The accursed scission, that Trennung which had already tormented Lessing’s Masons, thus penetrated the immaculate stronghold of the proletariat: seemingly crossed by a barely visible crack, a malignant line that swallowed up anyone who strayed from the right course. The damned of the earth would reemerge from that disguised chasm years later: they now formed a limitless network, equal only to the network that capital was casting over the planet. Having hidden like mice from every dependable census, they held the most elusive and corrosive weapon: silent rejection, repudiation of society in whatever form. Marx and Engels’s secret concern, in their practical action, was not so much the bourgeoisie, this devious class which, from the outset, had proved that it was just as eager to destroy itself as capable of recovering. It was the Lumpenproletariat, these dregs of all classes, this “apotheosis of rootlessness” that was likely to do something no less damaging than the various, predictable, defenses of class interests. The Lumpen threatened the very system of historical class succession, that salvific system on which was based the acceptance of present torture and of the radiant future. If the proletariat were not the ultimate class, were not the final class, the class that would make human destiny become weltgeschichtlich, that would have given it a global dimension, if the proletariat within it struggled to distinguish itself from another proletariat, that of the Lumpen, then the whole system seemed under threat, the pattern of historical Providence no longer converged toward one final point, but was itself in danger of becoming swallowed up by the regressus in infinitum of relentless dissociation.

This, then, was the threat signaled by Stirner, but it could not be named, since the mere fact of recognizing it extended its existence. And so Marx and Engels never declare that they are fighting Stirner for these reasons. They try, instead, to drive him back among the innocuous band of Berlin philosophers and even want to pass him off, against all the evidence, as “the weakest and most ignorant member” of “his whole philosophical fraternity.”⁵³⁹ References to the question of the Lumpen, even in The German Ideology, are brief and curt, but all the more significant: “He is consistent also in identifying the proletariat with pauperism, whereas pauperism is the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose whole energy has been sapped who becomes a pauper.⁵⁴⁰ Compare Sismondi, Wade, etc. ‘Stirner’ and his fraternity, for example, can in the eyes of the proletarians, in certain circumstances, count as paupers but never as proletarians.” The proletarian therefore epitomizes the smugness of poverty, and would never invite a pauper into his home. The reasons for this real class hatred are obscure: Marx and Engels tell us only that the “ruined proletarian” has no more “energy.” Sufficient motive—one might think—for the proletarians who are not yet ruined to trample him down. But can it be true that the “ruined proletarian” has no more energy? Or might it be a much more insidious energy, an energy that no longer allows itself to be channeled? Better to ignore the question and move on—this is the tactic chosen by Marx and Engels. It is true, even later, that the attacks on the Lumpen were violent, but they were always incidental and occasional. It hadn’t to be too apparent that (for Marx and Engels) the ultimate criterion for humanity was its availability to be organized. But their habitual contempt remained. It is enough to see with what sense of proud repugnance even Rosa Luxemburg would warn her comrades years later: “On the other hand the working class is the last class of bourgeois society that comes on the scene with revolutionary aims, and there is no question of it being overwhelmed by an even more radical social level, that goes beyond the aims consciously established by the proletariat.⁵⁴¹ The only social level below the proletariat, the level of disinherited social parasites, such as prostitutes, delinquents by profession, and every species of obscure and casual existences is not a revolutionary but, on the contrary, a counterrevolutionary factor.” And Lenin with characteristic nonchalance would consider the consequences of that hatred, to shore up the barrier against the recurring tide of anarchism: “Anarchism is a product of desperation.⁵⁴² It is the psychology of an intellectual who has gone off the rails or of a representative of the Lumpenproletariat, not of a proletarian.” Thus it was made clear, once and for all, what was to be the correct psychology of the proletarian, and of the intellectual who doesn’t go off the rails.