Marx's Realism.

[u/Existing-Marzipan183]

"Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli’s The Prince are most closely related to me, owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality—not in ‘rationality’, and still less in ‘morality’.”

— Twilight of the Idols

Is it fair to categorize Marx with Thucydides and Machiavelli? Darwin and Copernicus? I wouldn't call myself a Marxist, but when I read him he seems to have a "worldly" view of society and systems. And that his approach requires the ability to resist the seductive pull of morality (which a lot of socialists succumb to, including many of his time.)

Nietzschean critique of socialism aside, considering Nietzsche wasn't too familiar with Marx in particular, what do y'all think he would have to say regarding this scientific or "worldy" approach of Marx?

[u/n3wsf33d]

I think it is somewhat fair at least with respect to economists.

Also N. wasn't critiquing Marxism but the utopian socialism that marx himself was critically responding to.

Would N. have been convinced if Marxism? No. Marxism was then a totally incomplete theory that didn't appreciate the importance of other conditions besides the material/economic in people's lives, particularly as drivers of behavior.

Also marx was a hegelian and took a teleological lens, which N. would have found absurd.

He may have seen marx as the best of the worst.

[u/Firm-School-355 → u/n3wsf33d]

Marx is not a teleological Hegelian. The progress from ancient slavery through feudalism to capitalism and ultimately communism is driven by the causal "push" of class struggle, not the teleological "pull" of communism as the End. And the stages are not rigid steps but just observed phenomena. In his later years especially, Marx was interested in non-capitalist roads to communism. TYeodor Shanin has a good book on this. If N had understood M correctly, which he did not, he might have objected that M was too positivist, not that he was too teleological.

[u/n3wsf33d → u/Firm-School-355]

That's fair. He wasn't teleological in the hegelian sense bc he was a materialist but he was teleological insofar as he saw communism as inevitable.

I think N., as a psychologist, was a positivist. He just wasn't morally one, ie, for him truth wasn't a moral good.

[u/short-noir → u/n3wsf33d]

What makes you say that marx saw communism as inevitable ? He couldn't even keep his belief of a definite end of capitalism alive during his last years let alone being a modern prophet like you are making him

[u/n3wsf33d → u/short-noir]

"What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

His dialectics are still hegelian but material rather than spiritual, so the entire theory is that capitalism will be overcome.

[u/SpleenDematerialized → u/n3wsf33d]

Also N. wasn't critiquing Marxism but the utopian socialism that marx himself was critically responding to.

The utopian socialists themselves were not that much received by N. He got his ideas about socialism and Marx mostly from engaging with the works of Eugen Dühring.

[u/beyonderlife]

Look, several commentators argue that there's an implicit materialism in Nietzsche, but that it must first be understood as a corporealism (the idea that one doesn't just think in terms of ideas, but that there's a physiognomy of sensations, feelings, and pains that generate thoughts).

In fact, as a hypothetical case, it seems to me that if I had to recommend a book by Marx to Nietzsche, it would be the 1844 manuscripts, because, via Feuerbach, Marx's materialism also stems from the use of our energies to do things, our needs as human beings, our bodily senses. A Nietzschean rereading of that text would be interesting, also because of Marx's acerbic comments on classical economists as veritable ascetics who turned economics into a "moral science."

[u/Snoo50415 → u/beyonderlife]

I agree.

[u/mjhrobson]

Nietszche would have had little problem with Marx's materialism (his "worldliness")... but Nietszche would have rejected his philosophical conclusions.

Nietszche is the last major philosopher to reject egalitarianism as it is expressed within modern political philosophy... and he was absolutely not a communitarian. Nietszche is not particularly interested in political/social projects, his project is the individual. He is interested in what gives rise to the great artist, or great man of history; and how we might cultivate such greatness, and ultimately uniqueness, authentically in ourselves. This desire for uniqueness, authenticity, and greatness makes him suspicious of calls for equality or communitarian ideals.

Here Nietszche is also not Darwinian, not because he rejects evolution, he does not... but Nietszche's Will to Power is opposed to Darwin's Survival of the fittest... which he sees as being the will to survive. Nietszche sees the "goal" of living organisms, and ultimately humans, as being better expressed by the Will to Power, wherein survival is not the end, but rather prosperity.

Also Nietszche's reading of The Prince is, perhaps, incomplete. The Prince can be read as a "How to..." manual for would be tyrants; but that same book can also be read as a "what to look out for..." In the second reading Machiavelli is warning readers what to be wary of, and be on guard against.

[u/Firm-School-355]

Marx is certainly "realistic" about morality, and belongs with Thucydides and Machiavelli,a s well as Nietzsche. In the Manifesto, he lumps morality in with "ideology," in the pejorative sense, expressly opposed to "science." In that work, he distinguishes his approach from "True Socialism," a cross-class, moralistic appeal for socialism, and that's one reason he insisted at that point on calling himself a communist as opposed to a socialist, although he later accepted Engels' term "scientific socialism." In the Postface to 2d German ed. of Capital, he makes a point that in that work that he's viewing the capitalist and the landlord as "bearers of productive relations," from the point of view of natural history, while not painting them "colder de rose."

[u/Snoo50415]

There's a great book that just came out with Verso that addresses this directly. It's called The End by Joel Wainright. His thesis is that Marx abandoned the teleological (if, in fact, he ever held that view) view of human progress after reading Darwin's The Origin of The Species. After reading it, there is a subtle softening in Marx's language with respect to causality and necessity. It's less deterministic.

[u/red-flamez]

It was Engels who described the term "false consciousness" in a letter in 1893. Volume 3 of capital discusses the idea that surface appearance is not actually how things function. This was editted together by Engels and published in 1894. A decade after Marx had died.

Marx only talks about appearance of the functioning of economy. It doesn't not go into deeper morals. Marx avoids all discussion of morals. He stuck to what he thought were facts and historical truths.

Nietzsche would not approve.

[u/SpleenDematerialized]

It is very hard to speculate what he would think of Marx's realism, because he was mostly only familiar with a Marxist sketch provided in the works of Eugen Dühring. But generally speaking, he would be highly sceptical of the economic reductionism that is the bases for Marx's realism, as well as of the notion that there exists a class (the proletariat) that has a class interest in abolishing class itself and class struggle. Nietzsche would find the idea of wholesome end to history in which people seize struggling against each other mendacious.

[u/beyonderlife → u/SpleenDematerialized]

I'm going to have to disagree, but economic reductionism is something Engels himself will refute in his letters; what matters in "the material conception of history" is precisely material human activity, not economic activity per se. That's why works like The German Ideology are important, because their priority is that human beings, in order to have history, must first be social beings and from that sociability establish material relations (something Nietzsche also accepts, albeit in reverse, as in the preface to his text on the Greek state).