Revolution & Stirner

 

I am going to quote from the Wikipedia 2023 article paragraph on Max Stirner, and the title of this paragraph is Revolution: “Stirner criticizes conventional notions of revolution, arguing that social movements aimed at overturning established ideals are tacitly idealist because they are implicitly aimed at the establishment of a new ideal thereafter.”

 

My response: One of Stirner’s finest moral, critical, and skeptical insights all come to the fore and together as he denounces revolutionaries or ideologists seeking violent, forceful, totalitarian and statist war to overthrow the status quo and the idealistic narrative that the oppressors in power use to justify their injustice.

 

Once an ideal, or religious or moral truth of use to guiding people and filling their lives with purpose and constructive meaning, is mangled and distorted, remade into a perverse shadow of its former self, now a wretched, fixed idea, a fetish or obsession that its true-believing, mas-movement-centered enthusiasts and slavish followers are willing, eager and  glad to die for their spreading ism, then its adherents, leaders and followers alike, clamor for violent overthrow of the existing ideology to replace it with their new fetishized spook.

 

This revolution requires a vast totalitarian state to preserve, maintain and extend by war this monstrosity across the globe. It is a top-down enterprise, and postmodernist Marxism today is the hallmark example of a twisted ideology passionately pushed forward by its eager masters and their minions. Stirner saw through Marx from the get-go, and Marx never forgave him for that, but Marx had Stirner repressed and demonized, and it seem to take.

 

Stirner was a mild-yet-radical insurrectionist, a subjective egoist, and perhaps a petit bourgeois and a weak anarchist, but he despised capitalism and private property, but he was for insurrection not revolution. Offering an alternative plan of insurrection, I would bring forth individualist maverizing as the most effective form of personal insurrection to practice, and it is surprisingly revolutionary, enabling constant change and reforming without violent upheaval, or destruction of the system in place..

 

Wiki continues and quotes Stirner directly: “’Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in a overturning of conditions, of the established condition or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequences a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men’s discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes or ‘institutions. It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a working forth of me ot of the established. If I heave the established, it is dead and passes into decay.’”

 

My response: Before I interpret the rest of this Wiki-entry, I briefly wish to introduce the idea of voluntary servitude coined by Etienne de La Boetie, a brilliant French thinker that suggested that tyrants hold sway because people voluntarily agree to be subjugated. This concurs closely with my own theory that citizens are subjugated and tyrannized because they hate themselves, and prefer to be abused and oppressed rather than be strong, independent and competent in the world running their own private affairs, while cooperating with neighboring anarchist-individuator supercitizens in running public affairs, while bossing the executives and politicians at all levels of government that they have voted temporarily into office.

 

If the country is free, prosperous, capitalist, at peace and yet filled with law and order and little crime it is the accomplishment of the voters. If the system is a tyranny, the failure is the fault of the voters and citizens.

 

The supercitizens, the maverizers, would use their gentle but strong, perpetual insurrection o improve themselves and work together to prove salient social, economic and political conditions as needed to be improved, This change would be bottom-up as Stirner advises (or implicitly would support—if he would ever make such a prescriptive statement—most unlikely).

 

Marx’s model is very much that of revolution, a top-down change where a disenfranchised elite siding with the oppressed, less out of compassion and idealism, than using the disenfranchised and oppressed as their vehicle to gain power, overthrow the existing order, and they will be the new ruling class and the masses will stay in line, know their place, and obey, or be crushed.

 

Stirner’s tepid revolution (insurrection) is moderate and noble—though he would be horrified to have any adjective placed by his name—it is revolution by moderate good means, not violent involuntary, wicked means, leading to a rotten end.

 

I am an anarchist but a conservative, pro-capitalist, and most anarchists, many or most are Marxist and violent revolutionaries, and I reject them utterly.