism, the impact of The Ego on the evolution of socialist thought was far from negligible.
Chapter III: Stirner contra Marx: morality, society and liberty.

In many respects, Stirner’s work stands as an anticipatory attack on Marx’s thought. Modern critics of Marxism have frequently pointed out inadequacies in the Marxist conception of history, especially concerning what the theory had rendered obsolete in traditional philosophy. The Ego essentially anticipated these inadequacies. 1845 is judged to be the moment in Marx’s philosophical career where he “left behind” a fundamental discourse on ethics; one that Hook argues “still occupies us today”.[98] Marx’s new theory of historical materialism cut short a discussion about any systems of ethics or public morality. Many have recognised this negation in Marx’s work. For Marx, the crucial issue was the validity of his theory of history; he felt notions of morality and of religion had finally been eliminated from his work. However, the old assumption that “scientific socialism” was a scientific system has yielded to the notion that such a system of thought is in essence moralistic or even religious; what Martin Buber calls a “socialist secularisation of eschatology”.[99] If we accept this radical new perspective, as many do, then Stirner’s stance in The Ego emerges as more modern and radical than was previously considered. Stirner would no doubt have agreed that the materialist conception of history was eschatological; a religious mode of thought. Therefore, Stirner’s early, if somewhat undeveloped attack on morality, often disguised as ideology, assumes a vital position as the original critique of the young Marx.

In spite of the anti-moral nature of historical materialism and Marx’s explicit repudiations of morality, his early thought was packed with moral judgements, (e.g. condemnations, directions etc). Whether or not we see Marx as moralist is beside the point. Marx did not practice moral philosophy in the traditional sense of developing any form of system of ethics, or enquiry. Whilst criticising The Ego, Marx was inspired to claim:

“The communists … preach no morality, which Stirner does too much … on the contrary, they know well that egoism as well as self-sacrifice is, in certain circumstances, a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals.”[100]

The question of Marx’s status as a clandestine moralist who openly opposed moral philosophy remains a key contradiction, especially in his early thought. It represents a temporal rip in the fabric of Marxian thought that still plagues its acolytes today. Its origins, found in young Marx’s reading of The Ego, may further unsettle his adherents. If Marx needed inspiration, or even encouragement to abandon his more explicit moral leanings, then he needed to look no further than Stirner’s polemic. Stirner had refuted Left Hegelian humanism, especially targeting its innate moral content. He also attacked most forms of moral convention, challenging the absolute basis of moral edicts against polygamy, blasphemous desecration and even incest. Such acts were still able to cause a “moral shudder”[101] in the common man, an indication for Stirner that the actual emancipation of the ego, what others might call spiritual emancipation, had yet to be realised.

For Stirner, self-possession was to be sought by the judicious organisation of desire, rather than its arbitrary suppression. Taking his cue from Charles Fourier, Stirner lauded animal appetites as more healthy and poetic than a life of abstinence. Just as Feuerbachian humanism was seen as the negation of traditional theology, Stirnerian egoism was hailed the “negation of traditional ethics”.[102] Instead of Man creating God in his own image, Stirner taught that the individual ego had created Man in his own image. In The Essence of Christianity(1841) Feuerbach believed he was being truly radical by having dissolved the subject (God) into all of its predicates (Man); Stirner had simply demonstrated how far such dialectical sabotage could logically go, he chose to dissolve the predicate Society, into the individual pronouns – I, me, myself. The individual ego was Stirner’s “laughing heir” to the whole Hegelian project.[103] Stirnerian egoism was not conceived of as a new form of morality, rather it was opposed to morality. This is not to say egoism was inherently immoral; Stirner rejected the idea of absolute opposition between moral categories, “good” and “evil”, regarding them as “antediluvian”.[104]

Stirner’s claims of ethical antinomianism were deeply felt and taken seriously by Marx. The Ego encouraged him to dispel any ethical ideas from the new direction of his thought. Marx already regarded the Hegelian accounts of political, judicial and moral conceptions as critically wrong, but The Ego tipped the balance. If Marx’s moral or metaphysical scepticism stems from Stirner, then the potency of his criticism of the nihilism inherent in The Ego needs to be re-assessed. Marx used Stirner’s desecration of morality to justify his own thought, then proceeded to decry Stirnerian egoism as religious thought, as even “preaching” a morality. Classifying all idealistic philosophies as theodicies, a “surreptitious sort of clericalism”[105] that must be repudiated, was a result of the dogmatic materialist positions that Marx and Engels came to adopt. All idealists were by default religious thinkers, yet the materialistic basis of their thought did little to elucidate their position on moral teaching. The mystification surrounding Marx’s conception of morality finds its basis in his distortion of Stirner’s moral nihilism. Rather than offering an alternative moral theory for communism Marx had disregarded all morality in the pursuit of revolution and class struggle.

In truth, evacuating the moral content of his thought was something Marx only aspired to. Ultimately, Stirner had pushed Marx to a philosophical position where the moral content of his work now had to be implicit. Sidney Hook states “Marx leaned so far backward that, soon after his death, the myth became current that he had no place for any ethics in his philosophy of social activity”.[106] Marx’s reaction was a tactical manoeuvre, allowing him to preserve the silent moral content of his work. Karl Popper saw Marx as a man for whom “principles of humanity and decency … needed no discussion” they were “to be taken for granted”.[107] However, if Marx decided to adopt a personal notion of moral principles, why respond to Stirnerian egoism which was so obviously an aberration? It is difficult to believe that Marx simply avoided explicit moral theory because he disliked “preaching”, as Popper assumes. Marx’s real antipathy for moral philosophy was rooted in his actual thought. The very thought consolidated in The German Ideology as a result of reading The Ego.

Regardless of the problems Marx left unresolved, the crisis of 1845 had helped him finally realise the aim of his thought: to prove future world revolution. However, yet again another Marxian impossibility emerged; the problem of reconciling historical inevitability with an ethical model. Historical inevitability could hardly function as an inherent moral value for Marx.[108] The determinism of the materialist conception of history had necessitated an angry confrontation with Stirner. It also illuminated a displeasing characteristic of the young Marx, his inability to recognize any opposition to his revolution. Further, it showed that Marx underestimated the role of discontent in historical events, which Stirner and Hegel did not; they had allowed contingency an important role in the historical process. Crucially, unlike Marx, Stirner argued that the historical process had to be the work of human hands; history was never an abstraction that caused events. It was concrete, specific and human in all its forms. He also recognised that certain thinkers had hijacked history, and divested it of its autonomy:

“History seeks for man: but he is I, you, we. Sought as a mysterious essence, as the divine, first as God, then as man (humanity, humaneness, and mankind), he is found as the individual, the finite, the unique one.”[109]

Stirner saw that all kinds of politics wanted to educate man, to bring him to the realisation of his “essence”, to give man a “destiny” to make something out of him – namely, a “true man”.[110] This itself was a ruse, making thinkers fall for “the proper error of religion”.[111] Whether one saw destiny as divine or human was of no concern. Stirner found that both positions held that man should become this and that: this postulate, this commandment, to be something.

Incongruously, in his reading of The Ego Marx felt he could finally reject a system of morality and yet maintain moral positions. He was extremely anxious about the fact that his description of socialism could become tainted by abstract moral ideals, ideals which Stirner had shown to be transcendent. However, it was Stirner who had equipped Marx with the very tools to wage a methodological campaign against Feuerbach’s quasi-religious conception of “Man”, enabling him to reject an “ethics of love” or a “politics of socialism” through his analysis of the social nature of man. Such a solution would have been implausible to Stirner. To many, the religious essence of historical materialism was “superficially obscured by Marx’s rejection of the traditional religions”.[112] However, Stirner had already identified such religious essence in Marx’s pre-1845 intellectual allies. His criticisms of Feuerbach were equally applicable to the young Marx who had stated: “The criticism of religion ends with the precept that the supreme being for man is man”.[113] In the same way Stirner observed the religious essence of Left Hegelian humanism and early socialism, Marx too stands accused, his atheism was still a categorically religious proposition.[114] Thus, Stirner’s original accusation of the “pious” atheism of the Left Hegelians is particularly compelling when applied to the thought of young Marx.[115]

It is probable that Stirner would have seen the young Marx as a kind of post-theological moralist attempting to solve problem of original sin and ethical commitment through the redemptive power of human “History”. The picture that Marx paints of capitalists and the bourgeois as manifestations of evil, and his dismissal of the individual’s responsibility for their own misery would surely be seen as the personification of “clericalism”. Stirnerian critique would no doubt pronounce Marx a vulgar moralist, subordinating the individual to the new God, “History”. Now that history itself was moralised, the profound Hegelian awareness of history as amoral was lost.

Like morality, Stirner regarded society as an equally fictive notion, and saw that moral obligation was presumably derived from the social nature of man. Stirner observed that man’s social dimension was merely an alternative type of religious and moral ideology. His hostility to “sacred society” abounds in The Ego; it was the arena in which “the most oppressive evils make themselves felt”,[116] its domination was more brutal and insensitive than any previous despotism. Not only was Stirner’s notion of state antithetical to Marxism, but by utterly rejecting the constructions of idealist philosophers he could only discover consciousness inside the mind; not in some trans-empirical ego or the Marxian “social being”. For Stirner, emphasis upon the social nature of the mind, the evaluation of all ideas in relation to the social whole (or state), represented a menace to individual freedom and to the autonomy of the individual. He considered social duties as purely self-legislated. Our relationship to society was seen as one mediated by the ego. Whilst society may pattern self-realisation and define the egoist’s rebellion, its formative influence fades in favour of the individual until “society” itself is entirely displaced. For Marx, however, the “atomism” of civil society was offensive – and had to be transcended: Stirner had failed to root his ideas in the social process, hence the arbitrary nature of his ideology. However, Stirner implied that certain ideas are not merely reflections of their social environment and can remain outside the appraisal that they are socially conditioned by. For Stirner these were the figurative orderings of experiences, the result of the irreducible egocentric nature of the individual; self-reflection mediated by personal drives and private needs.

Marx’s communist vision would still require the individual to conform to a pattern of behaviour, though not through traditional morals, but through collective obligation. Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach and Proudhon had already shown that socialist morality was full of superstitions, just as much as the Apostles’ creed. Julius’ article in the second volume of Wigands Vierteljahrschrift (1845) attacked the essentially Feuerbachian character of Marx’s “practical humanism”, which Julius considered “religious alienation” – clearly inspired by Stirner’s perception of socialism.[117] Stirner’s criticisms anticipate much later accusations, especially from contemporary existentialists, against Marxism: “Society … is a new master, a new spook, a new “supreme being” which takes us into its service and allegiance”.[118] If society held the individual back from achieving autonomy then communism was its most severe form of suppression. In criticising Weitling’s communism, Stirner stated that the Communists sought the welfare of all, “true welfare”, which would eventually degenerate into fixity.[119] Stirner regarded communism as the “strictest” or most dogmatic paradigm based on the idea of “Man”. It was a sovereign power exalting itself over men, becoming their supreme essence, a new god. “Do we not with this come right to the point where religion begins its dominion of violence?” Stirner argued.[120] The philosophy of community was enshrined in the old Feuerbachian problem: separation from human essence. Essence was set above individuals as something to be striven for, and Stirner argued that both “Communism, and, consciously egoism-reviling humanism, still count on love”.[121] The socialist stipulation that individuals must work to become truly human simply reproduced the religious division of individuals into “an essential and unessential self”.[122] Here, Stirner refers to an obscure article by a contemporary – the young Karl Marx. The dualism that supported social liberalism in all of its various guises could not be tolerated and was brashly dismissed by Stirner: “we will hear nothing of this cutting in two”.[123]

Marx misread The Ego, regarding Stirner as an ideologue embroiled in the malicious circle of critical diatribe which had crippled Left Hegelian philosophy. Stirner, however, consciously refused to uphold egoism as a set of ideas or principles.

“Owness includes in itself everything own, and brings to honour again what Christian language dishonoured. But owness has not any alien standard either, as it is not in any sense an idea like freedom, morality, humanity and the like: it is only a description of the – owner.”[124]

Stirner desired above all to break free of the conceptual quagmire of the 1840s where to postulate revolution was the trend. Stirner’s critique of morality and society had shook the young Marx, forcing him to abandon notions of “species”, “man” and “estrangement” that had previously been assigned crucial roles in his earlier thought, but Stirner’s attack on the whole host ofisms went deeper still. If Marx’s repudiation of The Ego necessitated expunging the questions of ethical meaning from his thought, then the issues of individual fulfilment and emancipation – the very nucleus of Stirner’s thought – would also have to be negated.

Freedom for Stirner was always freedom from some thing or other. Human freedom was better interpreted as “freedom to action”; Stirner logically concluded “my freedom becomes complete only when my – might”.[125] Neither is freedom something to be given, it must be taken and defended: “If you took might, freedom would come of itself”.[126] Ideologues of political liberty were more dangerous, in Stirner’s mind, than even religious or philosophical thinkers. The idea of a society based upon a single principle (e.g. Communism) was simply an obligation putting man at the service of the state: “Liberty of the people is not myliberty!”.[127] Stirner saw that modern socialism, especially the kind espoused by Proudhon, interposed a new “principle” between the individual and the property of all, the socialist notion of “social justice”, a concept just as potentially oppressive as the religious notion of “divine grace”. Both socialism and communism left the individual’s mind unchanged; it was still “a mind of dependence”.[128] Communism was a backward step, a “dependence on another … on the generality or collectivity”, a “status, a condition hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me”.[129]

Marx’s new form of “social justice” was founded on the notion of labour, compulsory work done in the service of society. For Stirner, the division of labour, with all its subdivisions, was simply a conceptual apparatus directed against the individual. This of course led to alienated labour, which Marx too would later claim to resolve. Stirner argued that for the individual to negotiate so many forms of alienation in the world he simply had to “expropriate” his property, his creative strength and activity, to enable him to rely peacefully on himself again. Like Hegel, true concrete individuality (Einzelheit) was a return from alienation. Stirner’s notion of the Einzige, the “Ego”, more helpfully translated as “The Unique One” clarifies his whole project. “The Unique One” is man in his irreducible uniqueness, thus egoism is the final definition of the human “essence”, not the subject of an ethical category, but an uncomplicated existential fact. If one could perceive this, all conceivable forms of alienation, conscious or unconscious, would be impossible. Eigentum (Own-ness or Property) did not mean a seizure of some moral content, but a man’s identity with his manifestations, above all, with his individual existence. The notion has Hegelian heritage: In Philosophy of Right the immediate manifestation of right (liberty) was the possession by man of his body and his bodily functions (work). Stirner took his position from the minor degree of liberty advocated by Hegel. But the idea of liberty, like so many concepts for Stirner, had been set up as a new absolute, that man should be free. Stirner declared such a concept was nothing more than “… a new longing, a new torment, a new deviation, a new deity, a new contrition … ”.[130]

Stirner’s opposition to the dogmatic ideologues clearly engaged the thought of the young Marx. However, their two antithetical worlds – the concrete direct experience of The Ego and the world of universal labour outlined in The German Ideology – would never be reconciled. Marx, as ever the disciple rather than the usurper of Hegelian thought, had still sought some kind of accord. In attempting reconciliation, Marx decided to put forward the doctrine of individual consciousness mediated by social consciousness. The real question was to what extent social ties necessarily determined individual consciousness. Marx could not give a definitive answer. Such ambiguity lends support for Stirner; for if consciousness was completely determined by society then nothing was to be done, and an upheaval in the minds of men was therefore not possible. Stirner allowed individual consciousness to retain some autonomy, epitomised in the individual ego.

Marx could not perceive of any form such “oppositionist consciousness”[131] that characterised Stirner’s position and surely must arise if credence is given to ideas that intend to transform political reality. Both Stirner and Bauer held that recognition of dissent or “oppositionist consciousness” was essential to their project: the merciless use of the principles of criticism, the principle of the dialectic that would destroy the empty forms founded on dualism.[132] For Marx, criticism or thought alone was not enough. Thought was the acknowledged servant of human needs, and desired that philosophy (generalised thought) become an instrument in changing the world. There was no “oppositionist consciousness”; only moments of opposition that were inevitably transformed into successive phases of development in the historical process. Marx’s notion of social consciousness allowed him to transcend Stirner’s individualism and as well as the abstract morality of French materialism, and modify their historical conceptions with the notion of a dynamic, propelling movement in nature and human thinking – the dialectic.

Stirner saw man as progressing through stages of conflict and alienation. He understood as Hegel had, that freedom in contemporary society was explainable in terms of an individual’s orientation to a set of moral postulates and social practices. Whilst opposing Hegel, Stirner ironically posed a truly Hegelian problem: Could the “negativity” inherent in Hegel’s process of change, the dialectic, ever be halted for any possible ideological reasons? Both Stirner and Marx laid claim to the Hegelian dialectic, and both claimed they were demystifying its nature. Yet Marx’s “fundamental difficulty vis-à-vis Stirner” was the question of “how will man be once he is free of alienation?”.[133] Stirner refused to observe that the ideological process required an intermediate stage; a “total alienation” of consciousness. For Marx, this stage was to be found in the proletarian classes and necessitated revolution. Stirner’s reality was the world of his immediate experience; he wanted power straight away, not after some remote and hypothetical “proletarian revolution”.

Despite Marx’s own revolutionary tactics and tendencies of the future he saw displayed in his own age, historical materialism meant he lacked a doctrine for the immediate present – least of all for those whose existence was resigned to the limits of the capitalism’s grasp and economic process. On the other hand, for dissenting members of society who had yet to become socialist and look forward to the dawn of a “new order”, Stirnerian egoism provided an alternative protest: disobedience, radical questioning, active resistance and bodily enjoyment. Most importantly, it aimed at the deconstruction of linguistic “spooks”, fixed ideas which ruled the real world. For Marx, Stirner’s radical resistance did not engage the working class and was dismissed as a “petty bourgeois essence”. It is ironic that Marx considered Stirner as a quintessential wallflower of history, epitomising a shopkeeper’s egoism. Stirner considered himself as going beyond dissent, conjuring a picture of insurrection, rather than the polarised image of society that engendered a new, Communistic change of masters: a new religion of society. Stirner saw it as deceptive that the Enlightenment had simply amounted to transferring the balance of religion to humanism in its various bogus guises. Out of this last divisive stage of Hegelianism, Stirner saw no reason for the dialectic to be subsumed in history. Unlike Marx, he laid claim to its destructive force in the battle against alienating concepts:

“… why should I only dissent (think otherwise) about a thing? Why not push the thinking otherwise to its last extremity, that of no longer having any regard at all for the thing, and therefore thinking its nothingness, crushing it? Then the conception itself has en end, because there is no longer anything to conceive of it.”[134]

Now it is possible to understand how Stirner would seen have the “historical dialectic” as the “Will of God” reiterated in pseudo-secular terms, and that Marx, in true theological fashion, attempted to mask the causal efficacy given to ideological abstractions as “empirical” forces. Stirner’s position was clearly nihilistic, but by attacking the very idea of European Enlightenment in the nineteenth-century he had called into question much more than its socialist doctrines, and insisted that we lose all of our ideological props.
Conclusion: The divergent perspectives of “intimate” enemies: Marxian history and Stirnerian egoism.

Marx’s critique of Stirner in The German Ideology was a means of distinguishing himself from what was, in his eyes, the impotent Left Hegelian movement. For Marx, alienation was no longer a spiritual phenomenon, but the objective forms of man’s economic products, the separation of man from his production. Nevertheless, Marx’s position can be interpreted as a relapse into Left Hegelianism: He urged a change of consciousness in order to observe the correctness of a new standpoint; the communistBetrachtungsweise (mode of view). Instead of the standpoint from which consciousness is taken as the living individual, Marx wanted to highlight the rational superiority of his new position adopted in 1844 i.e. that consciousness was a “social product”. More generally, Marx wanted to establish that labour was our fundamental human relation to the world and must be regarded as the “celebrated unity of the human being and nature”.[135] In line with his attempt to leave behind “philosophy” as he saw it, Marx refused to treat this as a metaphysical question to be answered by the creation of a metaphysical premise.

Stirner, as opposed to Marx and many others, saw no prescriptive or essential elements in human nature. He had acquiesced “I am a man just as the earth is a star”.[136] Neither would Stirner fall into the trap of picturing a future for man, since it would entail constructing another external ideal:

“People have always supposed that they must give me a destiny lying outside myself, so that at last they demanded that I should lay claim to the human because I am – man. This is the Christian magic circle.”[137]

Stirner’s greatest fear was the “transcendent alternatives” that those philosophically closest to him were creating: the state, humanity, politics and the newest “spook” offered by the socialists: society. Like all Left Hegelians, Stirner knew that he was experiencing the initial stages of the apocalypse that would replace the old Christian world with philosophical humanism. This fear is reflected in the “dynamic titanism” of his own ego which became its own sort of absolute.[138] Dispossessed by academic and political circumstances of any real power in shaping humanity and its institutions, the Left Hegelians, particularly Stirner, had to satisfy themselves with the role of subjective critics.[139] Social or political action, vindicated by the younger generation of Hegelians (especially Marx and Engels), was held in contempt. Stirner’s inherent social atomism was evidently incompatible with the idea Marx shared with the Utopian French socialists: the desire for a truly “human” society.

If we regard Hegel as the last of the contemplative philosophers who possessed the “secret of contemplation”, post-Hegelian philosophy becomes what one commentator has called a “lost paradise”.[140] Stirner reverted to the acquiescent attitude of a self-effacing mortal who must find his entire fulfilment in his own life. Marx, to counter what he perceived as Stirner’s and Hegel’s quietism, developed a universal theory of action where contemplation was replaced by intolerance of those who seek out a better state of things. Marx’s answer was a form of materialistic fatalism that operated through economic laws. Stirner had forced not so much an Althusserian “epistemological break” in the young Marx’s thought, but had required him to retreat from a normative conception of human nature. Marx’s historical ontology meant either equating good with what happens or denying that there is any good: The outcome was either way a form of nihilism. Whilst apparently repudiating Stirner’s nihilistic egoism, Marx incorporated this nihilism into his theory of history. For if man creates himself in history, then there is no human essence from which he can be alienated. Therefore Marx cannot justifiably assert the pre-eminence of communist society. The incoherence of Marx’s philosophical anthropology was as much a result of his intense encounter with Stirner as well as with non-German philosophical concepts that had entered his work. In the mid-eighteen forties Marx and Engels absorbed French ideas into the Hegelian metaphysic. The French experience as well as that of the wider industrial world – such as the advanced industrialisation of Victorian England – dictated that the social question of industrial change and labour emerged as the most significant of their age.[141]

Occupying another world, isolated and thoroughly bourgeois, the “Berlin Buddhists” remained indifferent to these apparently epochal changes. Only in Germany, where intellectuals inhabited an eccentric world of blithe fantasy, would Marx’s reading of the “social question” not be explicable. For Marx, German theoretical engagement with political forms had consequently assumed a more abstract form than prevalent elsewhere.[142] Nonetheless this context affords Stirner the unique position of a disenfranchised academic dissenter, a point of disinterestedness between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Stirner occupied a disoriented historical moment, one before the experience of capitalism and industry had been filtered through the paradigmatic Marxian idioms. Moreover, Stirner did attempt to tackle the social phenomenon of “pauperism” (the progressive impoverishment of the lower social strata) which has been identified as the “dominant” social issue of “pre-March” period.[143] Unlike the social problems that Marx identified, pauperism was not a direct result of capitalism or even of rapid industrialization, but a problem of demographic growth and was a singularly (ignoring Berlin) rural phenomenon. Pauperism differed much from traditional poverty. It was collective and structural rather than determined by individual contingencies. Stirner recognized this social phenomenon and discussed it at length in The Ego.[144] He was not failing to grasp the true “social question” as Marx makes out; instead he was analyzing his own reality: the parochial, yet unique, pre-Industrial phase of German history – what Eric Hobsbawn called “the last, and perhaps worst, economic breakdown of the ancien régime”.[145]

Stirner, along with the other Left Hegelians, saw himself as exclusively concerned with the historical transition from religion to philosophy, the fall-out of Hegelian thought. Marx, on the other hand, had already proposed to disentangle himself from what he called “philosophy” through his theory of history. It is therefore little wonder that these two thinkers clashed theoretically, and that the specific ontological debates would be forgotten. In a crossed sentence from The German Ideology Marx confessed “We know only a single science, the science of history”.[146] Marx’s conception of history meant every profound philosophical problem would resolve itself as an empirical fact, and thus Marx felt free to abandon the metaphysical conception of essence that had been central to his thought up to 1845. With the division of labour, one’s orientation to the world was a less important concern. By rejecting this significant component of his conception of human nature, Marx struggled to avoid his philosophical obligations. The German Ideology was an attempt to avoid having to defend one’s standpoint philosophically, to escape the Hegelian prerequisite to occupy a supposedly epistemologically privileged position.

For all the progression that Marxists like to attribute to it, The German Ideologywas also a reductive exercise. Marx and Engels swept aside certain issues (ethics, individuality, consciousness) which they longer wanted on their “erstwhile philosophical conscience”. The Ego had conditioned Marx’s ontological response to Left Hegelian humanism. As we have already seen, The Ego was not only a catalyst in Marx’s adoption of the philosophical method of historical materialism, but also stood as an anticipatory critique of its emergent form. Stirner had forced Marx to break with Left Hegelian modes of thought, fracturing the epistemology and materialism Marx had developed in Theses on Feuerbach and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In doing this, he forced Marx to fundamentally reappraise his position on the role of human nature in relation to his social criticism.

As a theoretical conclusion to the criticism of religion, the “materialist conception of history” was an ambiguous explanation. Rather than settlingMarx’s conscience, The German Ideology emphatically displayed it as a badconscience. For many, Marx’s anger seems disproportionate to the threat posed by Stirner, yet a closer analysis has revealed just how much was at stake in their encounter. Marx chose to make Stirner into a scapegoat, an opportune external object onto which to project the unresolved inner conflict of his early thought. The garrulous “Sankt Max” was the work of an intellect under threat. Derrida recognised this:

“My feeling … is that Marx scares himself, he himself pursues relentlessly someone who almost resembles him to the point that we could mistake one for the other: a brother, a double, thus a diabolical image. A kind of ghost of himself.”[147]

Parallels between the two thinkers are often neglected. However, as we have seen, Marx and Stirner shared much in terms of philosophical language and theoretical goals. Regardless of the claims about Marxian humanism, Stirnerian egoism was just as much the “true” heir to German Idealist Philosophy. Stirner had realised the fundamental nihilistic element present in secularised Hegelianism and – through dialectics – fearlessly drawn the consequence that “everything is permitted”.[148] Or as Giles Deleuze more boldly claimed, “Stirner is the dialectician who reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic”.[149] Stirnerian nihilistic egoism, not Marxian humanism, certainly seems more consistent with an overthrow of suprahistorical values. The sovereignty of the ego and the exercise of self-assertion are the more spontaneous consequences of the “death of God” and transcendent norms, as opposed to a philosophy of community.

Marxists who see Marx and Engels’ socialism eschewing naturally from Left Hegelian humanism remain blinded by the alternative, highly inaccurate, account of their early thought which both men later developed. The Ego remains a unique and powerful attack on Marxism as well as all forms of socialism; Stirner highlighted the contradictions and problems inherent any form of socialist or communist society. Yet ironically for Max Stirner, the force of The Ego pushed Marx to embrace the totalising perspective of an essential communism, nascent in The German Ideology, rather than devalue the future of socialist thought which it had, in part, helped create. With the advent of Marxism, Stirner’s work was displaced in intellectual history. If Stirner is to undergo rehabilitation as a thinker, it is important that this must not revolve solely around Marx’s “leading role”, or in assigning debt to Stirner where it is due. Future scholarship must attempt to escape his status as the “too much intimate enemy” of Marx.[150]

In conclusion, Stirner’s answer to problems of the Hegelian dialectic was to rewrite in existential terms as the historico-cultural narrative of the self-actualisation of the spirit. His book described the liberated, self-expressive, contingent, existing individual as the “laughing heir”[151] of a dialectical development from immediacy through self-division, to self-conscious freedom and transparency. In The Ego, the Hegelian description of redemption found an existential form in “living oneself out”.[152] Stirner set his existential perspectives against the essentialism of Marx and others. Marx’s The German Ideology was an attempt to wrench socialism from its utopian yearnings and transform it philosophically into an empirical science. In doing so, Marx escaped the Hegelian conception of “consciousness” by turning consciousness into a by-product, socially determined. These two terminal and antithetical standpoints occupied by Stirner and Marx in 1845 have allowed fragments of the Hegelian project to continue to shape and frame the Marxist/Existentialist debate of the last and present century.
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[1] The Ego and Its Own (Leipzig, 1845). This work appeared in December of 1844, and press copies were available even earlier, as Moses Hess had read and forwarded his copy to Fredrich Engels no later than early November of 1844. I will use David Leopold revised version of “The Ego and His Own” (Cambridge 1995) based on Steven Byington’s original translation. This edition will hereafter be referred to as The Ego.

[2] Patterson (1971): 102.

[3] Hence Bauer’s later characterisation of the group as Berlin’s “beer literati”.

[4] Patterson (1971): 8.

[5] On Die Freien see: Patterson (1971) : 67–93; and Gustav Mayer, “Die Anfange des politischen Radikalismus im vormarzlichen Preussen,” in Zeitschrift für Politik. (1913) 6: 45–72.

[6] Quoted in Henri Arvon (1954) : 14.

[7] First usage: Engels to Marx, 19th November 1844 in MECW, 38: 11.

[8] See Hess’ “The Recent Philosophers” in Stepelevich (1983).

[9] Cited by McLellan (1969): 130.

[10] McLellan (1969): 130.

[11] Engels to Marx, 19th November 1844, MECW, 38: 13.

[12] Parker, S.E, “Introduction” The Ego and Its Own (1982).

[13] Patterson (1971) : 98.

[14] Stepelevich (1983): 14.

[15] Stepelevich (1983): 14.

[16] Stepelevich (1983): 14.

[17] Stepelevich (1983): 14.

[18] Cited by Stepelevich (1974) : 323.

[19] Engels to Marx, 19th November 1844 in MECW, 38 : 11.

[20] The German Ideology in MECW (1976) 5 : 19–539.

[21] Marx Selected Writings ed. D. McLellan (2000) : 177.

[22] McLellan (2000) : 177.

[23] Engels, F. “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy” in MECW, vol. 26.

[24] Patterson (1971) : 105.

[25] Avron (1954) : 149.

[26] Mackay (1898).

[27] Löwith (1967) : 187.

[28] Quoted in Basch, L’individualisme anarchiste: Max Stirner : ii-iii.

[29] Woodcock, Anarchism, ch. 4. cited by Patterson (1971) : 126–127.

[30] Avron (1954) cited by Patterson (1971) : 127.

[31] Helms (1968).

[32] Griffin, R. “Between metapolitics and apoliteia: the New Right’s strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the “interregnum”, Modern and Contemporary France 8 : 2 (2000).

[33] Hook (1962): 165.

[34] Berlin (2000) : 143.

[35] Avron (1954).

[36] Toews (1985) : 368.

[37] Toews (1985) : 369.

[38] Toews (1985) : 369.

[39] Toews (1985) : 369.

[40] Stepelevich (1974) : 325.

[41] Laska, Bernd A. LSR Publishing House, Nuremberg.

[42] Newman (2001) : 9.

[43] Stepelevich (1974) : 328.

[44] Derrida (1994 ) : 99.

[45] Huneker (1909) : 350.

[46] Clark (1997) : 38.

[47] Patterson (1971): 22.

[48] Patterson (1971): 33.

[49] Patterson (1971): 33.

[50] Mackay (1914) : 235.

[51] Stirner, The False Principle of Our Education Or Humanism And Realismfirst published in the supplements to four numbers of the Rheinische Zeitungbetween the 10th and l9th of April, 1842 edited by James J. Martin (Colorado Springs 1967).

[52] Stirner, The False Principle of Our Education from ▻http://www.nonserviam.com/egoistarchive/stirner/articles/false.html

[53] Toews (1993) : 378.

[54] Toews (1993) : 391.

[55] Toews (1993) : 393.

[56] Bauer, B. Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig, 1841) : 77, 70.

[57] Feuerbach, (1957) : 75.

[58] Toews (1993) : 400.

[59] Stirner (1995) : 140.

[60] Stirner (1995) : 204.

[61] Patterson (1971) : 20.

[62] Lobkowicz (1969) : 85.

[63] Patterson (1971) : 20.

[64] Stepelevich (1985) : 601.

[65] Löwith (1967) : 102.

[66] McLellan (1969) : 119 cited by Stepelevich (1985).

[67] Toews (1985) : 604.

[68] Marx (1976) : 23.

[69] Marx (1976) : 27.

[70] Marx (1976) : 24.

[71] Stirner (1995) : 166

[72] Lobkowicz (1967) : 394.

[73] Lobkowicz (1967) : 395.

[74] Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, MECW, 8 : 362.

[75] Lobkowicz (1967) : 397.

[76] Marx (1976) : 28.

[77] Brudney (1998) : 272.

[78] Stirner (1995) : 64–5

[79] Stirner (1995) : 88

[80] Marx (1976) : 36–37.

[81] Stedman-Jones (2002) : 144.

[82] Marx (1972–73) 1 : 19, 20.

[83] Collingwood (1956) : 125.

[84] Collingwood (1956) : 125.

[85] Kolakowski (1978) 2 : 403.

[86] Stedman-Jones (2002): 145.

[87] Marx (1976): 31.

[88] Cf. Stirner’s anonymously published article, “Recensenten Stirners” in Wigands Vierteljahrsschrift 3 (1845) 183. Cf. MECWvol 3. cf. 248.

[89] Lobkowicz (1978) : 412.

[90] Lobkowicz (1978) : 415.

[91] Lobkowicz (1967) : 413.

[92] Marx (1972–73) 2 : 863.

[93] Lobkowicz (1967) : 413.

[94] Stirner (1995) : 5, 7.

[95] Preface to The German Ideology, Lev Churbanov, Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Marx, K, The German Ideology, MECW 5 : xiii.

[96] Stedman-Jones (2002) : 146.

[97] Hook (1962): ch.5, sec. II, I (a).

[98] Hook (1962) : 165.

[99] Buber (1949) : 10.

[100] Marx (1976) : 247.

[101] Stirner (1995) : 45.

[102] Hook (1962) : 171–172.

[103] Stirner (1995) : 286.

[104] Stirner (1995) : 317.

[105] Hook (1928) : 121.

[106] Hook (1962) : 51

[107] Popper (2002) : 187–8

[108] Tucker (1972) : 22.

[109] Stirner (1995) : 217.

[110] Stirner (1995) : 215.

[111] Stirner (1995) : 215.

[112] Tucker (1972) : 22.

[113] 1844, cited by Tucker (1972).

[114] Tucker (1972) : 22.

[115] However, Tucker like so many others, misses the importance of The Ego. Stirner not only voiced essentially moderncriticisms of communist ideology, but he did so long before Marx’s thought was formally consolidated in The Communist Manifesto.

[116] Stirner (1995) : 106.

[117] Arnold Ruge’s thought was influenced in the same way, and expressed his admiration in his work entitled Our Last Ten Years.

[118] Stirner (1995) : 131.

[119] Stirner (1995) : 271.

[120] Stirner (1995) : 273.

[121] Stirner (1995) : 274.

[122] Stirner (1995) : 34.

[123] Stirner (1995) : 32.

[124] Stirner (1995) : 154.

[125] Stirner (1995) : 151.

[126] Stirner (1995) : 151.

[127] Stirner (1995) : 190.

[128] Stirner (1995) : 228.

[129] Stirner (1995) : 228.

[130] Stirner (1995) : 216.

[131] Hook (1967 ): 176.

[132] Brazill (1970) : 177–225.

[133] Hook (1962): 227.

[134] Stirner (1995) : 299.

[135] Brudney (1998) : 287

[136] Brudney (1998) : 163.

[137] Brudney (1998) : 318.

[138] Brazill (1970) : 224.

[139] Brudney (1998) : 224.

[140] Stern (2002).

[141] Brazill (1970) : 271.

[142] Marx (1976) : 489, 493

[143] Clark (1997) : 53.

[144] Stirner (1995) : 224–227.

[145] Cited by Clark (1997) : 53.

[146] Marx (1976) : 28.

[147] Derrida (1994) : 139–140.

[148] Myers (1976) : 193.

[149] Deleuze (1985) : 161.

[150] Calasso, R. “Accompagnamento alla lettura di Stirner”, in Max Stirner, L’Unico e la sua proprietà, Adelphi, (Milan 1999), 412.

[151] Stirner (1995) : 286.

[152] Stirner (1995) : 293, 294.

#Berlin #philosophie #poésie #marxisme #existentialisme #anarchisme #Hegel

Stirner, Feurbach, Marx and the Young Hegelians - David McLellan
►https://libcom.org/article/stirner-feurbach-marx-and-young-hegelians-david-mclellan

Source; originally a chapter in The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx; David McLellan, MacMillan Press, UK, 1980.

Citation en franglais :

Seht Stirner, seht ihn, den bedächt’gen Schrankenhasser,
Für jetzt noch trinkt er Bier, bald trinkt er Blut wie Wasser.
So wie die andern schrein ihr wild: à bas les rois!
Ergänzet Stirner gleich: à bas aussi les lois!

A propos de Friedrich Engels: Der Triumph des Glaubens, ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/1152206

MAX STIRNER

1. STIRNER’S LIFE AND WORKS

MAX STIRNER - whose real name was Kaspar Schmidt - was an only son of Protestant parents, his father being a Bayreuth flutemaker who earned a comfortable living. He died, however, two years after Stirner was born in 1806, his wife remarried a dentist and the family moved to west Prussia. When Stirner was aged twelve he was sent back to Bayreuth and lived there for the next six years while attending the grammar schoool. He went to the University of Berlin at the age of twenty and entered the philosophical faculty where he attended, among others, the lectures of Hegel. He stayed there two years, spent the next year at the University of Erlangen and then interrupted his studies to stay at home for some time, possibly owing to the incipient madness of his mother.

By 1832 he was back at the University of Berlin, but two years later he only obtained a limited facultas docendi and, when after further studies he failed to get a post in a state school, Stirner started teaching in a private girls’ school where he remained until he gave up the job in 1844 just before the publication of his book.

In 1837 Stirner had married the niece of his landlady, but she died a year later in childbirth, and in 1843 Stirner married again, this time Marie Dahnhardt to whom he dedicated Der Einzige. She was comparatively wealthy, but the money was lost when the creamery that Stirner had bought with it in 1845 failed the year after, and she left him the same year. Stirner worked as a hack translator of Jean Baptiste Say and Adam Smith, but he was twice imprisoned for debt and died destitute in 1856.

Stirner is a man of a single book, Der Einzige and sein Eigentum, and the whole of Stirner’s productive period is contained in the years 1842-4. Being a teacher and not immediately connected with the university Stirner did not come into contact with the Young Hegelians until quite late. What inspired him to his brief spell of creation was the group of young radical intellectuals formed in Berlin after Bruno Bauer’s dismissal from his post and known as the Freien. They used to meet almost nightly in a wineshop belonging to a certain Hippel, and Engels in his comic poem Der Triumph des Glaubens gives this description of Stirner as he appeared at these gatherings :

’For the time being he is still drinking beer,
Soon he will drink blood as if it were water;
As soon as the rest cry savagely “Down with kings!”
Stirner immediately goes the whole hog: “Down with laws too!”’

Stirner cannot have joined the group before the end of 1841 as this was the time that Marx, who apparently never met Stirner, left Berlin. During this period Stirner wrote several short articles for newspapers, among which a very laudatory review of Bruno Bauer’s Posaune, and also two longer articles published in the supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung, one on education as the development of the self and the second, in which the influence of Feuerbach is evident, on the very Hegelian subject of the relation between art and religion. Stirner also published two articles a little later in the Berliner Monatsschrift, a review edited by one of the Freien, the first rejecting any ideas of the state, while in the second, a commentary of Eugene Sue’s popular novel Les Mysteres de Paris, Stirner elevates the self at the expense of any fixed moral norms.

Stirner spent most of 1843 writing Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. It was finished by April 1844 and published in November of that year. For all its apparent eccentricities the book is very obviously a product of its time and of the Young Hegelian movement in particular. The form of the book, dialectical and divided into triads, is Hegelian, as is also the careful attention paid to language and the roots of words. Inside the Young Hegelian movement itself, Stirner carried to an extreme their rejection of anything religious and their opposition to any ’system’. The familiar accusation of still thinking in a ’theological’ manner, that is in an abstract manner which still left some ideas or principles outside, and in some way opposed to, the minds of men, and the accusation of lack of consequence and perseverance in drawing the full conclusion from premises both reach their culmination in Stirner who sees all his fellow-thinkers as spiritual' and religious’ as compared to himself.

Stirner can thus be seen as the last of the Hegelians, last perhaps because he was the most logical, not attempting to replace Hegel’s conerete universal' by any humanity’ or `classless’ society since he had no universal, only the individual, all-powerful ego. Stirner took Hegel’s views as his basis and then worked out his own philosophy by criticising everything that was positive in Hegel’s critics, Bauer, Feuerbach and Marx - whose criticisms, according to Stirner, were never pushed far enough. Hegelianism was thus at an end : Stirner only used the form not the content of the Hegelian system and, like all the Young Hegelians, was most fascinated by the dialectic. But even this was only an outer shell, for Stirner was very weak on history as he had no room to allow for a historical development whether of the world spirit, selfconsciousness or the class struggle. Stirner was indeed a solipsist and a nihilist but, for all his criticism of Feuerbach, he was still influenced by his naturalistic viewpoint. For Stirner’s individualism left no room for any sort of morality, which had been on the side of freedom in Hegel. Since the ethical sphere was left empty it is not surprising that Stirner sometimes lapsed into a Feuerbachian naturalism based on natural values and needs.

Stirner’s book is a difficult one because there is no rectilinear development and it often presents the appearance of notes taken at random and put down with no attempt at co-ordination. For example, at the beginning of the book we are offered two entirely different schemata of world history. Also Stirner’s attitude to Bruno Bauer changes considerably in the course of the book, but no attempt is made to reconcile the two views. Indeed, what Stirner himself says on this point probably applies to most of the book: `The foregoing review of “free human criticism” was written bit by bit immediately after the appearance of the books in question, as was also that which elsewhere refers to the writings of this tendency, and I did little more than bring together the fragments’.(1) The development is nevertheless progressive as the same points are returned to later and treated at greater length. A second factor complicating Stirner’s exposition is his treatment of language. He tries continually to obtain new effects by translating foreign words into German, by giving their original meaning to words in current use and by etymological investigations into the roots of words. Of course, all this makes translation difficult.

The basic message of the book, as well as the style in which it is written, is best shown by quoting the first and last paragraphs of the preface:

What is not supposed to be my concern? First and foremost the good cause, then God’s cause, then the cause of mankind, of truth, freedom, humanity, justice ... 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.(2)

And the last paragraph reads :

The divine is God’s concern; the human, man’s. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the good, true, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is - unique, as I am unique.(3)

The layout of the book is clearly modelled on Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums, being divided into two parts entitled man' and myself’, which correspond to the two parts of Feuerbach’s work that dealt respectively with God and man. The first chapter of Der Einzige describes a human life in a triadic form:

The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, till little by little he succeeded in getting at what was at the back of these things; the youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till the stage where he became the man, the egoistic man who deals with things and thoughts according to his heart’s pleasure, and sets his personal interest above everything. Finally the old man? `When I become one, there will be time enough to speak of that’.(4)

Stirner then goes on to apply this to human history: antiquity was the childhood of the human race, the modern age adolescence and its maturity will be that immediate future of which Stirner’s book is a precursor. The view of history as a gradual progress of philosophical thought is Hegelian, but in place of the reign of spirit, Stirner puts the supremacy of the self and its property. His analysis of the modern age is a sort of demonology of the spirits to which humanity has been successively enslaved.

Since Stirner’s ideas can best be understood by comparing them with those of his contemporaries, the most revealing part of the book is his attitude to his fellow Young Hegelians. After dealing with antiquity, in which nature and her laws were regarded as a reality more powerful than man, Stirner describes at greater length the modern, the Christian world, the kingdom of pure spirituality, whether in religion or philosophy, the latest manifestation of which - the philosophy of Feuerbach - is still `thoroughly theological’.

According to Stirner, Feuerbach has merely changed the Christian conception of grace into his idea of a human species and religious commands into moral ones. But the Christian dualisin between what is essential and what is non-essential in man remains; indeed, the situation is even worse than before for this dualism, since it has been brought down from heaven to earth, has thereby become even more inescapable: if Feuerbach destroys the heavenly dwelling of the spirit of God' and forces it to move to earth bag and baggage, then we, its earthly apartments, will be badly overcrowded. 'Feuerbach', says Stirner, thinks that if lie humanises the divine he has found the truth. No; if God has given us pain, “man” is capable of pinching us still inure torturingly’.(5) Men are still bound by ideals that stand above and separate from them. The humanist religion of Feuerbach is only the last metamorphosis of the Christian religion: Now that liberalism has proclaimed "man" we can now declare openly that herewith was only completed the consistent carrying out of Christianity and that in truth Christianity set itself no other task from the start than to realise "man", the "true" man'.(6) The only solution is therefore to do away with the divinity once and for all in any shape or form: Can the man-God really die if only the God in him dies?’(7) For a genuine liberation, we must not only kill God, but man, too. Stirner here, in a typically Young Hegelian manner, takes up Feuerbach’s own starting point and turns it against its author who is accused of not having followed it through to its proper end. All philosophy for Stirner, as for Marx too, was idealism, but whereas for Marx the basis to which philosophy had to be reduced was socio-economic, for Stirner it was the ego.

Stirner now goes on to deal with the `most modern among the moderns’ - the Freien or Liberals, whom he divides into three classes : political, social and humane.

Stirner begins the first section with a characterisation of the changes that came over the political scene in the eighteenth century:

After the chalice of the so-called monarchy had been drained down to the dregs, in the eighteenth century people became aware that their drink did not taste human - too clearly aware not to begin to crave a different cup. Since our fathers were human beings after all, they at last desired also to be regarded as such.(8)

The new idea that gained ground at this time was that in our being together as a nation or state we are human beings. How we act in other respects as individuals and what self-seeking im pulses we may there succumb to, belongs solely to our private life; our public or state life is a purely human one'.(9) The bourgeoisie developed itself in the struggle against the privileged classes by whom it was cavalierly treated as the third estate and confounded with the canaille. But now that the idea of the quality of man spread, the situation, as with Feuerbach's critique of religion, became much worse. For just as Feuerbach, by transferring the centre of religion from heaven to earth, had rendered its effects more immediate and obvious, so democracy renders more obvious the evils of politics. Stirner quotes Mirabeau's exclamation: Is not the people the source of all power?’ He goes on: `The monarch in the person of the “royal master” had been a paltry monarch compared with this new one, the “sovereign nation”. This monarchy was a thousand times stricter, severer and more consistent.’(10) This liberation, the second phase of protestantism, was inaugurated by the bourgeoisie and its watchword was rationalism. But this merely means the independence of persons, liberalism for the liberals and a replacing of personal power by one that is impersonal. It is no longer any individual, but the state itself and its laws that are the despots. Laws and decrees multiply and all thought and action become regulated. In return for this slavery the liberal state guarantees our life and property, but this free competition means merely that everyone can push forward, assert himself and fight one against another. The bourgeoisie also has a morality closely bound up with its essence, one that emphasises solid business, honourable trade and a moral life, disregarding all the time that the practice of this rests on the foundation of the exploitation of labour.

Under the heading of Social Liberalism' Stirner next deals with the doctrines of the communists. Whereas through the Revolution the bourgeoisie had become omnipotent and everyone was raised (or degraded) to the dignity of citizen’, communism or social liberalism responds :

Our dignity and essence consist not in our being all equal children of our mother, the state, but in our all existing each for the other ... that each exists only through the other who, while caring for my wants, at the same time sees his own satisfied by me. It is labour that constitutes our dignity and our equality.(11)

Stirner’s summary of the socialist doctrine is: all must have nothing, so that all may have. Under liberalism it is what he has' that makes the man and in having’ people are unequal. But this society where we are all to become members of the Lumpenproletariat is even worse than the previous ones, for here `neither command nor property is left to the individual; the state took the former, society the latter’.(12) The communist ideas show the same faults as those already criticised. They, too, have a dualistic view of man:

That the communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of communism. According to the workday side he does not take you as man simply, but as human labourer or labouring man. The first view has in it the liberal principle; in the second illiberality is concealed. If you were lazy, he would certainly not fail to recognise the man in you, but would endeavour to cleanse him as a lazy man' from laziness and to convert him to the faith’ that labour is man’s destiny and calling’.(13)

Thus in the communists’ glorification of society we merely have another in the line of deities that have tyrannised over mankind: `Society, which is the source of all we have, is a new master, a new spook, a new “supreme being”, which “takes us into its service and allegiance”.(14)

The criticism of communism advanced by the humanist liberal, or disciple of Bruno Bauer, to whom Stirner next passes, is that if society prescribes to the individual his work, then even this does not necessarily make it a purely human activity. For to be this it must be the work of aman' and that requires that he who labours should know the human object of his labour and he can have this consciousness only when he knows himself as man, the crucial condition is self-consciousness - the very watchword of Bruno Bauer and his School. Humanist liberalism says: “You want labour; all right, we want it likewise, but we want it in the fullest measure. We want it, not that we may gain spare time, but that we may find all satisfaction in labour itself. We want labour because it is our self-development” .’(15) In short, man can only be truly himself in human, self-conscious labour. According to Stirner this view seems to say that one cannot be more than man. He would sooner say that one cannot be less: It is not man that makes up your greatness, but you create it, because you are more than man and mightier than other - men'.(16) Stirner concedes that among social theories, Bauer's ideas are certainly the most complete for they remove everything that separates man from man. It is in Bauer's criticism, reminiscent of Feuerbach, that Stirner finds the purest fulfilment of the love principle of Christianity, the true social principle’, which he rejects with the question: `How can you be truly single so long as even one connection exists between you and other men?(17) These are the same objections as Stirner brought against Feuerbach. For Bauer shares Feuerbach’s humanism and sacrifices the individual man to the idea of humanity by maintaining that his vocation is to realise the human essence through the development of free
self-consciousness.

Nevertheless, Stirner does admire Bruno Bauer with his extreme dialectic and proclamation of the perpetual dissolution of ideas. In fact, Stirner thinks that this must finally end up in his own position:

It is precisely the keenest critic who is hit the hardest by the curse of his principle. Putting from him one exclusive thing after another ... at last, when all ties are undone, he stands alone. He, of all men, must exclude anything that has anything exclusive or private; and when you get to the bottom, what can be more exclusive than the exclusive, unique person himself?(18)

Bauer does, indeed, in later numbers of his Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung reject this Feuerbachian humanism in favour of a`pure criticism’, and Stirner adds to this section a postscript in which he deals with Bauer’s change of position as not going nearly far enough:

[Bauer] is saying too much when he speaks of `criticising criticism itself’. It, or rather he, has only criticised its oversight and cleared it of its inconsistencies. If he really wanted to criticise criticism he would have to look and see whether there was anything in its pre-supposition.(19)

It still remains true that Stirner found himself closer in outlook to Bauer than to any other of the Young Hegelians and this feeling was reciprocated : Bauer was the only one, apart from Buhl, to attend Stirner’s funeral and pay him this last mark of respect.

After thus dismissing the wiles of religion, philosophy and liberalism in their efforts to subdue the self, Stirner shows in the second part of the book the way to its complete liberation. It is not through attachment to other eternal ideas or values that the self is liberated, but by elevating itself above all the toils and snares of these ideas. My self is my own creation and my own property, its power is without limits and it belongs wholly to me. It is only in my own self that this liberation can be found, as Stirner points out, again in oppostion to Feuerbach :

Feuerbach in his Grundsatze' is always harping on being’. In this he, too, for all his antagonism to Hegel and the absolute philosophy, is stuck fast in abstraction; for being' is an abstraction as is also the I’. Only I am not an abstraction: I am all in all, consequently even abstraction or nothing; I am not a mere thought, but at the same time I am full of thoughts, a thought-world.(20)

This is a complete inversion of Hegel. What in Hegel was attributed to the general is here applied to the individual. Stirner, too, could have claimed to have stood Hegel on his head. Later Stirner explicitly compares the ego to God, whom names cannot name'. But this liberty needs to be supplemented by property. The only thing that really belongs to me is my self: this, too, is the only thing that is really free. Any lesser freedom is really useless, for it always carries with it the implication of a future enslavement, as Stirner has shown in dealing with the different liberal doctrines. The only reason that men do not grasp their liberty is that they have been taught to mistrust themselves and depend on priests, parents or law-givers. But if they are sincere with themselves they will admit that even so their actions are governed by self-love. Dare therefore to free yourself from all that is not your self. In place of deny yourself’ the slogan of the egoist is `return to yourself’. In the past people have been shame-faced egoists, now they should come out into the open and grasp for themselves what before they thought to acquire by persuasion, prayer and hypocrisy. Liberty is not something that can be granted - it has to be seized.

The liberal state sees me simply as a member of the human race and it does not interest itself in my peculiarities: it merely demands that I subordinate my individual interests to those of society in general. But human society and the rights of Man mean nothing to me: I seem to have many similarities with my fellows, but at the bottom I am incomparable. My flesh is not their flesh and my mind is not their mind. I refuse to forget myself for the benefit of others. Others - nations, society, state - are nothing but a means which I use. I convert them into my property and my creatures, I put in their place the association of egoists, that is to say, an association of selves of flesh and blood preferring themselves to everything else and having no inclination to sacrifice themselves to this species-man that is the ideal of liberalism. This species-man is plainly nothing but a concept, an idea, a ghost : the true self is without species, without norm, without model, without laws, without duty, without rights.

Law, too, is something that is offered me from the outside. But I am sole judge of what my rights are : they are co-terminous with my power', for only “your might”, “your power”, gives you the right’.(21) The only thing that I have not got the right to do is what I have not authorised myself. The only law for me is that which exists in and through my self.

The worst enemy of the self is thus the state, for it is continually opposed to the will of particular persons : I can never alienate my will to the state, as my will is something continually changing. Even the best type of state is one where I am a slave to myself. Did I but realise it, my will is something that no force can break. This does not mean, however, that there will be complete chaos and each man will be able to do as he pleases. For if all men act as egoists and defend themselves, then nothing untoward will happen to them. Marx’s view was too cosmopolitan for Stirner whose one passion was the individual person. Stirner considered that it was no use bettering the universal, the state, law, society. Progress was inductive, from below, from individuals. Although he shared with Marx the same criticisms of the Prussian state, the principles upon which these were based were different: Marx was a violent critic of any kind of atomism, from Epicurus’s onwards. Stirner on the other hand wanted the state to dissolve into atoms.

The liberal state’s aim is to guarantee a little piece of property to everyone. But in fact property falls a prey to the big owners and the proletariat increases and the attacks of the communists are justified. Stirner’s criticism of the liberal state here was quite probably influenced by Marx’s article ’Zur Judenfrage’; both have the same views on the dualism of the private and political spheres, the difference between corporations and free competition, and the essential features of the Christian state. The solution lies in the formation of an association of people who remain their particular selves, an association which would dispossess the proprietors and organise their wealth in common, each man bringing as much as he can conquer. By all means have associations to reduce the amount of labour needed but let the self and its unique power always have first priority. The supreme law quoted at all those who try to free themselves is that of love: `every man must have something that is more to him than himself’. This love is not to be a free gift, but is an injunction laid upon us. Certainly I may sacrifice all sorts of things for others, but I cannot sacrifice myself. The egoist loves others because this love makes him happy and has its basis in his egoism.

As an egoist I enjoy all those possessions that my liberation has granted me; they are my property and I dispose of them as I wish. I am even master of my ideas and change them as so many suits of clothes. But this does not mean that I am solitary and isolated. For man is by nature social. Family, friends, political party, state, all these are natural associations, so many chains that the egoist breaks in order to form a`free association’ supple and changeable according to varying interests.
Stirner admits that this `association of egoists’ must be based on a principle of love, but it is an egoistic love - my love. The association is my own creation and I enter and leave when I please. I am the only person who attaches myself to the association.

The aim of the association is not revolution, but revolt, not to create new institutions, but to institute themselves. Stirner realised the self-contradictory notion of his `association of egoists’ and in his replies to the critics of his book the element of association is minimised. The book ends, as it began, with an assertion of the uniqueness of the individual:

I am the owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the unique one the owner himself returns into his creative void out of which he was born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness and pales only before the sun of my consciousness of this fact. If I concern myself with myself, the unique one, then my concern is limited to its transitory, mortal creator which constitutes myself, and I can say: All things are nothing to me!(22)

2. STIRNER VERSUS FEUERBACH

Unlike Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach and Hess, Stirner had no positive doctrine to offer Marx: but he nevertheless played a very important role in the development of Marx’s thought by detaching him from the influence of Feuerbach. This role of Stirner in detaching Marx from Feuerbach can best be made clear by showing firstly that Marx at the time of the publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum was, and (more important) was regarded as being, a disciple of Feuerbach, secondly that Stirner’s book was regarded as important and that his criticism of Feuerbach had wide influence and thirdly that the Deutsche Ideologie was composed in the context of this debate and comprises a criticism of Feuerbach which borrows elements from Stirner and a criticism of Stirner which tacitly admits the validity of his attack on Feuerbach but maintains that it no longer applies.

As regards the first point, there are many facts showing that Marx was regarded in late 1844 as being a disciple of Feuerbach.

This was certainly so in the eyes of Stirner: the only reference to Marx in Der Einzige is to his use of the term Gattungswesen in his essay ’Zur Judenfrage’, and this term is one borrowed from Feuerbach (first chapter of Das Wesen des Christentums).

Feuerbach is referred to as a communist in Der Einzige.(23) The use of this word was at that time very loose and many did not distinguish it from socialism, but when in 1843 the Young Hegelian movement split, Feuerbach, at the height of his influence then and in the subsequent year, came to be regarded as the inspirer of the materialist wing in the same way as Bruno Bauer of the idealists.

In 1845 there appeared an article by G. Julius, former editor of the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung and friend of Bruno Bauer, entitled ’Kritik der Kritik der kritischen Kritik’, in which Marx is treated simply as a disciple of Feuerbach. In his construction of human nature', says Julius Marx by no means does away with dualism: all he does is to transpose this dualism into the real material world in which he follows Feuerbach exactly’.

Bruno Bauer, too, in his reply to Stirner, entitled ’Charakteristik Feuerbachs’, tries to show that Stirner is a refutation of
Feuerbachianism as expounded by his disciples Marx, Engels and Hess, but that both are dogmatisms which must in turn be overcome by `pure criticism’.

Hess, in particular in his essays in 21 Bogen aus der Schweiz, made great use of the Feuerbachian idea of alienation and viewed his `true socialism’ as the realisation of Feuerbach’s philosophy: and Marx and Engels were at this time closely associated with Hess.

At the time of the appearance of Stirner’s book Marx had only published, apart from the two essays in `Anekdota’ and some articles in the Rheinische Zeitung, the essays in the Deutschfranzosische Jahrbucher which are plainly under the influence of Feuerbach.

Finally, there is the evidence of Marx himself, his high praise of Feuerbach in the Heilige Familie, written before the appearance of Der Einzige, where Marx attributes to Feuerbach alone the overturning of the old system and the placing of `man’ in the centre of philosophical discussion.

As to the second point, that is, the importance of Der Einzige at the time and its criticism of Feuerbach: each of the groups attacked by Stirner replied at considerable length, Szeliga and Bruno Bauer both wrote articles, Feuerbach also replied. Hess wrote an essay `Die letzten Philosophen’, Marx and Engels wrote the best part of a book. Even as late as 1847-8 the young Kuno Fischer devoted his first publications to an attack on Der Einzige.

All acknowledged that Stirner was an adversary of note. Bruno Bauer wrote in his article that Stirner was the most capable and courageous of all the combatants' (that is of his pure criticism’). Feuerbach in a letter described Stirner as the most gifted and the freest writer it has been given me to meet'. Even Engels in his first letter to Marx discussing the book (19 November 1844) wrote that among the Freien it is plain that Stirner has the most talent, personality and energy’.

In view of this evidence, the fact that the book was very much a product of its time and that its interest has therefore largely disappeared should not obscure its great importance for its contemporaries.

The most influential part of the book was its criticism of Feuerbach on the grounds that his notion of man' was only yet one more universal abstraction to which men would be as enslaved as before. Indeed it was worse than the previous ones since they were at least idealistic and heavenly: now the tyranny had been brought down to earth and would thus be the more difficult to escape. Feuerbach had achieved the final metamorphosis of Ctiristianity’.(24)

Ruge, at least, considered the book a decisive criticism of socialism. In a letter to Nauwerck he described the book as a liberation from the `social dogmatism of artisans’ and in a letter to Hess he refuses Hess’s request for collaboration on the grounds that Stirner has destroyed Hess’s philosophical communism.

Finally, the only reason for Marx and Engels devoting such a large part (three-quarters) of the Deutsche Ideologie to a criticism of Stirner was that Stirner was considered by them as the most dangerous enemy of socialism at that time. There can have been nothing personal: it is very improbable that Marx ever met Stirner. The fact that the book was never published is, though not surprising, immaterial: Marx and Engels tried very hard to find a publisher.

As to the third point, that is, the treatment of Feuerbach and Stirner in the Deutsche Ideologie, Marx and Engels clearly separate themselves from Feuerbach in a way they had never done before, thereby implicitly accepting the criticism of Stirner. What is criticised in Feuerbach is his Sinnlichkeit, his static materialism. This is an aspect of Feuerbach’s thought which only came to the fore in his reply to Stirner, as a means of defending himself against the charge of abstraction. To this Marx and Engels oppose their notion of praxis', best expressed in the first thesis on Feuerbach: The chief defect of all previous materialism (including that of Feuerbach) is that things, reality, the sensible world, are conceived only in the form of objects of observation, but not as human sense activity, not as practical activity (praxis), not subjectively’.(25) Given the circumstances in which the Deutsche Ideologie was written, it is impossible that Stirner not only compelled Marx to revise his position vis-a-vis Feuerbach but also contributed something to this revision through the idea of the `creative ego’
that he opposed to all abstractions. Certainly Stirner seems to have been in Marx’s mind when he was composing the section on Feuerbach in the Deutsche Ideologie. There are many references to Stirner and even a parody of him in the well-known description of the future communist society:

In communist society, where no one has an exclusive sphere of activity, but can perfect himself in any branch that pleases him, society regulates general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening and go in for criticism after dinner, as I please, without ever becoming either hunter, fisherman or critic.(26)

The first unfavourable reference to Proudhon in Marx’s writings appears in the Deutsche Ideologie, obviously in connection with Stirner’s recent attack :

We invite St Sancho [Max Stirner] to show us, for example, in Owen (who, as representative of English communism can just as well count for communism' as Proudhon, who is not a communist and from whose writings he has extracted most of the above phrases) a passage that contains something of the above phrases on essence’, general organisation of work, etc.(27)

Just as it seems clear that this coolness towards Proudhon is a result of Stirner’s criticism (though never acknowledged), so to some extent in the case of Feuerbach. It is also likely that Marx’s constant attacks on anything that appeared to be based on morality' or love’ in true socialism was due to Stirner’s ruthless criticism of all such notions.

3. STIRNER AND MARX

It seems doubtful whether any direct influence' of Stirner on Marx in economic matters is provable. This can be seen from an examination of the dates : the principal work of Marx on alienated labour as such’ is the MSS. written in Paris in 1844. There is nothing new on alienated labour in the Heilige Familie and in the Deutsche Ideologie, and though the analysis of 1844 is repeated, it is only done so en passant and much more attention is paid to the historical side - its origin in the division of labour. Stirner’s book was published about September 1844, certainly no earlier than August, the month by which the Paris MSS. of Marx were completed. So what this parallelism will show is that Marx was by no means the only person to be thinking of such things at this time.

Marx’s theory as set out in the Paris MSS.(28) can be briefly summarised as follows:

1. The product of man is not his own but turns into a hostile power that dominates him.
2. The act by which man produces is not free but forced.
3. Man’s relation to nature is vitiated and he can no longer appropriate it as he should.
4. His relation to his fellow-men is also vitiated since he must be in a state of subjection vis-a-vis his employer.

This idea is briefly anticipated in Marx’s essay ’Zur Judenfrage’, but only with regard to money, and not products. He says: `Under the sway of egoistic need man can only affirm himself and produce objects in practice by subordinating his products and his own activity to the domination of an alien entity, and by attributing to them the significance of an alien entity, namely money’.

What this involves can be seen more clearly by looking at Marx’s ideas of what labour in an unalienated society would look like. In his notebooks Marx drafted out a few comments on the economists he was reading at the same time as the writing of the Paris MSS. The comment on James Mill contains a very interesting passage where Marx deals with what he called `free labour’, whose preconditions were:

1. that my production should be an objectification of my own individuality.
2. that my product should satisfy the needs of others, as, for instance, a composer and the singer of his song [My example, not Marx’s].
3. that my product should mediate between you and the species, should be a completion of your essence, should be known and felt by you to be a necessary part of yourself and that therefore I should feel myself confirmed in my thought and in my feelings;
4. that in my exterior activity I should have created your exterior activity and thus have confirmed my common human essence. Given these conditions, says Marx, our products would be like mirrors in which we could see reflected our common essence.

Coupled with the section on Feuerbach in the Deutsche Ideologie is a long and wearisome attack on Stirner enlivened by only occasional bright spots, the sum of which is that Stirner is criticising a communism that no longer exists and never did exist. This latter at least is not true (see the essays of Hess in 21 Bogen aus der Schweiz and of Marx in Deutsch franzosische Jahrbucher). It is worth while noting, too, that the writings referred to as a refutation of Stirner’s attack on `essence’ in Proudhon are not those of Marx or Hess, but those of Owen. Though it is certainly true that the ideas in the Deutsche ldeologie are different from those criticised by Stirner, it is reasonable to suppose that these differences are, to a considerable extent, due precisely to that criticism.

The principal reason for this neglect of Stirner when treating of the development of Marx’s thought is that Feuerbach is regarded as the last influence on Marx before the formulation of historical materialism in the Deutsche Ideologie. This misconception was started by Engels in his lucidly, too lucidly, written brochure Ludwig Feuerbach und der 11 usgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophic (1886). Here Feuerbach is separated from the list of the Young Hegelians, Strauss, Bauer, Stirner, and treated afterwards, thus giving the impression that this was the chronological order. This is belied by the dates themselves : Feuerbach’s last significant contribution to the Young Hegelian debate was `Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft’, published in July 1843, whereas Der Einzige appeared late 1844. This mistake has persisted even in very recent books none of which(29) give any place at all to the influence of Stirner and also treat the contribution of Feuerbach as coming after Stirner.(30)

It has been seen quite rightly that the ’Feuerbach’ part of the Deutsche Ideologie brings this period of Marx’s writings to a close, but what has not been seen is that it was the following and larger part entitled ’Sankt Max’ that both compelled and enabled this culmination. The ’Sankt Max’ may be too turgid to be worth while reading but it is worth while asking why it is there at all.

Stirner’s economic ideas are not clearly formulated (in keeping with the style of the book) but still many parallels to Marx are obvious.(31) These are chiefly found in the sections on political and social liberalism.(32) In the former there is a passage on the omnipotence of money that is closely parallel to the passage in the Paris MSS. where Marx quotes Shakespeare (Timon of Athens) and remarks: `What I as a man am unable to do, and thus what all my individual faculties are unable to do, is made possible for me by money.... In mediating thus money is a genuinely creative power’.

The passage in Stirner reads: `"Money governs the world" is the keynote of the bourgeois epoch. A destitute aristocrat and a destitute labourer amount to nothing so far as political significance is concerned. Birth and labour do not do it, but money brings consideration (Das Geld gibt Geltung)’.(33)

One place where Stirner seems to anticipate Marx is where he briefly mentions a doctrine which Marx will later make into one of the corner-stones of his economic theory - the doctrine of surplus value. Stirner says :

Under the regime of the commonalty (Burgertum) the labourers always fall into the hands of the possessors - that is of those who have at their disposal some bit of the state domains, especially money and land - of the capitalists therefore. The labourer cannot realise on his labour to the extent of the value that it has for the consumer. The capitalist has the greatest profit from it.

In the section on social liberalism (i.e. communism) Stirner has a passage analysing the bad effects of division of labour and the workers’ deprivation of their products which is very like what Marx was writing at the same time:

When everyone is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labour amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory worker must tire himself to death twelve hours or more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labour is to have the intent that man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it, too, that is be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin-factory only puts on the heads, only draws the wire, etc., works, as it were, mechanically, like a machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labour cannot satisfy him, by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labours only into another’s hands and is used (exploited) by this other.(34)

Even the call of the Eleventh Feuerbach Thesis `to change the world’ finds its echo here :

When, for example, a branch of industry is ruined and thousands of labourers become breadless, people think reasonably enough to acknowledge that it is not the individual who must bear the blame, but that `the evil lies in the situation’.

Let us change the situation, then, but let us change it thoroughly, so that its fortuity becomes powerless.(35)

It is difficult to show any direct influence of Stirner on Marx here, the more so as Stirner’s book was to a large extent an amalgam of current cliches. What the above passages show is that the ideas of alienated labour and exploitation were by no means confined to Marx at this time, even among Germans. Both Stirner and Marx were probably much influenced by the ideas of Fourier.

88888888

NOTES

1) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 190.
2) Ibid. p. 3.
3) Ibid. p. 6.
4) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 16.
5) Ibid. p. 227.
6) Ibid. p. 228.
7) Ibid. p. 202.
8) Ibid. p. 128.
9) Ibid. p. 128.
10) Ibid. p. 132.-11) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 156.
12) Ibid. p. 155.
13) Ibid. p. 160.
14) Ibid. p. 162.
15) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 173.
16) Ibid. p. 176.
17) Ibid. p. 177.
18) Ibid. p. 177f.
19) Ibid. P. 199.
20) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 453.
21) Ibid. p. 254.
22) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 496.
23) Ibid. p. 412.
24) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, p. 229.
25) Marx-Engels, Werke, iii, p. 533.
26) Ibid. p. 83.
27) Ibid. p. 197.
28) MEGA, I, 3, pp. 29ff.
29) With the exception of H. Arvon, Aux sources de l’existentialisme, Max Stirner.
30) See S. Hook, From Hegel to Marx, M. Friedrich, Philosophie u. Okonomie beim jungen Marx. R. Tucker has managed to write a whole book on Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx without once mentioning Stirner.
31) These are hinted at but not gone into in the book by D. Koigen Zur Vorgeschichle des modernen deutschen Sozialismus (Bern, 1901).
32) M. Stirner, The Ego and His Own, pp. 128ff., 152ff.
33) Ibid. p. 150.
34) Ibid. pp. 157.
35) Ibid. pp. 158f.

#Berlin #philosophie #poésie #marxisme #existentialisme #anarchisme #Hegel

Der Triumph des Glaubens
▻https://www.sozialistischeklassiker2punkt0.de/sites.google.com/site/sozialistischeklassiker2punkt0/friedrich-engels/1842/friedrich-engels-der-triumph-des-glaubens.html#sdfoot

Pour nos amis anarchistes-individualistes :-)

voire Stirner, Feurbach, Marx and the Young Hegelians - David McLellan
►https://libcom.org/article/stirner-feurbach-marx-and-young-hegelians-david-mclellan

Friedrich Engels: Die frech bedräute, jedoch wunderbar befreite Bibel.
Oder:
Der Triumph des Glaubens

[Geschrieben Juni/Juli 1842. Erschienen als Broschüre im Dezember 1842. Nach Marx Engels Werke, Ergänzungsband Zweiter Teil, Berlin 1982, S. 283-316]

Das ist: Schreckliche, jedoch wahrhafte und erkleckliche Historia von dem weiland Lizentiaten Bruno Bauer; wie selbiger vom Teufel verführet, vom reinen Glauben abgefallen, Oberteufel geworden und endlich kräftiglich entsetzet ist 1

Christliches Heldengedicht in vier Gesängen

Erster Gesang

Des Glaubens Gloria recht herrlich zu besingen,
Entfalt, o Seele mein, demütiglich die Schwingen;
Des Glaubens hohen Sieg – doch nein! ist eigne Kraft
Nicht gleich dem schwachen Rohr? Ein andrer gibt den Saft;
Ein anderer verleiht so Wollen wie Vermögen:
Ihr Gläub’gen fleht herab auf mich der Gnade Segen!
Ja, hebe dein Gebrüll, du Leu am Saalestrand,
Und falte, Hengstenberg, die sieggewohnte Hand!
Du mit der Leier groß und groß auf dem Katheder,
O Sack, von deiner Kraft ergieß in meine Feder!
Krummacher, Gottesmann, des wahren Glaubens Hort,
O lehre mich, gleich dir, verkündigen das Wort!
Und du, mein holder Knapp! Ich trag’, o fromme Seele,
Die Fackel deines Lieds kühn in die Lästerhöhle!
Und du, der dem Geschlecht der Spötter, kühn und frei,
Das Kreuz entgegenhielt, o Klopstock, steh mir bei!
Was war’ ich ohne dich, Theologus Johannes!
Wenn du mir treulich hilfst, ich unternehm’s und kann es.
Vertilgen helfet mir, David und Hesekiel,
Den Gräul der Lästerung mit Stumpf und auch mit Stiel!
Auf, scharet euch um mich, des Glaubens starke Säulen,
Beschützt mich gegen Spott und frecher Läst’rer Heulen;
Hebt eure Hände fromm zum Thron der Gnaden auf,
Dass ich zum Preis des Herrn vollende meinen Lauf! -
Was störet auf einmal der Sel’gen Hosianna?
Warum versieget denn des Engelliedes Manna?
Weh’, ist des Teufels List zum Himmel eingekehrt
Und hat sein Pestgestank die Freud’ in Leid verkehrt?
Wo Jubel nur und Preis und Loblied soll erklingen,
Was soll das Jammern dort, das Klageliedersingen?
Wer ist es, der da klagt? Wer schreit in Himmelshöh’n?
Der Frommen Seelen sind’s, sie haben das Gestöhn:
„O Herr, erhöre Herr, Herr höre unser Schreien!
Wie lange duldest du die Plage deiner Treuen?
Wie lange wartest du und hast noch nicht gerächt,
O Herr, der Gläub’gen Blut am frevelnden Geschlecht?
Ach, soll der Weltlust Trotz, der frechen Läst’rer Prahlen
Im Glanz der Herrlichkeit stets auf der Erde strahlen?
Soll jeder Philosoph stets sagen: Ich bin Ich?
Soll der Freigeister Schar stets frecher lästern dich?
Ach, immer lauter schallt des Übermutes Höhnen,
O lass des Weltgerichts Posaune bald ertönen!"
Besänftigend spricht der Herr: „Noch ist nicht voll das Maß,
Nicht arg genug der Stank, der ausgeht von dem Aas;
Und meine Streiter auch muss ich zum Mut erziehen,
Dass nicht im letzten Kampf sie vor dem Satan fliehen.
Dort unten in Berlin sind, die mich suchen, viel’,
Doch viele fesselt noch des stolzen Denkens Pfühl;
Nicht glauben wollen sie, sie wollen mich begreifen,
Mich fesseln wollen sie mit des Gedankens Reifen.
Seht Bruno Bauer dort: er glaubt, doch er denkt nach,
Wohl willig ist sein Fleisch, doch ach, der Geist ist schwach.
Nun, wartet kurze Zeit; bald weichen diese Schlacken,
Dann wird nicht Satan mehr ihn bei dem Denken packen.
Er, der so treu mich sucht, er findet mich zuletzt,
Fromm wirft er von sich ab, was Eitles ihn ergötzt.
Des Denkens Narretei, die seinen Sinn zersplittert,
Erkennet er als Wind – und seine Seel’ erzittert.
Ja, die Philosophie, sie wird ihm noch ein Spott,
Die Gnade bricht hindurch, er glaubet: Gott ist Gott."
Und über dieses Wort ward Seligkeit dort oben,
Zum Preis des starken Herrn ein Loblied ward erhoben:
„Wohl würdig bist du, Herr, zu nehmen Ehr’ und Preis
Und Kraft, geschaffen ist durch dich der Welten Kreis:
Bald kommen wird dein Zorn, die Bösen zu vernichten,
Die Knechte zu erhöh’n, die deinen Dienst verrichten."
Und weiter sprach der Herr: „Ja, jener ist der Mann,
Der in dem letzten Kampf die Gläub’gen führen kann.
Wenn auf die sünd’ge Welt dann meines Zornes Schalen
Herniederstürzen, sich die Meere blutig malen,
Und wenn des Abgrunds Born sich finster tuet auf,
Wenn der Heuschreckenschwarm erscheint in hellem Hauf,
Wenn Feuerhagel dann zur Erde niederprasselt,
Der Boden rings erbebt, der Fels zusammenrasselt,
Schwingt Bruno Bauer hoch die Fahne meiner Schar,
Nicht wankend in dem Kampf für Thron und für Altar."
Und über dieses Wort ward Seligkeit dort oben,
Zum Preis des starken Herrn ein Loblied ward erhoben:
„Halleluja! Und der Rauch gehet auf ewiglich."
Und sieh! Als noch das Lied ertönte durch die Himmel,
Da kam der Teufel an mit Stank und mit Getümmel.
In seinen Augen glomm der Hölle schwarze Wut,
Die Zunge lechzte nach der Gotteskinder Blut.
So trat er frevelnd hin zum Stuhl des Allerhöchsten,
Zu jenen Engeln, die dem Throne stehen am nächsten,
Und schrie wie Donnergraus: „Wie lange zauderst du,
Und hältst in meinem Haus mich auf in feiger Ruh’?
Du hast wohl Furcht, dass ich am jüngsten Tage,
Wo um die Krone dieser Welt
Wir kämpfen, dass ich da dein Heer von Engeln schlage,
Erstürme mir dein Himmelszelt?
Und hast du Mut, wohlan, den Kampf beschleunige,
Lass die Posaunen blasen,
Dass ich mein wildes Heer alsbald vereinige;
Ich brenne schon vor Lust, zu stürzen auf das deinige,
Durch deine Sphären hinzurasen!"
Der Herr: „Geduld, Geduld, die Zeit ist nicht mehr fern,
Wo du erkennen sollst, dass ich der Herr der Herrn!
Sieh auf die Erd’ herab, ob du sie merkst, die Zeichen,
Darob die Menschen all’ erzittern und erbleichen?
Sieh Krieg und Pest und Brand und Revolution,
Sieh das Gesetz verhöhnt, geschmäht Religion.
Die Gottesläst’rer blühn, verlästert sind die Frommen,
Und warte nur, es wird noch zehnmal besser kommen!
Jetzt hab’ ich auserwählt mir einen treuen Knecht,
Der predige das Reich dem gottlosen Geschlecht.
Sie werden ihn verschmähn, sie werden seiner lachen,
Das will ich just, so kann ich bald ein Ende machen.
Noch ist das Maß nicht voll, doch lange währt es nicht,
Wenn ferner sie verschmähn, wie jetzt, das Gnadenlicht."
Der Teufel: „Und wer ist ersehn zu diesen Taten?"
Der Herr: „Der Bauer ist’s." -
„Meinst du den Lizentiaten?
„Denselben“
„Nun, der dient dir auf besond’re Weise.
Nicht Beten und Gesang ist seines Herzens Speise.
Nein, sieh, von dir verlangt er deine schönsten Sterne,
Und dann begreift er sie – das ist so seine Lust.
Und aller Dogmata spekulativste Kerne
Befried’gen nicht die tiefbewegte Brust."
Der Herr: „Wenn er mir jetzt auch nur verworren dient,
So werd’ ich ihn gewiss bald in die Klarheit führen.
Und wenn er jetzt auch noch zu denken sich erkühnt,
Verlass dich drauf, bald soll er die Vernunft verlieren."
Der Teufel: „Nun, was gilt’s, den will ich dir verführen!
Er soll, ein Edelstein, bald meine Krone zieren.
Ihm steckt bei alledem der Hegel noch im Kopf,
Da fass’ ich ihn, gib acht, da fass’ ich ihn beim Schopf."
Der Herr: „Wohlan, er sei dir blindlings überlassen!
Zieh diesen Gläubigen von seinem Heiland ab
Und führ ihn, kannst du ihn mit deinem Trug erfassen,
Auf deinem Höllenweg hohnlachend mit hinab,
Und steh beschämt, wenn du zuletzt gestehen musst,
Ein Gläubiger, selbst im spekulativen Drange,
Ist sich des schmalen Wegs im Herzen stets bewusst."
Da schrie der Teufel froh: „Wohlan, mir ist nicht bange,
Gib acht, den Bauer hast du nicht mehr allzulange!"
Und mit des Sturmes Kraft fuhr er alsbald hinaus,
Erfüllend noch mit Qualm des Himmels strahlend Haus.
Indes der Teufel dort mit Gott dem Herrn verkehret,
Hat der Verdammten Schar sich in der Höll’ empöret.
Es tost der wilde Schwärm im Aufruhr fürchterlich,
Laut rufend mit Gebrüll: Wo bist du, Teufel, sprich?
An ihrer Spitze schwingt zwei Feuerbränder Hegel
und Voltaire hinterdrein mit feurigrotem Flegel,
Danton erhebt die Stimm’, es brüllet Edelmann,
Es ruft Napoleon: „Auf, Höllenbrut, voran!"
So rasen durch die Glut des Abgrunds finst’re Geister,
So schnauben sie voll Wut und rufen nach dem Meister.
Da von des Himmels Höh’n stürzt eilends er herab
In seine Feuerseen und in sein Flammengrab.
„Was ist, so ruft er laut, was wollt ihr, schnöde Rotten,
Wollt ihr des Teufels Zorn, des Teufels Macht verspotten?
Ist euch nicht heiß genug der Höllen Flammenglut,
Und tränk’ ich euch nicht satt in der Gerechten Blut?"
„Nein, nein! schreit Voltaire, nein, du tatenloser Teufel!
Hab’ ich darum gepflanzt, geheget stets den Zweifel,
Dass überall nun durch spekulative Nacht
Das Wort Philosophie wird in Verruf gebracht,
Dass mich Franzosen selbst, den Pfaffen glaubend, hassen -
Und das, du Teufel, das kannst du geschehen lassen?"
„Weshalb, spricht Danton, hab’ ich denn guillotiniert,
Weshalb, statt Gottesdienst, Vernunftdienst eingeführt,
Wenn wieder Unsinn herrscht, aristokrat’sche Laffen
Ins Reich sich teilen mit den hirnverbrannten Pfaffen?"
Und Hegel, dem bisher der Grimm den Mund verschloss,
Urplötzlich fand das Wort und hob sich riesengroß:
„Mein ganzes Leben weiht’ ich der Wissenschaft,
Den Atheismus lehrt’ ich mit ganzer Kraft,
Das Selbstbewusstsein hob zum Throne ich,
Gott zu bewältigen, glaubte schon ich.
Doch mich gebraucht nur törichter Missverstand,
Und feige Geister haben mich umgewandt,
Den Unsinn aufzukonstruieren,
Knechteten schnöde das Spekulieren.
Und jetzt, da endlich kühn sich erhob der Mann,
Der Strauß, der halb schon mich zu verstehen begann,
Als kaum nach Zürich er berufen,
Wies man ihn ab an der Aula Stufen.
O Schmach, vom ganzen Kreise der Welt verbannt
Ist schon das Werkzeug, welches ich klug erfand,
Die Freiheitskämpferin, die kühne,
Wehe, verbannt ist die Guillotine!
Auf, sag, o Teufel, hab’ ich umsonst gelebt?
Hab’ ich vergebens philosophiert, gestrebt?
Wird bald der Mann, der rechte, kommen,
Welcher es köpft, das Geschlecht der Frommen?" -
Das hört der Teufel an mit hämisch-zartem Grinsen:
„Still, still, du treu’ster Knecht und lass das eitle Plinsen.
Wie? Kennt ihr mich nicht mehr, den Teufel? Hört mich an:
Gefunden ist schon längst, gefunden ist der Mann!"
Wer ist’s? Lass uns so lang nicht stehen auf der Lauer!"
So rufen all. Und er: „Er heißet – Bruno Bauer!"
Es lacht die schnöde Schar. Sie wenden das Gesicht;
Und Hegel, zornentflammt, der wilde Hegel spricht:
„Willst du spotten noch und höhnen, du verfluchtester der Wichte!
Kann der Bauer denn uns helfen, der Vernunft nur macht zunichte,
Der die Wissenschaft nur führet auf des Glaubens Hochgerichte?"
„O Hegel, bist du blind?" sprach drauf der Höllenfürste,
„Glaubst du, dass Bauer nur nach Glaubensäpfeln dürste?
Sein Durst ist viel zu groß, die machen ihn nicht satt,
Wer so gewaltig kämpft, der wird so leicht nicht matt.
Hüllt er sich jetzt noch in des Glaubens Bettlermantel,
Er wirft ihn ab: gib acht, ich schließ’ mit ihm den Handel,"
„Ich beuge mich vor dir", sprach Hegel wieder froh,
Und drauf die ganze Schar erhob ein wild’ Hallo.
Mit Jubel führte sie den Herrscher an die Schwelle,
Und dieser, siegbewusst, entschwebete der Hölle. -
In frommer Leute Haus, in düsterem Gemach,
Von Büchern rings umstellt, denkt Bruno Bauer nach.
Vor sich den Pentateuch und hinter sich den Teufel,
Bannt ihn der Glaube vorn und hinten rupft der Zweifel:
„Schrieb Moses dieses Buch, ist echt es oder nicht?
O dass Philosophie so selten deutlich spricht!
Da hab’ ich nun, weh’ mir, Phänomenologie,
Ästhetik, Logik und Metaphysik
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, nicht ohne Glück,
Heiße Doktor und Lizentiat,
Lese Collegia früh und spat,
Ich habe den Glauben spekulativ
Versöhnt mit dem absoluten Begriff,
Mir ist nichts dunkel, da ist kein Geheimnis,
Das ich nicht ergründet hätt’ ohne Säumnis,
Ich habe begriffen die Dogmen alle
Von Schöpfung, Erlösung und Sündenfalle,
Der Jungfrau wunderbare Empfängnis
Hab’ ich begriffen sonder Bängnis,
Den ganzen Kram – und mit all’ dem Zeugs
Lässt sich nicht beweisen die Echtheit des Pentateuchs.
Wer hilft in dieser Not, wer deutet, was mich quälet?
Wer reicht des Wissens Brot, ergänzet, was mir fehlet? -
Dort dies geheimnisvolle Buch,
Von des Philippus eigner Hand,
Ist mir es nicht Geleit genug
Durch dieser Zweifel labyrinth’sches Land?
Ich schlag’ es auf. Schon wird der Sinn mir hell,
Entgegenrauscht mir ein Kategorienquell.
Sieh, wie sie auf- und niedersteigen
Und sich die goldnen Eimer reichen!
Ha, welch’ eine Höhe!
Vermittelt schon sehe
Ich Glauben und Wissen
In heiligen Küssen!
Tief unter mir die Mächte der Natur!
Welch Schauspiel! aber ach, ein Schauspiel nur!
Denn wird der Schleier mir gehoben,
Der um den Ursprung ist des Pentateuchs gewoben?
Philippe erscheine!"
Ein Schatten, dreigekrönt, tritt aus gespaltner Wand,
Und warnend hob er hoch empor die dürre Hand:
„O Bauer, Bauer, falle nicht vom Pfad hinab,
Der dir in Hegels Logik vorgezeichnet ist!
Und wo in absoluter Klarheit der Begriff
Erstrahlt, da lass vorstellungsmäßig Denken nicht
Dem Geiste trotzen, welcher da die Freiheit ist." -
„Doch ist dies Buch denn echt, wie lösest du die Frage?
O weiche mir nicht aus, o sprich, antworte, sage!"
„Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, nicht mir!"
„Nicht dir? Verschwinde nicht, o lass dich halten, Freund!"
Er ruft’s, springt auf, und sieh, da steht vor ihm der Feind.
„Ha haha haha haha haha haha!
Da steht der Theolog, da stehet er nun da!
Du bist doch sonst so klug und hast noch nie gesehn,
Dass man dich immer lässt ringsum im Kreise gehn?"
In wirrem Schrecken greift jetzt Bruno nach der Bibel.
„Pah", lacht der Teufel auf, „was soll die alte Fibel?
Pah, über solches Zeug sind wir schon längst hinaus,
Und dich, ich glaub’ es nicht, dich letzet solch ein Schmaus?
Wie? Glaubst du, wenn du hier in dumpfen Mauern steckest.
Wenn du aus krankem Hirn Kategorien heckest,
Wenn du das Wasser und das Feuer mischen willst,
Mit ekelem Gebräu den Geist, den durst’gen, stillst,
Den Geist, der frei sich sehnt, die Fesseln zu zersprengen,
Die ihn in schalen Dunst, in dumpfen Kerker zwängen, -
Dann glaubst dein Sehnen du gestillt mit solcher Qual?
Hat Hegel dich gelehrt, zusammen Berg und Tal
Zu bringen, schwarz mit weiß, und Feuersglut und Wasser?
An Hegel denke jetzt, den kühnen Gotteshasser,
Der ohne Grübeln warf das Faktum über Bord,
Vor der Vernunft verwarf der Überliefrung Wort!"
„Was du, o Teufel, sagst, schön klingt es, eine Quelle
des reinsten Himmelslichts, so scheint der Qualm der Hölle;
Doch mich verführst du nicht; die Spekulation,
Sie hat, o Teufel, längst auch dich begriffen schon.
Glaubst du, wo meinem Geist sich auftut jedes Wesen,
Du seist allein verschont von dem Begriff gewesen?
Ich weiß, mit schönem Schein, mit gleisnerischem Wort
Betörst du uns zuerst und reißest uns dann fort,
Versprichst uns freien Geist für unsre schönen Fakta,
Und führst uns dann ins Reich einseitiger Abstrakta.
Zu dem Extreme führt dein freier Geist mich hin,
Da ich nichts andres weiß und denk’, als dass ich bin.
Nicht jene kalte Höh* kann mich, o Freund, betören,
Wo, was der Geist begreift, er einzig will zerstören.
Ein beutegier’ger Schlund, ein Moloch ist dein Geist,
Der seine Zähne stets dem Positiven weist.
Du siehst, ich kenne dich, ich kenne deine Fahrten,
Und was du mir gesagt, sind lauter Redensarten.
Schau hier den Pentateuch; fass’ ich ihn positiv,
Hab’ ich mit ihm zugleich des Judentums Begriff."
Der Böse grinst und höhnt: „Ha, ist es nicht zum Lachen?
Was alt und rostig ist, das willst du glänzend machen?
Wo man in Läusen nur des Herren Finger sieht (2),
Und wo des Hauses Bau den Herrn im Himmel müht (3),
Wo Gottes Rufen man in allem will verspüren,
In Maß, Gewicht und Pfand (4), da willst du spekulieren?
Da mattest du dich ab, freudlos und ohne Ruh’?
Versuch’s, wer stärker ist, der Glauben oder du!
Hinauf, wo sich der Geist in seiner Herrschaft fühlet,
Wo nicht er, gleich dem Wurm, in altem Moder wühlet!
Dort thront er siegbewusst; vor seinem höchsten Recht
Beugt sich der Glaube tief, des Vorurteiles Knecht!"
„O Teufel, was ich sonst in unbewachten Stunden
Zu denken kaum gewagt, du sprichst es ungebunden.
Ach! dass es mich ergreift, mich fesselt mit Gewalt,
Dass quälend jetzt der Ruf in meinem Innern schallt:
,Du hast umsonst gelebt!’"
„Nur keine Zeit verloren,
Du brauchst zu wollen nur, und du bist neugeboren!"
„Doch was beginn ich nun?"
„Wie, glaubst du, dass du hier,
Im gläubigen Berlin, in diesem Sandrevier,
Zu jener Höhe kannst, zu jenem Frohsinn dringen,
Dem Glauben frank und frei ein Pereat zu bringen?
Ich führe dich nach Bonn zum stolzen grünen Rhein (5),
Da wasche dich vom Schlamm des Aberglaubens rein,
Da führ in Heiterkeit ein neues, schönes Leben
Im frischen Bunde mit dem treuen Saft der Reben;
Wo alles Atmen Sieg, wo frisch die Brust sich hebt,
Und wo der Freiheit Glut in allen Adern bebt!" -
„Wohlan, ich folge dir!" -
„Und wo in voller Klarheit
Aus stolzem Geisterkampf ersteht die reine Wahrheit;
Hoch auf den Trümmern dort von kühn zerstörten Schranken
Bau siegreich den Altar der freiesten Gedanken!"

Zweiter Gesang

O weh’ dir, Bonn! weh’ dir, frommste der Fakultäten!
Tu Buß’ in Asch’ und Sack, lass nimmer ab vom Beten!
Auf dem Katheder, wo nur Fromme sich gesetzt,
Lehrt durch des Teufels List der tolle Bauer jetzt.
Da steht er, schäumt vor Wut, ein Teufelchen im Nacken,
Ihn lehrend, wie er soll die Theologen packen.
Da heult er auf voll Grimm, ein wasserscheuer Hund,
Und also spricht der Feind durch Bauers Lästermund:
„O lasst euch nimmer durch der Theologen Tücken,
Durch ihre Gleisnerei und Hinterlist berücken!
O seht, wie sie den Sinn von jedem Wort verdrehn,
Wie sie auf bösem Pfad im Dunkeln schleichend gehn!
O seht die schmutz’ge Angst dieser Buchstabenknechte,
Seht, wie sie selber stets sich schlagen im Gefechte!
Gesalbte Quälerei und Jesuitenlug,
Sophistik all ihr Tun und gleißend frommer Trug!
Dem Dorfschulmeister gleich, dem aus der Schul’ entlaufen
Die Kinder, draußen sich nach Lust und Kräften raufen,
Wie der mit seinem Stock jagt wütend hinterdrein,
Und jene vor ihm fliehn mit Lärmen, Spott und Schrein -
So auch der Theolog. Stets kommt er in die Brüche,
Gerät er zwischen des Grundtextes Widersprüche.
Seht, wie er zirkelt, dreht, drückt, dehnt, presst, quetscht und misst,
Was eben er gesagt, im Augenblick vergisst;
Seht, wie er kocht und braut in seiner dunst’gen Küche,
Bis endlich mit Geschrei entfliehn die Widersprüche.
Wie jagt er ihnen nach! Wie schreit er hinterdrein:
Wollt ihr wohl wieder her? Wollt ihr wohl artig sein?
Wie schwingt er zornentbrannt des Glaubens heil’gen Bakel,
Wie haut er mitten in den gottlosen Spektakel!
Wie er sie fängt und in den Hexenkessel drückt,
Bis vor dem argen Qualm die Armen sind erstickt!
So sind sie all, so sind auch die Evangelisten,
So werden stets sie sein, so lang es gibt noch Christen!
Wie ein Evangelist den andern missversteht,
Wie er sich windet, quält, den Sinn noch mehr verdreht,
Wie in des Widerspruchs unrettbarer Verwirrung
Er sich nicht helfen kann und stets vermehrt die Irrung,
Wie er des andern Schrift zerstört, zerreißt, zerfetzt,
Und alle dem die Kron’ Johannes aufgesetzt;
O seht!" – Da hielten sich die Gläubigen nicht länger:
„Hinaus das Lästermaul, hinaus, am Galgen häng’ er!
Hinaus mit ihm, dafür ist nicht der Lehrstuhl da,
Hinaus mit ihm, hinaus, hinaus, Halleluja!"
Doch andre schrie’n: „Hurra, hoch lebe Bruno Bauer!
Der freien Wissenschaft, des freien Denkens Mauer!
Schweigt, fromme Heuchler, schweigt, sonst zeige Keilerei,
Ob wirklich euer Gott ein starker Helfer sei!"
„Hinaus den Lügner!" schallt es von der rechten Seite,
„Hinaus die Gläubigen!" schreit links die Frevlermeute.
„Schweigt, Atheisten, still!" – „Ihr frommen Schafe schweigt,
Eh’ euch der Böcke Schar die harten Hörner zeigt!"
„Hier Christus!" – „Bauer hier!"
Und mit gewalt’gem Rasseln
Hört man der Stöcke Wucht alsbald herniederprasseln.
Die wilde Schlacht entbrennt, es hallt das Kampfgeschrei,
Man wirft die Pulte um, schlägt jede Bank entzwei;
Aus Pulten bauen auf, zum Schutze vor den Christen,
Sich eine feste Burg die frechen Atheisten.
Als Bomben werfen sie, in dichter Schar vereint,
Die Dintenstecher all, die Bibeln auf den Feind.
Vergebens stürmen an auf diese Burg die Frommen,
Der dritte Anlauf selbst hat sie nicht eingenommen.
Schon blutet manches Haupt, und mancher Fromme sank,
Durch Atheistenhand getroffen, auf die Bank;
Da wirft der Frevler Hand die Mauer selbst zur Erde,
Dass rein des Kampfes Feld endlich gefeget werde.
Sie stürzen schnaubend auf die Gottesstreiter los,
Die Frommen fliehn erschreckt vor diesem wilden Tross.
Das Feld ist rein. -
Es wogt die Flucht im Korridore,
Doch endlich steht die Schar der Frommen vor dem Tore.
Zur Hilfe schickt der Herr Pedelle jetzt herbei,
Es kommt der Rektor an, Senat und Klerisei.
Erst schlichten wollen sie, des Kampfes Ursach wissen;
Doch sind sie in den Strom alsbald hineingerissen.
Von neuem fürchterlich erbraust die wilde Schlacht;
Wie manch hohweises Haupt wird windelweich gemacht!
Wie mancher krumme Rücken wird hier gerad geschlagen!
Wie senkt sich manche Nase, die sonst so hoch getragen!
Die Luft verdunkelt sich vom ausgeklopften Staub,
Perücken fliegen rings, dem frechen Wind zum Raub,
Die Philosophen auch, die Herren Positiven,
Hei, wie sie vor dem Stoß der Atheisten liefen!
Wie greifst du, kleiner Sohn des großen Fichte, aus!
Zu mager bist du doch zum Atheistenschmaus.
Wie wird Herrn Brandis, seht, trotz seinem schnellen Jagen,
Aus seinem Rocke der Systemstaub ausgeschlagen!
Was hilft es ihnen, dass sie Hegel widerlegt,
Wenn Hegels wilde Brut so wütend auf sie schlägt?
Denn immer toller drängt der Atheisten Rotte,
Vor ihren Stöcken wird das Gottvertraun zum Spotte.
Doch nein, sein Auge wacht; denn in der höchsten Not,
Die seine Gläubigen mit ärgstem Schimpf bedroht,
Da sendet er, den Sieg der Bösen zu vereiteln,
Den stets getreuen Sack mit glattgekämmten Scheiteln.
Soeben kommt er her vom Weinberge des Herrn:
Am Kirchenhimmel glänzt sein graues Aug’, ein Stern.
Es ist die Nase sein des Glaubens starke Säule,
Es triefet stets sein Mund von Gottes Wort und Heile.
Ihn trägt die Eselsmaid, gar wunderbar beschweift;
Ihn kümmert nimmer, dass sein Fuß am Boden schleift.
Er hat mit Gottes Kraft den Bibeltext erfunden
Und ihn der Eselsmaid dicht an den Schwanz gebunden.
Gesenkten Hauptes sitzt er auf der Eselin,
Unmerkbar führt der Geist das Tier zum Kampfplatz hin.
Als er das Tosen hört, der Frechen Jubilieren,
Will er sein frommes Tier auf andre Wege führen.
Doch, die so folgsam sonst, die treue Eselsmaid,
Sieh’, wie sie bäumt und stockt und springt und setzt und scheut.
„Was hast du, Tierchen, denn? Was kommt dir in die Quere?
Gehorche meinem Zaum, sei folgsam doch und höre!"
Doch sie gehorchet nicht und klemmt ihn an die Wand;
Da fasst zum ersten Mal ergrimmt den Stock die Hand.
Er schlägt und schlägt und schlägt, er schlägt und schlägt sie wieder,
Doch nimmer weicht das Tier, er fällt zur Erde nieder.
Da öffnete der Herr der Eselin den Mund,
Und seine Absicht tat sie dem Erstaunten kund:
„Was schlägst du? Sieh den Geist, der mir den Weg versperret,
Der an dem Zaume mich zu jenem Kampfplatz zerret!
Wo ist dein alter Mut? Auf, stürz in jenen Streit,
Wo Atheistenwut der Gläub’gen Heer bedräut!
Tu auf dein Ohr, o Sack! und hör die sel’ge Kunde,
Die Gott dir offenbart aus deines Viehes Munde:
Sack hießest du bisher und Beutel heiß hinfort,
So send’ ich, Beutel, dich, den Streit zu schlichten dort."
Gen Himmel schauend sprach der fromme Bruder Beutel:
„O Herr, wie ist vor dir des Menschen Wissen eitel!
Die Tiere wählest du zu deinem Sprachrohr aus;
Gehorsam deinem Ruf stürz’ ich in Kampfesgraus."
Er sprach’s und schnellgewandt eilt er zum Ort der Schrecken,
Den Matte, Blutende, Ohnmächtige bedecken.
Mit lautem Rufe sprengt der Kühne zwischen sie
Und singt den Friedenspsalm nach Himmelsmelodie.
Vor seinem Anblick stehen die Kämpfenden betroffen,
Doch Bruder Beutel steht und sieht den Himmel offen. -
„Wie", ruft er, „an dem Ort, wo sonst nur Lobgesang
Und Glaubenswort ertönt, herrscht Hass, Neid, Mord, Sturm, Drang?
Ihr wollet, wo ich seh’ den Himmel sich zerteilen,
Im Angesicht des Herrn die Rücken euch zerkeilen?"
Der Frommen Herde lauscht, zieht schüchtern sich zurück,
Der Atheisten Schar lacht drein mit frechem Blick.
Und Bruder Beutel sprach: „Hier unten Mord, Getümmel,
Doch oben ew’ge Ruh’ und Seligkeit im Himmel.
Ich seh’ die Cherubim um des Allmächt’gen Thron,
Ich seh’ das Gotteslamm, den eingeborenen Sohn.
Ich seh’ die Herrlichkeit des Herren niederscheinen,
Ich seh’ die Engelein zum Loblied sich vereinen.
Ich seh’ – o Seligkeit! das Lamm tut auf den Mund,
Und tut den Willen sein mir, seinem Knechte, kund:
,Auf den ich sonst gehofft, Bruno, den Theologen,
Um den hat uns der Feind durch seine List betrogen.
Er, welcher betend sonst in seiner Klause saß,
Gibt jetzt mein heilig Wort den Gottlosen zum Fraß.
Ein wütend Mordgeschlecht hetzt er auf meine Frommen.
Sein Wille soll geschehn, der Fluch soll auf ihn kommen!
So sei denn du erwählt; zieh hin durch Berg und Tal,
Und sammle du zum Kampf die Gläubigen zumal!
Lass dich dein frommes Tier durch alle Lande tragen,
Und predige das Wort vom Kreuze sonder Zagen!
So zieh’ den Harnisch an, den Harnisch deines Herrn,
Denn sieh’ des Kampfes Tag, der Tag ist nicht mehr fern.
Umgürte mit dem Gurt der Wahrheit deine Lenden,
Der Krebs der Rechtlichkeit soll dir Bewährung spenden.
Gestiefelt beide Bein’, marschfertig, zieh hinaus,
Lösch auf des Glaubens Schild die Höllenpfeile aus.
Setz auf den Helm des Heils, ihn trifft kein Schlag des Spottes,
Vor allem schwinge kühn das Schwert des Wortes Gottes!’
Ja, Herr, ich folge dir, es zieht hinaus dein Knecht,
Zu predigen das Wort dem sündigen Geschlecht!"
Zur Kirche war indes gewallt der Frommen Haufen,
Doch jene gingen hin, wie immer, um zu saufen.
Der Bruder Beutel lässt sein Tier nun fürbaß gehn,
Und singt: „Ehre sei Gott, dem Herrn in Himmelshöhn,
Den Menschen auf der Erd’ ein süßes Wohlgefallen!"
Und weithin höret man das fromme Liedlein schallen.
So zieht er selig fort und überlässt dem Tier,
Wohin es ihn des Wegs in Gottes Namen führ’.
Indessen sitzen drei in Leipzig still zusammen,
Drei Männer, längst schon reif für Satans Höllenflammen.
Der wilde Ruge ist’s, der dort am Tische sitzt,
Das sorgenschwere Haupt auf breite Fäuste stützt.
Ein Recke, wohlbeleibt, friedfertig anzuschauen,
Doch sind wie Schwerter scharf die kampfgewohnten Klauen.
Behaglich glaubst du ihn, dem Bierphilister gleich,
Doch trägt er in der Brust ein ganzes Höllenreich.
O Ruge, lache nur, bald kommet das Gerichte,
Da wird auch dir man ziehn die Maske vom Gesichte!
Der andre, welcher schaut ins Glas mit schnödem Trutz
Und Höllengräuel sinnt, das ist der grimme Prutz.
Kein menschliches Gefühl drang je in seinen Busen,
Sein Denken und sein Tun, sein Fühlen sind Medusen.
Den Unbefangnen sä’t sein gleißend glatter Reim
Ins unschuldvolle Herz des Atheismus Keim.
O Prutz, o lache nur, bald kommet das Gerichte,
Da wird auch dir man ziehn die Maske vom Gesichte!
Der Dritte endlich dort, der sich den Schnurrbart streicht,
Der Blücher-Wigand ist’s, an Kniffen unerreicht,
Der Gotteslästrer nie ermüdender Verleger
Und durch sein Kapital der ganzen Rotte Träger.
Ha! lache, Wigand, nur, mit deinem Bart von Blücher,
Bald kommet das Gericht, du bist dem Teufel sicher!
Sie sitzen um den Tisch und sehn sich grollend an,
Und Wigand spricht: „Hab’ ich darum mein Geld vertan,
Und musst’ ich darum bloß bis jetzt soviel bezahlen,
Dass man verbietet nun die ,Hallischen Annalen?"
„O welche schlechte Zeit!" spricht Arnold Ruge wild,
„Mit Mühe nur mein Blatt des Zensors Blutdurst stillt;
Zwei Drittel Manuskript, die muss er mind’stens haben,
Und dennoch wollen sie mein armes Blatt begraben!"
Und Prutz: „O wehe mir, seit einem halben Jahr
Ließ mir der Zensor durch auch nicht ein einzig Haar!
Aushungern will man mich! Wird’s besser nicht, ihr Brüder,
So dicht’ ich, wie zuvor, beim Teufel! Liebeslieder."
„Was soll man anders tun?" spricht Ruge wild danach,
„Ich bin beschränkt schon auf den ,Musenalmanach’.
Zum Teufel Hegelei! Den Busen mir zu schwellen,
Zieht süße Lieder ein, langweilige Novellen!"
„Und ich", fährt Wigand fort, „ich kriege Müggen ran,
Nehm’ seinen neuesten vierbändigen Roman. (6)
Komm an mein Herz, o komm, sanftmüt’ge Belletristik,
Dich streicht der Zensor nicht, wie Hegelsche Sophistik.
Für deutsche Dichter jetzt breit’ ich den Fittich aus,
Kommt, Minnesänger, kommt, Bierfiedler, in mein Haus!
Gebt Brüder mir die Hand, wir ändern unsre Führung,
Wir werden jetzt loyal, es lebe die Regierung!"
Da tritt der Teufel ein: „Ihr jämmerlicher Schund!"
Fährt er die Freien an mit flammensprühndem Mund;
„Ist das der Heldenmut, das euer kühnes Wagen,
Vor eines Zensors Spruch, vor dem Verbot zu zagen?
O schämen muss ich mich, dass ich auf euch vertraut,
Den Esel nicht erkannt in seiner Löwenhaut!
Ha, wartet! Kann ich euch erst in der Hölle packen,
Wie will ich da mit Lust euch peinigen und placken!
Nein! das, du feiger Troß, das wäre mir zu klein:
Zum Himmel jag’ ich euch, zu Gott dem Herrn hinein!"
„So sei vernünftig doch!" sagt Wigand ihm dagegen,
„Was fangen wir denn an? Führ uns auf bessern Wegen!"
„Ihr seid wie Ochsen dumm", der Teufel zornig spricht,
„Ihr sehet ja den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht!
Bindet den ,Hallischen Annalen’ man die Hände,
So nennt ihr ,Deutsche’ sie, und alles ist zu Ende.
Und mir nur überlasst die Sorge der Zensur,
Das findet alles sich, es gilt Courage nur!
Wer mit dem Teufel steht auf du und du im Bunde,
Der darf nicht feig entfliehn vor jedem Lumpenhunde!
Jetzt also fasset Mut! Ich muss noch weiter heut’,
Ihr wütet vor wie nach für die Gottlosigkeit!"
Er sprach es und verschwand. Da, wider alles Hoffen,
Tritt Bruder Beutel ein und sieht den Himmel offen.
Ihn trägt die Eselin, die Gottes Sprachrohr ward,
Sie wird ihn tragen auch bei seiner Himmelfahrt.
Zum Himmel schaut er auf mit gottverzückten Blicken,
Und spricht: „O Lästerschar, ich kenne deine Tücken!
So spricht der Herr dein Gott: Ihr seid des Teufels Brut,
Ihr dürstet immerdar nach der Gerechten Blut;
Noch einmal will ich euch durch meinen Knecht berufen,
Dass ihr euch demütigt vor meines Thrones Stufen.
Tut Buße, spricht der Herr, und kriecht vor mir im Staub,
Eh’ ihr hinfallt zuletzt, dem Höllenfeu’r ein Raub.
So spricht der Herr dein Gott: Wollt ihr euch nicht bekehren,
So will ich euch im Bauch das Eingeweid zerstören!
Zur süßen Speise geb’ ich dieses Schandgeschlecht,
Euch meinem Hengstenberg und Beuteln, meinem Knecht;
Es sei der Frommen Leib euch ein lebendig Grab!
So spricht der Herr dein Gott!" – Und damit zog er ab.

Dritter Gesang

Was seh’ ich! Wüst ein Heer, das ganz von Lästrung funkelt,
Ob sich bei seiner Schau die Sonne nicht verdunkelt?
Wer sind sie? Wie mit Hast sie kommen Mann für Mann!
Von Süden, Norden, Ost und Westen ziehn sie an.
Germaniens Auswurf ist’s; sie kommen, zu beraten
Und zu berauschen sich in neuen Freveltaten.
Schon fühlten sie die Hand des Herren über sich,
Schon maßen sie den Sturz, in den sie fürchterlich
Des Satans Kralle riss – schon wollten sie verzagen,
Den Atheismus schon zu allen Teufeln jagen -
Da scholl des Arnolds Ruf, er fordert alle Frei’n
Nach Bockenheim zusamt zu höllischem Verein:
„Auf, auf, ihr Freien all! Was sitzt ihr an den Kunkeln,
Wenn die Romantiker die Welt ringsum verdunkeln?
Wenn die Reaktion sich reget, wenn verschmitzt
Der Wissenschaft schon halb sie in dem Nacken sitzt?
Der Bauer ist bedroht; an wütige Zensoren
Geht, was ihr denkt und schreibt, zum größten Teil verloren;
Drum, Freie allesamt, horcht meinem Manifest,
Vorausgesetzt, dass es der Zensor drucken lässt:
Es ist jetzt hohe Zeit, dass wir als Diplomaten
Die heil’ge Allianz ernst im Kongress beraten.
Seht ihr, wie sie sich müht, die hohe Polizei,
Zu tilgen überall das kleine Wörtchen frei?
Wie der Gendarmerie das Gotteslamm sich eint,
Und gleichfalls nur zum Vieh herabzuwürd’gen meint?
Wohlauf, ihr Freien, denn zum schönen Bockenheim,
Dort pflanzen wir vereint der neuen Taten Keim!"
Kaum war das Manifest in alle Welt ergangen,
Welch fürchterlicher Drang, welch freventlich Verlangen
Erstand in frecher Brust, nach Bockenheim zu ziehn;
Die Frechsten sendete vor allen doch Berlin.
Schamlos ziehn sie daher, voran der breite Arnold,
Ihm nach in -wilder Jagd ein wüster Zug von Narr’n tollt;
Weit übertraf er noch den Jakobinerklub,
Der hinter Arnold tost, der Atheistentrupp.
Siehst du den Köppen dort mit dem bebrillten Haupte,
Den gänzlich guten Mann – wenn’s Ruge nur erlaubte.
Doch Arnolds blinde Wut hat ganz ihn angesteckt:
An seine Seite hat den Degen er gesteckt,
Ein langes, rost’ges Ding, gleich einem Teufelsschwanze,
Umwedelt’s wunderbar die Waden ihm im Tanze.
Ihn zieren Epauletts, ein Rohr trägt seine Hand,
Er braucht’s, den Wissensdrang der Jugend zornentbrannt
Herauszupauken. – Seht, ihm folgt der freie Maien -
Europa kennet ihn – er ist’s, an dem sich freuen
Der Bösen Böseste; geborener Atheist,
Der schon seit Mutterleib täglich im Voltaire liest,
So hold, so zart, so klein – o arger Teufel Maien!
Wer sind die Rangen, die an deiner Seite schreien?
Weh’, deine Neffen sind’s! Auch sie verführest du?
Gleich mit Familie fährst du dem Teufel zu?
Doch der am weitsten links mit langen Beinen toset,
Ist Oswald, grau berockt und pfefferfarb behoset,
Auch innen pfefferhaft, Oswald der Montagnard,
Der wurzelhafteste mit Haut und auch mit Haar.
Er spielt ein Instrument: das ist die Guillotine,
Auf ihr begleitet er stets eine Kavatine;
Stets tönt das Höllenlied, laut brüllt er den Refrain:
Formez vos bataillons! aux armes, citoyens! (7)
Wer raset neben ihm, bemuskelt wie ein Brauer?
Das ist der Blutdurst selbst, es ist der Edgar Bauer.
Sein braunes Antlitz ist von Bartgesproß umwallt,
An Jahren ist er jung, an Listen ist er alt.
Von außen blaubefrackt, von innen schwarz und zottig,
Von außen Modemann, von innen sanscüllotig.
O seht das Wunder, seht, sein Schatten selber trampst,
Sein arger Schatten, den er Radge (8) zubenambst.
Seht Stirner, seht ihn, den bedächt’gen Schrankenhasser,
Für jetzt noch trinkt er Bier, bald trinkt er Blut wie Wasser.
So wie die andern schrein ihr wild: à bas les rois! (9)
Ergänzet Stirner gleich: à bas aussi les lois! (10)
Es trippelt hinterher, die grünen Zähne weisend,
Mit ungekämmtem Haupt und vor der Zeit ergreisend,
Ein seifenscheuer und blutscheuer Patriot,
Von ihnen schmeidig-zart, von außen Sanscülot.
Arnold der Wilde vorn, der Atheisten-Zare,
Er schwingt an seinem Stock diverse Exemplare
Der „Hallischen Annalen"; ihm folget ungezählt
Der Schwärm, den Satan sich zum Fraß hat auserwählt.
Kaum sind zur Stelle sie, da tost heran der Bauer,
Gehüllt in Qualm und Dampf, und Höllenregenschauer.
Er rast im grünen Rock, ein schmaler Bösewicht,
Den Höllensohn verrät das lauernde Gesicht.
Er schwingt die Fahne hoch, dass rings die Funken flogen
Von seiner Schmachkritik der Bibel einen Bogen.
Wer jaget hinterdrein mit wildem Ungestüm?
Ein schwarzer Kerl aus Trier, ein markhaft Ungetüm.
Er gehet, hüpfet nicht, er springet auf den Hacken
Und raset voller Wut, und gleich, als wollt’ er packen
Das weite Himmelszelt und zu der Erde ziehn,
Streckt er die Arme sein weit in die Lüfte hin.
Geballt die böse Faust, so tobt er sonder Rasten,
Als wenn ihn bei dem Schopf zehntausend Teufel fassten.
Patriziermäß’gen Gangs ein Jüngling folgt aus Köln,
Zum Himmelreich zu arg, zu fein dem Schlund der Höll’n.
Aristokrate halb und halb ein Sanscüllote,
Ein feiner reicher Herr mit faltigem Jabote,
Doch seine Seele zählt der argen Falten mehr,
In seiner Tasche sitzt ein ganzes Teufelsheer
Mit goldigem Gesicht. Und Rtg., der schnöde,
Er baumelt hinterher, mit seiner Faust nicht blöde.
Aus seinem Munde steigt ein ewig gleicher Rauch,
Ein Höllentabaksqualm – das ist sein schnöder Brauch.
Wenn in dem Munde hängt die ellenlange Pfeife,
Er nimmt sie nur heraus, zu keifen sein Gekeife.
Doch wer von Süden dort kommt mutterseelallein,
Verschmähend jeden Trost, er selber ein Verein,
Er selbst ein ganzes Heer von frechen Atheisten,
Er selbst ein ganzer Schatz von argen Teufelslisten,
Er selbst ein ganzer Strom von Lästerung und Schmach,
Es ist, hilf Sankt Johann! – der grause Feuerbach.
Er rast und springet nicht, er schwebet in den Lüften,
Ein grauses Meteor, umwallt von Höllendüften.
In seiner einen Hand den blinkenden Pokal,
Und in der anderen des Brotes labend Mahl,
Sitzt bis zum Nabel er in einem Muschelbecken,
Den neuen Gottesdienst der Frechen zu entdecken.
Das Fressen, Saufen und das Baden, sagt er frei,
Dass dies die Wahrheit nur der Sakramente sei.
Ein Hoch empfanget ihn, ein Brüllen, Jubilieren;
Man muss ihn auch sogleich in eine Kneipe führen.
Ein Durcheinanderschrein, ein Toben fängt hier an,
Dass keiner in dem Saus zu Worte kommen kann.
Sie sitzen nimmer still, sie schwirren, drängen, schieben,
Vom bösen Geiste stets im Kreis herumgetrieben.
Es lässt sie nimmer ruhn des Stillstands toller Hass,
Zur Ordnung schreiet man umsonst ohn’ Unterlass.
Da fasste wilder Grimm den gänzlich guten Köppen,
Den ordnungsfrohen Mann: „Bin ich in wilden Steppen?
Ihr roher Hordenschwarm, vergeßt ihr immerdar,
Was von der Reis’ hieher der erste Anlass war?
O Arnold, treuer Hort, heb an das Disputieren,
O sage, willst du uns zu gutem Ausweg führen?"
Oswald und Edgar schrein in brüllendem Verein:
„Hört, hört! Genug, genug das ordnungslose Schrein!"
Still ward es alsobald, und Arnold, der indessen
Ganz in Harmlosigkeit drei Beefsteaks aufgegessen,
Den letzten Bissen noch würgt’ er in seinen Schlund,
Da öffnet’ er alsbald zum Reden seinen Mund:
„Ha, welch treffliche Schau rings im Verein! Freie, zum Kampf bereit
Und zu gehn in den Tod, immer am Platz, wenn’s die Idee gebeut.
Seht, die Reaktion hält uns am Schopf, wie mit dem Stock sie dräut;
Doch sie bändigt uns nicht, wenn ihr, o Freund’, einig und tapfer seid."
Nicht länger lassen ihn Oswald und Edgar reden,
Sie springen auf den Tisch und brüllen laut, die Beeden:
„Der Worte haben wir genug vor dir, Ruge,
Gehört; wir wollen heut’ mit Kraft und Mark: Taten!"
Ein wildes Bravo schallt, ein Echo, schlechtberaten,
Es brüllte stets und stets: „Ha, Taten, Taten, Taten!"
Und spöttisch lächelnd rief der Arnold nun darein:
„Unsere Taten sind nur Worte bis jetzt und noch lange,
Hinter die Abstraktion stellt sich die Praxis von selbst."
Indessen hatten schon die beiden wilden Schreier
Gehoben auf den Stuhl in ihrem Tatenfeuer
Den tollen Bruno; seht, es reiht sich eine Schar
Um sie, man hebt ihn hoch, da schwebt er gleich dem Aar.
Seht, wie die wilde Brunst in seinen Augen funkelt,
Wie Zornesfaltenwurf die ganze Stirn verdunkelt.
Hört, wie es brüllend rast. – Doch gegenüber, weh’!
Das schwarze Ungetüm erklettert Rtg.
Hört, wie er brüllt und tost! Hört, wie sie beide brüllen:
„Wie lange willst du uns den Durst mit Worten stillen?"
Bauer: „Siehst du, Verblendeter,
Siehst du die Frommen,
Ha, wie sie kommen!"
Ungetüm: „Ihr frommes Heer
Wächst mehr und mehr."
Bauer: „Beutel zieht um,
Verwirrt das Publikum."
Ungetüm: „Gott Vater soll schon längst daran denken,
Der Erd’ einen neuen Messias zu schenken."
Bauer: „Nicht ein Lamm macht uns jetzt Beschwerde,
Uns dränget von Lämmern ’ne ganze Herde."
Ungetüm: „Der heil’ge Geist
In tausend Gestalten auf Erden reist."
Beide: „Uns plaget nicht bloß die Dreieinigkeit,
Auch der Polizei und des Glaubens Zweieinigkeit."
Ungetüm: „Wenn sie nicht feiern, Wollen wir leiern?"
Bauer: „Sie nehmen die Waffen,
Wir sollen nun gaffen?"
Schon rief man hier und dort: „Wir sind zum Kampf bereit!"
Durch Feuerbach entbrennt jedoch ein neuer Streit.
Er schrie: „Was sollen wir so lange denn beraten,
Wenn jemand Taten will, so tu’ er selber Taten!
Sein eigner Helfer steht für sich der freie Mann,
Und was er immer tut, hab’ er allein getan!"
Seht, Köppen stehet auf, es leuchtet seine Brille,
Vor seinem Jovishaupt sind rings die Freien stille:
„Was hast, o Feuerbach, du gegen den Verein?
Es wird der Unordnung gewehrt durch ihn allein;
Des Fortschritts Strom wird dann in Ruhe sich ergießen,
Und, was das beste ist, kein Tröpfchen Blut wird fließen!"
Edgar und Oswald schrein: „Verfluchter Girondist,
Kraftloser Schwärmer, geh, du bist kein Atheist!"
Doch Stirner würdevoll: „Wer bindet ihm den Willen?
Wer will hier ein Gesetz aufdrängen uns durch Brüllen?
Den Willen bindet ihr, ihr wagt’s und nennt euch frei,
Wie seid ihr eingelebt noch in die Sklaverei!
Weg Satzung, weg Gesetz!" – Schon war durch diese Irrung
Der höllische Kongress in völliger Verwirrung,
Da teilet sich das Dach, und Blücher-Wigand schießt
Hernieder in den Saal auf eignem Flieggerüst;
Er ritt, o Teufelsspuk! hoch auf papiernem Drachen.
„Was", ruft energisch er, „wollt ihr für Streiche machen?
Hier seht mich fahren
Auf Exemplaren
Der ,Deutschen Jahrbücher’,
Die ich mir geklebt,
Die ich mir gewebt,
Ich, euer Blücher!
Wenn sie mich durch die Lüfte tragen,
Wollt ihr verzagen?
Wehe, wehe!
Frankfurts Nähe,
Gibt sie gutes Beispiel nicht?
Dort ist Einigkeit und Stille,
Und der Allerhöchsten Wille
Ist den Hohen und den Höchsten,
Ist den Kleinen und den Kleinsten
Leitstern, Überzeugung, Licht!
Wehte – wehe! -
Frankfurts Nähe
Euch herüber schlechten Wind?
Kann der Freie nicht bestehen,
Wo des Bundes Winde wehen?
Nun, so folget mir geschwind!
Nach Leipzig lasst uns ziehn,
dort hab’ ich aufgetürmt
Die schönsten Batterien,
die nie ein Frommer stürmt.
Das Haus, in dem ich sonst mit Hegelei gehandelt,
In eine feste Burg ist es jetzt umgewandelt.
Im Gutenberge dann, in Leipzig sammelt euch,
Das Zentrum des Verlags sei Zentrum auch vom Reich."
„Ja, auf nach Leipzig hin!" so schallt’s von allen Seiten,
„Dort sei der Mittelpunkt für das vereinte Streiten."
Und alle brechen auf, und Wigand schwebt voran,
Und nur der Feuerbach zieht einsam seine Bahn. -
Doch fort von dieser Schau, mir winken Friedentale,
Mir winkt die Stadt des Herrn, winkt Halle an der Saale.
O sel’ge Stadt, getreu bestehst du vor dem Herrn!
Des Teufels List zum Trotz strahlt heller stets dein Stern,
Dir tut die Jauche nichts, die Ruge ausgeeitert,
All seine Pläne sind an deiner Treu’ gescheitert!
Drum zog er wütend ab und kehret nicht zurück;
O danke, Stadt, dem Herrn für solchen Sieg und Glück!
Und sieh, die Gläubigen, die Auserwählten alle
Versammeln sich zu Lob und Preis mit süßem Schalle.
O sieh, welch feine Schar! sieh? jenen Schuster vorn,
Sein hektisch dürrer Leib ist ihm der Andacht Sporn.
Sieh dort den Schenkwirt an des Mäßigkeitsvereines,
Er schenkt euch aus fürs Geld Trinkwasser, klares, reines.
Der Friede Gottes hellt sein Vollmondsangesicht -
O sehet, was vermag ein fester Glaube nicht!
Seht jenes Mütterchen, die Sünde beugt sie nieder,
Doch Seligkeit durchstrahlt die abgestorbnen Glieder.
Sie singt ein geistlich Lied mit lieblichem Gekreisch,
Und kreuzigt Tag und Nacht ihr ausgedörrtes Fleisch.
Und seht, o sehet hier des Saalenstrandes Leuen,
An dessen Glaubenskraft sich Gottes Engel freuen.
Im Glauben griff er an der Hegelinge Schar,
Im Glauben schützte er den Thron und den Altar,
Im Glauben hat er die gottlose Weltgeschichte
Verbessert, umgewandt, verklärt in Himmelslichte.
O, komm, du treue Schar, geh in das Kämmerlein
Und singe deinem Gott ein Loblied zart und fein!
O hört, wie liebelich das Liedelein erschallet,
Gleich Opferrauch empor zum Thron der Gnaden wallet:
„O Herr, wir sind vor dir ein Aas,
Ein Pestgestank, ein Rabenfraß,
Im Schinderloch der Sünden!
Wir sind von Mutterleib grundschlecht,
Zertritt uns, so geschieht uns recht
Für unsre argen Sünden!
Wenn auch, dennoch hast du gnädig
Uns entledigt
Von dem Krebs, der uns beschädigt.
Du lässt uns in den Himmel ein
Zu deinen lieben Engelein
Und wäschest uns vom Schlamme.
Du hast den Bösen weggejagt,
Der uns stets Unruh’ hat gebracht,
Friss ihn, und ihn verdamme!
Glühend, sprühend in der Hölle
Schlimmster Stelle
Lass ihn braten
Für die schnöden Sündentaten!"
Der Schuster stellet sich, o sieh’, auf einen Stuhl,
Und predigt schrecklich laut vom Höllenschwefelpfuhl:
„Seht ihr den grausen Schlund, der qualmend sich ergießet,
Der Schwefel, Pech und Feu’r auf alle Lande gießet!
Seht, wie er kocht und braut und lauter Teufel speit,
Zu fressen, zu verzehr’n die ganze Christenheit!
Seht, wie er weithin streut der Hölle schwarzen Samen!
Groß ist der Herr, dein Gott, die Welt geht unter. Amen."
„Ja wahrlich, also ist’s", so ruft der Leu begeistert,
„Die Teufel ziehen nackt, selbst nicht die Scham verkleistert.
Die große Hure kommt vom schnöden Babylon,
Die Göttin der Vernunft, die Revolution!
Bauer ist Robespierre, und Danton lebt in Ruge,
Marat ist Feuerbach, o dass ihn Gott verfluche!
Drum nehmet, Gläubige, der Zeiten wohl in acht!
Es kommt der Tag des Herrn, o betet, betet, wacht!"
Er sprach’s, und siehe da – und alle stehen betroffen - -
Tritt Bruder Beutel ein und sieht den Himmel offen.
Ihn trägt die Eselin, die Gottes Sprachrohr ward,
Sie wird ihn tragen auch bei seiner Himmelfahrt.
Zum Himmel schaut er auf mit Gottvertraun und Stärke
Und spricht: „O fromme Schar, ich kenne deine Werke.
So spricht der Herr, dein Gott: Gehorchet meinem Knecht,
Den ich erwählt, mein Heer zu führen ins Gefecht.
Gehorchet ihm, gehorcht, gehorchet Bruder Beuteln,
Er wird des Teufels List und Trug und Macht vereiteln.
So spricht der Herr; und ich fiel demutsvoll aufs Knie
Und sprach: Du rufst, o Herr, ich folge dir und zieh’.
So zog ich mutig aus, das Wort des Herrn zu kündigen,
Das angenehme Jahr des Herrn, der Welt, der sündigen.
Und in die Schlösser ging ich, in die reichen, hin
Zu vornehmem Geschlecht, zu Fürst und Königin.
Doch dies Geschlecht, das stets nach ird’schen Gütern trachtet,
Nach eitler Ehre geizt, hat mich geschmäht, verachtet.
Sie saßen um den Tisch in wilder Völlerei,
Genossen Augenlust und Fleischeslust dabei.
Da ging ich fort, den Staub von meinen Füßen schüttelnd,
Doch zu mir sprach der Herr, mich nachts vom Schlafe rüttelnd:
.Gehn nicht zum Himmelreich die Reichen ein so schwer,
Als ein Kamel du machst gehn durch eine Nadelöhr?
Wie steht geschrieben? Geh hinaus auf die Landstraßen,
Die Armen führe her, die Blinden von den Gassen,
Die Krüppel, Lahmen lass herein zum Abendmahl,
Die an den Zäunen stehen, ruf an mit lautem Schall.
Da sind die wahren Leut’, das ist der Kern des Heeres,
So geh und sammle sie, wirb Knechte und vermehr’ es!’
So sprach der Herr, und ich, ich komme also gleich,
Gehorsam seinem Wort, ihr Gläubigen, zu euch.
Gehorcht dem Ruf des Herrn, bald wird der Morgen tagen,
Wo mit dem Teufel wird die große Schlacht geschlagen.
Die Freien scharen sich, gen Leipzig zieht ihr Heer,
Und Blücher-Wigands Haus ist ihnen feste Wehr.
Dort hinter Ballen stehen und Büchern sie verschanzet,
Dort wird der Kampfestanz, der heil’ge Tanz getanzet.
Hier gilt Beständigkeit und starker Mut im Sturm,
Dass wir einnehmen bald der argen Frevler Turm.
So schart euch, Brüder, denn, seid stark in Lieb’ und Hoffen,
Am Glauben haltet fest! Ich seh’ den Himmel offen.
Der Glauben ist das A und auch das Omega,
Im Glauben bist du groß, Halle, Halleluja!
Im Glauben hat die Maid den Gottessohn empfangen,
Im Glauben spie der Fisch den Jonas aus, den bangen.
Im Glauben tat der Herr das Evangelium kund,
Im Glauben sprach zu mir der Herr durch Eselsmund.
Im Glauben sah das Licht der Blinde wider Hoffen,
Im Glauben blick’ ich auf und seh’ den Himmel offen.
Im Glauben ruf ich laut: credo ut intelligam,
Im Glauben halt’ ich fest am rauhen Kreuzesstamm.
Im Glauben ist mein Tun, im Glauben ist mein Hoffen,
Im Glauben blick’ ich auf und seh’ den Himmel offen:
Und zu mir spricht der Herr: Lass meinen Knecht, den Leun,
Von der Hallenser Schar den kühnen Hauptmann sein.
Durchziehe Land und Stadt, geh ein in alle Burgen
Und wirb Soldaten an und Kompagniechirurgen.
Und ruhe nimmer aus, bei Tage wie bei Nacht,
Dass bald der Frommen Heer zusammen sei gebracht.
So spricht der Herr, dein Gott, so sei’s mein Hort und Hoffen!
Lebt wohl, ihr Brüder lieb, ich seh’ den Himmel offen!" -

Vierter Gesang

Was seh’ ich! Sankt Johann, erleuchte meine Blicke,
Dass deiner Dichterei Gewalt mich schier verzücke;
Der mit geweihtem Aug’ den Engel Michael
Im Drachenkampfe schaut’, o läutre meine Seel’!
Was seh’ ich! Ha, er naht, er naht, der Tag des Richtens,
Der Tag der letzten Schlacht, der Tag naht des Vernichtens!
Was seh’ ich! Ein Gewölk, das rings des Himmels Kreis
Umzog, es steigt herauf, erst sacht’, erst schmeichelnd-leis;
Doch plötzlich, wie der Leu, voll Gier nach seiner Beute,
Rast es gewaltig an. Die ganze Höllenmeute
Zischt durch der Wolken Dunst; mit feuerglühn’dem Schwanz
Zerpeitschen sie die Luft; in wildem Hexentanz
Drehn sie sich ruhelos, in rasend gier’gem Brüllen
Versuchen sie die Wut, die sie durchkocht, zu stillen.
Was seh’ ich! Schandgeschlecht, sind dein des Himmels Höh’n,
Und darfst du ungestraft auf Gottes Pfaden gehn?
In eurer Hand der Blitz, in eurer Macht der Donner?
Doch, ich versteh’, es führt voll Wildheit euch der Bonner!
Doch sieh’, die Gnad’ des Herrn ist ewig wachsam da,
Und alles endiget mit einem Gloria. – -
Da kommen sie heran, die wutentbrannten Freien,
Bald, bald wird ihren Stolz der Herr mit Macht zerstreuen.
Da brausen sie heran, und Wigand schwebt vorauf,
Die andern hinterdrein mit Brüllen und Geschnauf.
Nach Leipzig führt er sie; zu einem Platz der Waffen
Hat er den „Gutenberg" in Eile umgeschaffen.
Von Ballen aufgetürmt, prangt manche Bastion,
Wallgang und Graben ist des Sturms gewärtig schon.
Von Bauers Schriften sind getürmt vier Raveline,
Wohl mit Geschütz versehn, zu decken die Kurtine.
Von Köppens „Friederich“ liegt dort manch Exemplar,
Manch Blatt „Annalen" auch von längstvergangnem Jahr.
„Posaune" (11), Feuerbach, geschnürt in schwere Ballen,
Ziehn sich in langen Reihn, die Festung zu umwallen.
Als span’scher Reiter liegt dort Ruges „Novellist",
Zum Schweißabtrocknen der „verhallerte Pietist" (12)
Zum Rückzug bleibt das Haus, dies kleine Stückchen Hölle,
Das jetzt verwandelt in die stärkste Zitadelle.
Die Fenster sind verbaut, die Tür barrikadiert,
Und die Munition hart unters Dach geführt,
Dass, kommt der Frommen Schar, die Schanzen einzureißen,
Die Frei’n von oben her ihnen den Kopf zerschmeißen.
Sie ziehen mit Gebrüll und wildem Jubel ein,
Und auf die Bastions verteilen sich die Frei’n.
Von Halle rückten an die frommen Gottesstreiter,
Zum Stürmen trugen sie des Jakob Himmelsleiter.
Die Feuersäule wogt als Fahne stolz voran,
Die Büsche brannten hell auf ihrer nächt’gen Bahn.
O, wär’ ich stark genug, der Frommen Zug zu malen
Und ihn mit heil’gem Glanz gar köstlich zu umstrahlen!
Die erste Reihe führt der grimmig stolze Leu;
Er schreitet kühn daher und schwinget sonder Scheu
Fünf Bände Weltgeschicht (13) in seinen frommen Fäusten;
Sonst ist er waffenlos; der Glaube muss ihm leisten,
Was aller Übermut und Selbstvertrau’n nicht kann.
Die zweite Reihe führt ein wahrer Gottesmann.
Die Frommen nennen ihn Herr Julius van der Sünden (14);
Ihr könnt am lieben Mann nicht eine Waffe finden;
Er schlägt die Freien bloß durch seine Gegenwart,
Drum hatten sich um ihn die Gläubigsten geschart,
Und ihre Waffe war das Beten nur und Singen,
Denn wenn von weitem nur des Himmelssanges Klingen
Die Freien angehört, sie laufen meilenweit. -
Bonn sendet Kämpen auch, viel tapfre, zu dem Streit,
Sie führet Bruder Nichts; und andre ziehn von Schwaben,
Der „Christenbote" schwebt als Fahne hoch erhaben.
Die Bremer führt zum Kampf der tapfre Mallet hin,
Es führet Hengstenberg die Frommen von Berlin.
Auch ihr, die ihr den Strauß von Zürich fortgejaget,
Es führet euch zum Kampf der Hirzel unverzaget,
Der Pfaff von Pfäffikon (15). Auch Basler ziehn heran.
Du kommst vom Wuppertal, Krummacher, Gottesmann.
Die Scharen sammeln sich auf Leipzigs weiten Plätzen;
Da höret man von fern zu lieblichem Ergötzen
Erbaulichen Gesang, der zu dem Herzen dringt;
Und alle fragen sich: Wer ist es, der da singt?
Sieh, auf der Eselin – und alle stehen betroffen -
Naht Bruder Beutel sich und sieht den Himmel offen.
Sein Sang ertönt: „Hie Schwert des Herrn und Gideon,
Auf, Brüder, sehet dort des Teufels Schanzen schon!
Wie fürchterlich sich auch der Höllen Pforten türmen,
Hinauf in Gottvertraun! Der Glaube wird sie stürmen!"
Und sieh, die Eselin sprengt auf die Schanzen ein,
Die Schar der Gläubigen eilt singend hinterdrein.
O welch ein wilder Sturm! Verzagt, ihr Lästermäuler,
Und heult zum Teufel nun, ihr gottvergess’nen Heuler!
Sieh, Bruder Beutel fliegt hinan den stolzen Wall;
Es führet Hengstenberg zum Kampf der Gläub’gen Schwall.
Doch drinnen ordnet an den Widerstand der Teufel,
Gibt guten Rat zur Schlacht und scheuchet feige Zweifel.
Seht, Blücher-Wigand steht hoch auf dem Ravelin,
Von Maien unterstützt, seht, wie sie Feuer sprühn;
Seht Stirner, wie er wirft mit ganzen Bücherballen,
Dass scharenweis betäubt die Frommen niederfallen;
Seht Arnold auf dem Wall, wie er gewaltig ficht,
Wie er den Gläub’gen wirft „Jahrbücher" ins Gesicht;
Seht, wie in erster Reih’, hoch auf der Büchermauer,
Wild die „Posaune" schwingt der tolle Bruno Bauer;
Seht, wie aus sichrem Ort, wo ihn kein Wurf bedroht,
Broschüren rücklings wirft ins Feld der Patriot;
Wie Köppen wütend ficht mit seinem Krötenspieße,
Und dennoch menschlich sorgt, dass er kein Blut vergieße;
Wie streitet Edgar wild mit Brauerskraft und Mut,
Wie färbt der Pfefferrock Oswalds sich rot von Blut!
O seht die Kölner Schar! Im Kampf ist ausgegangen
Die Pfeife Rtg’s, doch das macht ihm kein Bangen,
Er fasst sie umgekehrt am langen, schwanken Schlauch,
Und schwenkt den Wassersack den Frommen um den Bauch.
Der Jüngling schleudert grimm Goldteufel rings hernieder,
Es rast das Ungetüm und reckt zum Kampf die Glieder.
Doch immer mut’ger vor das fromme Häuflein dringt
Und immer herrlicher das Halleluja klingt.
Seht, wie den Wigand fasst auf seinem Bücherberg
Am langen blonden Bart der fromme Hengstenberg;
Seht, wie er wütend hat den Bart ihm ausgerissen,
Und in den grausen Kot Wigand herabgeschmissen;
Seht Arnold ist bedrängt und Edgar hart bedroht,
Ins Haus flieht Köppen schon, mit ihm der Patriot.
Halb eingerissen ist die stolze Büchermauer,
Doch immer wütend kämpft allein der tolle Bauer.
Auf Bruder Beuteln fliegt von seiner Hand herab
Ein ganzer Ballen jetzt und wird des Frommen Grab.
Es wankt von seinem Schlag Herr Julius van der Sünden,
Da trotzet Halles Leu den wilden Höllenschlünden.
Ein Simson, reißt er ein den stolzen Festungwall,
Er stürzt und Bauer, seht, auch Bauer kommt zu Fall!
Da liegt er, eingepresst von seinen eignen Ballen, -
Ha, wie die Gläub’gen ihn lobsingend überfallen!
Seht, Bruder Beutel rafft sich von der Erd’ empor
Und fasset siegesfroh des tollen Bauer Ohr,
Und spricht: „O Gläubige, der Herr erfüllt mein Hoffen,
Der Herr ist unser Hort, ich seh’ den Himmel offen!
Zum Kampfe, fort zum Kampf! O lasst den Bauer mir;
Derweil ihr jene schlagt, bewach’ ich diesen hier."
Sie binden Bauer rasch und stürzen singend weiter,
Und setzen an das Haus zum Sturm die Jakobsleiter.
Es wankt der Gutenberg, es kracht die Türe schon.
Schon geht den Freien aus oben die Munition,
Schon ringt der Patriot verzweiflungsvoll die Hände,
Schon ist durch einen Wurf gelähmet Arnolds Lende,
Schon blutet Maien stark aus Nasenloch und Mund,
Da eilt der Teufel fort voll Angst zum Höllenschlund.
Mit grausigem Geheul flieht er in seine Tiefen,
Hei, wie die Bösen da in Angst zusammenliefen!
Sie fragen, lästern, drohn, und er in grimmem Zagen:
„O Schmach, die Freien sind vom frommen Heer geschlagen!
Nichts half mein Spott und Hohn, nichts half mein Pestgestank;
Weh’, sie besiegten mich mit himmlischem Gesang!
Wigand ist ohne Bart, gefangen ist der Bauer,
Genommen ist mit Sturm der Bücherballen Mauer!"
Hei, wie von Angstgebrüll der Höllen Tiefe dröhnt!
Hei, wie vor grausem Schmerz der wilde Hegel stöhnt!
Doch hat sich kaum erholt der Schwärm vom ersten Schrecken,
Erheben Schimpf und Drohn die tollen Höllenrecken;
In Aufruhr tosen sie. „Du willst ein Teufel sein,
Und lässt uns das geschehn?", schreit Hegel wild darein.
„Wo war dein Schwefeldampf, wo war dein Brand und Feuer?
Vor einem Amen fliehst du, feiges Ungeheuer?
Wir sehen, ach, zu spät! vor Alter bist du schwach,
Nur Kindern läufst du noch und alten Vetteln nach.
Auf! rasches Handeln hilft, nicht weichliches Geplärre,
Hier, Danton! Voltaire, auf! Und du, Robespierre!
Nur ihr könnt helfen hier, die ihr gewallt auf Erden;
Zum Himmel mit dem Teufel! Wir müssen Teufel werden!
Stets kraftlos ist und bleibt das mythische Geschmeiß,
Selbst tausendjähr’ger Brand macht nicht die Feigen heiß.
Auf, Bruder Marat! Wir, die Menschen einst gewesen,
Wir müssen einen Mann zum Führer auserlesen.
Der Teufel ist und bleibt nur mythische Person,
Und er ist unser Feind, wie jeder Himmelssohn.
Hinauf, hinauf zum Sieg!" – Hei, wie in tollem Rasen
Sie aus der Hölle fliehn, die blutgewohnten Asen!
An ihrer Spitze schwingt zwei Feuerbränder Hegel,
Und Voltaire hinter ihm mit feurigrotem Flegel.
Danton erhebt die Stimm’, es brüllet Edelmann,
Es ruft Napoleon: „Auf, Höllenbrut, voran!"
Marat, in jeder Hand zwei borst’ge Höllenkinder,
Schon lechzet er nach Blut, der wüste Menschenschinder.
Robespierre saust, von Grimme zuckt sein Mund -
Weh’! diese wilde Schar speit aus der Höllenschlund.
Wo Bruder Beutel hält, der Bauern fromm behütet,
Da ist die wilde Jagd gradhin zuerst gewütet.
Der Beutel steht erschreckt, es weint die Eselsmaid:
„Ach, Herr, jetzt ist es aus, es kommt nun unsre Zeit."
Marat wirft sein Geschoss, und Beutel wird getroffen,
Zur Erde sinkt er hin und sieht den Himmel offen.
Und Hegel hat umarmt den tollen Bauer schon:
„Ja, du hast mich gefasst, du bist mein lieber Sohn!"
Die Bande löst er ihm, die Bösen jubilieren:
„Hoch Bauer, unser Held! Er soll zum Kampf uns führen!
Der Teufel ist entsetzt, wir brauchen einen Mann."
So stürmen mit Geschrei sie auf die Frommen an.
Es wendet sich das Blatt, die Frommen fliehn betroffen;
Doch Bruder Beutel sieht, wie stets, den Himmel offen.
Es trägt die Eselin zum Himmel ihn hinan -
O welch ein Wunder, seht, hat Gott der Herr getan!
Zum Himmel fahren seht, o seht Elias-Beuteln!
Der Gotteslästrer Plan, seht herrlich ihn vereiteln.
Und hinter ihm mit Glanz der Frommen Heeresschar,
Sie fliehen mit Gesang zum Himmel auf fürwahr.
Doch weh’! die Höllenbrut, sie fähret hinterdrein:
Es stürmen wütend nach mit Siegesruf die Frei’n.
Dem Schrecken sind, der Furcht die Frommen nun zur Beute,
Und ihnen mit Gebrüll stürzt nach die Höllenmeute. -
Den Teufel unterdes hat die Rebellion,
Mit der die Trefflichsten aus seinem Haus geflohn,
Auf lange stumm gemacht, und mit ihm staunt die Hölle;
Sie stehen regungslos und stieren nach der Schwelle,
Aus welcher Hegel und die ganze Schar gesaust;
Bis endlich ihm der Zorn aus schaum’gem Munde braust:
„Daran erkenn’ ich euch, ich Dummer bin verraten,
Die Tat ist teuflischer als meine faden Taten.
Zu frei sind diese Frei’n, erst hab’ ich sie verführt,
Nun haben sie von mir sich schnöd’ emanzipiert.
Mit diesem Menschenpack ist gar nichts anzufangen.
Nach frechster Freiheit steht ihr freventlich Verlangen;
Erkennen diese Frei’n kein Heiliges mehr an,
Am Ende ist es dann auch noch um mich getan.
Ich kämpfe wider mich, indem ich Gott bestreite,
Als mythische Person schiebt man mich auch beiseite.
Hinauf! wir suchen Gott in seinem Himmelsglanz
Und schließen treu vereint hochheil’ge Allianz."
So stürzt er wild hinauf, er wirft sich Gott zu Füßen
Und spricht: „O lass mich nicht, was ich gefrevelt, büßen!
Vereint kämpf ich mit dir." Und Gott, der güt’ge, sprach:
„Einstweilen sehen wir dir deine Sünden nach;
Geh, wasch in Lästrerblut dir ab die argen Sünden,
Und kommst du dann zurück, wird sich das andre finden."
Voll Freude stürmt er fort; er findet grimme Schlacht.
Ob Beistand auch der Schar der Frommen ward gebracht -
Ach dennoch muss – o Schmach! – der Glauben unterliegen,
Es eilt die Frevlerbrut zu immer neuen Siegen.
Von Stern zu Sterne fort springt Bauer, wutentbrannt,
Und die „Posaune" schwingt als Keule seine Hand.
Entgegen ziehen ihm die vier Evangelisten,
Jedoch sie schrecken nicht den frechen Atheisten;
Ob auch des Lukas Ochs die Hörner grimmig streckt,
Des Markus Löwe brüllt – Er bleibet unerschreckt;
Er scheucht die Heil’gen all. – Wie wild der Hegel dränget,
Der Engel Flügelein mit seinem Brand versenget;
Wie mit dem Flegel hoch der schnöde Voltaire dräut;
Wie Ruge wutentbrannt die Kirchenväter bleut;
Seht Bauer einen Stern in seinem Laufe packen
Und, ach! ihn schleudern auf die fliehnden frommen Nacken;
Seht, wie der Teufel sinkt von der „Posaune" Schlag,
Und vor ihr Michael selbst nicht bestehen mag;
Seht, wie den Sirius der wilde Hegel fasset,
Und Hengstenbergen wirft, dass er alsbald erblasset;
Seht, wie der Englein Schar versengt die Flügelein,
Durchzappelt das Gewölk mit angsterfülltem Schrein!
Das Lämmlein hält das Kreuz dem Ungetüm entgegen,
Der aber ballt die Faust und droht mit grimmen Schlägen.
Die Magd Maria selbst verlässt das Heiligtum
Und spornt die Engel an zu Kampfesmut und Ruhm:
„Auf, gegen Bauer, auf! auf, gegen den Titanen!
Begreifen wollt’ er mich, das müsst, das müsst ihr ahnen."
Doch, wie sie fleht und ruft, wie sie auch lieblich blickt,
Der Freien Scharen sind stets weiter vorgerückt.
O seht, schon nahen sie dem Heiligtum des Herren,
Schon kann die Gottesschar nicht mehr den Weg versperren;
Schon stößt an einen Stern die fromme Eselin,
Und fällt auf ihrer Flucht mit Bruder Beuteln hin;
Schon nahet Bauer ihm mit fürchterlichem Rasen,
Sein Lebenslicht mit der „Posaune" auszublasen;
Schon fasset Ruge wild des Saalestrandes Leun,
Und presst in seinen Mund ein Blatt „Annalen" ein –
Da sieh! was schwebt heran, von Himmelsglanz umgeben,
Was lässt den Bauer so gewaltiglich erbeben?
Es ist, ihr glaubt es kaum, ein einfach Pergamen:
Was mag mit Himmelslicht darauf verzeichnet stehen?
Es schwebt gelind herab, es schwebt vor Bauer nieder,
Und Bruno hebt es auf; es zittern seine Glieder –
Was ist es, was die Stirn mit kaltem Schweiß benetzt?
Was murmelt er so dumpf? Er murmelt: – „Abgesetzt!"
Kaum ist dies Himmelswort dem Höllenmund entfahren,
Da brüllen: „Abgesetzt!" ringsum der Freien Scharen.
Sie stehen starr und stumm, es jauchzt der Engel Heer,
Die Freien fliehn voll Graus, die Engel hinterher.
Sie treiben in Triumph die Freien bis zur Erde.
Dass jeder Böse doch also bestrafet werde!

1 Dieses parodistische Heldengedicht entstand als Protest gegen die Ende März 1842 erfolgte Entlassung Bruno Bauers aus dem Universitätsdienst. Es wurde von Engels gemeinsam mit seinem damaligen Freund Edgar Bauer, dem Bruder Bruno Bauers, verfasst, der wohl vor allem die Fakten zur Geschichte der Berliner Junghegelianer vor Engels’ Eintreffen in Berlin beigesteuert hat.

2 - 2. Mose 8,19

3 - 5. Mose 22,8

4 - 5. Mose 25

5 Anspielung auf die Versetzung Bruno Bauers als Privatdozent der Theologie nach Bonn im Jahre 1839.

6 Hier ist wahrscheinlich der 1840 in Stuttgart erschienene vierteilige Roman „Toussaint" von Theodor Mügge gemeint.

7 Formiert eure Bataillone! zu den Waffen, Bürger! [aus der „Marseillaise“]

8 Anagramm von „Edgar“ (Bauer) [WK]

9 nieder mit den Königen!

10 nieder auch mit den Gesetzen!

11 Gemeint ist Bruno Bauers anonym erschienene Schrift „Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen. Ein Ultimatum", Leipzig 1841.

12 Hinweis auf Eduard Meyens Buch „Heinrich Leo, der verhallerte Pietist. Ein Literaturbrief. Allen Schülern Hegel’s gewidmet", Leipzig 1839.

13 Gemeint ist Heinrich Leos Werk „Lehrbuch der Universalgeschichte", von dem von 1835 bis zur Niederschrift der „Frech bedräuten, jedoch wunderbar befreiten Bibel..." in Halle fünf Bände erschienen waren; ein sechster Band erschien 1844.

14 Mit Julius van der Sünden bezeichnete Engels den evangelischen Theologen Julius Müller, den Autor des 1839 in Breslau erschienenen ersten Bandes des Buches „Die christliche Lehre von der Sünde. Vom Wesen der Sünde...".

15 Am 6. September 1839 wurde die gemäßigte liberale Regierung des Kantons Zürich durch einen Putsch reaktionärer Kräfte vor allem aus dem Lager des Klerikalismus gestürzt. Hierbei spielte der Pfarrer von Pfäffikon, Bernhard Hirzel, mit seinen bewaffneten glaubenseifrigen Anhängern eine ausschlaggebende Rolle.

#philosophie #poésie #marxisme #existentialisme #anarchisme #Hegel

Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism
Interview withVivek Chibber
▻https://jacobin.com/2025/12/colonialism-transition-feudalism-capitalism-history-economy

Une bonne explication de l’origine des idées erronnées qui situent le prolétariat européen et de l’Amérique du Nord du côté des profiteurs du colonialisme sous prétexte d’une couleur de peau commune.

14.12.2025 Interview by Melissa Naschek - Despite what you may have heard, colonial plunder didn’t give rise to capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber discusses why the “colonialism-created-capitalism” argument fails, and why Marxism provides a better account of its emergence.

It’s well understood that capitalist economies are a recent development in human history. But there is persistent disagreement on the Left over exactly how and where the transition to capitalism occurred, as well as what role colonial plunder played in enriching the West.

On this episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber explains the origins of capitalism, what primitive accumulation means, and how colonialism actually affected European development.

Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Melissa Naschek

Today, we’re going to talk about the development of capitalism. And specifically, we’re going to look at a very trendy argument right now in left-wing and academic circles about the connection between colonial plunder and the establishment of capitalism. And the big argument going around is that, basically, the West became rich and economically developed directly as a result of colonial plunder — that colonial plunder was essentially responsible for bringing about capitalism. So what do you think of these arguments?

Vivek Chibber

They’re utter nonsense. They don’t have a shred of truth to them.

The idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder can’t even get off the ground. And it’s interesting — and maybe not surprising — that this argument is in such vogue today especially within the activist left. But it’s also coming back in academia, after it had been pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1980s and ’90s. So I think it is worth going into it a bit to explain why it’s empirically unsustainable, but also why even theoretically, it just makes no sense.

Melissa Naschek

And what’s interesting is that a lot of leftists point to Marx himself in Capital, Volume I and how he talks about the relationship between colonial plunder and capitalism, using that as evidence that there is a deep relationship between the two.

Vivek Chibber

The last few chapters of Capital are on something that Marx calls the “secret of so-called primitive accumulation.” And in those chapters, he’s trying to explain where capitalism in fact comes from. So he calls it “primitive accumulation” because that expression comes from Adam Smith — sometimes it’s called the “original accumulation.” And he takes up Smith’s position as a kind of a springboard from which he then derives his own position.

Smith’s argument said that in order to have capitalism, you need to have investment. And that investment has to come from some pool of money somewhere. You need to have a pool of money so that you can invest it. And that money must have some point of origin if you’re going to get the system. So Smith says, “Well, there must have been some original accumulation of capital that launched this new system.” So where did it come from? And he says it came from people being really frugal, from saving their money. And then they were able to derive from that enough investible funds that they then put it to use as capital.

Now, Marx starts off his chapters on so-called primitive accumulation by poking fun at this. First of all, he says it’s empirically not the case that it was this kind of frugality and good customs and habits that gave you that pool of money. In fact, he says, if anything, what got you the pool of money was things like robbery, the nobility thieving people of their money, and, he says, the fruits of colonial plunder. That’s the context.

So basically what he’s trying to do there is to say, look, insofar as an initial pool of money was needed, it did not come from savings. It came from the worst kinds of practices you can imagine. So he’s indicting capitalism in those terms.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And so rejecting Smith’s savings-oriented argument, he’s putting out a potential counter that maybe it was this other source of forcible, often violent wealth extraction.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. Essentially, he’s saying it’s not from decent people using their Protestant ways to save lots of money. It came from the worst kinds of things.

But that’s just a rhetorical ploy he’s using. In fact, what he says immediately after that is it doesn’t matter how much money you have. It doesn’t matter how much capital you have, because money only becomes capital in certain situations, in certain circumstances.

What are those circumstances? He says that whatever money these people had, it could only be put to use for capital accumulation once you had the social context and the institutional situation that induces people to use money productively toward profit maximization.

Now, what does that even mean? Why wouldn’t they use it toward profit maximization prior to capitalism? This is Marx’s main point. What Marx is saying is that money does not become capital until you get a change in the social structure of feudalism, so that you move from a feudal class structure to a capitalist class structure. And the money itself can’t make that happen.

Feudalism was the economic system that existed prior to capitalism. Within feudalism, whatever money people got, whether it was from savings or from plunder, was put to use “feudalistically”, you might say — i.e., in a non-capitalistic way.

Melissa Naschek

Can you explain that a little bit more?

Vivek Chibber

To begin with, I think Marx made a rhetorical error when he indulged Smith even to the point of saying that it wasn’t frugality that gave you the original accumulation, but plunder. Because that’s just a kind of a side note in the chapter. But people have fixed their sights on this rhetorical device and used it to justify exactly the argument he was trying to falsify, and spent the next five chapters doing so.

The core of what Marx is saying is that, first of all, there was no shortage of savings within feudalism. In other words, there was no shortage of lots of investable funds in feudalism. How do we know that? Well, because the feudal nobility, the aristocracy, the people who had all the money and the power, were filthy rich. If they had wanted to deploy that money in a profit-maximizing way, which is what capitalists do, they would have done it long ago.

Furthermore, plunder and colonial expansion were endemic to Europe for a thousand years before capitalism came around. So, if what it took to get to capitalism was some kind of original accumulation of money — even through plunder — you would have had capitalism a thousand years prior.

The key is to remember that there was never any shortage of investable funds within feudalism. So, even if it is the case that lots of new silver and gold is coming through colonialism, it doesn’t alter the fact that whatever money you have, you’re going use it in a way that’s sensible by whatever economic rules there are in your system.

And because feudalism was a system in which the most sensible thing to do with your money was to use it toward nonproductive, non-profit-maximizing ends, regardless of whether you were the peasantry or the nobility, whatever money you had would be deployed in that particular feudalistic way.

Now, the fact of the matter is that in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the two European countries that had the largest empires were Spain and Portugal. And those empires were explicitly created to bring lots and lots of treasure from the New World to the Old World.

This treasure is exactly what Smith is talking about. It’s enormous hoardings of wealth. And if Smith was right that you needed to first have this original accumulation of wealth, Spain and Portugal ought to have had the first transitions to capitalism. They should have gone from being feudal monarchies to being capitalist economies and the fastest growing economies in Europe. What happened in fact was that this treasure, as it came into these countries, did nothing to bring about a change in the economic system. In fact, what it did was it pushed these two countries into about 150 years of economic stagnation.

Where you did have a change to a new economic structure was in the country where there was virtually no empire, which was England. And let’s get our dates right. England moves toward a new economic structure that had not been seen in the world before, which we call capitalism, starting in the mid- to late 1400s. So that by about 1550 or 1560, you’ve essentially got a truly capitalist economy. This is about a hundred years before England has any kind of real empire at all.

So, the countries with the largest empires and the largest inflows of treasure — colonial extraction, you can call it — experienced no change to a new economic system. The country that did experience a change to a new economic system is the one that didn’t have an empire.

So if the question is “What role do treasure and plunder play in the rise of capitalism?” then the argument that treasure and plunder are what trigger it can’t even get off the ground, because the countries where it should have happened — if the argument were correct — are the countries where it didn’t happen. And where it does happen is in a country where you don’t have this kind of plunder. And that’s England.

Now, this is just the empirical record. The theoretical problem is this: You have to explain what would make a feudal landlord or a monarch who’s suddenly endowed with this huge pool of money to change the entire class structure, whether it’s of his feudal holdings if he’s a landlord or, if he’s the monarch, the entire national economic structure itself? What would make them do it in, say, 1550? I’ve never seen a single argument that would explain why they would do that. What they did, in fact, was use it in a way that makes sense for a feudal landlord.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And a Smithian-type argument assumes that capitalism has just always been this little kernel developing in society. They don’t need to point to any sort of turning point. They don’t need to explain why suddenly the wealthy class decided to reinvest their money and pursue a profit-maximizing strategy. And this is a very key point, that the main strategy among the exploiting class of pursuing profit maximization through improving and expanding production is specific to capitalism. That was not the basic imperative of the feudal system.

Vivek Chibber

That’s right. Now, without getting too deep into the weeds, let me just make this argument here. In feudalism, you had plenty of money going around. In feudalism, you had plenty of markets as well. But the markets were very limited, and the money was deployed in a mostly nonproductive way. Why?

Well, who were the bulk of the producing class in feudalism? Who controlled production? It was peasants. Peasants with small plots of land. And those peasants with small plots of land overwhelmingly were geared toward what you might call a “safety-first” strategy. Instead of throwing themselves onto the market, trying their best to be as efficient as possible, or trying their best to outcompete other peasants, they tried to steer away from market competition and relied on their own crops, their own land, and even produced as many of their own manufactured goods as they could.

Now, because they’re making their own food and their own manufactures, it means that they don’t actually go to the market very often. They don’t have to buy things very often. Now, if every peasant is doing this — if every peasant is basically producing for himself — it means that they only take those things to the market that are left over after they’ve taken care of their consumption needs.

But if this is the case, it also means that markets are pretty thin. They don’t have a lot of goods coming to them because people only bring the tiniest fraction of all the goods they’re growing or making at home to the market. But this means, in turn, that the markets themselves are not very reliable. Peasants can’t count on finding everything they need there. And that reinforces peasants’ tendency to not rely on the markets.

So you have a situation where there are some markets, but they are not continually growing. This is the opposite of Adam Smith’s assumption. The same can be said regarding the nobility. They don’t control production the way capitalists control production. The way they get their income is by extracting rents from peasants.

But rent extraction posed a problem. The nobility, like today’s landlords, could say, “Hey, I’m jacking up your rent a hundred bucks. Pay it or I’m going to evict you.” But whereas the landlord nowadays can rely on the fact that whoever’s renting from them is going to try to raise money to pay these higher and higher rents, the feudal landlords were not legally allowed to kick peasants off the land as long as the peasants were willing to pay what’s called a customary rent. So they couldn’t jack up the rents.

Now, how do feudal landlords increase their income if it’s coming out of rents? The main way they can do it when they can’t threaten peasants with eviction is through coercion. Often times, this involved physical threats and intimidation. But most of all, it involved raiding other lords’ lands and annexing them. Warfare is the best way to dramatically increasing your revenue when markets don’t allow for it.

Warfare and coercion were built into the feudal system. This had a very important implication: The rational thing to do with your surplus, if you were a lord, was not to invest it in means of production, but in means of warfare and coercion. If lords come across a windfall, a lot of money, what they’re going to use the money for is a larger retinue, a larger army — that is to say, the means of coercion.

So, for both the main classes — peasants on the one hand, lords on the other — the feudal structure imposed specific economic strategies. Peasants avoided the market to the extent that they could, which kept the market small, and they committed to a safety-first strategy rather than a profit-first strategy. And the lords did not put what money they had into new machines, new tractors, new trailers, new plows, but instead put their money into larger and larger armies.

In this situation, if these lords suddenly got lots of physical treasure, what they did with it was accelerate the intensification not of production, but of warfare, which is what Spain and Portugal did. In turn, that system generated its own rationality for what you do with your money. And no matter if it’s a small pool of money or a large pool of money, you’re going to use it in a way that makes sense within that class structure.

So what it required, therefore, for money to become capital, and this is what Marx is saying in his chapters on primitive accumulation — and it’s impossible to miss unless you’re going quotation-hunting — is if money is to be used in a way that’s recognizably capitalist, the money itself won’t trigger that change in class structure. It’s a prior change in class structure that creates a new function for money. That money now becomes capital, whereas previously it was just money.

That is what the chapters on primitive accumulation are supposed to show. They show that Smith’s mistake was not that he was wrong on where the money came from — plunder versus frugality. He was wrong in assuming that the money would be used capitalistically at all.

And this is what you just said, Melissa. The key here is Smith assumes what needs to be proved. He’s assuming that capitalism already exists. Yeah, if it already exists, then a windfall like treasure could accelerate your pace of development. But if it doesn’t already exist, that money is going to be put to other uses, which brings us back to the question of where capitalism came from if it couldn’t have come from the windfall?

Melissa Naschek

I want to return to one of the claims that you just made, that you can really locate in time and geographic space where capitalism originated, which is fifteenth-century England. That is another claim that is very trendy to challenge. And typically, the response today is that it’s a “Eurocentric” claim that capitalism originated in England. So what do you think of that argument?

Vivek Chibber

It’s preposterous. It has no basis. Again, this is just part of the general decline in intellectual discourse, not just on the Left, but generally. For it to be a Eurocentric claim, it would have to show that the claim is empirically wrong.

Eurocentrism is a kind of parochialism, which means that you’re ignoring obvious facts about the world because you’re biased toward Europe. In other words, if you’re biased toward Europe, it has to be the case that something that is recognizably capitalist could be found elsewhere, but you’re ignoring the fact that it was found elsewhere and you’re just focusing on Europe.

All right. So empirically, can one show that something that’s recognizably capitalist could be found everywhere? That’s going to come down to how you define capitalism. Now, if you define capitalism as just the presence of a market, then yeah — it was everywhere. It would therefore be Eurocentric or racist to say that capitalism was just in Europe.

But it is not the case that capitalism is just markets. Capitalism is not the presence of a market, but when the market rules society. It’s when everybody becomes dependent on markets. So, is it the case that something different was happening in those parts of Europe that I’m talking about — Northwestern Europe, which was England, but also included parts of Holland and what’s called “the Low Countries” — was something different happening there?

Now, as it happens, in the last thirty-odd years, there’s been an extraordinary outpouring of economic history. And the leading economic historians from all parts of the world have converged around some very, very interesting findings. And those findings are that, if you just look at growth rates in Eurasia — which is the European continent, but also Asia, China, and India — the core of the global economy at this time was the Mediterranean and Asia. If you look in those countries and you examine the growth rates, whether it’s per capita income or whether it’s national income — whichever way you’re measuring it — from say 1300 or 1400 to the 1900s, what you find is that, from about 1400 to 1600, Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries quickly take off. And the Low Countries are growing faster than Spain and Italy by say 1500.

But very quickly after that, the British rates of growth go onto an entirely new slope, so that by 1600 or 1650, England was visibly growing faster than any of the other European countries. And China and India, which were in fact leading from 1500 to 1700 in Asia, are, along with the rest of Europe, falling behind England and the Low Countries.

There is a very strong consensus around this. If it is the case, empirically, that England is on a different growth path than these Asian countries, then two questions arise: What explains the explosive growth that England is witnessing? And when I say explosive, these growth rates were never seen before in the world. Something happens between 1500 and 1550, right? You have to note this fact. The second is to say, well, where does it come from? Why does it happen?

This has been the central theoretical question for all of social science for about three hundred years now: What explains the divergence of this part of Europe from the rest of the world?

The best explanation for this is that, suddenly, the people in this country had to follow different sorts of economic activities and economic strategies just to survive than had been available to them in the first fifteen hundred years after the death of Christ, which was the rise of capitalism. Because up until then, as I said earlier, it had been the avoidance of market activity — safety first and the accumulation of armies, retinues, and means of coercion (e.g., big old guns) — that had been the way to get rich.

Now, if it is the case that, empirically, these parts of Europe are taking off, leaving the rest of Europe and Asia behind — and let me emphasize, it’s not that Europe is developing rapidly while Asia and Africa are not, it’s that this part of Europe is leaving the rest of Europe behind as well. If that is the case, then it is simply absurd to say that locating capitalism in Europe is parochial or biased or ignores the facts. It is, in fact, trying to explain the facts. And by now, there’s not much of a debate about this. It is pretty clear that by 1600, England and Holland are on a different growth path than China, India, Africa, and Latin America.

So the claim that it is arbitrary, random, or parochial to locate the origins of this new economic system in those parts of Europe doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s fashionable, but it goes nowhere.

Melissa Naschek

What happened in England and Holland at that time that basically shifted their societies into capitalist societies?

Vivek Chibber

What happened was that the economic structure was transformed through willful action in such a way that peasants in the villages had no choice but to throw themselves onto the market to survive, either as wage laborers or as farmers paying competitive rents.

Basically, starting in the 1400s and 1500s in these countries, everybody had to compete in order to survive. Market competition became the norm. And as we know, the essence of capitalism is market competition. What happened in all these precapitalist systems was that people did not have to compete with anybody else on the market, whether it was in the labor market or the product market, because they mostly produced for themselves on their own plots of land to which they had rights that could not be taken away from them.

As long as you had an economic system in which everybody has rights to their land and they’re guaranteed a subsistence, they actually resist being market dependent. This is because market dependence, as any worker will tell you, is fraught with insecurity and with all kinds of vulnerabilities. And land was an insurance policy. You’re not going to give up that land because, come hell or high water, you’ve got your land.

For most people, they had insulation from market competition for thousands of years. But in these countries, for the first time, you get masses of people being thrown onto the market. This is what Marx says is the secret to primitive accumulation. It is not the original hoarding of wealth at some point in time. It is the changing of your economic structure through willful acts that, for the first time, forced people onto the market to compete with each other.

And it’s that competition that gives you these explosive rates of growth in productivity. Because everyone is having to compete on the market, they have no alternative but to seek to be more efficient, to seek to drive down the prices of the goods that they’re selling. And that is what gives you this constant upgrading of productivity and of techniques and things like that. That happens in Northwestern Europe. In the rest of Europe and in Asia and Latin America, they continue to lag behind for decades and for centuries because it takes them that long to inaugurate and engineer this kind of transformation themselves.

This was Marx’s insight — that you needed to have a change in the class structure in order to bring about modern growth. And among the more contemporary historians and social theorists, it was Robert Brenner who made this point more forcefully, I think, than anybody had in postwar Marxism. And a lot of this credit goes to him for making this point in a very cogent way.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah. I’d add Ellen Meiksins Wood as another person who really popularized this argument.

Vivek Chibber

Absolutely. But, you know, as she would have told you, she was building on Brenner’s arguments. And these two, I think, have played an absolutely crucial role.

But let me just make an important point clear: It isn’t just them. This account is the consensus that most of the leading economic historians have come to, Marxist and non-Marxist. There is a mountain of economic literature and data supporting it.

The argument is driving home the point that I think was fundamental to Marx’s epoch-making insight, which is that economic activity is always constrained and dictated by economic structure. So the economic structure of the medieval world dictated a different kind of macroeconomics and microeconomics than the macro- and microeconomics of the contemporary world. And the reason the two are different is that the underlying economic structures — what we would call class structures — are different.

Now, this was pretty well understood into the 1970s and ’80s. And the argument for colonial plunder had been pretty thoroughly discredited. It has just come back now for a variety of reasons. But it really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Melissa Naschek

Something struck me in your comments about the labor market. We’re talking about the traditional Smithian arguments about the development of capitalism and what capitalism is, and one of the data points Smithians cite is the history of merchant capital and the fact that, during feudalism, there were many trade routes and markets. There was a lot of wealth creation. But I think one of the things that you’re pointing to is that markets themselves are not sufficient for a capitalist society. What happens when you get a capitalist society is a complete transformation of markets.

Vivek Chibber

The way I would put it, Melissa is markets are not a sign of capitalism because we know that markets have been in existence for thousands of years. So, you can call anything you want capitalism — that’s up to you. But if you want to attach the word “capitalism” to that which explains the historically unprecedented rates of growth that we see emerging in the 1500s and the 1600s in Northwestern Europe and then later across the world — if you want to say that is what capitalism is, whatever explains that — then it can’t just be the presence of markets. It is when markets take over all of production. Between 3000 BC to 1500 AD, markets existed, but they were on the fringes of society — not geographically, but economically.

Melissa Naschek

And also, this is not to say that they weren’t generating vast amounts of wealth.

Vivek Chibber

No, they were generating plenty of wealth for some people. But the point is, if you measured economic activity in feudal Europe, what you would find is that merchant activity, markets, and trade only accounted for a tiny proportion of national wealth. Overwhelmingly, national wealth came in the form of production for the household, on people’s own lands, and production directly for the lordly class by their serfs. So, the fact that there’s mercantile activity is not a sign of capitalism.

Second — and this is the really important point — feudalism put limits on how far markets could expand in the first place. So, the thing about markets was that it’s not like they were born, say, three thousand years ago, then they just kept expanding to the point where you got capitalism. It’s that within precapitalist societies, there was a place for markets, but there were always also severe limits on how far markets could go. So there were markets in the village, as I said, but peasants tended to try to avoid them as much as they could.

Also, there’s an idea that the cities are where all the merchants were, and where the markets were, and this is where capitalism grows out of. Also not true. Urban centers were directly controlled by the feudal nobility. There was no urban competition in manufacturers. People weren’t trying to minimize costs and drive costs down. Prices were completely administratively controlled by the guilds of the time, which were associations of artisans and merchants, but also by the feudal aristocrats. Cities were completely controlled and dominated by landlords, and the merchants were completely dependent on the landlords to give them access to markets.

There was no question of merchants fighting against feudal lords or markets eroding feudal priorities and feudal power. The markets were internal to feudalism. They were limited by feudalism, and merchants wouldn’t even dream of taking up the cudgels against feudal lords.

So, that alternative account of where capitalism might’ve come from — meaning, maybe not from plunder, but just from the expansion of the market — is also untrue. As I said, this was the epoch-making insight of Marx, that it’s not that the market gives you capitalism, it’s that capitalism gave you the market. That’s putting it in a very compressed way.

I don’t mean quite literally that markets didn’t exist before capitalism. It’s the consolidation of capitalism that finally allows markets to expand to the point that they have today. So why did it happen? It happened because, as Marx says, what happened in England was the expropriation of the peasant classes, which threw them out onto the labor market and also then the product market.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And this is another jargony but very common line that one hears about Marxist analysis, which is that, under capitalism, workers do not own their own means of production. And the distinction here is, in feudal societies, peasants did directly own their means of production. There was no alienation of the worker from their labor. They had a lot of control over the labor process in a way that is unthinkable today. But, with the transformation of the feudal economy into the capitalist economy, all of that is taken away from them. And they’re thrown onto this new thing, which is the capitalist labor market.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. You get capitalism when the economic structure is changed. And that doesn’t happen on its own. It requires action.

Melissa Naschek

So if we’re rejecting the arguments about colonial plunder and the expansion of merchant capital, what about the arguments made by someone like Max Weber about a certain mentality or mindset that led to this shift into capitalist society?

Vivek Chibber

You mean like Protestantism, for example?

Melissa Naschek

Yeah, the Protestant work ethic.

Vivek Chibber

Weber’s real heyday was the 1950s and ’60s. In economic history, he didn’t really have much influence, oddly enough.

The real influence was in the sociology of development and in certain parts of cultural history, where they took seriously the idea that it was the presence of Protestantism that gave you the rise of capitalism in the first place. But more importantly, and just as relevant, that it was some kind of Protestant-like mentality that would be needed in the Global South in order to get them to develop. Because remember, in the 1950s and ’60s, much of the Global South was still overwhelmingly agricultural. And their primary challenge was how to accelerate and foster development.

Now, Weber’s Protestant ethic argument was that what gave you capitalism was a prior shift in people’s orientation to the world and in their mentalities. And so, in the South, you would also need an orientation of this kind to give you capitalism.

This was a plausible argument in the 1940s and ’50s, because, as I said, in much of the Global South, you still didn’t really have a visible capitalist economy because they were all still primarily agrarian. That argument died a very rapid death by the 1970s and ’80s, when you saw countries like Japan and Korea and Brazil developing really, really fast, where there wasn’t a whisper of Protestantism, obviously.

Why was that? What does that tell us? It tells us two things.

I think the experience of the Global South told us that you don’t have to have a prior shift in mentalities to give you market dominance. What happens, in fact, is that market dominance gives rise to the functionally needed mentalities.

So, in all these countries where there wasn’t even a hint of Protestantism, why did you get a full-fledged roaring capitalism by the 1980s? Well, it’s because you took the peasantry and you took their land away from them. And here’s the essence of it: Once you take the land away from people and you throw them out on the market, they don’t need to read Calvin or Martin Luther to understand what to do. They’re going to go out looking for jobs. And once they go out looking for jobs, and the people who they’re working for find that they need to sell their products to survive on the market, they’re going to do what they need to survive on the market, which involves cost-cutting and efficiency-enhancing activities.

So what you find is that capitalism was emerging everywhere, regardless of the culture and the religion. And the dynamics of that capitalism are the same everywhere, at least in the very narrow sense that profit-maximizing activity and job-hunting took root everywhere around the world. So by the 1970s and ’80s, it was pretty clear that if this is what’s happening in the Global South, it probably was also the case in the original capitalist countries that you didn’t need Protestantism. And where was the Protestantism in 1480 England all the way into the 1500s in England, right?

Melissa Naschek

That sounds like bad news for the Weberian argument.

Vivek Chibber

Right. I think that the notion that you needed a prior shift in mentality to give you capitalism doesn’t hold much water. And here’s the interesting thing. Weber is very cagey about this. He says it and then he draws back, because I think he understood that the empirical basis for it is just too thin. It became kind of the bubblegum, popular version of his book, where it’s been argued that there’s a causal sequence going from shifts in mentality to shifts in the economy. If that is the way in which you interpret Weber, I don’t think it has much credibility.

And interestingly, if you just read the debates among economic historians of the past sixty years, that question doesn’t even arise. And that’s a pretty good sign that they just never take it seriously. The questions that arise are the ones that Marx raised, which are: Why did the enclosures happen? Why did productivity take off? In what way was it linked to market competition? Et cetera. Weber, fortunately or unfortunately, has not played much of a role in the contemporary debates among the people who actually study this business, economic historians.

Melissa Naschek

So, if there’s all this evidence that pretty definitively proves your argument, where does this other argument about colonial plunder come from? Why does it keep cropping up?

Vivek Chibber

It really came out of third world nationalism, anti-colonial nationalism, in the late nineteenth century and then expanding through the early parts of the twentieth century. The motivation for it, I think, was a respectable one, because they were trying to counter the justification for colonial rule that came out of the metropoles from the European countries. And that justification was, “We’re doing this out of some sense of moral mission, a moral commitment to civilize, to educate, to uplift. And so therefore, actually, we’re bearing the costs of this responsibility that we have, and we’ll go when we think you’re ready.”

So nationalists had to deal with this rationalization, or a justification, that says colonial rule is actually a sign of Western morality and their sense of responsibility. So what they wanted to say was, “You’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart, you’re doing it because you’re getting something out of it. You’re not here to educate us, you’re here for yourself.”

So the weak version of the argument was to say there’s a material basis for colonialism. And that was 100 percent right.

The British did not go into Africa and Asia, and the French did not go into the Middle East and into Africa, in order to do right by the natives. They went there because segments of British and French capital wanted to make profits and they went there for these profits.

So in this, the nationalists were correct. But then there was a stronger version of the argument — and I can understand why they wanted to make that — which is that, “It’s not just that some of you got rich and that’s why you came to India and to Africa to enrich yourselves. Your entire wealth has come out of your plunder of our country.” So you can see how that’s a much more provocative way of saying, “Screw you. Not only did you not do this out of a sense of morality, but your actual enrichment, the fact that you’re so rich has come on our labor, on our backs.”

So that was, I think, the initial motivation. Now, it happens that I think the argument is quite mistaken. The argument that Western capitalism itself came out of plunder, that’s quite wrong. But the motivation for it was correct. It is the case that colonialism was an abomination. It is the case that it was driven by material incentives. But you can make all those claims without making the further argument that capitalism came out of colonial plunder.

Melissa Naschek

So if that’s what the justification was for it back then, what’s the justification for it now?

Vivek Chibber

As I said, it was Marxists from the Global South and from the West who had discredited this line of reasoning in the 1970s and ’80s. In the 1960s and ’70s, it had come back in the form of what’s called “Third Worldism,” which was this idea that the Global North collectively exploits the Global South. And you can see how that’s an extension of the view that capitalism in the West came out of the plunder of the Global South. You can just extend it to say that the Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the South.

But empirically, we can show that it was mistaken. And for the reasons that I said, theoretically also, it’s very hard to account for why feudal lords would have changed to capitalism just because they had a bunch of money in their hands. So it was discredited. I’m old enough now to have seen it go underground or disappear by the 1990s.

But it has, I would say in the last six or eight years, made a resurgence. Why? In my view, it’s one of the dimensions or consequences of this flight into race reductionism in the past six or eight years. You see this again and again and again now, this notion that colonialism and colonial plunder were an expression of what’s called “global white supremacy.” This idea that the plunder of the colonial world is what enriched the West is easy to translate into racial terms. That it is the lighter, whiter nations which were able to make this traversal into capitalism by virtue of plundering the darker nations.

Melissa Naschek

So it’s transforming a materialist argument into a sort of semi-materialist, but at heart, racialist argument.

Vivek Chibber

It’s transforming a class argument into a racial and national argument. And in today’s left, nationalism and racialism are the dominant ideologies. It’s quite striking to me how this trope, this “global white supremacy” has become so current on the Left. And it’s utterly nonsensical. It has literally no connection to reality.

But it’s become fashionable on the Left because it allows you to align radicalism with the current wave of racial identity politics. And the core of this is whatever divisions there might be within the races, pale — no pun intended — in relation to the divisions between the races.

Melissa Naschek

Well, maybe China becoming the new global hegemon will kind of help us out then.

Vivek Chibber

But jokes aside, this notion of global white supremacy is really pernicious. At best, what you can say is that white supremacy was the kind of rationalizing ideology of colonialism. There’s no doubt about that. Colonialism justified itself by all kinds of racist notions.

But the idea that this actually cemented a deep alliance between Western workers and Western capitalists to the point where Western workers share more with their own capitalists than with workers of the Global South, is not only factually wrong — and it’s profoundly wrong — it is also quite reactionary. Because, until about the recent past, the only people who said this basically were white supremacists because they saw the world as one of warring racial tribes. And this is where parts of the Left have come to now with very heavy doses of race reductionism.

That’s the only sense I can make of it, because the factual basis for this claim about colonial plunder and capitalism is zero. The theoretical coherence and plausibility of the argument is zero. Because, what is a mechanism by which you would say that feudal lords would actually change their economic rules of production on the basis of just having a new pot of money? Nobody’s been able to explain it yet.

So why would you bring this argument back? I think it has to do with this virtue signaling and race reductionism. And my guess is that it’s going to dissipate as the Left continues to mature and they don’t see this as the respectable face of radicalism.

Melissa Naschek

If I’m understanding your argument correctly, basically what you’re saying is that the way that we should understand primitive accumulation is not as a hoarding of wealth that was then suddenly distributed to maximize profit, but instead was the changing of basic social relations such that the peasantry were kicked off their land and thrown onto a newly created capitalist labor market. If that’s the case, was that just something that happened once in England and then we had capitalism? Or is that a process that continues to happen within capitalism?

Vivek Chibber

Well, if capitalism is to spread into other parts of the world, that same thing has to happen everywhere else as well. And since it doesn’t all happen all at once, over time, as capitalism spreads, it continues to dispossess the peasantry and bring them into wage labor and into the cities.

And it is still going on today in that sense, because there are still parts of the world where you have large agrarian sectors in which people have their own land and where they’re not engaging in wage labor. And if capitalism is to spread there, they’re going to have to be brought into what we call commodity production. So it’s not just that it happened once and then nowhere else.

But you can also say that the principles behind it continue to be relevant inside countries like England and the United States, which went through their agrarian transition centuries ago.

Here’s how to understand how the principle is still relevant. What is it that primitive accumulation was trying to achieve? It was trying to take away from the laboring population access to their subsistence, to their food, to their needs, their housing needs, access to these things outside the market. Now, the way you did that originally was to take away peasants’ land, because that’s how they survived.

But one might ask, even inside a mature capitalism, isn’t it still possible for people to find access to basic necessities outside of the market? And the answer is, yeah, they still achieve it, whether it’s through things like having their own plots of land, whether it’s through things like having their own means of subsistence, but most importantly it is through things like the welfare state.

You can think of the welfare state as something where people are given access to basic necessities as a matter of right, which is what they had in feudalism. They had access to basic necessities because they had rights to the land. And just like that was a barrier to capitalism back then, the welfare state is seen by capitalists as a barrier to their growing expansion and profitability today. And that’s why capitalists oppose what’s called “decommodification” — this is when goods that have been bought and sold in the market are taken off the market by giving them to people as rights.

So in that sense, even while it’s not technically speaking a “primitive accumulation” that’s going on today, the principle behind capitalists’ opposition to non-commodified goods today is more or less the same as it was when capitalism was brought into being four hundred years ago. In that sense, you can say that it’s an ongoing process even inside capitalism as well.

The key to it all is this: That what capitalism and capitalists strive for constantly is the maintenance of the widest expansion of commodification as is possible. And any movement to restrict the scope of commodities is going to be resisted by capital. That’s going to show up in all kinds of political and social conflicts today.

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