Daily Dialectic
Täglich Dialektik

Max Stirner, the egoist fully in agreement with himself, states in his theory of humane liberalism:

 “You want labor; 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 it itself.  We want labor because it is our self-development.”

 He adds:

“But then the labor too must be adapted to that end!  Man is honored only by human, self-conscious labor, only by the labor that has for its end no ‘egoistic’ purpose, but man, and is man’s self-revelation; so that the saying should be laboro, ergo sum, I labor, therefore I am a man.  The humane liberal wants that labor of the mind which works up all material; he wants the mind, that leaves no thing quiet or in its existing condition, that acquiesces in nothing, analyzes everything, criticizes anew every result that has been gained.  This restless mind is the true laborer, it obliterates prejudices, shatters limits and narrowness, and raises man above everything that would like to dominate over him, while the communist labors only for himself, and not even freely, but from necessity, in short, represents a man condemned to hard labor.” 

                  25 December 2011:
You are not a man; you are a secret police state!
May we remind you?

Hegel already showed in his mathematical studies how the emergence of genuine dialectical contradictions creates the semblance of an irrationality for metaphysical thinking. 

But at the same time, he showed how dialectical thought can resolve the contradictions into a higher rationality. 

Marx, on the other hand, shows us the concrete circumstances that raise the problems of irrationalism and turn their intellectual reflection into methodological, philosophical problems of irrationalism.

Here it is the case that, what ordinary common sense finds irrational is the rational, and what it holds to be rational is irrationality itself.

 

Marx duly responds to Stirner’s objections to communism in The German Ideology:

 

They were nothing but a preliminary, concealed legitimization of his egoism in agreement with itself, in which these objections are resurrected in the flesh. The “equal well-being of all in one and the same respect” is resurrected in the demand that “we should [only] feel happy in dissolution”.  “Care” is resurrected in the form of the unique “care” to secure one’s ego as one’s property; but “with the passage of time” “care” again arises as to “how” one can arrive at a unity – viz., unity of creator and creation. And, finally, humanism re-appears, which in the form of the true egoist confronts empirical individuals as an unattainable ideal.  Hence page 117 of “the book” should read as follows: Egoism in agreement with itself really endeavors to transform every man into a “secret police state”.  The spy and sleuth “reflection” keeps a strict eye on every impulse of spirit and body, and every deed and thought, every manifestation of life is, for him, a matter of reflection, i.e., a police matter. It is this dismemberment of man into “natural instinct” and “reflection” (the inner plebeian – creation, and the internal police – creator) which constitutes the egoist in agreement with himself.  

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"Our only goal in this analysis is to register the general ideological change of direction after Hitler's downfall." György Lukács