Schmidt (Stirner) and his Egoistic Anarchism

I cannot remember whether Max Nordau has included Schmidt among the imaginative monstrosities of his “Degeneration;” but if ever a person earnt an epitaph from that atrabilious Philistine, that person was Johann Kaspar Schmidt, pseudonymously known as Max Stirner. Stirner—I shall henceforth call him Stirner—was the expounder of an Anarchism so harsh and intolerant to little men, that it seems the glum gaiety of a megalomaniac. In my opinion, there is nothing quite like it in all the categories of vain crazes and enormous fads, for Stirner’s Anarchism is Egoism militant; Egoism all Egoism—Egoism raging to turn titans out of tuck-pointers or supermen out of grooms.

Purely endemonistic in aim, this Egoism recognises nothing but the elevation of the individual by the might which is right. Turn we to Stirner’s truly remarkable book, “The Ego and His Own” (English translation), and we find a glorification of might, involving a rejection of all bourgeois omnipotence’s like the policeman on the corner—or The Policeman in The Clouds. Says Stirner with almost splenetic vigor: —

“What you have the might to be you have the right to be. I deduce all right and entitlement from myself; I am entitled to everything that I have might over. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus Jehovah, God, etc., if I can; if I cannot, then these gods will remain in the right and in the might as against me.”

In holding that might is right, Stirner not only sets up the lawless law of Will, but the heretical law of UNmorality. Things are to him neither “good” nor “bad,” for he ignores the arbitrary values of “good” and “bad.” Therein one might perceive an affinity with Nietzsche, the transvaluator of all values, and might suspect a philosophical relationship in this somewhat striking passage:—

“Away, then, with every business that is not altogether my business! You think, at least, the “good cause” must be my business? What good, what bad? Why, I myself am my business, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me. What is divine is God’s business, what is human “Man’s.” My business is neither what is divine nor what is human, it is not what is true, good, right, free, etc., but only what is mine; and it is no general business, but it is—unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself.”

The inevitable conclusion of Stirner’s teaching is, of course, an abrogation of the legal institutions of the State, law, and property, and the substitution in their stead of a “union of conscious egoists.” But in “union of egoists,” one scents a hint of paradoxical altruism, until one comes to consider that altruism itself might be a paradox. In the bald collectivism of every herd, for instance, one might behold the noble sense of helping others; but when one remarks that the instinct of collectivism might be the instinct of self-preservation, one might be beholding the utilitarian sense of helping oneself. Hence Stirner seems to have some biological basis for the proposed union of egoists, and, in fact, convinces one that he has some practical basis, when, in answer to critics, he cites familiar examples of egoistic unions. Children at play is a particular example of his, and it requires no ostentatious show of reasoning to assure one that their union for pleasure is for the pleasure of the unit. Take again a couple in the drawing-room when the lights are low, and note that a personal felicity is the underlying motive of their mutual embraces.. But, after all, Stirner’s union” has no place for the orthodox sentimentalities of friendship, comradeship, good will, and so forth. On the contrary, he plainly points out that his union is a selfish agreement, only, so far as it increases the power of his implacable ego. If I can exploit my fellowmen, then in Stirner’s own words:—

“I am likely to come to an understanding and unite myself with them, in order to strengthen my power by the agreement, and to do more by joint force than individual force could accomplish. In this joinder I see nothing at all else than a multiplication of my strength, and only so long as it is my multiplied strength do I retain it.”

But union involves another idea—the idea of a State in the germ, and, since an agreement suggests obedience to as extent, and. therefore, law to an extent, one might wonder vaguely whether Stirner absolutely renounces the State and law in their entirety. Union, moreover, might also become a union for mutual defence, as well as for individual power, and, since defence ipso facto argues the defensible, what should be more defensible than the institution of property? Stirner, indeed, implies a union for defence of the property, acquired, be it noted, by his amiable law of force majeure:—

“Property, therefore, should not and cannot be done away with; rather, It must be torn from ghostly hands and become my property; then will the erroneous consciousness that I cannot entitle myself to as much as I want vanish—’But what cannot a man want?’ Well, he who wants much, and knows how to get it, has in all times taken it to him, as Napoleon did the continent, and the French Algeria. Therefore, the only point is that the respectful ‘lower classes’ should, at length, learn to take to themselves what they want. If they reach their hands too far for you, why defend yourselves.”

Altogether Stirner’s book is an original contribution to the literature of rebellion, and, as an intellectual recreation, is a change from leaderettes on obstetric evils, or from the gusty farce of a Kiplingesque, ode. True, it is not a respectable book, but no revolutionist ever writes a respectable book. Yet, if one cannot applaud it, one would be cheap to despise it. In philosophical value, it appears to be not inferior to anything that Nietzsche ever conceived, though it lack the literary lightning of the later Teuton.

Also Stirner’s faith is not a respectable faith. It is a creed more suited to the needs of “free spirits” than to the frugal necessities of law-abiding, modern men. It is a creed that abjures weakness for strength, pessimism for optimism, and preaches hope just as surely as Nietzsche preached it with the dramatic promise of his UEBERMENSCH. For that reason Stirner is worth a little attentive exploration, although I fear that he never will become a popular idol. Still, unpopularity should add a subtler distinction to his name. For nobody who is anybody is popular!

JEAN SIBI.

A Century of Progress by John Drury (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers Inc 1933)

“TOWER TOWN,” over the river on the near north side. Chicago’s largest and most flourishing bohemian quarter, bounded roughly on the south by Grand Avenue, on the east by Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive, on the north by Division Street and on the west by Clark Street. District centers about the historic old Chicago Avenue Water Tower, Chicago and Michigan Avenues. Studios, art galleries, tea rooms, bookshops, alley forums and Italian restaurants are on every hand. The famous Dill Pickle Club, conducted by Jack Jones, is “Tower Town’s” main rendezvous. On Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings lectures, debates and dances are held here. The Dill Pickle occupies a chapter in Albert Parry’s “Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America.” It is located at 18 Tooker Place. Nearby is “Bughouse Square” (Washington Square, North Dearborn Street and Walton Place), haunt of soap-box orators.

Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1953)

In Towertown, one-eyed Jack Jones had started the Dill Pickle Club, and here, every Saturday night, a Chicago one act play, written by some unknown Chicago playwright, presented by unknown Chicago actors, took the boards. […] With the coming of Prohibition, Towertown became something of a haunt for the underworld, too. The Dill Pickle became a scarcely-disguised speakeasy, and even had itself raided a few times just for the publicity.

Hobohemia by Frank O. Beck (Rindge: Richard R. Smith Publisher Inc. 1956)

One evening in 1919 no less a luminary than Sherwood Anderson published in The Chicago Daily News the statement, “Jack Jones and the Dill Pickle Club are the bright spots in the rather somber aspects of our town.”

Jack was a man of stature and a visit to the Club was for many years a must in the itinerary of all pilgrims making a round of the night clubs of the Windy City. It was a focal point of the nightlife of Towertown, a region of the near north side where, when the shades of night arrived, foregathered the Bohemian, the artist, the near-artist and the strange conglomeration of city dwellers who follow in their train.

The Dill Pickle Club is surely an appropriate name for an eating spot. What epicure but does not relish the dill, the humble anise of the Scriptures? When the eating club was opened on Locust Street and patronized mainly by disputatious labor leaders, it had over its door the sign, “The Copper Kettle and the Dill Pickle. ” A few years later, Bohemia-in-Chicago was stirred by food poisoning caused (supposedly) by the use of the copper kettle and the Club dropped “The Copper Kettle” end of the name and the Dill Pickle went it alone. While the Irish were pleased, the Germans were not.

The same Jack Jones, who in 1917 opened the Dill Pickle Club, now incorporated the club, copyrighted the name and moved it to Tooker Alley, where he continued to serve “coffee and a few light foods that are tolerable” as John Drury writes in his Dining in Chicago. On Wednesdays, his mild-mannered sister prepared a goodly assortment of sandwiches for the literary group who took over that evening. It was on one of these special evenings that I, in search of a copywriter, bought “coffee and — ” for a young writer, Carl Sandburg. He ate it in a dimly lighted recess in the wall, as I tried to persuade him to come with me to do some special writing, as I was then making the Chicago Area Survey of the Inter-Church World Movement.

But for John Archibald (Jack) Jones, the Dill Pickle Club was to serve purposes other than gastronomy. This king of the Picklers came to Chicago about the year 1907 and, as a labor leader, he wished his Club to serve his ends, by enlisting the intelligentsia.

Where he came from and who he was was definitely secondary to the fact that he was a most intelligent and militant labor agitator, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. His Club was to be a public forum for the discussion of what, to Jones, was the most vital subject in our national life, the rights of manual laborers.

Of an earlier interesting place, a nursery rhyme said, “The way into my parlor is up a winding stair.” The way into the Dill Pickle Club was even more complicated. Off North State Street to the left you wedged yourself, if you were thin enough, through a hole in the wall, a narrow slit between the four-story buildings. Then, with ashcans and garbage cans making it wise to watch your step, you went over the cobblestones and bricks of Tooker Alley to No. 18, where you faced a bright green light over an orange door with three small stained glass apertures. Here you were admonished, if you aspired to enter, to “Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside.” Crawling was really the best means of locomotion from there on in.

Blazed across the vestibule was the enigmatical line “This club is established to elevate the minds of people to a lower level.” There were several ways in which the Club made no more sense than that.

However, the founder, Jack Jones, an American pioneer in the field of labor education, was a powerful magnet and drew unusual personalities within his orbit. It was probably in the cards from the beginning that Jack, years later, should die alone in a third-class men’s lodging house, and his wasted and besotted body, not yet sixty-four years old, be buried in a casket, the gift of a thousand derelict men on the stem on West Madison Street.

What mattered was what Jack Jones, a flaming missionary of industrial justice, did with his opportunity in the Dill Pickle Club. At once it became the rendezvous of leading labor organizers and leaders, of radical artists too often coarse and ribald, of modern poets often equally unrefined and gross, of rising literary personages and revolutionists. It became more than a serious labor forum, it became an institution for all the arts. It opened its doors wide to everybody who had a message, a grievance, a hope, or a criticism, constructive or destructive; who wished to raise his voice against oppression, prejudice and injustice in all their multiforms. To every guest, at some time during his sojourn at the Club, Jack Jones, the ingenious, put the question, “Are you a nut about anything?”

One night in an unrestrained moment the group of the evening accepted the following credo: “We of the Dill Pickle believe in everything. We are radicals, pickpockets, second-story men and thinkers. Some of us practice free love, and some, medicine. Most of us have gone through religion and have tired of it. Some of us have tired of our wives.” This was the Dill Pickle Club in its most indulgent and unrestrained mood.

This creed did not express the main objectives of the Club. It was definitely not a place where men grow broad bellied and narrow minded, despite the fact that there were hedonists there and those allergic to purity. Through the years they did much creative work. Here experts taught dancing and other arts. Poets read their own verses. Artists, wood carvers, ornamental iron designers, sculptors and painters created and displayed their handicraft, always to an interested public. From the haymow on the second floor — the city used transportation that fed on hay — came the mingled odors of charcoal, turpentine, fixatives. Often a party of visitors stood by, waiting to be shocked at the nude subject.

In the birth and early development of the little theatre the Club must be given prominent mention. This, one of the earliest of the little theatres, presented some of the finest amateur talent. Jack, a man of varied talent, built with his own hands a splendid stage, invented and installed an unusual lighting system, wrote, directed and acted in the plays.

The open forum of the Club was stimulated by the idea that truth wholly controlled may become dangerous. Yet no matter how important the question brought before the Dill forum or how illustrious the speaker, he was thrown to the lions, as he expected to be. His message — important, crack-brained, serious or humorous — the omnipresent heckler treated the same as the last and the next. And what consummate hecklers were there! There was big John Laughman, whose biting Irish witticism, often almost sadistical, literally cowed the speaker and thrilled the audience; little Birdie Weber, hook-nosed and bespectacled, vulgar always and thunderous in his approach, confused and trapped the orator. The heckling was usually brilliant and constituted not an inconsiderable part of the entertainment.

The Dill Pickle Club drew to its platform a surprising “Who’s Who” of speakers. In my diary are listed speakers heard there, and many of them were monthly guests. There was Maxwell Bodenheim, author of Ninth Avenue; Carl Sandburg, the poet; Ben Reitman, King of the Hoboes; Ben Hecht, author of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, editor of the Chicago Literary Times and a promising poet; Countess Luddie, who wore sandals and bobbed her hair; Paddy Carrol from Hell’s Half Acre; Aimee Semple McPherson, and a Spanish spiritualist who shaved her head and dyed it green; Morris Levine, blind, gray-haired orator; Van Cima, Dutch artist and piccolo player; Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, and Rube Menken, Russian art critic; Eugene Debs and William D. Haywood, tycoons of the labor movement; Sherwood Anderson, the playwright, and Jim Larkin, the famous Irish rebel; Harry Batters, selling socialism to the Democrats and democracy to the Socialists; Yellow Kid Weil, of high-finance fame; Clarence Darrow and scores of the more brilliant members of the faculties of Northwestern and Chicago universities. Sooner or later everybody had a chance to ex- press himself and the Club’s Sunday night doings often made Monday morning news.

One night one of the university speakers remarked seriously, “More famous people have passed through this Club than through any fifty universities in the world.” The statement was, to say the least, extravagant. It was statements like this that convinced me that I was using rather well the time I gave to them. Early in the Club’s history, Jack Jones invited me to join his staff and called me “Chaplain.” I have met few groups with such enormous responsiveness and so much in need of education of the spirit. I tried to understand when they needed praise and when they needed prayer. They always needed a friend. Jack Jones climaxed his study of labor’s problems by writing a treatise, “The Tech-Up,” a pronouncement on technocracy.

Harper Leech, co-originator of the War Insurance plan, wrote of Jack’s “The Tech-Up”: “A masterpiece of explanation of the industrial form of unionism.” It brought Jack a trip to Washington, D. C., during World War I at Uncle Sam’s expense, for conference with the Department of Labor. Labor sympathizers of the Dill Pickle type later followed the worker’s movement through syndicalism and the Worker’s Party into the Communist Party.

When the crest of bootlegging came, the Club’s cultural flame flickered low. The lawless horned in on the management of the Club and chiseling gangsters followed. Man shall not live by free love, companionate marriage, unrestrained Bohemianism, rackets, “red” Russia, alone — vital subjects though they were to the adherents of the Club. However, sincere voices raised against suppression, prejudice and injustice bring their own reward. Dill Pickle’s popular forum, little theatre, art school, social center, all often on the five-yard line in their way and day, served the cause of adult education and democracy.

And possibly society has a greater ability to reform itself than many of us thought that day.

I am enclosing the first issue of a boot-leg publication called the Clarion. L. J. Shapiro is a contractor, sympathizer but not an anarchist. He made available sufficient funds for the first three issues. Archie Turner was formerly with Havel on [illegible] Gordin, you know. Amedy Chappeau is a French comrade, an individualist and always considered a dependable comrade. I understand he has merely lent his name to give the Clarion some reason to be. Malfew Seklew is a street fakir with a flair for alliterative sentences. He claims to have been a follower of Kropotkin’s for more than 30 years until he found out how much more he knew than Peter and what damn fools and underdeveloped organisms the anarchists are when he decided that nothing matters but the ego and that the greatest social system man has ever devised is the capitalist system which provides bread and luxuries for hordes too dumb to provide it for themselves. Therefore if 30 capitalists would quit business tomorrow, the whole working class would starve within the next week. He is something over seventy and draws an old age pension from the State of NY, which may have something to do with his defense of capitalism! Anyhow no one takes him seriously except A. Gordin and A. Turner. But he is one of the sponsors of the Clarion. As to its contents, they speak for themselves.

Union of Egoist Note: the letter immediately following this one is Emma Goldman’s statement of earnings from Living My Life, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Anarchism is not a doctrine of love, nonviolence or even freedom. This is a description of the society at which we are aiming. It is not for revolutionaries to idealise aims but resist oppression, even if it is the resistance of one person alone. But the parcelling up of anarchism by academics into “schools of thought” has both hindered such resistance and confused anarchist aims. Amongst the early pioneers of anarchism have been both activists – like Bakunin, to whom participation in the struggle rarely allowed time to finish any of his voluminous works – and non-activists, such as Max Stirner, the reserved teacher and family nan who nevertheless gave one of the most important and most abused contributions to the development of libertarian ideas The Ego and His Own – and has suffered greatly at the hands of the academics.

As an early critic of state socialism he provoked the anger of authoritarian contemporaries like Marx and Engels, and in stating his position boldly and with determination drew either hostility or too uncritical acceptance from within the ranks of the anarchists. This polarised and over simplified for-or-against response has sadly persisted until today, resulting in Stirner being too little read and too much maligned on the one hand and too uncritically acclaimed and distorted on the other.

Stirner‘s real strength lies in probing the motivations behind human action, explaining why people act as they do. This is not to say that he believed people would always do things in the same way (as claimed for him by his critics), only that whichever way they act they do so for the same reason: self interest, that of promoting their own welfare.

If I seclude myself, I do so because I no longer find enjoyment in society, if I remain with people, I do so because they still have something to offer me. To remain is no less egoistic than to seclude myself. (p. 41).

He cautioned strongly against mistaking freedom as an abstract end in itself. For him freedom was only the means to an end; the real end being control over ones own actions within an atmosphere of personal autonomy. Not being physically punished for holding a particular opinion is mot real freedom, for by holding an opinion the individual may be enslaved by that opinion itself.

Freedom is only desirable if it is in one’s own interest to be free, but acting from self determination, self-awareness and free will (real freedom) best serves the individual’s interest (“egoism”). And to be so, those things which stand in the way of that must be removed (by a free choice, consciously); the greatest obstacle being (for Stirner) the State in aid its forms:

The State’s behaviour is violence, and it calls its violence law; that of the individual ‘crime.’ (p.75).

The fact of the State’s legalising its restriction of the individuals freedom through institutionalised violence does not make it acceptable, but only calls attention to our resistance against being just as valid and more necessary. Stirner believed the individual must overcome the power exerted by the State and should not hesitate to do so by force; to “overcome the State’s violence when he thinks that the State is not above him, but he is above the State.” (p. 75)

This viewpoint was abstracted from the context of class struggle, and was certainly not unsympathetic to the workers’ movement. Stirner advocated insurrection as the road to freedom and strikes as a necessary tactic for the workers within capitalism:

The labourers who ask for higher pay are treated as criminals as soon as they want to compel it. What are they to do? Without compulsion they don’t get it, and in compulsion the State sees a self-help, a determination of price by the ego, a genuine, free realisation of value from his property, which it cannot admit of. (p. 83)

In opposition to Statism (both capitalist and communist) as a means of social organisation, Stirner proposed the “Union of Egoists” – which is fundamental to anarchist federalism as a truly libertarian way of re-constituting society around individual freedom. The union, as John P. Clark describes it,

… arises out of truly voluntary action and from a genuine choice of those participating in it, it is not a group into which one is born or socialised, like society, but an association into which one enters out of one’s own power, Since society lacks this element of free commitment and creative action, it is in essence static and lifeless, while the union is always dynamic and living, depending for its existence on continuing renewal through individual decisions, it is an “incessant self-uniting,” while “society is crystallised;” “come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity” – in short “dead.” (p.78-9)

There are still (in Glasgow) a few survivors from a generation of syndicalists which interpreted Stirner’s union of egoists literally as a workers’ union, a way of organising freely within industry. Nothing in Stirner exists to prove them wrong. He believed, whatever social context the union was put in, that people should enter into it only if “… they are of themselves led to the point that they care best for their welfare if they unite with others…” Their coming together would not constitute a state or a nation, simply the recognition (which is fundamental to all anarchist thought) that the individual co-operates freely with others because it is in his (and therefore the others) interest to do so. “I shall find enough… who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag.”

The Egoism of Max Stirner is a skillfully written appraisal of “egoism” managing somehow to both illuminate and annoy at the same time, that sadly lacks something in the telling. John P. Clark adds little to any constructive understanding of Stirner‘s ideas, and confuses much. In the absence of a better introduction it is worth reading. But better still is Stirner‘s own writing, which has stood the test of time well and certainly rewards the effort of reading.

Maurice Cranston (1920 – 1993) was an English philosopher. He was a conscientious objector as a young man and a supporter of Margret Thatcher as an adult. His books include Politics and Ethics, The New Left and Tomorrow We’ll Be Sober. L. A. Rollins quotes Cranston in The Myth of Natural Rights (Port Townsend: Loompanics 1983. Charleston: Nine-Banded Books 2008). In an unknown United Kingdom newspaper article dated 7-3-71, Cranston reviews The Ego and His Own.*

*–Technically the proper title of this book is Max Stirner: The Ego and His Own. It is an abridged/altered edition of Byington’s translation of Der Einzige, that also includes sections from some of Stirner’s other writings. -KIS

Self love

The Ego and His Own
by Max Stirner, edited by John Carroll Cape
£2.95 (59s)

The Ego and His Own is a classic of anarchist thought, written under the name of Max Stirner by a Bavarian schoolmaster, Johann Schmidt, who died in obscurity and debt at the age of fifty in 1856. Many of the shocking things which were later said by Nietzsche were first said by Stirner. But Stirner was never, like Nietzsche, a colourful personality, and he had no luck as a writer. He lived the dull, frustrated, regimented life of the German petite bourgeoisie: his writings were his protest, burning with passion for liberty and heroic self-assertion.

“God is dead,” cried Stirner, and he went on to plead for men to live like God. This plea took an unexpected form. God was above law, so Stirner argued that men should be above law. God sought to impose his will on all things, so men should do the same. To be God-like is not to submit and obey and put others before oneself. If I am to be like God, I must command and dominate and make my own will the law.

In politics, Stirner noted, all this meant abolishing both the Church and the State, and abandoning all creeds of social obligation, rights and duties. The ego must be free to perfect itself in its own way, and become as unique as possible. Stirner had no objection to war, but he did not expect his type of egoism to lead to endless conflict: indeed he thought a “union of egoists.” the most natural of human associations. He believed in rebellion, the individual act of violent protest, but not in revolution, the replacement of one régime with another. He thought all régimes were evil.

But he was an odd sort of anarchist. Other anarchists thought that if the state were abolished, men would be united by social sentiment and mutual aid. Stirner despised such utopian dreams of sweetness and light. His was a hard, fierce doctrine of the self. So it is not altogether sure that Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, which was last published in 1963 in an anarchist book club edition, should now appear in George Steiner’s “black” collection of the forerunners of fascism. Dr Steiner calls his series “The Roots of the Right” and suggests in a preface that there is a tradition of right-wing thought which has produced fascist-type ideology in the twentieth century.

Mr. John Carroll in his introduction to this volume expresses some doubts about describing Stirner as a forerunner of fascism, but then adds “in an age of mass politics… the choice to be apolitical is not available; in such an arena Stirner has by default Rightist tendencies.” But this book of Stirner’s is proof that fascism has at least some of its roots in an extremist left-wing tradition. Mussolini had a great admiration for Stirner. However, when Mussolini took up Stirner’s egoism, he rejected his anarchism: and it has remained for the New Left movements of our own day to revive Stirner’s ideas in their entirety. If his theories are essentially the fantasies of a petit bourgeois mind rather than the insights of a genuine philosopher, that does not diminish their appeal to readers whose predicaments and desires and limitations are the same as his.