Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Stimer, Feuerbach and Marx

It has rarely been recognized in recent literature about Stirner that
The Individual and his Own was designed, inter alia, as it was received
upon its first publication in 1845, as an attack on Feuerbach’s The
Essence of Christianity. Yet the very structure of Stirner’s argument
allows of no other explanation; the division of his book into ‘theological-
false’ then ‘anthropological-true’ sections (which Stirner labels ‘Man’


-Der Mensch - and ‘Myself - Ich - respectively) is intended to indicate
its target by mirroring it. So is its subject-matter. Both The Individual
and his Own and The Essence of Christianity are concerned with men’s
alienated attributes and their reappropriation, and both arguments are
cast in terms of the task of recapturing human autonomy.

This comparison is not one that can be pressed too far; whatever the
overlap between the two books, Stirner was convinced that the ultimate
expression of the oppressive spirituality he so detested was the very
book, The Essence of Christianity, in which Feuerbach had laid claim
to having neutralized spirituality once and for all. Stirner regarded
Feuerbach’s theoretical coup as a mere ‘theological insurrection’,
Feuerbach himself as a religious thinker malgre luv, his accusation
should detain us, in spite of the familiarity of charges of this kind
among the Young Hegelians. It is true that in the bitter and remarkably
well publicized controversies that animated the Hegelian Left through-
out its brief florescence it became commonplace to accuse one’s op-
ponent of remaining trapped within the insidious coils of a religious
way of thinking or a theological cast of mind. (Feuerbach made this
kind of accusation against Hegel, Bauer against Ruge and Marx, Ruge
against Bauer and Marx, Marx against Bauer and Stirner, as well as
Stirner against Feuerbach.) Nor is it beside the point that most of
these accusations were quite justified; the radical critique of religion
(which according to Marx in 1843 was ‘the prerequisite of every critique’)
was regarded not so much as the contribution of Feuerbach - whose
importance in this respect Engels was to exaggerate - but as part and
parcel of the legacy of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel himself had indicated
that ‘religion is principally sought and recommended for times of
public calamity, disorder and oppression’, that ‘people are referred to
it as solace in the face of wrong or as hope in compensation for loss’,
and that religion ‘may take a form leading to the harshest bondage’.²⁶
Bruno Bauer used the authority of Hegel to justify his public break
with Christianity, and suffered the consequences; the activity of the
Prussian censors, as well as that of the Young Hegelians themselves,
attests to the connection both sides believed to exist between the
radical critique of religion and that of politics. Marx’s essay ‘On the
Jewish Question’, to give one by now familiar example, had as its
terrain the penumbra where religious and political critiques overlap;
and it may be that what really distinguishes Feuerbach from his Young
Hegelian confederates is not that he introduced them to a radical
critique of religion (Engels’s claim that Feuerbach did so is in David
McLellan’s words ‘completely at variance with the facts’)²⁷ but that
he alone discussed religion without also discussing the state.

Stirner, whose central concern was domination, not religion, was on
the other hand quick to perceive a connection between the critique of
religion and the critique of politics. He believed that all claims emanating




from outside the individual, whatever their designation, are attempts
to annihilate the self, that with the advancement of such claims ‘our
essence is brought into opposition with us - we are split into an essential
and an unessential self. The outer ‘man’ is ranged against the real
individual. Stirner’s basic point against Feuerbach, accordingly, was
very much the same as his basic point against everyone else; what
Feuerbach called ‘sense experience’ was in Stirner’s view by no means
the actual experience of real, individual men, but instead an ‘essence’,
an abstraction to which Feuerbach had given the name ‘sensuousness’
but which in reality, like all abstractions and essences, is likely to come
to dominate real men. For this reason Feuerbach, according to Stirner,
is an abstract philosopher like all the rest. More specifically, the weak-
ness in Feuerbach’s position that Stirner seized upon was his conception
of man’s ‘divinity’ not as something man had to build or create but as
something that could be regained at the level of consciousness. Because
man must by implication give way before his newly found ‘divinity’
once it is regained, Stirner believed that this very category would be as
oppressive and burdensome a taskmaster as any other spirit or collectivity
to which individuals historically had succumbed.

What this means, according to Stirner, is that Feuerbach’s self-
proclaimed and much vaunted atheism was at best half-hearted - and
there is a certain truth in Stirner’s accusation. Faith in an eternally
present divinity does seem to be compatible with atheism on Feuerbach’s
definition: ‘a true atheist’, Feuerbach himself admitted, ‘is one who
denies the predicates of the divine being, not one to whom the subject
of these predicates is nothing’.²⁸

Stirner’s The Individual and his Own challenged Feuerbach on the
grounds that his celebrated reversal of subject and predicate (‘all we
need do is always to make the predicate into the subject ... to arrive
at the undisguised, pure and clear truth’),²⁹ his substitution of ‘man’
for ‘God’ as the agent of divinity, changes nothing for men. The re-
located divine is no less burdensome and no less divine because of a
mere change of position. ‘Man’ or mankind considered as a collectivity
is no less oppressive and sacred than ‘God’ so long as the individual
continues to be related to this collective divinity in a religious manner.
Feuerbach had failed in Stirner’s view to deal adequately with the
oppression and indigence which had made men turn to religion in the
first place; Feuerbach had achieved nothing more than an abstract
change in the object of self-renunciation. What he had considered to
be a radical clarification of the issue of religious alienation Stirner
regarded as an exercise in obfuscation; Feuerbach, as Stirner put it, was
just a ‘pious atheist’, and Feuerbach found it difficult to disagree. In
his reply to Stirner he admitted that his statement ‘There is no God’ was
only the negative form of the ‘practical and religious, i.e. positive
statement’ that ‘man is the God’, which was precisely Stirner’s point.³⁰




Feuerbach’s bombastic claims to have solved the problem of self-
renunciation leave it more firmly entrenched than ever in human
consciousness, and give self-renunciation a new lease of life by obscuring
what Stirner considered to be the fundamental need to transcend or
do away with all self-renunciation, before any ‘higher’ power, be it
religious, social or political. Feuerbach’s relocation of divine essence
within a naturalistically conceived humanity means only that some
categorical, collective human essence continues to be brought into
opposition to the real individual, who remains split into ‘essential’
and ‘non-essential’ spheres of being. Stirner conceived his task to be
that of overcoming all such divisions, on the grounds that if the individ-
ual makes an essence (Feuerbach’s ‘species-being’ or Hegel’s Geist, for
example) or a moral imperative (such as the Kantian Sollen) the centre
or goal oi his being, he must bifurcate himself, exalting the ‘better’
spiritual or moral part of his nature over the paltrier residue.

The characteristic conclusion Stirner draws from his critique of
Feuerbach is that Feuerbachian humanism is the ne plus ultra of man’s
self-renunciation, of his enslavement to the categories he has himself
created; and that the adumbration of such humanism accordingly
signals the imminence of the advent of Stirner’s ‘association of egoists’
which is to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of ‘spirituality’. But we
need not follow Siirner’s footsteps down this particular path, a tortuous
and meandering one indeed, to appreciate the force of his argument
against Feuerbach. Nor need we accept the very Young Hegelian
polemical gloss Stirner gives his argument - the notion that because
the distinguishing feature of Christianity since its inception is its
location of divine essence within the individual, who is then said to be
its vessel, Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity expresses a distinc-
tively Christian principle in the most extreme possible form. Feuerbach
in this view is not just one more, but also the ultimate, Christian
philosopher.³¹

What is crucial with respect to Marx’s response to him is that Stirner,
in the course of excoriating Feuerbach’s notion of ‘species-being’

(Gattungswesen) as an example of empty but ominous humanitarian-
ism, singled out Marx’s use of the term in ‘On the Jewish Question’ in
a manner that suggested that Marx himself was a Feuerbachian, subject
to all Stirner’s criticisms of Feuerbach. Whether or not Marx was
personally stung or piqued by this criticism, as seems likely, Stirner’s
accusation, made though it was in passing, can be seen to have had
sufficient force to elicit from Marx an extended response.

Marx’s most obvious line of defence - one which he in effect adopted
throughout The German Ideology - was that of asserting his credentials
as a communist revolutionary and of identifying himself with other
communist revolutionaries. This defence, which separated him decisively
from Feuerbach, who disavowed social revolution, placed upon Marx




the burden of disproving Stirner’s insistence that revolutionary tasks
and goals were as burdensome and anti-human as any other goal or
essence; and this, as we shall see, is indeed one of the projects Marx
did adopt in The German Ideology. To adjudicate whether or not
Marx succeeded, we must stand back and take our bearings.

To begin with, there was much in Feuerbach’s compensatory theory
of religion in general and Christianity in particular with which Marx
never disagreed. There is no reason why Marx’s otherwise remarkable
silence - remarkable, that is, for a nineteenth-century theorist - about
religion throughout the body of his writings should not be taken to
denote agreement with the main lineaments of Feuerbach’s critique.
Marx took exception to Feuerbach’s social quietism and to his resolutely
Young Hegelian belief that religious alienation could be abrogated at
the level of consciousness:³² but Marx nevertheless took over wholesale
the Feuerbachian ideas that the attributes of man are in religious life
projected, upwards and outwards, on to the man-made figure of the
Divine; that what man lacks in fact he accordingly attains in fancy;
that the vacuity of the real world accounts for the plenitude of God;
and that only an indigent humanity needs an opulent God - a God who
is defined by the real, empirical exigency from which he emerges. If
God’s in ‘His’ Heaven, all is manifestly not right with the world, its
real counterpart. All of these prepositions imply beliefs that Marx
and Feuerbach shared; all of them, too, are involved, as we have already
seen, in Marx’s essay, ‘On the Jewish Question’.

What Stirner overlooked when he accused Marx of being a Feurbach-
ian humanist, however, is that Marx differed from Feuerbach in signifi-
cant ways. Even with respect to religion Marx distinguished himself
quite uncompromisingly from Feuerbach in at least one crucial respect.
Taking his cue, apparently, from the earlier (pre-1843) writings of
his erstwhile mentor, Bruno Bauer, Marx never entertained the Feuer-
bachian belief that all men had to do, in the face of the expropriation
which had given rise to the need for religion in the first place, was to
reclaim their alienated human essence at the level of consciousness.
What Feuerbach refused to admit was something Marx, following
Bauer, adamantly insisted upon: the point that any such consciousness
must be as distorted, as dissonant, and as unworthy of human purposes
and dignity as the image of God projected in the first place. As Marx
himself put it:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes
religion; religion does not make man. Religion is, in fact, the
self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not
yet gained himself or has lost himself again. But man is no
abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the world
of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce




religion, which is an inverted world-consciousness, because they
are an inverted world. Religion ... is the fantastic realization
of the human being because the human being has attained no true
reality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle
against that world of which religion is the spritual aroma . . .

Religion is the illusory sun about which man revolves only so
long as he does not revolve around himself.³³

Feuerbach’s mistake, from Marx’s vantage point, had been to portray
God as harmonious, proportioned and superhuman. Bauer’s God had
been very different; and Marx, following Bauer, hinged his argument
not on harmoniousness but on dissonance, a dissonance arising (in
Marx’s case) from a destructive and self-destructive form of society.
It is largely for this very reason that Marx was driven to insist - in his
Theses on Feuerbach as well as in his essay, ‘On the Jewish Question’
- against Feuerbach that an act of consciousness per se can change
nothing unless consciousness itself has undergone a prior change. In
Marx’s own words, the ‘critique of religion ends in the doctrine that
man is the supreme being for man; thus it ends in the categorical
imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased,
enslaved, neglected, contemptible being’.³⁴ Because this is a conclusion
Feuerbach refrained from drawing, Stimer’s attack on Marx’s use of the
Feuerbachian sounding phrase, ‘species-being’, is disingenuous, since
Marx’s usage of this term in ‘On the Jewish Question’, or for that
matter the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, is no
longer Feuerbachian. In the former essay alone, as we have seen, Marx
extends Feuerbach’s notion of alienation into the political and social
realm in a way that makes it incompatible with Feuerbach’s theory;
once shifted and extended in this way alienation no longer requires
a mere adjustment of consciousness if it is to be transcended. A reality
like the state cannot be abrogated merely by revealing at the level of
consciousness its unsound position - although Stirner, as we are about
to see, thought that it could - and Marx, in indicating that alien politics
can be abolished only by actively transforming the real world, was in
effect revealing himself as much less Young Hegelian than either Feuer-
bach or Stirner. Marx did not share Stirner’s typically Young Hegelian
belief in the oppressive force of Feuerbach’s relocated divinity; but he
did share with Stirner a desire to assault Feuerbach’s vapid anthropo-
centrism, the abstract love for an abstract ‘Man’ at the expense of any
concern for real, individual men. Marx maintained in The German
Ideology that Feuerbach

only conceives [man] as an object of the senses, not as sensuous
activity, because he still remains in the world of theory . . . [and]
stops at the abstraction ‘Man’ . . . [He] never manages to conceive


the sensuous world as the total, living, sensuous activity of the
individuals comprising it.

Later in The German Ideology, in the course of his attack on the ‘True
Socialists’, we find Marx maintaining that they, too, by casting their
arguments in terms of an abstraction, ‘Man’, return from ‘the realm
of history’ to ‘the realm of ideology’.³⁵

What underlies all such statements in The German Ideology, a book
which is full of them, is something that emerges only from a careful
analysis of its most lengthy single section, ‘Saint Max’. Stirner’s accu-
sation that Marx, with his talk of ‘species-being’, was a Feuerbachian,
however exaggerated and insensitive it may have been, nevertheless
had enough bite to impel Marx to redefine his own position. In rejecting
Feuerbachian humanism with all its shortcomings, Marx perforce had
to avoid aligning himself with the extreme individualism that Stirner
had propounded; and it is Marx’s perception of the need to avoid the
horns of this dilemma that does much to account for the argumentation,
and the very structure, of The German Ideology. While Marx’s attack
on Feuerbach in the first section of The German Ideology has been
contrasted, quite rightly, with his earlier near adulation of Feuerbach,
it has rarely been recognized that it was none other than Stirner who
impelled Marx into taking this new position as publicly and dramatically
as he did.

Revolution and rebellion

Stirner’s portrayal of successive stages of human submission issues in
an injunction, which he intended as a call to action: ‘my own will is
the state’s destroyer’ (‘der eigener Wille meiner ist der Verderberer des
Staats’). While this sentiment expresses an anarchist position, to be sure,
Stirner was the first to deny that it could in any way be termed a
revolutionary one. On Stirner’s interpretation of it, revolution, like
the state, and like all anterior social and moral systems, appeals, and
must by its very nature appeal, to collectivity and self-sacrifice - prin-
ciples from which an anarchist like Bakunin did not shrink, but which
according to Stirner must at all costs be avoided by the assertive egoist.
Social revolution of the type advocated most notably by Wilhelm
Weitling (who, along with Feuerbach and ‘the French Feuerbach’, as
the Young Hegelians were wont to label Proudhon, can be numbered
among Stirner’s betes noires) was a game not worth the candle. Stirner
considered revolution to be just one more variant of faith, morality
and domination, one more creed or Sollen displacing and feeding upon
the uniqueness, particularity and singularity (Eigenheit) of the individual.
Any submission to any revolutionary task, agency or body must rest




according to Stirner on some prior belief in what he called the ‘sacred-
ness’ of some precept or other, however ostensibly subversive such a
precept may be; and it is belief in the sacredness of precepts that men
most need to overcome, once and for all. Revolutionary organization
may appear to go against the grain of established forms of society, but
such appearances are deceptive; for all its disruptive claims and pre-
tensions, revolutionary organization is after all a form of organization.
What this fatal drawback means for Stirner is that men, in espousing
revolutionary ends or even in succumbing to revolutionary fervour,
are simply trading one form of submissiveness and self-sacrifice for
another.

Revolution was to Stirner an agency of ‘fanaticism’, or morality,
another imposed ‘vocation’ involving a prima facie devaluation of the
individual; he did not hesitate to claim that the militant communism
of Weitling and what came to be termed the ‘mutualism’ of Proudhon
(who was not a revolutionary in the same sense, as we shall see) were
alike ‘religious’ forms of doctrine because of the demands on the
individual they made. Stirner saw no need to distinguish Weitling’s
revolutionary creed, which did embody certain residual elements of
Christian millenarianism, from Proudhon’s avowed and brash anti-
clericalism. Stirner, whose individualism and anarchism were unremit-
ting, insisted against all revolutionaries and Utopians that freedom,
which they claimed as the goal of their endeavours, was something
that had to be taken, self-assertively; if it were simply ‘received’ it
would amount in Stirner’s unorthodox vocabulary to mere ‘emanci-
pation’. While revolution was no more than yet another ‘human act’,
an act predicated on some normative vision of humanity, what Stirner
called ‘rebellion’ (Empdrung) was to be a rising of individuals who
would be reacting to nothing outside themselves and relying on nobody
but themselves. Such an uprising would take place spontaneously and
without regard to future arrangements; its object would be less the
overthrow of some established order than the elevation of the auton-
omous individual above all established orders. Whereas revolution, if
we are to believe Stirner, aims at new arrangements of one sort or
another, rebellion aims at our no longer allowing ourselves to be arranged
at all.

The incoherence of Stirner’s distinction between revolution and
rebellion is evident - Marx regarded it as ‘comic’ - but the anti-revolution-
ary cast of his argument is unmistakable. Stirner’s principle of ‘rebellion’
was specifically intended and advanced in order to avoid the need for
the tyrannical regimentation that he thought necessarily characterized
revolutionary (and non-revolutionary) organization. ‘Rebellion’ was to
be an upsurge, an unleashing of individual passions, energy and anger
against every social and political tie, which would be destroyed; the
outcome of this expression of individual self-assertion and outrage was


to be not a new kind of political or social form, but the non-systematic
‘association’ (Verein) of egoists, which Stirner characterized (rather
than defined) in contradistinction to the state and its deficiencies.

Of all forms of organization, if we are to believe Stirner, only his
own projected ‘association’ would exert no moral influence and exercise
no legal constraint. It alone would not displace or feed upon the
individual’s distinguishing feature, his Eigenheif, the individual, indeed,
according to Stirner would be and remain ‘more than’ the Verein.
Stirner urges us to aspire not to the chimera of community but to our
own ‘one-sidedness’; we should combine with others purely and simply
in order to multiply our own powers, and only for the duration of any
given task.³⁶ To lapse into Stirner’s own distinctive terminology, if the
state ‘consumes’ the individual, the individual will ‘consume’ the
‘association’ in his turn. In view of such characterizations of the associ-
ation of egoists, which Stirner himself portrayed as a ‘free for all’ in
which everyone should have as much as he could appropriate, it is
perhaps small wonder that Marx saw fit to regard it as an ‘ideal copy’
of capitalist society, of Hegel’s ‘civil society’ and its ‘system of needs’.³⁷
Stirner’s ‘egoistical property’, said Marx (with considerable justification),
‘is nothing more than ordinary or bourgeois property sanctified’.³⁸
In Stirner’s association, Marx went on,

every relation, whether caused by economic conditions or
direct compulsion is regarded as a relation of ‘agreement’ . . .

[and] all property belonging to others is relinquished to
them by us and remains with them only until we have the
power to take it from them.

What this means is that

in practice the ‘Association’ reaches agreement with Sancho
[Stirner] with the aid of a stick... This ‘agreement’ is a mere
phrase, since everyone knows that the others enter into it with
the secret reservation that they will reject it on the first possible
occasion.

Moreover, Stirner’s conception of ‘unique’ property - his idea that
private property would not only be retained in the ‘association’ but also
actually perfected there because it would no longer need any legal
guarantees - leads him into a contradiction on which Marx was quick
to pounce. Marx paraphrases Stirner’s egoist, the better to reveal his
Young Hegelian pretensions: ‘I see in your property something that is
not yours but mine; since every ego does likewise, they see in it the
universal, by which we arrive at the modern-German philosophical
interpretation of ordinary, special, and exclusive private property.’³⁹




What little Stirner says about the form of his ‘association’, indeed,
lends support to Marx’s accusation that Stirner in effect ‘lets the old
[civil] society continue in existence ... [and] strives to retain the present
state of affairs’; for Stirner ‘retains in his association the existing form
of landownership, division of labour and money’. Marx adds that ‘with
such premises Sancho [Stirner] cannot . . . escape the fate of having a
special “peculiarity” [Eigenheit] prescribed for him by the division of
labour’.⁴⁰ (The resonance of this last point, in particular, will become
apparent presently.)

Marx, indeed, at one level has little trouble disposing of Stirner’s
argument not only about the ‘association’ but also about the ‘rebellion’
that is supposedly to bring it into existence. Stirner, in attempting to
make of ‘rebellion’ a means without an end, lapses into obscurity and
incoherence. Even his advocacy of violence is muted, in effect, by the
Young Hegelianism that tinges it. According to Marx it should not
surprise us that Stirner

waxes indignant at the thought of atheism, terrorism, communism,
regicide, etc. The object against which Saint Sancho [Stirner]
rebels is the Holy; therefore rebellion does not need to take the
form of . . . action for it is only a sin against the ‘Holy.’⁴¹

Yet there is another level to Marx’s response which indicates that
Stirner had,as it were, touched a nerve. Stirner insisted that the ideologies
of liberation proferred by his ‘progressive’ contemporaries, in particular
Feuerbachian humanism and the revolutionary communism with which
Marx aimed to identify himself, were no solutions to the problem he
was concerned to outline. Such ‘liberation’, he argued with some force,
was simply not worthy of the name; its self-styled avatars, Feuerbach
and Marx, are deceptive thinkers who deliberately refuse to acknow-
ledge that their doctrines incur an irredeemable loss for the individual.

What concerns us here most pointedly is Stirner’s accusation that
revolutionary communism involves and must involve the violation of
individuals. In advancing this accusation Stirner raised for Marx a
spectre (however maladroit its conjuring up) that had to be put to
rest, an issue (however badly raised it may have been) that demanded
settlement. The point here is not that Stirner succeeded in convincing
Marx that what passed for revolutionary enthusiasm among the Young
Hegelians was bogus; Marx by 1845 stood in no need of being con-
vinced of this. Yet Stirner did raise a question of some seriousness:
whether there is any distinction not between revolution and ‘rebellion’,
but between revolution, considered as a collective act requiring the
possibility of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice on the part of the
committed revolutionary, and other forms of subjection. The question
was whether men in espousing revolutionary goals were (to steal a phrase




from Rousseau) walking headlong into their chains. The importance
of this question need not be laboured; but the fact that Marx, prompted
by Stirner, was concerned to respond to it in ‘Saint Max’ and by
extension throughout The German Ideology has often been overlooked.

It is no coincidence that Marx, faced with Stirner’s anti-communist
diatribe, took issue with it most vehemently and archly, no longer
simply ridiculing Stirner’s learning, logic and skill in argument with all
the scorn and heavy-handed irony he could muster, but also outlining
at great length the dangers inherent in such a false view of revolution.
The question whether men, in succumbing to revolutionary ideals and
revolutionary forms of organization, were simply replacing one form
of subjection with another, at the immense and increasing cost of their
own individuality, is, after all, a question of sufficient importance and
moment to outweigh the particulars of scholarship and argumentation
marshalled in its support; and it was a question, posed directly and
bluntly by Stirner, to which Marx, for his part, responded at great
length and in great detail not only in ‘Saint Max’ but throughout The
German Ideology. When Marx wrote in one of its most central, and
typical, passages that ‘communist society is the only society in which
the creative and free development of the individual is no mere empty
phrase’⁴² it is important to recognize that he had Stirner, who was
responsible for having raised this issue, in his sights.