Obsolete Philosophy Kickoff: Marx vs Nietzsche

In the early-to-mid 90’s, not everybody had a computer. Among those who had a computer, not everybody had a printer. Among those who had a printer, not everybody had a word processor. If you make a Venn diagram of all of those circles, you’ll see a pretty dinky intersection.

I was not in that intersection.

That’s what I wrote my papers on. A Brother WP760d.

Over the last month, mom has been cleaning out her office and transferring a whole bunch of little 3.5″ floppies to her computer before sighing and throwing the floppies away. At the very bottom of the pile of floppies were a handful of disks with files that she didn’t really recognize but half of them had my sister’s initials as part of their filenames and the other half had titles like “marxniet” and “analysis” and “thesis”. She asked me to come over and figure out how to open them because she didn’t know what kind of files they were. I guessed that they were in some weird proprietary Brother file format

Mom made a roast and so I went over and opened the files in notepad and, holy cow! They were our college papers from ~1995ish! I spent about 10 minutes searching for a file translation app before just shrugging and trying to open the files in Word and, wouldn’t you know it, “Compatibility Mode” saved the day. There they were! I emailed my sister’s files to her and my own files to me and I got to take home leftovers.

It seems kinda nuts that we have an entire industry dedicated to make young people write thousands of words about obscure (and not so obscure) philosophy theories and then these words go on to be read by one other person. (Okay, maybe the writer’s mom also reads them. So, like, *TWO* people.) So, in order to fix that in one tiny place, I present to you Obsolete Philosophy.

I’m going to share three or four of my old papers with no editing. You’ll get to read the horrible stuff that I wrote 25 years ago in all of its glory (I’ve done some very minor editing of spacing but zero editing of content beyond changing my name from what was originally on there to “Jaybird”). I read this stuff and, yes, spent most of my time cringing but, occasionally, I thought “huh… I used to be smart!”

To kick us off, here’s what I wrote comparing Marx’s Utopia with Nietzsche’s… whatever it is that Nietzsche saw coming.

Marx and Nietzsche
Everyman vs. Overman
by
Jaybird

Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche are philosophers who have been referred to as intellectual giants, and rightly so. Marx, being an economist, put forth a theory of social contract and interaction that is unparalleled in its analysis of capitalism and contains the greatest amount of egalitarianism and even Bethamite utilitarianism (the maximization of good for the maximum amount of people) seen in any social theory yet. Nietzsche, on the other hand, being an anti-Platonist, came up with a theory of society that not only brings to mind Plato’s Republic, but surpasses it in scope and expectation. This paper will first briefly look at the backgrounds of both men, the social theories they espoused and then proceed to give a critique of both.

Marx was born a Jew in Trier, Prussia in 1818, but his father converted to Lutheranism when Karl was not yet an adolescent. When Marx was in his early twenties, he renounced his Christianity, and was part of a group called “the young Hegelians”. There is evidence that Marx was ashamed of his Jewish heritage since he wrote a piece called On the Jewish Question that can be interpreted as anti-Semitic, but this viewpoint does not show up in his later works. He lived all over Europe, and had a very difficult life, one of poverty, and had to see three of his children die of diseases that could well have not affected them if he had not been so poor. Later in life, he suffered from afflictions such as boils, bronchitis and other lung afflictions, and insomnia. His works are voluminous, and the complete works of Marx have yet to be translated into English. He died in London in 1883 of his afflictions and was buried in the same city.

Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Rocken, Prussia. He received education to become a Lutheran minister, as his father and his father’s father were before him, but he lost his faith and became a philologist. He was a professor of some repute, but lost his job because of his denigrating comments on Christianity. He wrote many works, the least of which excelled the masterpieces of many philosophers before him. He metaphorically died in 1889 when he went insane and reverted to childhood, and his body followed in 1900.

It is interesting that both men began life as devout Lutherans, but lost their faith and became atheists. It is even more interesting that both, coming from the same premises of atheism, would reach such wildly different conclusions as to how society ideally would be structured. Marx, with his atheism came to the conclusion of a Benthamite society, where the good of all is maximized, and Nietzsche, the anti-platonist, would come to a conclusion so similar to the society in Plato’s Republic, where there is a three-tiered system, the mediocre masses, the warrior/protectiors, and the noble overmen-the ruling class.

Marx, on the one hand, had a critique of capitalism that the bourgeois (the rich factory owners) were parasites living off the sweat and blood of the proletariat (the workers). This view surely came from his life experience as a reporter for a newspaper that often printed his articles as unsigned editorials or as “from our correspondent.” He saw that the majority of people did all of the work, and received a wage that barely paid for rent and food, while the owners, who did nothing more than inherit the means of production from their parents, sat back and did nothing but watch. Marx saw the bourgoise as being secure in the knowledge that the people had no choice but to work unreasonable hours for unthinkable pay because they had nowhere else to go, or, if they did, their lot would be no better in the new place.

Marx thought that it would only be fair to institute a society that would reward the workers in a proportion equal to their work, and no one person would be rewarded less than the value of their work. In the ideal Marxist society, people would work in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and engage in discussion and intellectual pursuits at night. While many detractors claim that communism is anti-democracy and anti-capitalism, the truth is that the goal of communism is to institute a full democracy, where all are truly equal, and also to make everyone a capitalist, and not just the bourgeois (as is the case in even America’s more evolved and enlightened form of capitalism).

Of course, the problem with this theory is in the institutionalization of it. Marx knew that it would be impossible to get the bourgeois to agree to share the profits equally with the workers responsible for the surplus. He then thought that the only way for the ideal society to be instituted would be through a worker revolution against the bourgeois. The one thing that Marx did not count on was the fact that the bourgeois are far more prone to have a class consciousness (translated: self-awareness) that would know that the best form of self-preservation would be to throw scraps to the proles, in order to keep the class consciousness of the workers to a minimum.

The mechanism that Marx thought was responsible for keeping the proletariat in a quiet, non-revolutionary mode was ideology. He specifically targeted Protestant Christianity and the doctrine of Christ from the Sermon of the Mount where He teaches that, in the next life, all of the roles in this life are reversed: “But many who are first will be last, and the last first” (Matthew 19:30 NKJV). Marx put forth the viewpoint that this ideology is responsible for keeping people satisfied, while the bourgeois obviously didn’t believe this doctrine–or else they would be willing to sacrifice their vain years of wealth in this world in order to gain eternal riches in the next. This ideology affected the workers in much the same way that smoke affects bees: it makes them lethargic and takes away their desire to sting, without cutting down on production. As the oh-so-famous quotation states: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” (However, it should be noted that, in his last days, Marx smoked opium to help him sleep, and is quoted in David B. Myers’ book, Marx and Nietzsche, as saying “For deteriorating old atheists, religion cannot hold a candle to opium. Opium is the religion of the dying infidel.”)

First, Marx made the claim that the society should be an atheistic one, without a “eternal reward” system, which would allow for such a system as communism to have a reason to be established. Only after religion, and its congenital ideology, has been abolished, can people be truly free. However, it would be a valid criticism to point out that if the Christ’s injunctions were followed, that it would also be the case that there would be no bourgeois, and no proletariat, but merely a community where people take care of each other, and not ninety-five percent of the population taking care of the other 5 percent.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, had a much different critique of modern society. He claimed that it was one that didn’t benefit the great and noble men, but one that kept such men repressed, and rewarded mediocrity. He makes the claims that the will to power, though manifest in great and noble men, is much stronger in the multitudes of the mediocre, who have no desire to be reminded of their mediocrity, and will fight to have the great and noble destroyed, and go back to the status quo of keeping the mediocre in an unenlightened state where they didn’t have to be reminded of exactly what they are.

He felt the status quo should be overcome, and he came up with a system to do this. His ideal society was one that resembled the stark society in Plato’s Republic. He felt that there should be roughly three levels of society. The overmen, the warrior/protectors, and the mediocre. He said that such a society would search for such things as greatness among children, and have a series of tests to decide in which caste the children would ultimately reside. Some children would have precious little strength or mettle or creative powers, and they would belong to the ranks of the mediocre lowest level.(The children with wisdom or creativity but no strength or mettle could not aspire to be much more than mediocre, and that, sadly, is very much the case in modern society as well). The children with strength and mettle, but no wisdom, would belong to the warrior/protector class, and the children with strength, wisdom, creativity, and mettle would take the tests, thrive on them, and desire more, because that is what greatness does. Ultimately, these children would no longer be children, and would then be admitted to the highest caste, the caste of the overmen. This way, the traits such as nobility would be rewarded, the traits of the warrior/protectors would be rewarded, as would the traits of the mediocre. The noble overmen would be rewarded with a constant chance to grow and sharpen and become even better. The warrior/protectors would be able to grow stronger, and the mediocre masses would not have to be put through the tests and challenges of the other two classes and could remain content with their bucolic lives. Nietzsche would have abolished religion as well, but only for the top caste of the overmen, the warrior/protectors would have opportunity to it, if so they wished, and the masses would have it to provide some hope for their dismal, little lives, so they wouldn’t come to see the truth of nihilism and, therefore, stop providing services for the protectors and overmen. Nietzsche, too, thought that religion was the opiate of the masses, but he thought that this painkiller was absolutely necessary to keep the workers from hating the overmen. The ideal society for Nietzsche would not be that of a democracy for everyone, but an aristocracy that is based solely upon merit, and the ability to overcome mediocrity.

According to Myers, Nietzsche would have argued against Marx that the reason there was so much unrest in capitalist society is because the bourgeois were not noble. He would have made the claim that the factory owners seemed neither noble nor great to the workers, which in turn would have fueled their thoughts that the factory owner was nothing more than a worker who got lucky, and this would keep revolutionary thoughts in their minds (to be pushed to the back burner by paychecks and religion). Nietzsche would have claimed that if the factory owners gave off an aura of greatness and nobility, that revolution would never be an issue with the proletariat, as the mediocre have no desire to go to war against the great. As a matter of fact, the mediocre really have no problem serving the great, as long as the great keep their distance and maintain the aura of nobility.

Myers contains in his book a Nietzschean critique of Marxism, which holds that the masses should never be allowed to choose for themselves, since they will always choose mediocrity. Nietzsche would have called Marx a teleologist, and would have made the claim that an atheist cannot hold teleology, for without God, teleology is meaningless and worthless. Moreover, a communist society could never produce a da Vinci, nor a Michelangelo, nor yet a Marx, because while all receive training in the arts (and economics) greatness is not, and cannot be rewarded more than mediocrity or else the society would remain static at Marx’s transition level of bourgeois communism. This bourgeois communism, (also called universal capitalism), would never attempt to overcome its own state to rise to the final levels. Nietzsche would say that the masses, once complacent, would not change.

Myers’ book also contained a Marxist critique of Nietzsche’s aristocracy. Marx would say that the masses are mediocre because they have no choice, the 14-hour work days keep them from being able to appreciate much more than beer and low comedy before collapsing into sleep. If everyone was given opportunity to be a da Vinci, there would be a multitude more da Vinci’s than just the one that history has produced. Marx would also point out that Nietzsche’s theory of aristocracy is deficient because it makes no allowances for gender, except for women as breeding stock, and therefore misogynistic, while Marx’s makes quite a few concessions to women as human beings with needs, desires, etc., and is therefore contains much less potential for misogyny. Marx would also hate the fact that the nobles would be lying to the masses in order to keep a high appearance of nobility. Nietzsche would not abolish religion in any caste but the highest, and allow the masses to still worship their dead god. Marx would see this level of dishonesty as repugnant and not conducive to a society that would be able to last.

In conclusion, it is quite interesting that the avowed atheist Marx would come up with a version of society so much like the ideal society espoused by Jesus in the Gospels, and that Nietzsche, the avowed anti-platonist, would claim that a society almost identical to the one found in the Republic is an ideal one.

While Nietzsche holds that an aristocracy is the model for a perfect society, and Marx holds that a democracy within which all are capitalists, but equal in this role, both are holding up an ideal of a certain kind of nobility. Marx holds that all men are potentially noble, but the working conditions preclude nobility in the masses. Nietzsche holds that precious few are noble, and unrest resides in the fact that the people in power in modern society lack as much nobility as the people they rule. The leaders should be noble, and then the masses will follow naturally (if they do not rise up to stamp out that which serves to remind them exactly how mediocre they are).

If there is a problem with both positions, it is the exact fact that the base for social contract is under the umbrella of atheism. It strikes me that without religion, the masses would not see a reason to treat everyone with the equanimity presented in Marx’s theory, and the noble will see no reason to rule over the mediocre without a moral injunction from above to do so. After all, why would the truly great and truly noble want to do anything more than leave the mediocre to their own devices?. The introduction of religion into Marxist society would make Marx’s ideal social contract plausible, and even realizable. While the introduction of religion into Nietzschean society, at least into the highest caste (the masses of the mediocre would never have lost religion), would make the presence of the noble within the society much more likely. But, it does strike this researcher as terribly ironic that, in order to make the societies work for both of these giants, there must still be an appeal to a higher power.

Bibliography

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Books, New York. 1968.

Myers, David B. Marx and Nietzsche. University Press of America, Lanham, MD. 1986.

Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. Ed. Frederic L. Bender. W.W. Norton and Company, New York. 1988.

God. The Bible. Ed. W.A. Criswell. Thomas Nelson, Nashville. 1982.