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(often quite wrongly considered an ‘individualist’ text) and, even more, with the practice of revolutionary movements – a practice which never opposes the individual’s self-realization to the interests of the community, and indeed does not even separate these, but always seeks to accomplish the one by accomplishing the other. For, though it is true that only individuals can, in the last analysis, possess rights and formulate demands, the winning of those rights or liberation (even insurrection) is no less necessarily collective.

      It will doubtless be objected that this formulation does not describe an existing state of affairs or, even less, a system of institutions, but rather a process (at least as experienced by those taking part in it). But this is exactly what Marx intends. And in these circumstances one can see that the sixth thesis, which identifies the human essence with ‘the ensemble of social relations’, and the third, eighth and eleventh theses, which link all thought to revolutionary practice and change, are, in reality, saying basically the same thing. Let us risk the expression, then, and say that social relations as designated here are nothing but an endless transformation, a ‘permanent revolution’ (the term was doubtless not invented by Marx, but it would play a decisive role in his thinking up to around 1850). For the Marx of March 1845, it is not enough to say with Hegel that ‘the real is rational’ and that the rational, of necessity, becomes reality: one has to say that the only thing which is real or rational is revolution.

       Stirner’s objection

      What more could one ask? I have said above, however, that Marx could not leave matters there: we now have to understand why this is the case. We should not arrive at such an understanding if we were content merely to show that by substituting practice for the subject, a circle or logical difficulty is generated, or that there is a danger that the notion of essence will be left in a state of disequilibrium, caught between the internal critique of traditional ontology and its dissolution into the multiplicity of concrete investigations of social relations. Without doubt, The German Ideology is a text very close in inspiration to the Theses on Feuerbach and yet it already speaks another language. The formal reasons we have just mentioned are not sufficient to explain this.

      I believe there is a very precise conjunctural reason for it, but one which served to bring out a deep-seated problem. Some historians of Marx’s philosophy (particularly Auguste Cornu) have clearly seen this, though many have under-estimated or not been aware of it, mainly because it is usually only the first part of the text that is read. A long tradition has accustomed us to regarding this section (‘A. Concerning Feuerbach’) as a free-standing exposition of ‘historical materialism’, whereas it is essentially a response, and often a difficult one (as readers will have learnt to their cost), to the challenge posed by another theorist. That theorist, the force of whose argument it is now time to gauge, is Max Stirner (the pseudonym of Caspar Schmidt), the author of The Ego and its Own, published at the end of 1844.¹⁷ But it was some months later, just after the Theses were written, and on Engels’s insistence, that Marx began to wrestle with that book.

      From a theoretical perspective who is Stirner? First of all, he is an anarchist, a defender of the autonomy of society – composed of individuals, all of whom are singular and the ‘owners’ of their bodies, needs and ideas – against the modern State, in which, as he sees it, all domination is concentrated and which has taken over the sacred attributes of power elaborated by the political theology of the Middle Ages. But, above all, Stirner is a radical nominalist: by this we mean that in his view, every ‘generality’, every ‘universal concept’ is a fiction concocted by institutions to dominate (by organizing, classifying, simplifying, if not indeed merely by naming) the only natural reality, i.e. the multiplicity of individuals of whom each is ‘unique of his kind’ (hence Stirner’s essential play on words here, which has in fact a long history: what is proper to each individual is his/her property).

      We saw a moment ago that Marx was developing a notion of social relation which, at least in principle, rejected both nominalism and essentialism. But Stirner’s critique poses a formidable challenge to Marx because it is not content merely to target traditional metaphysical ‘non-particulars’ (all of them more or less theological: Being, Substance, the Idea, Reason, Good), but encompasses all universal notions without exception, thereby anticipating certain of Nietzsche’s arguments and what is today known as postmodernism. Stirner wants none of these beliefs, Ideas or ‘meta-narratives’, whether they concern God or Man, Church or State, or Revolution either. And there is, indeed, no logical difference between Christianity, humanity, the people, society, the nation or the proletariat, any more than there is between the rights of man or communism: all these universal notions are indeed abstractions which, from Stirner’s viewpoint, means that they are fictions. And these fictions are used to substitute for individuals and the thought of individuals, which is why Stirner’s book was to continue to fuel critiques from both left and right, which argued that nothing is to be gained by exchanging the cult of abstract humanity for an equally abstract cult of revolution or revolutionary practice, and that by doing so one may indeed be running the risk of an even more perverse domination.

      It is certain that Marx and Engels could not sidestep this objection, for they aspired to be critics both of the idealism and essentialism of the philosophers and of the communists (more precisely the humanist communists). We have seen that this dual perspective was at the heart of the category which had just emerged for Marx as the ‘solution’ to the enigmas of philosophy: revolutionary practice. How, then, did he respond to this challenge? By transforming his symbolic notion of ‘praxis’ into a historical and sociological concept of production and by posing a question unprecedented in philosophy (even if the term was not absolutely new) – the question of ideology.

      (The) German Ideology

      These two moves are, of course, closely interlinked. The one constantly presupposes the other and this is what gives The German Ideology its coherence, despite its unfinished and unbalanced composition (Chapter 3 on Stirner, ‘Saint Max’, alone occupies almost two-thirds of the work and largely consists in verbal jousting with the typically ‘ironic’ argumentation of The Ego and its Own, the outcome of which, from the strictly rhetorical point of view, is rather inconclusive). The work is entirely organized around the notion of production, taken here in a general sense to refer to any human activity of formation and transformation of nature. It is no exaggeration to say that, after the ‘ontology of praxis’ heralded in the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology sets out an ‘ontology of production’ since, as Marx himself tells us, it is production which shapes man’s being (his Sein, to which he will oppose his consciousness: Bewusst-sein, literally, his ‘being conscious’). It is, more exactly, the production of his own means of existence, an activity at once personal and collective (transindividual) which transforms him at the same time as it irreversibly transforms nature and which, in this way, constitutes ‘history’.

      Conversely, however, Marx will show that ideology is itself produced, before constituting itself as an autonomous structure of production (the ‘products’ of which are ideas, collective consciousness: this is the object of the theory of intellectual labour). The critique of ideology is the necessary precondition for a knowledge of social being as development of production: from its immediate forms, linked to the subsistence of individuals, to its most mediated forms, which play only an indirect role in the reproduction of human life. To gain access to this guiding thread of the whole of history, it is not enough to contemplate the facts; one can only get to it through the critique of the dominant ideology, because this latter is both an inversion of reality and an autonomization of the ‘intellectual products’ in which the trace of the real origin of ideas has been lost and which denies the very existence of that origin.

      This is why I spoke above of a reciprocal presupposition. At the same time, however, Stirner’s objection can be rejected, because the point is no longer to denounce the abstraction of ‘universals’, of ‘generalities’, of ‘idealities’, by showing that that abstraction substitutes itself for real individuals; it now becomes possible to study the genesis of those abstractions, their production by individuals, as a function of the collective or social

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