Vladimir Lennin and the Egoist Revolution

[Everdarklegion]

Say that Stirner, contrary to OTL, actively promoted Egoism to a point that his philosophy overtakes Marx's Communist philosophy. Say that when the German Empire sends Vladimir Lennin back to Russia in 1917, that he becomes the leader of a Egoist Revolution, and they win. How would this Russia effect Europe and the rest of the world? Would the Allies see Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the same way that they saw the Soviet Union, a lesser of two evils? Would WW2 be a war that would be Started by Lennin's Egoist Russia?

Thoughts?

 

[SandroPertini98]

Stirner was openly against the revolution, thinking it was "statist", so how could Lenin starts a revolution on Stirner's thought?
Maybe Lenin could create a Stirnerism-Leninism (as Marxism-Leninism IOTL) that justify revolution but then Egoism was a deeply anarchical ideology: an "Union of Egoistic Soviet Republics" (UESR) would weaker and more decentralized, I suppose.
I don't see others possible changes, Marxism was just seen bad without a Stirnerist contamination and Nazism appeared clearly as a more dangerous threat to Western democracies and interests.

 

[overoceans]

@OP...

When I first read summaries of Stirner in university, it sounded like an earlier, Hegelian grounded version of Ayn Rand. Though wikipedia says it had some influence on people like the French Situationists, and Hakim Bey, of NAMBLA fame.

So, I dunno. For all its opaque terminology and ocassionally messianic pretensions, Marxism at least contains a fairly direct promise of improving the material lives of the average person, which probably made it an easy sell in early 20th-century Russia. Not sure what an avowedly "egoist" philosophy would have to offer people in that time and place, especially given that rampant individualism was probably as familiar a worldview to Russian workers and peasants in 1917 as feudal Orthodoxy would be to the denizens of hipster-enclaves in contemporary Europe and North America.

 

[Born in the USSA]

So, I dunno. For all its opaque terminology and ocassionally messianic pretensions, Marxism at least contains a fairly direct promise of improving the material lives of the average person, which probably made it an easy sell in early 20th-century Russia. Not sure what an avowedly "egoist" philosophy would have to offer people in that time and place, especially given that rampant individualism was probably as familiar a worldview to Russian workers and peasants in 1917 as feudal Orthodoxy would be to the denizens of hipster-enclaves in contemporary Europe and North America.

I'm not so sure about that, I think in a scenario where Stirner's work is more broadly popular it's possible Egoism could form a more prominent contributory strain of the Russian Nihilist movement, which would in turn keep the embers of popular discontent burning until Stirnerist-Leninism enters the scene.

Stirner was openly against the revolution, thinking it was "statist", so how could Lenin starts a revolution on Stirner's thought?

As for Stirner himself decrying the revolution as statist, Marx also firmly believed that a socialist revolution was ill-advised in an agrarian society and it's easy to see that got left by the wayside.

Maybe Lenin could create a Stirnerism-Leninism (as Marxism-Leninism IOTL) that justify revolution but then Egoism was a deeply anarchical ideology: an "Union of Egoistic Soviet Republics" (UESR) would weaker and more decentralized, I suppose.

It's true it would likely be much more decentralized, but it's possible that any Leninist Union of Egoists could be something closer to a version of syndicalism, albeit much more freeform and not necessarily related to labor.

I don't see others possible changes, Marxism was just seen bad without a Stirnerist contamination and Nazism appeared clearly as a more dangerous threat to Western democracies and interests.

While there would definitely be people up in arms about Nazism, the Egoist stereotype would basically be stabhappy thieves and whores if they had a country, compared to a militarized but capitalist Germany picking itself up from the Depression by its bootstraps.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Also in a world where Stirner eclipses Marx is the most widely known picture of Marx a little doodle drawn by one of Stirner's friends?

 

[LostInNewDelhi]

When I first read summaries of Stirner in university, it sounded like an earlier, Hegelian grounded version of Ayn Rand. Though wikipedia says it had some influence on people like the French Situationists, and Hakim Bey, of NAMBLA fame.

So, I dunno. For all its opaque terminology and ocassionally messianic pretensions, Marxism at least contains a fairly direct promise of improving the material lives of the average person, which probably made it an easy sell in early 20th-century Russia. Not sure what an avowedly "egoist" philosophy would have to offer people in that time and place, especially given that rampant individualism was probably as familiar a worldview to Russian workers and peasants in 1917 as feudal Orthodoxy would be to the denizens of hipster-enclaves in contemporary Europe and North America.

This.

"Improving and reforming is the Mongolism of the Caucasian, because thereby he is always getting up again what already existed — to wit, a precept, a generality, a heaven. He harbors the most irreconcilable enmity to heaven, and yet builds new heavens daily; piling heaven on heaven, he only crushes one by another; the Jews’ heaven destroys the Greeks’, the Christians’ the Jews’, the Protestants’ the Catholics’, etc."

"...the pitiless dealing of the “righteous” man... is like the unfeelingness of that robber [Procrustes] who cut off or stretched his prisoners’ legs to the measure of his bedstead: Rudolph’s bedstead, which he cuts men to fit, is the concept of the “good.”"

(full text of Ego and Its Own)

The thing Stirner is describing by "heaven" isn't a state necessarily-- any moral philosophy that claims to be universal is a "heaven". A revolutionary, for example, doesn't seek only to destroy the old state and the old morality, instead he builds a new state and a new morality and subjugates individuals to it once again. Egoism literally can't have a cohesive program for society besides "let people be themselves, even if they're assholes." At most you can go off Stirner's idea of humans having a certain "fellow-feeling" or voluntary love for each other that can be the basis for cooperation/peace but he does not see any "commandment" to love as a real thing that people need to abide by. They can resume the war of all against all whenever they like. Actually now that I'm using that phrase, what if the counter-ideology ends up being a revamped Hobbesian statism (which I would consider more or less the exact opposite of Stirner's egoism, beginning from similar premises and reaching a totally opposite conclusion as to what condition is desireable for humanity)? And then you get a Cold War between Leviathans and "Voluntary Unions"

"Am I perchance to have no lively interest in the person of another, are his joy and his weal not to lie at my heart, is the enjoyment that I furnish him not to be more to me than other enjoyments of my own? On the contrary, I can with joy sacrifice to him numberless enjoyments, I can deny myself numberless things for the enhancement of his pleasure, and I can hazard for him what without him was the dearest to me, my life, my welfare, my freedom. Why, it constitutes my pleasure and my happiness to refresh myself with his happiness and his pleasure. But myself, my own self, I do not sacrifice to him, but remain an egoist and — enjoy him. If I sacrifice to him everything that but for my love to him I should keep, that is very simple, and even more usual in life than it seems to be; but it proves nothing further than that this one passion is more powerful in me than all the rest. Christianity too teaches us to sacrifice all other passions to this. But, if to one passion I sacrifice others, I do not on that account go so far as to sacrifice myself, nor sacrifice anything of that whereby I truly am myself; I do not sacrifice my peculiar value, my ownness. Where this bad case occurs, love cuts no better figure than any other passion that I obey blindly. The ambitious man, who is carried away by ambition and remains deaf to every warning that a calm moment begets in him, has let this passion grow up into a despot against whom he abandons all power of dissolution: he has given up himself, because he cannot dissolve himself, and consequently cannot absolve himself from the passion: he is possessed."

I guess this is the paragraph you could misinterpret into a revolutionary ideology-- devote yourself to the Revolution, but... I don't know, go play football on the weekends, dude. And after the Revolution you can do whatever you want, there won't* be any commandments on you!

*rules and restrictions apply :^)

 

[David T]

A world in which Stirner eclipses Marx (not very likely in any event) is one where it is very unlikely that Ulyanov/Lenin as we know him exists. (I don't necessarily mean that Vladimir Ulyanov won't be born in 1870, but if he is, his subsequent career is going to be different; after all, much of his early career in OTL was devoted to defending Plekhanov-style orthodox Marxism against other versions of socialism, especially Populism, and then developing his own twist on it.)

In any event, though there was no socialist state before 1917, the socialist movement did have an impact on European history before then, so this whole notion that "otherwise everything in 1917 is going to be exactly the same, and there will still be a Lenin in Switzerland and the Germans will still send him back to Russia in a war that develops exactly at the same time and the same way as in OTL" seems to me dubious.