Marx, Nietzsche and the Individual

Feuerbach argued that man created God after his own likeness, that God is the abstraction and alienation of human attributes projected into an ideal type, denying man his own content and features, thereby impoverishing him. Marx pointed to a profound contradiction within Feuerbach’s argument: ‘he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and theology). ... he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite - restoration of religion and theology.’1 It was their developments on this contradiction that formed the diametrically opposed content of the work of Marx and Nietzsche.

The most fundamental question underlying all others is ‘Which precedes which - matter (that which is independent of thought) or “mind”?’ Marx understood that it is the former, Nietzsche, on the basis of ‘will’, chose the latter. He questioned both our sensory experience of material objects and even their very existence.2 Where Marx’s man creatively develops by projecting himself through social production on objective reality, Nietzsche’s ‘develops’ himself by focusing his creativity on his individual self. Where Marx had done with God and studied man in his practice in the material world, Nietzsche, inspired by Stirner and apophaticism, sought via Dionysus and the overman to bring God down to earth, and in the most subjective way.3 Where Marx’s socio-economic analysis identified man in the world, Nietzsche’s socio-psychological analysis found a theological world in man.

Despite the dichotomy between the basic and many other positions of Marx and Nietzsche, their criticisms of bourgeois society were equally strong and had a number of similarities. They both understood man as a being who creates himself historically through his relations to nature and society and both strongly challenged the premises of bourgeois society. Both thought that there is something wrong with it, that man’s life activity (his labour or his willing) is frustrated. Both conceived of it as the sacrifice of the individual and thought that it must be transcended because it is irredeemably alienated from those on whom their theorising focused, that the bourgeois was in control4 in a society in which for Marx the primary (economic) conflict was between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie and for Nietzsche the primary conflict, at the level of values, was between those of the herd and ‘higher men’.

‘Bourgeois individualism’ is an understanding of ‘individual’ in the context of the bourgeois class and its ideology. ‘Bourgeois individualism’ and ‘bourgeois individual’ denote essentially the shaping of the individual by both capitalist ideology and that person’s practice into, as much as possible, a self-focused unit of consumption who subscribes to the values of capitalism. Marx endorsed individuality as an expression of freedom and human potential but he rejected the bourgeois notion (with its implication of egoism) because it required a one-sided development and the dehumanisation of the great majority. Only the bourgeoisie had the wealth and power to experience this, yet even their personalities are conditioned and determined by class relations, by their opposition to the proletariat. Marx argued that the right to security protects the egoistic individualism of bourgeois civil society. ‘The concept of security does not enable civil society to rise above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the guarantee of its egoism.’5

The proletarians, forced to sell their labour power to the bourgeoisie, are denied the possibility of individuality in several ways by that class, who exploit and control them6 - their function is to produce commodities and surplus value for the bourgeoisie. They are alienated from their products (they collectively don’t own what they produce - it is appropriated by the capitalists), they are alienated from their productive activity (in producing, they are reduced to the level of a machine), they are alienated from their species essence (from what is distinctively human - their ability to create and learn) and from others (by specialisation and the division of labour). As a result, the worker is degraded morally and suffers a loss of self. Marx wrote that the proletarian is most human when he is away from work.7 Deskilling through the division of labour, prolonged working hours and a wage barely sufficient to enable their survival all keep proletarians at the level of a mere animal, in the position of a slave.8

What Marx wrote most passionately against and to change - the existence of a ‘slave’ class beneath and at the service of a ‘higher’, bourgeois class, Nietzsche wrote with equal passion in defence of and to retain. Where Marx defended individuality, Nietzsche did the same for individualism. Nietzsche thought that actions performed on the basis of respect for the law or sense of duty were marks of the herd, harmful to the ‘higher man’ who was a law to himself - unmanageable and unpredictable. The herd instinct of morality and ‘Socratic’ rationality threatened Nietzsche’s model. He believed that the modern and mediocre European had a rage against ‘noble men’ and ‘great types’, that he was adrift in a world devoid of creative capacity. Society was just a scaffolding for the appearance of higher types: ‘Basic error: to place the goal in the herd and not in single individuals! The herd is a means, no more! But now one is attempting to understand the herd as an individual and to ascribe to it a higher rank than to the individual - profound misunderstanding!!!’9

Liberal democracy is that form of political organisation best suited to a prosperous and stable capitalist system and to the notion of a mass ‘bourgeois individualism’. Both Marx and Nietzsche criticised liberal democracy - again, from opposed positions. Both argued that political freedom is oppression, that political equality is inequality (regarding those whose antipodal interests they represented). Marx argued as he did because inequality is concealed in bourgeois equality - despite the appearance of an exchange of equivalents when the worker sells his labour power for money, that part of it which constitutes surplus value is in fact appropriated under the guise of exchange, presupposing the worker’s labour power as the property of the capitalist. At the level of parliaments, Marx believed them to be fronts for the bourgeoisie and theorised little on them.

Nietzsche believed liberal democracy to be the manifestation of a profound sickness and crisis, that it is a sign for everything that is wrong with modernity. By placing one’s will on a par with others, one wills the denial of life. He regarded democracy as essentially on a continuum with Christianity - equality in the eyes of God becomes the rights of man and popular sovereignty. His virulent and laughable attack10 on socialism was even stronger on this basis. For Nietzsche inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of rights - those of the ‘noble man’. Democracy, the embodiment of herd morality, represents a disbelief in great humans. It was a threat to ‘all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man’11

Yet both saw some benefit in the potential of bourgeois democracy. Marx thought that in the most economically advanced countries the proletariat might use it to attain power while Nietzsche, though believing that it represented nihilism, saw it as a training ground for individualism and potentially the basis for the emergence of a new ‘aristocracy’ who would transcend justice, the herd and its state.12

Where Marx theorised for the emancipation of society and individuality13 through that of the great majority, and did so on the basis of a material analysis, Nietzsche theorised for the appearance of a self-focused few - geniuses and saints, the ‘peak of rapture’ of the world14 - beyond the constraints of the majority, on the basis of his fertile imagination.

For Marx freedom is only possible in society, and the grounds for the the development of true individuality would begin to show with the abolition of private property, the freeing of the proletarian ‘slaves’ and the attainment of socialism.15 The reactionary Nietzsche thought that ‘free society’ is a contradiction in terms and deplored the disappearance of slaves: ‘A higher culture can come into being only where there are two castes of society: the working caste and the idle caste, capable of true leisure; or, to express it more emphatically, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour.’16

The individualism that Nietzsche was committed to was a fantasist notion of a ‘higher man’ overcoming any self-identified imperfections and, sustained by his will, crafting himself towards a mystical perfection.17 His argument amounts to an aesthetic abstraction of and reactionary counterpart to the class conflict of which Marx wrote. Just as Marx’s theorising and activity was a threat to capitalism and it ideology, so Nietzsche’s theorising was consistent with them - the celebration of exploitation, the worker knowing his place, the justification of an elite, the focus on and aestheticisation of self, the satisfaction of one’s needs above all and the use of whatever means to achieve that - in practice, when God is dead, how else does one find solace in one’s hour of need other than attend the church of consumption? While Marx’s scientific austerity is distinct from Nietzsche’s ascetic will to suffering and a longing for mystical unity,18 there is a teleological finality implicit in his theories that contradicts the basic tenet of dialectical materialism - that the one absolute is change.

‘Bourgeois individual’, as with ‘bourgeois individualism’ are ideological concepts. They cannot be defended because they both not only embody the exploitation of the great majority by a small minority, but a self-centredness and degree of irresponsible consumption that is clearly an increasing threat to global survival. What is required is an orientation to the concept that Marx subscribed to - an individuality that functions as the full development of a person, ethically responsible within their society - one which is not based on exploitation.

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Notes

1. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 135.

2. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1990, ‘aphorisms’ 12 and 14.

3. In their lengthy critique of Stirner in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels referred to him as ‘Saint Max’ and ‘John the Divine’. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Progress, Moscow, 1976. On the benefits of mysticism: ‘Zarathustra’s speeches are carefully orchestrated ... to ensure that the prophet encounters no opposition, demands, or pressure to be precise.’ Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, trans., Shelley Frisch, Granata Books, London, 2002, pp. 267-268. The widespread ignorance by philosophers regarding the impact of apophaticism on their subject - a prime example being Nietzsche - the man of ‘god’ who told us God is dead - who cannot be understood without an understanding of apophaticism, is one of the great (deliberate?) failures of philosophy. Apophaticism suffuses Nietzsche’s writing from The Birth of Tragedy to the final words of his last book published during his life, Ecce Homo, to the last ‘aphorism’ of The Will To Power which is a synopsis of The Enneads. Wherever romanticism, there apophaticism. William Franke’s groundbreaking two volume anthology On What Cannot Be Said, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 2007 traces the history of apophaticism in the West through the writing of its greats in philosophy, religion, literature and the arts. Mark Cheetham has written on its impact in the visual arts - M. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity, Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1991. On the influence of Stirner on Nietzsche and why Nietzsche denied it, see Safranski, Nietzsche, ever the rhetorician and lover of ‘truth’, with one eye on his backside and the other on history, was quoted from a conversation in which he said that people would say he was a plagiarist but that the person with whom he was talking, who reported the conversation in her memoirs (Ida Overbeck, a close friend of his in the 1870’s) would not let on that he was familiar with the writing of Stirner. p.127 Safranski quotes one contemporary of Nietzsche’s having written that Nietzsche would have been ‘permanently discredited in any educated milieu if he had demonstrated even the least bit of sympathy for Stirner’. Ibid., 126. Why is this profoundly contradictory and tormented voluntarist and master rhetorician taken so much at his word? Style and sensitivity are neither arguments nor an excuse.

4. Marx and Engels wrote: ‘To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt’ K, Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology op. cit., p. 99. Nietzsche: ‘Step by step, private companies incorporate state business; even the most stubborn vestige of the old work of governing (For example, that activity, which is supposed to secure private parties against other private parties) will ultimately be managed by private contractors’, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Penguin, 2004, p. 225, ‘aphorism’ 472.

5. K. Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, Quoted in Nancy S Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, p. 158.

6. Both classes are controlled by the uncertainties of the world-market.

7. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 op. cit., p. 71. For Marx in his later work the alienation of man’s species-essence no longer had explanatory power. He retained his concern with why man’s labour is alienated in capitalist society, but turned to historical materialist analysis of the economic laws of motion of modern society.

8. ‘Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. ... Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State: they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine ... and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.’ The Communist Manifesto in K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Progress, Moscow, 1977, vol. 1, p. 115.

9. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, New York, 1968, p. 403, ‘aphorism’ 766.

10. ‘Whom among today’s rabble do I hate the most? The Socialist rabble, the Chandala apostles who undermine the worker’s instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his little state of being - who makes him envious, who teach him revengefulness...Injustice never lies in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to ‘equal’ rights’. These words and many similar were written by a man who travelled southern Europe for years on a pension. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (or How to Philosophise with a Hammer) and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Penguin, 2003, p. 191, ‘aphorism’ 57.

11. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future op. cit., p. 144, ‘aphorism’ 212.

12. The man who so forcefully expounded on his ‘aristocratic values’ while venting contempt for ‘the herd’ (among others) was the son of a provincial pastor. Marx wrote that ‘aristocratic radicalism’ expresses the class interests of the bourgeoisie - the ‘aristocratic radical’ finds the source of social revolution not in the brutal ‘mass’ but in its opposite, in critical individuals. (Marx and Engels, Holy Family, 111) ‘In their contempt for the masses, aristocratic radicals are at one with their supposed bourgeois antagonists.’ In Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity op. cit., 166. Safranski wrote ‘all of Nietzsche’s past humiliations fed into his destructive fantasies ... he had sought refuge in self-discovery and self-invention ... Hatred festered in him toward everything that had dragged him down: the milieu of Naumburg, his family, his sister, his mother, ultimately his friends as well - and, of course, Wagner ... In his view, all of these insults, affronts, and disdain stemmed from the tedious world of mediocrity. Nietzsche, the critic of ressentiment, was himself sometimes full of vengeance toward the common man of ressentiment ... Nietzsche responded with fantasies of annihilation (of the ‘last man’). He, the Ubermensch, with whom they will all come face to face. Woe unto them...(the ‘last people’)’. Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, op. cit., pp. 269-271. Marx and Engels wrote similarly about Stirner: ‘In actual content he is, therefore, the defender of the practical petty bourgeois, but he combats the consciousness that corresponds to the petty bourgeois, a consciousness which in the final analysis reduces itself to the idealising ideas of the petty bourgeois about the bourgeoisie to whom he cannot attain.’ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology op. cit., p. 287. 

13. The handwriting of the famous section of The German Ideology where it states ‘society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind ...’ has been analysed and it has been argued that what Marx contributed to it (the section was in different hands) may well have been a playful afterthought. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology op. cit., p. 53.

14. Safranski op. cit., 264. In a draft to a preface for The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote that the goal of mankind lies in its peaks, in the great individuals, the saints and the artists. Ibid., 287.

15. ‘In bourgeois society capital is independent & has individuality, while the living person is dependent & has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.’ The Communist Manifesto in K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works op. cit, pp. 121-122.

16. F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, op. cit., p. 211, ‘aphorism’ 439. Nietzsche was: ‘a proponent of child labour, noting with approval that Basel permitted children over the age of twelve to work up to eleven hours a day’, was against shortening the length of the workday in Basel from twelve hours to eleven and opposed educational groups for workers. R. Safranski, Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography op. cit., 148.

17. On the ‘death of God’ - Nietzsche wanted the Christian god gone...so his, a mix of Dionysus and the overman, could take centre stage - in the world. ‘what would there be to create if gods - existed!’ F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Penguin, 2004, p. 81, ‘aphorism’ 8; ‘the raising of an altar requires the breaking of an altar’ in The Genealogy of Morals in F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing, Doubleday, New York, 1956, p. 228, section XXIV.

18. ‘But the hope of the epopts was the rebirth of Dionysus, which we can now interpret, with some foreboding, as the end of individuation ... the basic understanding of the unity of all things, individuation seen as the primal source of evil, art as the joyful hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, as a presentiment of restored oneness.’ F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, 1993, p. 52, section 10.