I. The Transformer Philosopher

In his proclaimed outsidership, as the history of reception suggests, Nietzsche seems to have something suitable for everyone. From his popularity in the philosophy of Nazi fascism to humanist philosophy of life to left-wing Nietzschean interpretations, which at their core often make attempts to materialize and historicize, in particular his moral criticism and the will to power. One should pay attention when such a chameleon-like philosopher allows himself to be equally appropriated for contradictory and even antagonistic agendas, since these should be fundamentally incompatible with each other. The question of how Nietzsche's theoretical work, which once served to legitimize racial ideology and is currently like the Bible from hand to hand Alpha Bros Being able to be productive for a historical-materialistic analysis in the service of the proletarian class struggle and whether such an attempt makes sense is obvious. It is important to take a look at the attempts to synthesize Marxist and Nietzschean theory, which form just such a materialistic understanding of the will to power and its resulting moral criticism.

‍

II. The will to power as a reactionary metaphysics

The will to power may well be Nietzsche's most fundamental as well as the most controversial concept. Some are satisfied with seeing him as a creative, creative life force, but in his later work, the will to power is more than an ontological principle with a causal character of all possible phenomena of life. In the 36th aphorism in Beyond good and evil Nietzsche formulates a critique of idealism that aims to postulate desires and passions as the only given reality and to consolidate them in a single uniform principle, the will to power:

Assuming that it would be possible to explain our entire instinct as the formation and branching of a basic form of will — namely the will to power [...] [,] this would have given oneself the right all The effective force can be clearly determined as: The will to power. Seen from within, defined and described the world in terms of its “intelligible character” — it would simply be “will to power” and nothing else.¹

Previously, in the 9th aphorism, Nietzsche characterized this will as “wanting to be different.”², which results in the striving for becoming and, as a result, the multiplicity of obvious realities, but Nietzsche always speaks of the will to power itself as a singular principle. In the same way, he rejects all original thinking. Is the will to power explained, even if not as a historical origin, as a supra-historical universal, or in other words: the metaphysical principle? In view of his genealogical critique of ideals and morals, which aims precisely at deconstructing seemingly universal moral laws of Christianity as contingent phenomena, the will to power as an ontological principle is a very contradictory assumption. And yet, as such, he consistently runs through his, especially later, writings. Everything is the will to power and nothing else. In his quest for difference, he naturally produces hierarchies — after all, the masters are strong, the slaves simply weak. Who would seriously denounce the raptor for tearing poor lambs? And so the story can be understood as processes of blind struggles between will and will, arbitrary and exclusively for the purpose of self-promotion. Nietzsche's fantasies of self-overcoming and of superman, however hopeful and vitalistic, remain committed to an essentially conservative and reactionary image of man, which, last but not least, appears quite openly in his vehement anti-socialism.

‍

III. Dialectics instead of ontology

Despite this, how could his writings be so well received, particularly in French post-Marxism? As is well known, Marx and Engels represented a strict scientific historical-dialectical materialism, according to which history develops in accordance with the progress of material productive forces, which include human labor power in particular:

In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary relationships independent of their will, production relations which correspond to a specific stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these production relations forms the economic structure of society, the real basis on which a legal and political superstructure is built, and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual process of life in general.³

In order to understand this dialectical materialistic logic, it is necessary, of course, to abstract from concrete reality, but abstraction always remains subordinate to material reality. It is an important principle to say that material production relations determine the structure of society, but in no way replaces the analysis of the specific form of a society, which only makes this principle determinable. The assumption of a fundamental, self-serving force as a condition and motor for the development of history has little place where the analysis of bourgeois private ownership of social means of production and the accumulation of capital necessary for capitalism through the appropriation of the surplus value of labor power is concerned. Just as there are no unhistorical hierarchies between natural strong and weak, so the story is not an arbitrary struggle of forces, but is the legal development of productive forces as the material basis of entire societies. For Marx and Engels, of course, this development is also a struggle — otherwise Marxism would be a mechanical economy, not a political economy — but one of the classes: the one that owns and the one who has to sell their only property, labor power. “The consistent basic idea of the [communist] 'manifesto',” says Engels, is that “the whole of history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, dominated and ruling classes at various stages of social development. ”⁴

There were and still are numerous post-Marxist attempts to understand the will to power as a life-affirming, material desire in the sense of revolutionary and emancipatory forces. The emphasis is on difference and processuality, which drive the story forward. Desire as a differentiating engine, such as Deleuze, is by definition revolutionary,⁵ because it goes against every petrified totality, every woody dogma. And as is well known, according to Foucault, there can be no such totality at all, because “where there is power, there is resistance.”⁶. In both cases, the evolution of the will to power remains which ontological category and as such, even though they dress in materialistic skirt, they do not differ from the metaphysical core of Nietzschean will to power. Here it is desire as an immanent will that, in the worst case, is directed against itself, there the productive power that suppresses as well as rebels. From a consistently materialistic perspective, it must be asked: Where does the desire for metaphysics come from, since Marx, Engels and their successors have already brought us so close to material reality in their theoretical writings? Why the will, the will to power, which — if you stick strictly to Nietzsche — naturalizes hierarchies, exploitation and cruelty instead of historicizing, with bend and break, to the Marxist theory and politics that oppose him? The attempts to reinterpret them seem to attract many, but remain cumbersome upon closer inspection because, instead of successfully materializing the will to power, they try to idealize the material productive forces, i.e. to release them from their reality themselves.

‍

IV. Critique of Morality as Ideology

This may be due to the fact that, as a result of the failure of Western European revolutions in the first half of the 20th century, many thinkers turned away from the primacy of the material basis in their attempts to explain and rely increasingly on the abovementioned ideological superstructure. Instead of adhering to that primacy and understanding the concrete interactions between base and superstructure at that time, we still see an overemphasis on idealistic concepts and ideological criticism which, contrary to their intent, obscure rather than reveal the actually relevant production relations. In order to anticipate well-known criticism, Marx and Engels were by no means involved and at no time was crude economism: “Political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc. development is based on economic development. But they all also react to each other and to the economic basis. ”⁷ — Anyone who forgets this dialectical interaction between base and superstructure will quickly lose themselves in abstractions.

Nietzsche's genealogical moral critique — pointedly summed up in On the genealogy of morality, who probably received his work most frequently among left-Nietzscheans — questions and deconstructs the “value of morality” in a radical way⁸ themselves, in particular the Christian and their secularized excesses. According to Nietzsche, Western moral values are by no means absolute truths, but primarily instruments of subjugation for the purpose of certain consolidations of power. Where the pious sheep donate their last cents to the church, the priest laughs up his sleeve. In fact, Nietzsche identified an important moment between moral values and power relations, and this certainly echoes a materialistic critique of ideology. Certain parallels can be found in German ideology:

In every epoch, the thoughts of the ruling class are the dominant ideas, i.e. the class that is the ruling class material The power of society is at the same time its dominant spiritual power. [...] The prevailing thoughts are nothing more than the ideal expression of the prevailing material conditions [.]⁹

Asceticism, law and order, civil freedom and equality — they are all identified and criticized as instruments of power by Nietzsche as well as by Marx and Engels. But — and this is the decisive point — Christian moral values, according to Nietzsche, are the result of the resentment and powerlessness of the weak and, as such, sick will, will to nothing. After revealing the relative character of morality, it is necessary to abolish slave morality in favor of creating a new master morality of the strong. For Nietzsche, “life-affirming” simply means the affirmation of the strong lord and for this reason he needs his metaphysical will to power. For him, there is no question that this cannot be addressed equally to everyone and everyone:

Every increase in the “human” type has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society — and so it will be again and again: as a society which believes in a long ladder of ranking and difference in the values of man and person and needs slavery in some sense.¹⁰

Nietzsche's pathos of new creation involves moral relativism and he necessarily must, because, unlike historical materialism, Nietzsche places the metaphysical, speculative principle of will to power and his otherwise indefinite struggles first, with which he ultimately legitimizes his aristocratic ideology of natural social hierarchies. This is in insurmountable contradiction to Marx and Engels's understanding of morality. They repeatedly emphasize the historical character of ideas and the materially given power relationship, which is reflected in them. Moral values are not just as arbitrary as they are universal, but the product of those conditions. The fact that the bourgeoisie loudly cries out for individual freedom (for private property) and universal equality (on paper) is not a form of weak or strong morality, but an expression of bourgeois interests in maintaining private ownership of social means of production. The fact that proletarian values are those of solidarity, incorruptibility, collectivity, internationalism, etc., has nothing to do with altruism, but with economic and political necessity and the recognition of this need. They are therefore by no means arbitrary, but decisive for the proletarian class struggle. This is the difference between idealistic arbitrariness and historical specificity. Who benefits should read Nietzsche as a critic of bourgeois morality. Beyond your time diagnosis, you have to be aware that you quickly sink into the swamp of idealistic speculation and reactionary fantasies of great power.

‍

Sources

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Frankfurt am Main 2019.

Engels, Frederick: Letter to W. Borgius v. 25/1/1894. Marx-Engels-Werke Vol. 39. Berlin 1968.

Ders. : Preface to the German edition of ”Manifests” from 1883. Marx-Engels-Werke Vol. 4 Berlin 1977.

Ders. & Karl Marx: The German Ideology. Marx-Engels-Werke Vol 3. Berlin 1978.

Foucault, Michel: The will to know. Sexuality and Truth I. Frankfurt am Main 1983.

Marx, Karl: On the critique of political economy. Marx-Engels-Werke Vol. 13. Berlin 1961.

‍

Footnotes

1: Beyond good and evil, Aph 36.

2: Beyond good and evil, Aph 9.

3: Karl Marx, On the critique of political economy, p. 8 f.

4: Frederick Engels, Preface to the German edition of ”Manifests” from 1883, P. 577.

5: Cf. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, P. 149.

6: Michel Foucault, The will to know, P. 116.

7: Frederick Engels, Letter to W. Borgius v. 25/1/1894, P. 206.

8: On the genealogy of morality, Preface, paragraph 5.

9: Frederick Engels & Karl Marx, The German Ideology, P. 46.

10: Beyond good and evil, Aph 257.