Date: Sat, 31 Dec 1994 00:13:58 -0500 (EST)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Marx & Stirner



The information about Engels's initial opinion of Stirner I got from the 
Introduction (by Sidney Parker) to the 1982 Rebel Press edition of _The 
Ego and Its Own_. No bibliographic reference is cited, but the passage 
referring to Stirner's book, from a letter of Engels to Marx, is worth 
reproducing here: "this work is important, far more important than Hess 
believes...the first point we find true is that, before doing whatever we 
will on behalf of some idea, we have first to make our cause personal, 
egoistic...Stirner is right to reject the 'Man' of Feuerbach...[since] 
Feuerbach's Man is derived from God...among all of the 'The Free' Stirner 
obviously has the most talent, personality, and dynamism."
	 Ralph Dumain believes that if Stirner were alive today he would 
be a nerdy Randroid. I don't think this is any more justified than if I 
were to say that if Karl Marx were alive today he would be a maoist 
bureaucrat or a trotskyist militant (or perhaps more plausibly, a social 
democratic M.P.). Perhaps I wasn't doing justice to Marx by implying that 
he was necessarily to blame for Stalin (we've already gone over this 
ground on this list). Marx very clearly rejected the cult of personality 
and stated that communism was to him a movement and a theory, not a 
reified doctrine. But this should point out the gap, not only between 
Marx and Leninism-Stalinism-Trotskysim-Maoism-etc., but also between Marx 
and marxism. If you're determined not to let Stalinists have Marx, then why 
let the Libertarians have Stirner?
	Dumain was correct to point out that Marx was, for the most part, 
an amoralist, as was Stirner. It occurs to me that Marx's concept of the 
party in the historic (as opposed to the formal) sense is not all that 
different from Stirner's concept of the free union of egoists.
	One more thought: If Dumain thinks the sits were "dimwits," then 
what branch of Marx's legacy does he identify with? News and Letters (and 
its inspiration, Raya Stolichnaya)? Unreconstructed council communism? I am 
curious...

Alex Trotter


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