Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

This from the (planned introduction to) the autobiography of an anarchist, titled “FREEDOM: My Dream”, being published by Western World Press in a limited manuscript edition, mainly for the author’s distribution; a few are available for $10.00 postpaid, and comments are invited towards a revised and typeset edition in 1986.

The author does not wish any such introduction or praise, so it is being circulated to announce the book, and the importance given to it here, and hopefully those who stand for freedom will see the significance of it, and come to terms with a fundamental fact (and force) that all on the Right reject, even as they are unable to cope with it. That terror and force do not sustain the Communist Empire, no system can survive on that alone; it is the Leftist usurpation and perversion of the promise of Modernism, the hope and the possibility of a better world and better life that sustains it, that supplies it with True Believers ready to rationalize away the present errors, ready to suffer all things including if need be death in the hope that out of this horror and degradation will be born the New World Order; the hope and redemption of all humanity.

Take that away from them, and their Empire would collapse of its own internal contradictions.

PUBLISHER’S INTRODUCTION

Western World Press is not an anarchist press and this is plainly the autobiography of an anarchist, and if an explanation is required it is that this is a book that all who stand for freedom, or even think they do, should read, As an aid to sorting out the polemics as to what has gone wrong and what can be and should be done to set things straight.

Modernism liberated us from the old and repressive orders and gave us freedom and the potential for a better life, yet in the name of that liberation and better life the new and secular and classless Statisms oppose and degrade in a manner all too similar and often even far worse than the old orders; their efficiency enhanced by Modern technology. Now how did we get from there to here and how do these tyrannies maintain themselves, and in the name of the people, with so little popular support and such widespread aversion to their oppressive and parasitic ways? Do we who stand for freedom confront the absolute power of the “System”-or the factionalism and the blindness and human folly of the opposition? I am one of those who have arrived at the latter view, and am now convinced that although the System or the Establishment of course fosters and sustains this, it is in no sense their creation.

If you must reduce it to a single factor then call it human folly, which the oppressors did not invent, though they cynically and enthusiastically exploit it. And it is not just the ignorant masses who get so used; the intellectuals and academics are the greater fools in this regard eagerly shaping facts and circumstances to fit their ideological perspectives.

One of the (many) ironies of this long and losing struggle, which has been well described as the road back to the new and technological serfdom, is that former Leftists have taken control of it. Yes: the Conservative Citadels – those proud bastions that stand for the best of our Christian and Western heritage, were long since programmed, and remain so, by former Marxist-Leninist Dialecticians, including even 33rd Degree Trotskytes. Which, dear readers, is not proof of subversion, or if it is the subversion started far back and runs deep indeed. And do not ask how the subversives accomplished this, ask rather how the best of the West lost out to the scientific-materialistic dialectical forensics of former Marxists, and no matter how you slice it that is what happened.

From the Preface to the (1963, Gateway Edition) of James Burnham’s “The Machiavellians” – written in the early 40’s after his break with the communist Left, and “. . . the long re-education I had to undertake after seven Trotskyist years . Having come to know something of the gigantic ideology of Bolshevism, I knew I was not going to be able to settle for the pigmy ideologies of Liberalism, social democracy, refurbished laissez-faire, or the inverted, cut-rate Bolshevism called ‘fascism.’ Through the Machiavellians I began to understand more thoroughly what I had long felt; that only by renouncing all ideology can we begin to see the world and man.”

Now a quote from this book, page 71: “For me now, after the tragic experiment of communism in power since the Russian revolution, the extreme communist left is the extreme reactionary right, because from the anarchist point of view every totalitarianism is fascism pure and clear; even if some anarchists in love with left phraseology would not agree with me.”

Somewhere around here and within these limits you can begin to sort it out, and begin to understand the Modern dilemma, and opportunity. We have broken with the past. we have made this Modern miracle of progress; which includes a Pandora’s Box of problems, most of which should be opportunities. For instance, surplus production and surplus wealth, which today are factors in unemployment and fantastically destructive wars, So check it out, from the time Modernism disrupted the old Order, accomplished some of the practical possibilities of change, and obviously even better is possible-, until we have this mystique of progress via change, where any disruption of the status quo, no matter how harmful in the short run, is justified in the name of long run progress. While all the “reactionaries” – scarce any of whom would go back to pre-Modernism, want to stabilize wherever they are and with the progress to date, undisturbed.

All of which is now obvious to anyone w ho can get beyond ideology and factionalism, and for those unaware of it, all you need is some careful and systematic study and you can see it clearly enough – see beyond the intellectual snares and ideological polemics of Left and Right and Communist and Capitalist. Where if you are on the “Right” and in the “Free World” you believe capitalism is the free enterprise system in action; when the truth is and by simple definition – this is but a form of fascism. And here communism equals socialism equals folly and ruin. While the truth is that socialism and the oppression they have in the name of same in the Communist Slave States are not one and the same, and contrary to the tiresome litany of our advocates of free enterprise (which they think we have but if we did the corporations would not have their monopoly position that now approaches total ownership) socialistic economic enterprises, relationships of other than employer-employee, have succeeded, and have had a productive efficiency second to none. The evidence is there and from more than one situation or point in time, and the West’s free market Guru s should know of it and include it in their freedom litany. or else perhaps call themselves the Church of Laissez-Faire.

Further, the anarchists made’ their “anarchism” work. in Spain and other places, where they went at it right and where allowed. And that is a fact, but believe a fiction it you prefer. However .if you examine their successful factories and farms and other enterprises, entire areas under anarchist control and doing very well indeed, you are left wondering: what is this anarchism” For anarchism in practice and working well is very like a free republic, with a free economy but of course with a hit of management, direction, and control. The essentials are covered by the author; and the problems and benefits and limits are very like those of any free society. For instance ,Roger Williams and his followers left the confines of a New England theocracy to establish the free society of Rhode Island, and soon enough had the same benefits and problems; likewise with the many communes of the 19th Century, and all those before and since.

You have the problem of all the human parasites who are eager to live off the free and fraternal community but reluctant to give anything in return. And always the factions that will seize control and exploit and oppress any way they can. You must have a set of common codes and rules governing society and all contractual relationships – laws where there is archy in anarchy they are reluctant to impose, hut they must have rules, at least a few, that are universal. But do not be too critical, instead try to understand. The author treats quite frankly with all this, so consider what was accomplished, and the broad popular support for the anarchists.

In America — throughout the “Free World” — we have had a half century of anti-Communism, and unrestrained (or scarce restrained) Communist advancement and encroachment. And set against that the self-appointed and often self-annointed anti-commie factions and their leaders, and all the while the masses and most of the middle class have been and remain only too eager to he rid of this pestilence. Does it leave you wondering? Well it really should. The leadership of and the precepts of the opposition to the Modern style of tyranny is obviously derelict: unequal to the task, and blindly sustains what it opposes, and will remain so as long as it accepts and sustains the dialectical riddle of Left and Right, as good and evil, as the idea-ologists have created and juxtaposed them, to our great harm and ultimate ruin.

Sort out all of this confusion, see just why we are losing this great struggle for the world, and it is that; and see the possibilities for an effective Popular Front. And if you are on the Right and you automatically reject that term as Leftist jargon, well you automatically reject common sense. And if you are on the Left and reject the benefits of Liberty and Property because of the exploitation that has gone on in the name of same, you are in the same category.

But enough of explanations and introduction; the point is this. Whether you are an archist or an an-archist, Christian or Athiest, Left or Right, there are essentials here that you need to understand, if you would understand this dilemma. You need to understand the forces that fuel the revolutionary effort, and re-fuel it with each new generation, forces and values that are not wrong (or evil) because the communist Left has misused them.

Once you understand the basics you will see that it is not a question of why aren’t we winning but rather no wonder we are losing. So, whoever you are and wherever you stand, you should read this autobiography of a 20th Century Rebel, or Crusader for Freedom: an education, an entertaining story, and a guide to the perplexed.

Robert E. Sagehorn, Editor & Publisher
Western World Press 1985

MEN AGAINST THE STATE: THE EXPOSITORS OF INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM IN AMERICA 1827-1908 by James J. Martin
Ralph Myles Publisher, Inc., P.O. Box 1533, Colorado Springs, Colorodo 80901 1970, 315 pp., S2.50
Reviewed by S.E. Parker, editor of MINUS ONE
Reprinted from FREEDOM — 10-10-70, 84 Whitechapel High Street, London E1, England

Just as no two blades of grass are exactly alike; just as no grain of sand is identical with another; so are human beings diverse. And their diversity is much more profound and complex than that of blades of grass or grains of sand. They differ in their physique, physiognomy, reactions, abilities and aspirations. It is for this reason that government is the enemy of the individual, for all governments try to force the individual into pre-established patterns of behaviour and to combine his interests with the interests of others, thus robbing him of his individuality and freedom. For life to be worth living the soverignty of the individual must take the place of the sovereignty of government:

Everyone must Peel that he is the supreme arbiter of his own, that no power on earth shall rise over him, that he is and always shall be sovereign of himself and ail relating to his individuality. Then only shall all men realise security of person and property.

It was in this way that Josiah Warren, “the first American anarchist”, set the theme for a talented, articulate, sometimes brilliant, group of libertarian writers and publicists who flourished in the USA between 1827 and 1908. It is to these that Dr. Martin devotes his MEN AGAINST THE STATE.

When I reviewed the first edition of this work in 1953, I wrote that it was “one of the most objective books on anarchists ever written.” Seventeen years later I still think the same. Dr. Martin’s book remains an outstanding model for the historical treatment of men and their ideas. Other recent writings on anarchism (Woodcock, Joll, Jacker, et al.) compare badly with h. And it is much superior to Rudolph Rocker’s Pioneers of American Freedom which covers almost the same ground. So definitive was the first edition that Dr.Martin has only had to make slight revisions (mainly additional biographical data concerning Warren and Tucker) for the second.

Dr. Martin begins his book with Josiah Warren, the first of the group in point of time. Warren was pre-eminently an inventor and experimenter who found writing difficult. Nonetheless, he managed to expound his ideas in a straightforward and often eloquent manner. Taking his stand on “the sovereignty of the individual” and the labour note principle he called “cost the limit of price”, he experimented with “time stores” to prove the practicability of his economic ideas, and founded three “equity villages” as examples of living in freedom.

For a time Warren had a valuable ally in the person of the erudite philosopher and polymath, Stephen Pearl Andrews, who wrote The Science of Society, in which Warren’s ideas received their most polished expression. Despite his later partial defection from Warrenite individualism, Andrews still continued to contribute to the contemporary anarchist press.

Independently of Warren and Andrews, the lawyer and legal theorist, Lysander Spooner, developed his fiery attacks on the banking monopoly and his mercilessly logical critiques of the American Constitution. The latter, he held, had no authority whatsoever over anyone who had not given his formal and open consent to its provisions (No Treason, his main work on this subject, was reprinted as late as 1966, thanks to the efforts of Dr. Martin, and received an unexpected accolade from Playboy magazine!) In defiance of conventional theories of maturation, Spooner became more radical as he grew older and eventually became a contributor to Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty after following a lone path for many years.

As well as the work of Warren, Andrews and Spooner, Dr, Martin details that of J.K. Ingalls, whose main concern was the elimination of land monopolies; W.B. Greene, whose theories of mutual banking had a great influence on Tucker; and Ezra Heywood, the most militant pamphleteer and flamboyant character of them all, who was the only one of the group to suffer serious persecution for hie activities, being imprisoned for several years for his outspoken advocacy of sexual freedom.

The last and best known of this group was Benjamin Tucker. Dr. Martin corrects the impression fostered by Eltzbacher that Tucker was an original thinker. Tucker’s thinking was, in fact, a synthesis of the ideas of Warren, Greene, Proudhon and (later) Stirner, together with material taken from such writers as Spooner and Ingalls. An accomplished translator, he was also a skilled joumalist, a cultural catalyst, and a stimulating commentator on current events. A logical and lucid polemicist, he delighted in debate. When his lnstead of a Book was published in 1893, he included his opponents’ criticisms in full — a rare, if not unique, thing for an author to do.

Tucker’s main achievement, however, was the publishing and editing of the journal Liberty from 1881 to 1908. In the first issue he declared:

It may be well to state at the outset that this journal will be edited to suit its editor, not its readers. He hopes that what suits him will suit them; but if not, it will make no difference. No subscriber, or body of subscribers, will be allowed to govern his course, dictate his policy, or prescribe his methods. Liberty is published for the vert’ definate purpose of spreading certain ideas, and no claim will be admitted on any pretext of freedom of speech, to waste its limited space in hindering the attainment of that object.

The result of this admirably selfish declaration was a publication of a polish and competence unusual among radical journals. Tucker and his collaborators ranged over economics, politics, history, philosophy, ethics and the arts, and one notable issue was written by George Bernard Shaw as a reply to Max Nordau’s Degeneration — a lengthy and vitriolic attack on the avant-garde of the period.

It was in the columns of Liberty that the shift began amongst individualists from the “natural rights” doctrines of Warren and the earlier writers to the conscious egoism of Max Stirner. Led by James L. Walker, who had reached similiar conclusions independently of Stirner, the egoists split the Tucker associates in two and carried Tucker with them. Walker, whose posthumous Philosophy of Egoism deserves reprinting, later contributed the introduction to the English translation of Stirners The Ego and His Own, published by Tucker in 1907.

In 1908 Tucker went to live in France after his uninsured bookshop and publishing business were destroyed by fire. There he lived in retirement until bis death in 1939, becoming increasingly pessimistic about the social realization of his ideas. Writing to Clarence Lee Swartz in 1930 he commented:

” . . . the insurmountable obstacle to the realization of Anarchy is no longer the power of the trusts, but the indisputable fact that our civilization is in its death throes. We may last a couple of decades yet; on the other hand, a decade may precipitate our finish. . . . The dark ages sure enough. The Monster, Mechanism, is devouring Mankind.”

He was still unrelenting in his opposition to communism: ‘The term Communist Anarchist has no sense’, he wrote to Eugene Baskette in 1933, echoing his debates of over forty years before with Kropotkin and Johann Most.

To chose whose perspectives were shaped by the hope that anarchism can be universalized, the story told by Dr. Martin may well proue depressing. Here was a movement, born at a time of social ferment and optimism, in a country where the State apparatus was comparatively weak and land plentiful. It was supported not only by capable theoreticians and publiciste, but also by practical exponents of ‘community living’ whose work, with varying degrees of success, extended over thirty years. Yet after eighty years of vigorous activity it petered out — despite the efforts of the few and scattered survivors of Tucker’s departure.

As I see it, one of the reasons for this was the attempt to reconcile anarchist individualism with “social engineering.”

Because of their desire to establish a future society on the basis of their ideas, Warren and Tucker were forced to squeeze their anarchism into a societal context. Their championship of the individual was thereby deformed. Dr. Martin rightly questions whether anarchism is translatable into a social reality. That it is capable of being made an individual reality, and even partially viable as a small milieu, Warren’s experiments showed. But between the conscious choice of a few, select individuals and universal application to a mass there is a wide and apparently unbridgeable gulf. Neither Warren nor Tucker seem to have had any awareness of that fundamental aspect of the organizational problem that Robert Michels called “the iron law of oligarchy”; the invariable development of oligarchs in all organizations of any scale or permanence. Nor were they aware that any extended, organised social application of anarchism might at most lead to an “anarchism of groups” — to use Estey’s terminology — but would necessarily deny the “anarchism of individuals.”

For these reasons the later anarchist individualist perspective of continual conflict between the individual and the collective makes far more sense. Warren’s “equity villages” functioned as they did not because of the essence of the societary principle, but because of one of its accidents: the conjunction of pioneering conditions in the USA with an unusually wide plurality of differing and conflicting interests among reformers and rebels. The threatening future blend of 1984 with Brave New World, or the equally ominous alternative of rule by the acephalous mob, makes the possibility of even the small scale and limited efflorescence of individual autonomy possible in Warren’s experiments an increasingly remote prospect.

However, Warren’s concept of the individualization of interests, instead of their combination, was one of the most fruitful approaches to anarchism ever made. Its eclipse by the attempt to link anarchism with collectivism led to disastrous consequences. Now that there is a revival of interest in Warrenite anarchism in the USA — which even shows signs of spreading to Britain –perhaps its value will be recognised once more and, shorn of social utopianism, it can be developed into an effective weapon in the unending struggle for the individual. The sovereignty of the individual may never replace the sovereignty of government, but it certainly can be opposed to it.