ake it. Let your power be felt,
nerve yourselves, and you will not lack money--_your_ money, the money
of your own coining. But working I do not call letting your power be
felt. Those who only 'seek for work, and are willing to work hard,'
prepare for themselves inextinguishable lack of work." What we
now-a-days call free competition, Stirner refuses to regard as free,
since everyone has not the means for competing. "To abolish
competition only means to favour members of some craft. The
distinction is this: in a craft, such as baking, baking is the
business of the members of the craft; under a system of competition it
is the business of anyone who likes to compete; but in societies it is
the business of those who use what is baked; thus, my or your
business, not the business of the members of the craft, nor of the
baker who has a concession given him, but of those in the union or
society." Here for the second time we meet with the idea of a union,
without Stirner expressing himself exactly about its character. Only
in one other place does he happen to speak about the ideas of this
union. He says the end of society is agreement or union. A society
also certainly arises through union, but only in the same way as a
fixed idea arises from a thought, namely, by the fact that the energy
of the thought, thinking itself the restless absorption of all rising
thoughts, disappears from thought. When a union has crystallised
itself into a society, it has ceased to be an active union; for the
act of union is a ceaseless uniting of individuals, it has become a
united existence, has come to a standstill, has degenerated into a
fixity; it is dead as a union; it is the corpse of union, and of the
act of union; that is, it is a society or community. What is known as
"party" is a striking example of this.

Stirner admits that union cannot exist without freedom, being limited
in all manner of ways. But absolute freedom is merely an ideal, a
spectre, and the object of the union is not freedom, which it, on the
contrary, sacrifices to individualism, but its object is only
individualism. "Union is my creation, my implement, sacred to me, but
has no spiritual power over my mind, and does not make me bow down to
it; but I make it bow down to me, and use it for my own purposes. As I
may not be a slave of my maxims, but without any guarantee expose them
to my own continual criticism, and give no guarantee of their
continuance, so, still less, do