Postmodernity is a particular socio-philosophical paradigm which represents the attained limit of modernity. The modern operates with materiality, facts, objects, individuals, and presents epistemological abstractions as basic data. In Aristotelianism and in Platonism it is not being, not phenomenon, but only a speculative limit of the degradation of the spirit, just as the atom is some conditional measure of the decay of wholeness, but not something holistic. In modernity, matter is taken as a self-evident fact, as some ontological phenomenon. In the political philosophy of the modern, matter, atomicity, is represented as an individual, as an object, as a thing, as a price, as a society. Modernism holds that everything conceptual that it recognises — the market mechanism, wealth, class, nation, nature, society, state, the world of things and objects — is, that it has unconditional being. The consensus on materiality is the common denominator of all three political theories of modernity.

In this materialist worldview, the two fundamentals of New Age philosophy converge. René Descartes described these as ‘subject’ and ‘object’. The subject is the individual human being, the object the individual item. Traditional political philosophy does not know either the subject or the object as Descartes conceived of them, because above the subject there is a functioning Deity, and the world is created by God. Accordingly, above the subject and object there is always a third instance, God, and the subject and object are not the final measure of things.

In New Age political philosophy, by contrast, we are dealing with this fundamental, basic dualism: the subject is the individual, the citizen in politics, and the object in the outside world is property (private in liberalism, collective in socialism, corporate in Fascism). This theme is very well described by the anarchist Max Stirner (1806–1856) in his The Ego and Its Own.1

All political philosophy of the modern age deals with ‘the one and his property’, ‘the individual and private property’. Marxism attempts to overcome this dualism, so that in the return to the proletarian class there is a generalisation of property and the replacement of the individual with class consciousness, but it is still the antithesis of the ‘ego and its property’ thesis.

It is no coincidence that Marx and Engels mocked Stirner so thoroughly and extensively in The German Ideology.2

The attitude to property lies at the heart of the modern philosophy of law, which regulates, first and foremost, the relationship of the individual and his property, i.e. the subject and the object in their political dimension. In capitalist society this is absolutised, private property becomes the measure of the individual subject.

Marxism opposes both the singular and property, but in its practice this boils down to the formula ‘the individual and not his property’, which underlies the doctrine of the class struggle.

The struggle against private property constitutes the programme of Marxism, but the singular (the individual, the subject) is here thought of dialectically. The capitalists represent a collective subject or false subject. They are not truly free precisely because of their blind attachment to property, which becomes a fate. To emancipate oneself it is necessary to take as a basis a subject that is devoid of property but also devoid of self-consciousness, since capitalism projects a false consciousness onto it, effectively turning it into a submissive machine.

The proletariat must wake up as an oppressed subject, realise its subjugation, over throw the pseudo-subjectivity of the bourgeois class, and, having distributed property among all members of the working class, move to wards the construction of Communism, where at last the individual will be freed from the chains of the object, subduing matter and nature, precisely because man is matter and nature, only the summit of its development. In medieval epistemology, man could understand the world only through the divine mind. With the Marxists, however, the knowledge of matter is given only to the one who is matter itself, and who is the most material among the material things — that is, to the proletariat.

Bourgeois nationalism also fully accepts the modernist subject, merely placing ‘the one and his property’ in a national context, contrasting him with ‘the others and their property’ in the representative of another nation-state; the individual is merely placed in a national framework. They restrict the individual’s freedom of action in relation to his property if it goes beyond national boundaries.

1. Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own (Verso Books, 2014).

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2011).

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