For example, you shouldn't ask the money-collecting banker about the purpose of his restless activity: it is unreasonable. The workers roll as the stone rolls, according to the stupidity of mechanics. — All people disintegrate, as in all ages and even now, into slaves and free people; for anyone who does not have two thirds of his day for himself is a slave, he is, by the way, whoever he wants: statesman, merchant, official, scholar.¹

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Contrary to all hermeneutical rumours, this quote makes it clear that Nietzsche is a good critic of capitalism. Even more — and this is likely to completely confuse academic minds — Nietzsche defends reason against capital in him. The banker is unreasonable because the former means, money, became an end in itself, capital, resulting in an inversion of means and end, in short: alienation. Money, however, cannot be eaten, as the myth of King Midas already reminds us; the pursuit of profit therefore becomes a life-averted delusion that collectively infects the atomized. The banker is thus a representative of irrationality and remoteness, as only the priest once was — which can also be seen in the effects of the financial market as a new place of worship. The supposedly most rational or streamlined form of transport in society — spoken with Nietzschean Max Weber — is therefore unreasonable for Nietzsche at heart, just because she is turned against life. Continuing with Weber: Purpose-rational action as such, which has said goodbye to substantive reason, becomes irrational because, cut off from the question of possibility and goal, it becomes entangled in its own function and only hunts for ghosts. It is obvious that Nietzsche was not only a contemporary of Marx, but also criticized the same society as that society, namely the capitalist one. Even more, it can help us today to further deepen many Marxist insights. For example, he proved how behind the alleged egoism of his class — the representatives of Protestant ethics — the ultimate Super-ego of self-weakness stuck, and how the flaunted luxury of the upper class, as they lose all personality behind their performance and thus impoverishes humanly, descends into asceticism. This, not least, was where Freud's reception of Nietzsche began, but this translated him back to bourgeois: into the absolute necessity of renouncing all culture. Nietzsche, on the other hand, stands for a culture of the body and a cultivation of pleasure rather than its suppression, which, as it were, must include reason as “great health” (Nietzsche), instead of remaining rejected by it.  

What is described in the opening quote as the “stupidity of mechanics” can therefore also be understood in Marxist terms as an “automatic subject,” as which capital functions. Under his spell, it is not the economy that serves us, but we serve it, which is why we do not work to live, but live to work. In short, the world is upside down because it is headless, i.e. ruled by an anonymous structure. The result: “slave morality” is rampant everywhere, affecting everyone, but particularly dominating the rulers, the successful, the beautiful, powerful and strong, because they are most deeply entangled in the false awareness of their grandeur, which, regardless, remains mere appearances. The opening quote argues against this pretense that wage slavery is still slavery, that modernity is not as liberal as it appears to be, and that statesmen, merchants, officials, scholars — i.e. the “high animals” from politics, business, state and cultural enterprises — are no less slaves than their former counterparts from ancient Greek times. The supposedly Nietzschean, in actual Schumpeter, adoration of the entrepreneur as a genius, as a creator, as a heroic individual thus receives an embarrassing refutation in Nietzsche himself: The individual principle lies precisely behind the celebration of individuality, because the persona, still that of power, is, according to the Latin root of the word, a mere mask of character, and thus implies the deep impotence of those people that they have to bear. From this perspective, Nietzsche becomes an alienation theorist par excellence. As against his modernist students Freud, Weber or Joseph Schumpeter, in order to become who he is, he must also be defended from his other, later, post-modern epigons — just as Adorno once had to defend Bach “against his lovers.” Just as it was once necessary, according to Bataille, to protect Nietzsche from the fascists, so today it is important to protect him from further integration into post-modern ideology. This certainly requires saving criticism — but this should primarily be about highlighting the emancipatory aspects of Nietzsche's thinking.

It remains to be clarified that what Nietzsche was largely reduced to in the post-structuralist reading — death of the subject, transhumanism, post-criticism — not only massively shortened, but completely upside down. Let us briefly review the shrinkage stages of post-modern Nietzscheanism, which have popularized that perversion. Instead of being a gravedigger of the subject, Nietzsche, particularly the middle period, can be understood far more convincingly as an individualist, existentialist or anarchist, to whom, influenced by romance, hardly anything is more important than qualitative individuality, self-conscious resistance and self-strong deviance — i.e. as everything that postmodernism abhors, denies or tries to dispose of in the blind spot of history. Nietzsche also calls for a new People who set their own goals instead of slipping off into an updated afterlife to humanity — i.e. lost transhumanistically to the back worlds of whimpering theo or technocracy and their theodicy — idolize the last person as aimless, willless, freely collaging and programmable Frankenstein. And post-critics who refer to Nietzsche are also rejected, as his aphorisms can hardly be understood otherwise than as those of a gifted critic and stylish polemicist. There are also reasons for this choice of form. Finally, the Nietzschean affirmation of life requires the negation of an entire system of resentment that only sees its own worth in comparing, competing, defeating and only mobilizes its own appreciation by devaluing others. In short, anyone who loves life must hate the forces hostile to life; anyone who affirms it must deny them; anyone who wants to live criticizes. Affirmation and criticism are thus a dialectic instead of, as the cheerful cynics of post-criticism tell themselves, antipodes to one another. In short, Nietzsche is not a gravedigger of the subject, not a transhumanist and not a post-critic, but their incarnate negation, precisely because he takes the affirmation of life so seriously.

Contrary to Nietzsche's postmodern reformats, he can be read more as an alienation theorist critical of capitalism, who socializes profoundly in Christian terms so that not least — like Marx — is in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach. Related to Young Hegelianism not in spite of, but precisely because of, extensive Hegel complaints, Nietzsche sees capitalist modernity — to which postmodernism as Decadence The last man and his slave morality are, of course, part of it — the metaphysics at work, from modern science to modern economics. While the former is scientistically speaking to the only truth in order to declare its positivist abbreviations the absolute essence of the universe, the latter is never just a political economy, but always a moral economy. For Nietzsche, debt and debt, a negative financial and ethical balance, are indivisible from one another, as he said in his The genealogy of morality clarifies. Capitalism is therefore to be understood as a religion, as Walter Benjamin emphasized, and not as an already reasonable or enlightened system. Modern economics and science, capitalism as a religion and scientific positivism are also combined by means of modern technology to exploit nature, which devastates both internal and external nature.

Together, Nietzsche sees real nihilistic violence at work whose negation of life could only stop people's self-determination and new determination beyond alienation. In this sense, he thinks anti-capitalist, yes, sometimes beyond the equally materialistic Marx, since he places the question of subjectifying capitalist objectivity centrally. Nietzsche's answer: Idealism, its real abstractions and its “identity principle” (Adorno), which are based on the exchange value of capital and in the self-purpose logic of capital, generate three tendencies in their subjects — one towards positivism, one towards nihilism and one towards moralism. All three can only be understood together, and cultural criticism only exists as one that involves political as a moral economy — i.e. as a dedicated critique of capitalism.

Marx's version of this critique is certainly the most developed, complex and important up to our time. But Nietzsche can supplement them by showing in his work: Positivism is also a form of alienation, of reifying thinking, and forces science into scientism by naturalizing it. “Scientific socialism” thus acquires a different, more ambivalent meaning. Nihilism, in turn, can be understood as a form of subjectification of late capitalism, after capital buried the former bourgeois values under its own development, so that nihilistic anti-bourgeoisie — whether in a modernist or post-modern manner — is no longer directed against capitalism, but is in an elective relationship with capital that is unconscious of itself. And moralism is also no real alternative to the said interplay of positivism and nihilism, because here the primacy of politics does not really replace that of economics. Rather, political impotence results in a moralizing resentment, which is therefore in continuity of being wrong and has no better purpose that could still break it.

Isms were always opposed to Nietzsche, as an enemy of the system: he found the positive side of life stifled in positivism; the critical moment of negation degenerated into an irrelevant, because indefinite apology of nihilism; and morality, which in turn could also serve to protect vulnerable bodies and the one earth that we animate, goes wrong in the moralism of inquisitorial gestures, who value nothing but their own nullity dispels isolated persons. What should therefore be written in the 21st century in the spirit of Nietzsche is a genealogy of moralism, which must be, as it were, a genealogy of positivism and nihilism, and as such a historical questioning of that social objectivity which forces positivist, nihilistic, moralistic modes of subjectification — in order to question capitalist totality in all its facets.

Nietzsche's work does not work against the subject, people, or criticism, but against the — devaluating — principle of capital, which destroys bodies, takes lives and threatens our living space. At least that is the more interesting reading of his oeuvre, which is far more emancipatory than that of postmodernism.

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Footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human, Vol. I, Aph. 283.