/lit/ - Literature

Max Stirner is a pseudonym that Engels used to expose his actual ideals to Marx without being fucking bashed and instantaneously cancelled.
There are no photos of Stirner, the only two depictions of him are drawings made by Engels - which, btw, one of them was made 40y after Stirner's death for a biography by Mackay because he couldn't find any photos nor descriptions of his appearance apart from, of course, Engels. Engels was a closet egoist and the story goes like this: Engels has issues with ideals of non-individuality, humanism (Feuerbach) and authority, so he creates a scapegoat to publish his true beliefs because he doesn't want to get harassed by the ever-so-growing scientific socialism and the stigma that utopian socialism created with class cooperativism and "egoism". He publishes under the pseudonym "Max Stirner", a common name and a common surname in southern Germany - and if needed he can just point to a random dude he worked with, "uuhhh let me think, oh there's this Hegelian weirdo that Feuerbach told me about, what was his name? Oh somethin something Kaspar Schmidt fuck it, he will never know. The book doesn't get much attention, let alone enough to daddy Marx take a look. He gets a copy, send a bunch of *enthusiastic* letters to Marx, essentially praising himself and hoping Marx would agree. "But what is true in his principle, we, too, must accept. And what is true is that before we can be active in any cause we must make it our own, egoistic cause-and that in this sense, quite aside from any material expectations, we are communists in virtue of our egoism, that out of egoism we want to be human beings and not merely individuals." Engels IS egoist. Engels IS Stirner. Marx reads it. And it's shit. Marx comes to Engels and convinces him that Stirner is just a little whinny egocentric white bourgeois anti-revolutionary POS and both write an entire passage in German Ideology just shitting on Saint Max. Engels is pissed AND sad, he writes a rebuttal: Stirner's Critics, which is written in the third person (like a persona), defending his views from what Marx criticized in German Ideology, or should I say, would criticize, because German Ideology was published the year AFTER Stirner's Critics, but by pure magic Stirner knew Marx and Engels' criticisms before they published them. Well, The Unique and Its Property, Stirner's Critics and German Ideology are out and Marx still doesn't give a shit, so he gives up this egoism idea, maybe he changed his mind, maybe he just didn't care, we will never know.