/dead/ - dead

> What would Stirner say to solidarity?
I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being.

In my opinion the key to understanding The Unique and Its Property is Stirner's article "Art and Religion". It's not that good and the thick Hegelian jargon is a bit hard to decipher but it lays down the problem statement and goal of the ego book in a pretty straightforward way. At least in my headcanon.

Post-leftism (most closely associated with post-left anarchism because anarchists are a lot more open to criticizing their forebears failures and foibles than a lot of other left tendencies, *but are by no means perfect about this*) is a critique of the self-castration of the left by its insistence on being boring and labyrinthine and just generally unbearable. A lot of leftists don't like that, but the results leftists have had impeding the creeping doom of this neoliberal hellscape speak for themselves. We suck at changing the modern world, and we aren't going to stop sucking at it until we stop clinging to outmoded models of political and economic change.

To be clear, I'm a communist. I'm an anarchist. I even like Soviet imagery, that stark red flag with the gold star, hammer, and sickle is fucking *electric*. Peak aesthetic, my god that flag is gorgeous. But we're not gonna get anywhere jerking off the corpses of men who've been dead for a century. If "leftist" politics are about aesthetic and feeling special? Sure, have at it. But if we want to help people, and make the world better, we need better models of organization and praxis that aren't just more of a drag on our already-burdened souls. We need protests and political rallies and stuff to be fun and emotive and thrilling, not boring fucking marches like the libs love so much.

I will never see mature communism, mature anarchy. I won't live that long. If I do, great! I'll be stoked as hell. But I won't. And that's okay, I don't need to. Anarchy is a guiding principle for me, it is my North Star. So it doesn't fucking matter if I organize with non-anarchists, does it, as long as our goals are in the same direction of making regular people's lives better and loosening the chains around all of our necks? This is why socdems, yes, cringe as they are, have so much more success than anarchists whining about how the Black Army was dong wrong or MLs talking about how *AKCHUALLY* Stalin did nothing wrong because \[blah blah fuckin blah, who cares the man's been dead since fifty-three give it a goddamn rest\], and all that have absolutely no fucking relevance. That's all *way* more cringe than socdems or electoral politics are. Sure, sucks Makhno and Ukraine got done raw by the Bolsheviks. What does this information empower me to do today? Instead of talking about theoretical bullshit a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now, socdems are actually talking about the⠀m a t e r i a l⠀c o n d i t i o n s⠀of peoples' lives *today*, and how to make their lives better *right now*. Or, y'know, in the near future, not in some nebulous far-off someday that makes us sound like a bunch of ivory tower dickheads who don't actually care about the plight of the workers and marginalized people. Building dual power is supposed to build communities, and we build communities by making it enjoyable to be a part of a community. Nobody cares about communities that are lame and boring and just waste everyone's time, that's what an HOA or a PTA is, and everylne hates those. And that's how the modern left really looks to libs (and to each other!): Just a bunch of partisan Karens screaming about who gets the wall and who gets the gulag for how they cut their lawns, because apparently none of us have real concerns to worry about if we can be bothered to care about constantly (*constantly!*) relitigating century-old rotten beef between Marx and Bakunin.

>Did I get that right?
Yeah pretty much I agree with you so far.

>E.g. knowingly not caring about the suffering of others kind of feels bad, not sure if that is a "spook", too.
If you only cared because it was a moral expectation that made you care in the first place, that would be spooked in the sense that you try to correspond to an idea of good that entails that you are only good, a real person, when you care. This idea would be a fixed one and you would behave according to it.
However, I think most people would feel bad for them out of empathy, out of their own desire that others dont suffer.

>What would Stirner say to solidarity?
This is a part that alot of ppl get wrong about Stirner on first glance because of his strong defence of self-interest - but said interest isn't vulgar as in 'only doing things that enrich you materially'. Because Stirner was a pupil of Hegel and not some libertarian market fanatic he sees humans as social. We use each other according to our desires, but that desires also include the desire for friendship or love. As >>1976 quoted, he feels a fellow feeling towards feeling beings, empathy. In fact, it haven't been the egoists (as Stirner defines them, those centering their action on their unique being and desire) who caused and carried out the greatest atrocities in history, but selfless people, involuntarily acting in the name of something outside themselves (god, the race, the nation).
One of my favourite allegories here is that only an egoist gifts a friend a present out of his own desire, while the involuntary actor, who does it because it's the right thing to do, or it's custom and expected from them, always has other motives behind his action.
Egoism doesnt set rules for any behavior, its rather the consequent critique of such rules. If you find it fulfilling to show solidarity because it's your inner desire, it's an egoist act.