Karl Marx: A biography by David McLellan

f

I3 4 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowboy

or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we

ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of

our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calcu-

lations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till

now.^40

At least the means to the end was clear. The section finished with the
words:

If the proletarians are to assert themselves as individuals, they will have

to abolish the very condition of their existence hitherto (which has,

moreover, been that of all society up to the present), namely, labour.

Thus they find themselves direcdy opposed to the form in which,

hitherto, the individuals of which society consists have given themselves

collective expression, that is, the State. In order therefore to assert

themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State^41

The section of The German Ideology dealing with Bruno Bauer is very
short: Marx had already dealt with Bauer's ideas at length in The Holy
Family and restricted himself here to reiterating in a few pages the
complete barrenness of 'critical criticism' and refuting Bauer's attacks on
Feuerbach.
The section on Stirner, on the other hand, is much longer than all the
other parts of The German Ideology put together. When Stirner's book
first appeared Engels considered that it contained several positive elements
that could serve as a basis for communist ideas, but Marx soon disabused
him of any such notion.^42 Marx's plans in December 1844 to write an
article criticising Stirner had been upset by his expulsion from Paris and
the banning of Vorwiirts. In The German Ideology he and Engels certainly
spared no effort: their onslaught on 'Saint Max' as they called him equals
in length and easily surpasses in tedium Stirner's own book.^43 There is
the occasional flash of brilliance, but the (quite correct) portrayal of
Stirner as the final product of the Young Hegelian school who carried to
its logical extreme the subjective side of the Hegelian dialectic too often
degenerates into pages of mere word-play and hair-splitting. The central
criticism made by Marx and Engels is that Stirner's fundamental oppo-
sition of egoism to altruism is itself a superficial view:

Communist theoreticians, the only ones who have time to devote to

the study of history, are distinguished precisely because they alone have

discovered that throughout history the 'general interest' is created by

individuals who are defined as 'private persons'. They know that this

contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, the so-called

'general', is constandy being produced by the other side, private