Marx, Stirner, autonomist marxism

[sj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

At the risk of straddling two different threads of discussion, I'd like
briefly to cut into the great Marx vs Stirner debate. I think interesting
points have been made by Ralph and Alex alike, but I found some of the cracks
on both sides irritating. Just two examples: simply to dismiss the
situationists as 'dimwits' strikes me as no less senseless than dredging up
hoary old myths about 'the tyranny of the socialist state dreamed of by Marx'.
Bad boys and girls!

As to 'communist egoism': the phrase itself mightn't be in Marx - though check
out the passage concerning the Quashees in the *Grundrisse* (Penguin edn,
pp.325-6) - but it's hardly alien to certain class struggles of the postwar
period. Anyone who's read Nanni Balestrini's novel *Vogliamo Tutto* (We Want
Everything) will have a good sense of the collective egoism who ran through
the sensibilities of many militant FIAT workers during the Hot Autumn years.
Its continued resonance in a later Italian generation (and class composition)
also emerges clearly in the only Balestrini novel that has so far appeared in
English - *The Unseen* (Verso 1989). Both are good reads which draw on
interviews with protagonists of each struggle.

Here's my new year's resolution: More light and less heat...

Yours in cloying libertarian marxist moralism,

Steve Wright



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