Karl Marx and Nietzsche: philosophical comparison

Marx & Nietzsche

Trust No One" -- Marx's and Nietzsche's Utopian Ethos of Suspicion

The pursuit of sex, the accumulation of money, and the worship of institutionalized religion: these three principles (to love, to prosper, and to find relief from fear of the unknown) have come to define contemporary culture, particularly American culture. The containment of sexuality through the cultural institutions of repression, the containment of the dispersion of money through capitalism and inheritance, and the containment of thought through religious doctrine still provides order and structure to contemporary life. Modernism rejected these impulses, and demanded a radical questioning of all of these culturally-generated ideals, which are so entrenched in our culturally shaped psychology they feel like innate impulses. Modernism demanded that ordinary individuals trust nothing, and be suspicious and viscerally critical of everything taught by teachers, parents, and the media from birth.

Freud has been called one of the Founding Fathers of Modernism because of his characterization of the human sexual drive as natural. He believed there was an innate desire for the mother hard-wired into the human infant consciousness. Human beings were not of a higher order; only cultural repression contained their sexual desires. Marx rejected the notion that anyone could prosper, provided they worked hard enough, in a capitalist system. The system was designed to make workers the wage slaves of factory owners. Marx provided a radical critique of private ownership, and the idea that creating and maintaining wealth by profiting from private property and renting the bodies of employees for labor was fair. Nietzsche questioned the idea of the civilizing, progressive march of thought, rejecting Christianity and proclaiming the Christian God to be dead. He advocated a return to a time during the classical era, where sexuality and individuality was unfettered by received notions of morality. This would produce a true Superman, defiant of all norms.

A reading of these philosophers, Marx and Nietzsche in particular, might suggest that Marx was primarily suspicious of how human labor was valued in his society and Nietzsche was primarily suspicious of faith as a medium of social control. However, both philosophers, it could be postulated, aimed their sights at attacking something even greater -- the notion of positive historical progress altogether. Capitalism was initially seen as essentially democratic in its impulse -- hence the concept of the factory owner as a representative of 'new money,' a man who was self-made, and had earned his luxury though toil, not birth.

The capitalist, in Marx's view, merely accumulated wealth and used that wealth to unjustly make more wealth, like an aristocrat of old. The capitalist's exploitation of the worker was no progress at all. It was merely the latest manifestation of the age-old dialectic of the haves vs. The have-nots. The have-nots inevitably overthrew the haves, came to power, and exploited the lower orders once again, as had occurred in the new economic system. Likewise, Nietzsche questioned the idea that Christianity had made human beings more moral and civilized, he felt it had merely made them less creative and more complacent. Progress should not be measured through the creation of more social controls. Nietzsche advocated a return to a Dionysian worship of the body, not a containment of the body.

However radical these critiques, however, both Marx and Nietzsche in their own ways created visions of progress that were fundamentally utopian and Progressive in spirit. Marx believed the workers would collectively unite, give up personal notions of success and private property, and create a new economic future for the world. Nietzsche believed an anarchic society without law would heal all modern angst. Today, Marx and Nietzsche's prescriptions for societal ills have been discounted by both philosophers' taints with communism and fascism, respectively, however their critiques remain trenchant, and highlight the collective cultural discontent of their times.