this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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both author's books need to be in the trashcan
Nah Stirner was based.
LOL! Hell no, he wasn't. His ideas were simple, stupid and had not really a connection to the reality. It works maybe on a personal level, but mostly in your mind. If you have a connection with economics and the materialistic world, nah - it doesn't. I think the funniest part is that nobody would remember him, if Engels didn't make a lot of jokes about him. Even the only existing portrait of him is from Engels making fun of him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_German_Ideology
Ideas about personal connections and your mind are also incredibly important.
If you don't understand how humans work, then you won't be able to create an ideology that works. Economics aren't everything.
Sure, a lot of his works weren't particularly good, but he tried to encompass a psychological component into his works, which hadn't been done previously. His assertions were almost all wrong, but the fact that he tried had massive impacts on socialism as a whole.
In that sense I see him fulfilling a similar role to Freud: He wasn't correct, but his ideas opened up a new direction, which lead the broader field to actually think about and look into that stuff. Writing against Stirner made Marxism encompass some important aspects, like the historical materialism itself, that might not have existed had Stirner not existed.
Stirner was a pioneer, but also mostly wrong. He was important for the development of socialism and for his time, but is now almost useless.