Date: Fri, 17 Feb 1995 09:22:27 -0800 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc2.igc.apc.org> Subject: C.L.R. JAMES, KARL MARX, MAX STIRNER MY FAVORITE MARXIAN: C.L.R. JAMES AND THE MARX-STIRNER STRUGGLE In my research on the Marx vs. Stirner bout, I discovered two remarkable things: (1) Marx's greatness is even more awesome than I had supposed, (2) C.L.R. James was not only a Marx-ist, but Marx-ian to the marrow. It was James's critique of intellectuals as a social grouping that led me to thinking a certain way about the intellectual and society. For years, a very casual acquaintance with the unabridged THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY tipped me off to the notion that Marx had dispatched a certain social type a century and a half before I had to deal with the same sort of people. Then, when beginning to study the Young Hegelians and the young Marx (which was partly prompted by James concerns), I also realized the opportunity to commemorate publicly the sesquicentennial of the birth of Marxism. In the past couple of days, I've been given even more to think about. I've been boning up on scholarly treatments of the Marx-Stirner match. John Carroll's BREAK-OUT FROM THE CRYSTAL PALACE; THE ANARCHO-PSYCHOLOGICAL CRITIQUE; STIRNER, NIETZSCHE, DOSTOEVSKY is quite typical of a certain genre of thought on this topic, one I had found pervasive among Hegel scholars on the net. Carroll criticizes Stirner for his lack of historical knowledge and social realism, but defends Stirner's existential concerns against Marx, whom he deems guilty, as these people do, of scientism, positivism, a retreat to abstract man, and so on. The common wisdom here is that Marx suffered the anxiety of Stirner's influence, so he beat a retreat from psychological man to structural, collectivist concerns. Marx was too shallow, you see, to plumb the dark depths of the human soul, especially the dark dank soul of a certain intellectual type, the type that Hegel scholars would naturally admire. In my last message I had already put a dent in Carroll, and I recommended a study of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts (at which time, incidentally, Marx was still taken with Feuerbach, which was no longer the case in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY). But last night, while reading the Stirner chapter of Paul Thomas' KARL MARX AND THE ANARCHISTS, it all came together. Thomas not only undoes the entire line of thought embodied in Carroll, he establishes that THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY (GI) represents the summit of Marx's humanism by arguing that GI is a defense of the INDIVIDUAL! I had already known that Marx was no collectivist and spoke out against any such hypostatization in this book, but I didn't take it as far as Thomas. Stirner claimed to oppose all subordinations of the concrete, living man to the slavery of abstract moral and systemic concerns. Marx turns Stirner upside down, proving that Stirner's abstract egoistical individualism is a hollow ideological construct, especially in the age of capitalist production which has virtually obliterated real human personality and individual expression, especially in the work process, and that communism is the real movement that rescues and restores the living human individual, who can only thrive in common association with others, and that this communist movement is no abstract utopian ideal or new tyranny of some outside force over living man, but is rooted in historical reality and the imperatives of the survival of humanity. In other words, Marx heads existentialism off at the pass, nips it in the very bud by identifying the concrete individual -- not just the narcissistic intellectual, but the millions and millions who suffer the crisis of the modern personality --- with the need to restructure society for his own salvation. Imagine, for Marx to have understood the narcissism of an intellectual type so thoroughly at such an early stage, and then for his critique to have gone unpublished for a century, and then not fully translated into English until 30 years ago, and then to have been so thoroughly ignored (even by the people who published the material -- especially by them -- Stalinists!) until recently. Imagine that! Now here is an irony. It is now evident that C.L.R. James was more thoroughly Marxian than anyone, even he, could have supposed, and that Marx was thoroughly Jamesian. We now know that James indeed read GI in the 1940s, but that was the abridged 1938 edition, in which the bulk of the manuscript -- the critique of "Saint Max" (Stirner) -- did not appear! James could not have read it. He could have gotten a translation or summary from a comrade who read German, which Grace Lee Boggs and/or Raya Dunayevskaya certainly did, to have been able to translate the 1844 Manuscripts which so influenced the group. James may not have known much of the critique of Stirner, but he surely would have appreciated it. Remember James's concern with the work process. He is interested in the heroic qualities workers show in work and in their common association, while he dismisses the existential anguish of the brooding intellectual. Consider James's contempt for existentialism and psychoanalysis in the 1940s and '50s. (Only in the 1960s did he show any sympathy for existentialism, and I'll bet he read Heidegger only because of Wilson Harris.) James cares not a whit for the self-centered despair of the intellectual who has turned away from society to contemplate the dark depths of his own soul, which somehow are not hardly so deep as he thinks. Max Stirner was the progenitor of this type, the lumpen-intellectual prototype of all the Nietzschean filth that has plagued the world since. By 1846 Marx and Engels sent him and his kind straight to hell. How magnificent Marx is! A century later, James comes to the same conclusions, which he sums up in MARINERS, RENEGADES, AND CASTAWAYS in 1953, as exemplified in this soul-stirring passage: "Yet how light in the scales is the contemporary mountain of self-examination and self-pity against the warmth, the humor, the sanity, the anonymous but unfailing humanity of the renegades and castaways and savages of the Pequod, rooted in the whole historical past of man, doing what they have to do, facing what they have to face." --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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