Our Struggle Series: The Politics That Isn't

Our Struggle is a militant theoretical series dedicated to dismantling the illusions that pass for politics in our time. It refuses the comfort of spectacle, symbolic resistance, or shallow identity performance. Instead, it seeks to build a strategic framework grounded in material conditions, emotional clarity, and the sober recognition that we are, in fact, at war—against entrenched power, liberal containment, and the internalized habits that dull insurgency before it begins.

If the first labors of insurgency entails discerning political realness from its aesthetic imitations, then the third attack is identifying the ideologies that refuse power altogether while masquerading as political thought. Few doctrines better epitomize this phenomenon than Max Stirner's egoism. Stirner famously writes:

"I decide whether it is the right thing in me; there is no right outside me. If it is right for me, it is right. Possibly this may not suffice to make it right for the rest; that is their care, not mine: let them defend themselves. And if for the whole world something were not right, but it were right for me, that is, I wanted it, then I would ask nothing about the whole world. So every one does who knows how to value himself, every one in the degree that he is an egoist; for might goes before right, and that—with perfect right."

This is neither political theory nor ethical architecture. It is a moral vacancy masquerading as sovereignty. Stirner's philosophy annihilates the conditions under which political insurgency becomes possible, because it denies the very shared materiality through which power, suffering, and moral action emerge. It is not just apolitical; it is anti-political. In the place of politics, Stirner offers a narcissistic calculus where desire is sanctified and reality is optional.

Where Stirner sees only spooks and illusions in shared ideals, we see material conditions that provoke a common moral response. Stirner believes that right is determined solely by will. We contend that moral action is driven by visceral experience. This is the core of the equation we have named: Ψ = Φ.

Ψ represents the immediate, tangible, often brutal nature of reality; Φ, the moral impulse that arises in response. Stirner's framework ignores Ψ entirely. His will exists in a vacuum, untethered to others, untethered to pain, untethered to consequence. But we do not recoil from the sight of an electrocution because of a law or ideology. If we recoil or engage, it is because reality itself makes a demand on us. Our morality is not fabricated in rhetoric; it emerges from the shockwave of human experience.

This perspective aligns with G.E. Moore's intuitionism and Thomas Nagel's objective standpoint. Both resist the collapse of ethics into subjectivity. While Nagel accepts the inescapability of viewpoint, he insists that certain experiences possess intrinsic moral weight, regardless of ideological frame. Stirner, by contrast, denies even the possibility of shared valuation. For him, the suffering of another is irrelevant unless it interferes with the self.

This is precisely why individualist anarchism, relates in spirit to Stirner's ideology, and it therefore cannot generate a politics of resistance. It is incapable of recognizing political power except as a personal affront to individuality.

Political realness, as defined in Chapter 1, requires engagement with power, recognition of shared materiality, and strategic deviation from hegemonic norms. Stirner offers none of these. His version of might-makes-right is not revolutionary—it is the status quo. It pretends to be radical because it refuses morality, but this refusal disables any meaningful confrontation with violence, exploitation, or domination.

To put it plainly: you cannot build an insurgency out of people who believe that nothing exists but their own wants. Stirner's egoism does not liberate; it isolates. He is not a threat to the state. He is the state, atomized.

But if Stirner’s egoism regurgitates the status quo under the guise of transcendence, the centrist does something subtler: they aestheticize equilibrium. Their quasi-politics disguises itself as wisdom, claiming moral high ground through balance, reasonableness, and stability—without ever confronting the asymmetries of power that make such balance impossible. Where Stirner retreats from collectivity, the centrist preserves hierarchy by pretending no hierarchy exists. This delusion, too, must be dismantled.

Being a centrist means to conform to the existing political order, to be a sycophant. Of course, a centrist does not possess the infinite minutiae of the ever changing political landscape, but they possess enough knowledge to state, “I am somewhere between what is coded left and what is coded right.” With the u.s. political environment being broadly conservative, a centrist is more subdued than they might comprehend because their position inevitably skews toward preserving existing hierarchies. They frame themselves as reasonable, but their refusal to deviate from the manufactured center makes them a passive collaborator with power. Rather than challenging systemic asymmetries, they become arbiters of decorum within the narrow limits set by entrenched elites, effectively acting as a safety valve that relieves pressure without ever allowing for structural change.

It is, in fact, far too generous to even associate the centrist's thinking with a literal attempt to calculate a balance between oppression and non-oppression. They do not possess anything close to a rigorous political mathematics. What they know is what exists comfortably within the narrow perimeter of the system to which they have pledged their centrist allegiance. They do not interrogate the outer limits of political possibility, nor do they attempt to understand the structural violence that defines the edges of that perimeter. They accept the menu handed to them by the dominant order and choose “somewhere in between,” mistaking this shallow triangulation for thoughtful moderation. In doing so, they reveal themselves not as political strategists or philosophers, but as petty idealists—small in vision, limited in courage, and content to exist as middle managers of systemic injustice.

At this point, it may seem odd—perhaps even strategically backwards—that we direct such sustained attack on the avoidants rather than follow the left’s typical reflex of focusing its ire on neo-Marxists for their LARPing tendencies and their frequent disconnect from material reality. Yes, we readily acknowledge that much of the neo-Marxist discourse has become performative and abstract, consumed by jargon and self-referential theoretical spirals that rarely translate into action. Likewise, one could easily argue that the more obvious enemy lies in the various fascistic ideologies, which demand the clearest and most immediate opposition. But there is an important distinction: both the neo-Marxists and the fascists, despite their wildly divergent aims, are at least engaged with political reality—they grasp that politics is about power and that power must be confronted or captured. The individualist anarchists and centrists, by contrast, occupy a peculiar no-man’s land. They wish to be helpful. They wish to be meaningful. But they are lost. They exist within frameworks of avoidance, drifting along the periphery of struggle without ever stepping fully into it. It is precisely because of this dissonance—this tragic proximity to political engagement coupled with their persistent refusal to cross the threshold—that they demand our attention and critique.

The centrist and the individualist anarchist, interestingly, have more in common than either would ever care—or be able—to imagine. One wraps themselves in the moral comfort of moderation, the other in the illusion of absolute autonomy. Yet, both will live and die believing their positions hold deep meaning, without ever establishing or wielding any actual political power. Their lives become case studies in the performance of belief without consequence, in which the appearance of engagement substitutes for the burden of impact. Neither disrupts nor destabilizes the structures they claim to critique or avoid. They exist, ultimately, as parallel manifestations of political impotence.

What these camps must come to understand is that the supposed purity of their positions—the centrists’ devotion to balance for its own sake and the individualist anarchists’ fixation on self-sufficient ideology—is not only disconnected from power, it is actively incompatible with political consequence. Like toddlers undergoing the painful but essential process of ego development, realizing for the first time that they are not the center of the world, these ideological camps must recognize that their frameworks are not the axis upon which struggle turns. They can, however, mature. They can simultaneously abandon the need to sit inertly between competing positionalities or to believe that freedom can be sustained in isolation from material structures. In doing so, they could finally enter the realm of political effectiveness, where ideology does not exist as self-validation but as the basis for action capable of altering the conditions of oppression.

Having laid bare the avoidance and self-referential traps of centrists and individualist anarchists, it becomes necessary to widen the scope of critique. If political realness demands the pursuit of material power for the sake of collective liberation, then we must also interrogate those movements that, while politically real in the sense of action and consequence, have been miscategorized as inherently leftist. This constitutes our fourth attack: the conflation of non-leftist issues with leftist causes. A prime example is the realm of ecological terrorism. While their tactics often embody real confrontation with power, ecological militants are designer organizers pursuing goals that are not rooted in equity, which is the cornerstone of leftist praxis. Their end state is ecological absolutism, not distributive justice. Similarly, certain strands of contemporary gender and sexuality politics, while undeniably important, have been co-opted into frameworks that fracture material solidarity by privileging hyper-individualized identity claims over collective struggle and structural class analysis. Intersectionality must remain a lens for understanding overlapping systems of oppression, not a license for substituting personal affirmation for political action. In the next chapter, we will explore how these misplaced affiliations dilute the potency of the left and why a sharper delineation of purpose and commitment is required to reclaim focus, discipline, and insurgent effectiveness.