Translated from Indonesian.
In The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels devoted hundreds of pages to attacking a single man: Max Stirner. They called that section “Sankt Max”—Saint Max, mockingly. They never published it during their lifetime. The manuscript was only discovered and published long after both men were dead.
Some interpret this as evidence that even they themselves felt the section was unfinished—not strong enough to publish. And when it was finally read more widely, many readers did not come away thinking “Marx successfully refuted Stirner,” but rather the opposite: just how much energy had been spent avoiding the questions that actually needed answering.
Except, of course, for Leftists, who desperately defend Marx and Engels without ever having read the work of the ‘Saint’ targeted by their intellectual idols. And if they have read it, I suspect they sweated through trying to decipher The Ego and Its Own in Byington’s English translation from the original German—a translation already notorious for interpretive distortions. It is absurd, obviously, to read and claim to understand a response while failing to understand what that response was actually responding to.
But setting that aside—what really happened there?
There are three central errors, and together they form a remarkably consistent pattern.
The First Error: Stirner Is Accused of Still Being Hegelian
Marx and Engels argue that Stirner criticizes abstract ideas such as God, the State, and Man—but that his critique still operates entirely at the level of ideas. He does not touch the material conditions that produce those ideas. Therefore, to them, Stirner is merely a shy Hegelian: someone who still believes changing consciousness can change reality.
But this misses the mark in two directions.
First, Stirner never claimed that changing one’s mind is sufficient to change the world. Aufstand—insurrection in Stirner’s sense—is not a project of consciousness. It is the act of stepping out of concrete relations that bind the individual. Stirner does not say, “Realize the state is an illusion, and you become free.” He speaks of real relationships between individuals and institutions—relationships that can be disrupted materially and concretely.
Second—and more importantly—Marx and Engels read Stirner as though he were proposing a failed program of social transformation because it remained too idealistic. But Stirner was never proposing a program of social transformation in the first place. That is not his failure. He simply was not interested in such a project.
And this raises a more revealing question: why did Marx and Engels need to read Stirner as a failed Hegelian? Because if Stirner was not a failed Hegelian—if he was doing something fundamentally different altogether—then their materialist critique of him no longer works. And if that critique fails, then the questions Stirner throws at communism must be confronted seriously.
Stirner attacks every universalism—including materialist universalism. Class, history, universal emancipation: all of these are “spooks” to Stirner as well. Burying him as merely a “failed Hegelian” was a way to avoid facing the Saint directly.
The Second Error: Stirner Is Accused of Social Naivety
The next accusation is that Stirner fails to understand that individuals are shaped by material and social conditions. His egoism supposedly presupposes an already free and autonomous individual existing prior to society—a kind of social atom able to choose its relations at will. To Marx and Engels, this is a classic bourgeois illusion.
The problem is that Stirner never presupposed a pre-social individual at all. What he says is actually darker than that: you are already shaped by all these forces—religion, the state, morality, the family—and precisely because of that, you must recognize that these relationships are not your destiny. Not because you possess some metaphysical freedom, but because these relations are concrete, and anything concrete can also be disrupted concretely.
And here lies an unavoidable irony: Marx’s own project of emancipation depends on the working class being able to recognize its material conditions and act to transform them. But if individuals are truly and completely determined by material conditions—if there is no gap whatsoever between condition and consciousness—then where does critical consciousness come from? How can revolution occur if its subjects are entirely products of the very system they oppose?
Marx has an answer to this—capitalism’s internal contradictions. But his answer still presupposes that individuals possess some capacity to see beyond the conditions that formed them. And that same capacity is also presupposed by Stirner—except Stirner does not wrap it in historical teleology. In this sense, Marx and Engels’ critique rebounds back onto themselves.
The Third Error: Avoiding the Most Disturbing Question
This is the most revealing point—and the one Marx and Engels most deliberately avoid.
Stirner criticizes communism not from the outside, not as a defender of capitalism, but from a direction absent from the existing ideological map altogether: communism, he argues, merely transfers property from individuals to the collective while leaving the structure of subordination intact. The individual remains subordinated to something outside himself. God is replaced by the State, the State by Society, Society by Class—but the individual remains in the same position: serving an abstract entity larger than himself.
The question Stirner poses is extremely specific:
In a communist society, what happens when an individual disagrees with the collective decision? Who becomes master after the revolution? And on what basis does the individual owe loyalty to the collective?
Marx and Engels respond in three ways—and all three are evasions.
They caricature Stirner’s position until it sounds shallower than it really is. They shift the debate from the philosophical level to the historical-materialist level, which does not actually answer Stirner’s question. And they mock him—which, in philosophical debate, is very often a sign that one lacks a sufficiently strong rebuttal, especially when the mockery appears without addressing the argument itself.
Stirner’s question is never truly answered in The German Ideology. It is simply buried beneath hundreds of pages of ridicule. And the tension he exposed—the tension between collective projects and the concrete individual—has continued resurfacing throughout the history of Leftist movements ever since.
A Consistent Pattern
Taken together, these three errors reveal a clear thread: Marx and Engels could not allow Stirner to be right—not because Stirner was necessarily wrong, but because if he were right, the foundations of their own communist project would have to be questioned.
Stirner is not a naïve idealist. He is a universal source of discomfort—striking both liberals and Marxists for different but equally fundamental reasons. Liberals serve masters called Rights and Law. Marxists serve masters called Class and History. Stirner rejects both—not in order to offer an alternative system, but precisely because he rejects the logic of systems themselves.
And that is why he is so difficult to dispose of. Not because he offers better answers, but because he refuses to offer answers at all. He dismantles. And that dismantling remains relevant whenever a movement begins demanding obedience without questioning itself.
A Note on the Local Context
In Indonesia, there is a particularly ridiculous phenomenon: sections of the Left and progressive circles promote The German Ideology—especially “Sankt Max”—as a refutation of Stirner despite seemingly never having read Stirner themselves.
This is not merely intellectual laziness. There is a social function behind such rituals: citing certain texts while dismissing others without truly engaging with them is a way of building identity and authority within a social circle, not a way of pursuing understanding. “I stand with Marx against Stirner” is not an intellectual statement—it is a statement of membership. What is this, an attempt to build a mass organization?
The irony is that by doing this, they are proving Stirner right. Stirner already wrote about how people devote themselves to ideas not because they understand them, but because those ideas give them the feeling of belonging to something greater than themselves.
They are proving Stirner right while claiming to refute him.
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