"Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals."
-Marx, German Ideology
“By taking away also property” (!) “the socialists do not take into account that its continuance is safeguarded by the peculiarities of human beings. Are only money and goods property, or is not every opinion also something that is mine, that belongs to me? Hence, every opinion must be abolished or made impersonal.” (Stirner)
Or does Saint Sancho’s opinion, insofar as it does not become the opinion of others as well, give him command over anything, even over another’s opinion? By bringing into play against communism the capital of his opinion, Saint Max again does nothing but advance against it the oldest and most trivial bourgeois objections, and he thinks he has said something new because for him, the “educated” Berliner, these hackneyed ideas are new. Destutt de Tracy among, and after, many others said the same thing much better approximately thirty years ago, and also later, in the book quoted below. For example:
“Formal proceedings were instituted against property, and arguments were brought forward for and against it, as though it depended on us to decide whether property should or should not exist in the world; but this is based on a complete misunderstanding of our nature” (Traité de la volonté, Paris, 1826, p. 18).
And then M. Destutt de Tracy undertakes to prove that propriété, individualité and personnalité are identical, that the “ego” [moi] also includes “mine” [mien], and he finds as a natural basis for private property that
“nature has endowed man with an inevitable and inalienable property, property in the form of his own individuality” (p. 17). — The individual “clearly sees that this ego is the exclusive owner of the body which it animates, the organs which it sets in motion, all their capacities, all their forces, all the effects they produce, all their passions and actions; for all this ends and begins with this ego, exists only through it, is set in motion through its action; and no other person can make use of these same instruments or be affected in the same way by them” (p. 16). “Property exists, if not precisely, everywhere that a sentient individual exists, at least wherever there is a conative individual” (p. 19).
Having thus made private property and personality identical, Destutt de Tracy with a play on the words propriété and propre, like “Stirner” with his play on the words Mein and Meinung, Eigentum and Eigenheit, [one’s own, my, mine; opinion, view; property; peculiarity] arrives at the following conclusion:
“It is, therefore, quite futile to argue about whether it would not be better for each of us to have nothing of our own (de discuter s'il ne vaudrait pas mieux que rien ne fût propre à chacun de nous) ... in any case it is equivalent to asking whether it would not be desirable for us to be quite different from what we are, and even to examining whether it would not be better for us not to exist at all” (p. 22).
“these are extremely popular”, now already traditional objections to communism, and for that very reason “it is not surprising that Stirner” repeats them.
— Individuality and Property —
When the narrow-minded bourgeois says to the communists: by abolishing property, i.e., my existence as a capitalist, as a landed proprietor, as a factory-owner, and your existence as workers, you abolish my individuality and your own; by making it impossible for me to exploit you, the workers, to rake in my profit, interest or rent, you make it impossible for me to exist as an individual. — When, therefore, the bourgeois tells the communists: by abolishing my existence as a bourgeois, you abolish my existence as an individual; when thus he identifies himself as a bourgeois with himself as an individual, one must, at least, recognise his frankness and shamelessness. For the bourgeois it is actually the case, he believes himself to be an individual only insofar as he is a bourgeois.
But when the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie come forward and give a general expression to this assertion, when they equate the bourgeois’s property with individuality in theory as well and want to give a logical justification for this equation, then this nonsense begins to become solemn and holy.
Above “Stirner” refuted the communist abolition of private property by first transforming private property into “having” and then declaring the verb “to have” an indispensable word, an eternal truth, because even in communist society it could happen that Stirner will “have” a stomach-ache. In exactly the same way here his arguments regarding the impossibility of abolishing private property depend on his transforming private property into the concept of property, on exploiting the etymological connection between the words Eigentum and eigen and declaring the word eigen an eternal truth, because even under the communist system it could happen that a stomach-ache will be eigen to him. All this theoretical nonsense, which seeks refuge in etymology, would be impossible if the actual private property that the communists want to abolish had not been transformed into the abstract notion of “property”. This transformation, on the one hand, saves one the trouble of having to say anything, or even merely to know anything, about actual private property and, on the other hand, makes it easy to discover a contradiction in communism, since after the abolition of (actual) property it is, of course, easy to discover all sorts of things in communism which can be included in the concept “property”. In reality, of course, the situation is just the reverse. In reality I possess private property only insofar as I have something vendible, whereas what is peculiar to me [meine Eigenheit] may not be vendible at all. My frock-coat is private property for me only so long as I can barter, pawn or sell it, so long [as it] is [marketable]. If it loses that feature, if it becomes tattered, it can still have a number of features which make it valuable for me, it may even become a feature of me and turn me into a tatterdemalion. But no economist would think of classing it as my private property, since it does not enable me to command any, even the smallest, amount of other people’s labour. A lawyer, an ideologist of private property, could perhaps still indulge in such twaddle.
Private property alienates [entfremdet] the individuality not only of people but also of things. Land has nothing to do with rent of land, the machine has nothing to do with profit. For the landed proprietor, land has the significance only of rent of land; he leases his plots of land and receives rent; this is a feature which land can lose without losing a single one of its inherent features, without, for example, losing any part of its fertility; it is a feature the extent and even the existence of which depends on social relations which are created and destroyed without the assistance of individual landed proprietors. It is the same with machines. How little connection there is between money, the most general form of property, and personal peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed to each other was already known to Shakespeare better than to our theorising petty bourgeois:
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
This yellow slave...
Will make the hear leprosy adored...
This it is
That makes the wappened widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again...
Thou visible god,
That solder’st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss!"
[Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene 3]
In a word, rent of land, profit, etc., these actual forms of existence of private property, are social relations corresponding to a definite stage of production, and they are “individual” only so long as they have not become fetters on the existing productive forces.
According to Destutt de Tracy, the majority of people, the proletarians, must have lost all individuality long ago, although nowadays it looks as if it was precisely among them that individuality is most developed. For the bourgeois it is all the easier to prove on the basis of his language the identity of commercial and individual, or even universal, human relations, as this language itself is a product of the bourgeoisie, and therefore both in actuality and in language the relations of buying and selling have been made the basis of all others. For example, propriété — property [Eigentum] and characteristic feature [Eigenschaft]; property — possession [Eigentum] and peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit]; “eigen” ["one’s own"] — In the commercial and in the individual sense; valeur, value, Wert; commerce, Verkehr; échange, exchange, Austausch, etc., all of which are used both for commercial relations and for characteristic features and mutual relations of individuals as such. In the other modern languages this is equally the case. If Saint Max seriously applies himself to exploit this ambiguity, he may easily succeed in making a brilliant series of new economic discoveries, without knowing anything about political economy; for, indeed, his new economic facts, which we shall take note of later, lie wholly within this sphere of synonymy.
Our kindly, credulous Jacques takes the bourgeois play on the words Eigentum [property] and Eigenschaft [characteristic feature] so literally, in such holy earnest, that he even endeavours to behave like a private property-owner in relation to his own features, as we shall see later on.
Finally, on page 421, “Stirner” instructs communism that
“actually it” (viz., communism) “does not attack property, but the alienation of property”.
In this new revelation of his, Saint Max merely repeats an old witticism already used repeatedly by, for example, the Saint-Simonists. Cf., for example, Leçons sur l'industrie et les finances, Paris, 1832, where, inter alia, it is stated:
“Property will not be abolished, but its form will be changed ... it will for the first time become true personification ... it will for the first time acquire its real, individual character” (pp. 42, 43).
Since this phrase, introduced by the French and particularly enlarged on by Pierre Leroux, was seized on with great pleasure by the German speculative socialists and used for further speculation, and finally gave occasion for reactionary intrigues and sharp practices — we shall not deal with it here where it says nothing, but later on, in connection with true socialism.
Saint Sancho, [following the] example of Woeniger, whom Reichardt [used], takes delight in turning the proletarians, [and hence] also the communists, into “ragamuffins”. He defines his “ragamuffin” on page 362 as a “man possessing only ideal wealth”. If Stirner’s “ragamuffins” ever set up a vagabond kingdom, as the Paris beggars did in the fifteenth century, then Saint Sancho will be the vagabond king, for he is the “perfect” ragamuffin, a man possessing not even ideal wealth and therefore living on the interest from the capital of his opinion.
--Marx, German Ideology, pg 245-249
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