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Chapter 6 MARX AND NIETZSCHE

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche shared a basic vision of modernity and an appreciation of how economic arrangements shape culture, though their political projects opposed each other - Marx envisioned overcoming class division while Nietzsche aimed to prevent that. 2. Both thinkers were preoccupied with contradictions, but Marx was a conscious dialectician who saw contradictions as agents of revolutionary change, while Nietzsche's contradictions resisted resolution and sublation. 3. Defining Marx and Nietzsche risks oversimplifying their complex, contradictory thought. Marx praised capitalism's productivity while aiming to overcome it, and straightforward labels do not capture their full perspectives.

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119 views2 pages

Chapter 6 MARX AND NIETZSCHE

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche shared a basic vision of modernity and an appreciation of how economic arrangements shape culture, though their political projects opposed each other - Marx envisioned overcoming class division while Nietzsche aimed to prevent that. 2. Both thinkers were preoccupied with contradictions, but Marx was a conscious dialectician who saw contradictions as agents of revolutionary change, while Nietzsche's contradictions resisted resolution and sublation. 3. Defining Marx and Nietzsche risks oversimplifying their complex, contradictory thought. Marx praised capitalism's productivity while aiming to overcome it, and straightforward labels do not capture their full perspectives.

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nathaniel z
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Chapter 6

Marx, Nietzsche, and the Contradictions of


Capitalism
Ishay Landa

1. Introduction

Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche have a lot in common in their basic vision
of modernity. It is mistaken, for example, to assume that Nietzsche was inter-
ested chiefly in ethical and cultural matters, as opposed to Marx’s supposed
fixation on the economic ‘base.’ Nietzsche’s whole notion of culture was predi-
cated upon a keen appreciation of the indispensable role of economic arrange-
ments, particularly of the hierarchical division of labor, in sustaining all
culture, while Marx, for his part, was deeply concerned about the fate of civili-
zation. Their respective social vantage-points and political projects, however,
were fundamentally opposed: Marx envisioned a society overcoming class di-
vision, whereas Nietzsche directed all his powers at preventing precisely such
an outcome. What Nietzsche in many respects offers us is therefore a Marxist
theory with inverted signs.1

No comprehensive comparison of these two immensely complex and influ-


ential philosophers is possible here, of course. But if we have to zoom in on the
most important feature they have in common, it is useful to foreground the
fact that both Marx and Nietzsche were thinkers of the contradiction: contra-
dictions and dealing with contradictions was absolutely central to their
thought. Yet to this the caveat must be added that Marx was a conscious think-
er of the contradiction, a dialectician, so he came closer to mastering contra-
dictions, or was at least disposed to thinking them through systematically. For
Marx, furthermore, contradictions were celebrated as the prime agent of
change, impelling a revolutionary forward movement. This indispensable in-
sight about the inextricable linkage between contradiction, motion and change
was inherited from the Hegelian dialectic, and it might be helpful to recall
Hegel’s original emphasis on this point:
1 A portion of this essay appeared in Landa (2019). Landa148

Something moves, not because at one moment it is here and at another there, but
because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this “here,” it
at once is and is not. The ancient dialecticians must be granted the contradictions that
they pointed out in motion; but it does not follow that therefore there is no motion, but
on the contrary, that motion is existent contradiction itself. Hegel 1969: 440

Nietzsche was no less preoccupied with contradictions and in fact often


seemed content to give the impression that he was toying with contradictions,
turning his entire oeuvre into a site of hectic ping-pong movement between
wildly conflicting statements and affirmations, wearing masks, asserting sup-
posed Truths only to demolish them shortly thereafter, etc. This is Nietzsche in
the familiar guise of the forefather of postmodernist irreverence. What is ab-
sent, however, in Nietzsche’s contradictions is precisely the key notion, for
Hegel and Marx, of forward movement. For this, Nietzsche substitutes an ele-
ment of stasis, of contradictions resisting any prospect of sublation.
This contradictory basis they have in common means that it is not very
helpful to approach Marx and Nietzsche with an eye to straightforward defini-
tions, for these are likely to mislead us. Even as they will capture some truth,
they will tend to efface the contradiction. The simplest and apparently un-
problematic epithets – for example, ‘Marx was revolutionary,’ ‘Nietzsche was a
defender of the status quo’ – will fall short of the mark.

2 Marx and the Social Individual

Take Marx, to begin with. Possibly the safest way to define Marx would be as
‘a revolutionary anti-capitalist.’ Yet, as is well known, Marx had a lot of positive
things to say about capitalism and the bourgeois mode of production, on whose
productive and dynamical prowess he showered effusive praise in The Commu-
nist Manifesto, which was repeated in later works such as the Grundrisse and
Capital, where one frequently reads of capital’s ‘civilizing aspects,’ its ‘civilizing
mission,’ its ‘historic mission,’ and so on and so forth. While this is common
knowledge relatively few commentators have attempted to pursue this and ask
what exactly Marx had meant when affixing the adjective ‘civilizing’ to capital-
ism. One common way of coming to terms with such utterances – apart from
skipping over them with embarrassed silence – is to see them as reflections of
Marx’s weak side: he was after all a child his time, a Victorian, and therefore
could not but have shared some of the common beliefs and prejudices of the

SOURCE
Landa, I. (2019). "Chapter 6 Marx, Nietzsche, and the Contradictions of Capitalism". In Nietzsche and
Critical Social Theory. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004415577_008

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