Lecture 9: (cont) Marx on Science, Democracy and Nationalism & Lecture 10: Nietzsche on Diagnosis and Nihilism

15. (Cont) Now I want to focus on Marx’s attitude to three of the leading tendencies of modernity: science, democracy and nationalism. Marx was impressed by the immense productivity of bourgeois industrialisation. He is hostile to its bourgeois form but not to technological progress based on science. In fact, he views science, increasingly, as a major force of production. Science becomes the exclusive worldview of modernity. At the same time, Marx is the first sociologist of knowledge. Other knowledge is tainted by its social commitments. They serve the interests of domination. This leads to a pluralism of truths tied to social interests. But natural science is domination free knowledge. Science is of the base not the superstructure. It never occurred to Marx that it could be considered as a worldview of domination.

16. Marx’s own self-understanding wavers between critique and science. This explains the interpretative disputes that have raged around the status of his theory. The former is socially conditioned but universal because it serves a universal interest. Whether Marx’s own identification of his critical theory with the consciousness of the proletariat is valid is essentially an empirical question. Irrespective of whether Marx worked out the theory before he discovered the workers or not, the vital point is whether or not the workers empirical consciousness can identify with class consciousness. On this question, the historical evidence is against Marx as only a minority of workers have ever completely identified with the theory.

17. This raises the potential problem of political substitutionalism clearly linked to this theoretical distinction between these two levels of consciousness and opens up the question of Marx’s relation to democracy. However, this cognitive gap was compounded by Marx’s scepticism towards bourgeois parliamentary institutions. He viewed the bourgeois parliaments of his time either as a facade masking the contemporary equilibrium of hostile classes or nothing more than an instrument of the ruling classes. While Marx espoused democracy as a fundamental value and saw the attainment of universal suffrage as a key goal in the movement towards socialism, he was so focused on social revolution that he failed to investigate the logic of politics, tends to reduce it to an instrument and fails to specify what shape and role it may have in a socialist society. He remained sceptical as to the potential of mere political revolution in the shape of Republicanism to eliminate the material constraints on freedom in the modern bourgeois world. Marx did not live to see the full democratisation of bourgeois society leading to the welfare state compromises of the 20th century. This was undoubtedly the main factor in softening the most brutal aspects of capitalism and placating worker discontent and incorporating them into bourgeois society.

18. Marx gives priority to social revolution over political revolution. The latter does not achieve full emancipation. This is a critique of the formalism of bourgeois political emancipation that does not address the social inequalities of this society and the persisting consequences of alienation. Marx is not interested in politics in its own right. This neglect of politics and its democratic institutionalisation was to have profound consequences for 20th century modernity. It is the very radicalism of Marx’s project that leads him to reject piecemeal reform. This is his unacknowledged utopianism. Marx affirms modern individuality but provides no institutional means of sustaining its dynamism in complex societies. Here specialisation and representation play a vital role in the economic and political domains despite their limitations and need for supplementation. Marx’s concept of social revolution requires a once and for all solution to alienation. What will be the motor of dynamism in socialism? Marx lapses into another form of historical finalism that is opposed to true open-endedness and the essential unpredictability of modernity.

19. We have already seen that Marx equates capitalism with the era of a single world market and World history as such. This being the case, it is no surprise that a sort of cosmopolitanism (in the shape of proletarian solidarity) looms larger in Marx’s thinking than nationalism. This preference was supported in his own mind by the radical plight of the proletariat and the inadequacy of mere bourgeois political solutions to put it right. In the first instance, Marx notes the extreme polarising and homogenising dynamics of capitalism. Not only is the population divided between the increasingly small bourgeois class of capitalist and those reduced to the proletariat by the increasing functionalisation of economic roles. The latter, are also largely reduced to the role of wage labourers who begin to share not only a common location, similarly de-skilling as a result of the advanced division of labour but more generally the common interests of a shared place in the new social hierarchy. We should remember that Marx initially viewed the proletariat as a class of bourgeois society that was yet deprived of all its benefits and therefore not fully a member of it. As a consequence, he felt justified in arguing that the normal ties that bind the individual to the community—family, religion, patriotism- were in the process of being eroded by dynamics that left the workers with no other primary allegiance than their collective solidarity. The fact that capital was a trans-national phenomenon that reproduced the same basic conditions where ever it became established meant that workers all over the world would now see a collective fate and collective interest in struggle against the new enemy. For this reason, Marx located the world historical struggle of his own time as one that required an international solution. His participation in the First International Working Men’s Association (1864-1872) was the practical expression of this theoretical insight. This was to be an association for education, knowledge, contact and strategic action amongst workers. Already at this time capitalist had employed international labour as a means of strike breaking and undermining the conditions of domestic workers. Against an enemy with a trans-national profile and power, Marx thought the only feasible strategy was a response of international proletarian solidarity. However, it would be a mistake to believe that Marx ignored the emerging nationalism of his times. Quite to the contrary, he was especially supportive of struggles for national emancipation like that of Poland in the early 1860’s which he saw as weakening the most reactionary forces of the European Ancien Regime and advancing the cause of democratic politics. However, his general view was that the cause of the nation-state was never going to bring about the sort of social emancipation that he felt could only come from social revolution and that the success of the latter largely depended upon simultaneous victories across the main centers of bourgeois power. Of course, one of the main disadvantages of this view from the standpoint of strategy, is that it tended to subordinate all other political causes to those that advanced the project of social revolution. Even if other political issues where more accessible or galvanising more support, the Marxian scenario tended to view them merely instrumentally in terms of the revolutionary project.

20. It was common twenty year ago to begin a book on Marxism by explaining that any doctrine that served as ideological worldview of one third of the world’s population could not be ignored. Today after the demise of the Soviet Union and its central European satellites and the Chinese return to capitalist economics, it might be argued that Marx can be confidently consigned to the dustbin of history. Personally I think such a judgement is both premature and ill-founded. It is true that the most forceful claims Marx made for his theories have been refuted by the developments within liberal democratic societies in the twentieth century. But facing the novelty of an entirely new historical situation and in light of unprecedented extremes of social conflict, it is hardly surprising that he made exaggerated claims for his own theory. His most basic mistake was to simplify the phenomenon of modernity before him and reduce it to the logic of capitalism and the immanent struggles engendered by it. This is why he tends to minimise the important of other factors like political democracy and nationalism and views them as subordinate issues in his diagnosis of the present. On the other hand, capitalism remains a crucial, if not often the dominant, element in the overall dynamics of modernity in the era of globalisation. In the era of Neo-liberalism, we have seen many of the constraints imposed on capitalism as a result of historical crises, worker’s struggles and their effective political organisation relinquished in the quest for economic efficiency and profitability. This has produced increasing inequalities and a diminishing middle class within liberal democratic societies and generally increased the insecurity of life conditions. These developments culminated only a few years ago in the most spectacular economic collapse in three generations and clearly we are still coming to terms with its consequences and what to do about it from the standpoint of rebalancing the relationship between economics and politics in the contemporary world. The scale of the crisis points to the sort of problems that initially fuelled the Marxian critique of capitalism. While these tendencies remain we can hardly ignore Marx and the insights that his theory lends to the understanding of contemporary modernity even if he is unable to provide us with an adequate solution.




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Lccture 10: Nietzsche (1844-1900

1. Tocqueville articulates his doubts about democracy in order to make it fit to serve as the basis for the future of modernity. Marx is more sceptical of the potential of bourgeois parliaments but ultimately concedes that in the most advanced bourgeois countries democracy may offer the proletariat an avenue to assume political power. For Nietzsche, however democracy is the manifestation of a profound sickness and crisis. For him, it is a signature for everything that is wrong with modernity. He wants to confront modernity at the level of foundational values. But Nietzsche is no mere conservative. His refusal to deny life saves him from mere negativity. He is orientated to the future and pursues the fundamental question of meaning after the collapse of tradition. Unread in his own time, it is the intensity of Nietzsche’s questioning, of his repudiation of modern values that has made him the inspiration of many late 20th century postmodern critics of modernity.

2. Biography. Born at Röcken in 1844, son of a Lutheran minister. His father died when Friedrich was five from a degenerative brain disease. He was a brilliant student and a talented musician. He was brought up by his mother and elder sister and educated at exclusive Prussian boarding Schulpforta; at 25 the Professor of classical philology at the University of Basle. It was at this time that he became friends with Wagner who, for a short time, served as his paradigm for a possible cultural rebirth in Germany. Resigned at 35 on the grounds of illhealth and was pensioned off. He spent roughly the next ten years living the life of a wandering private scholar between Southern Italy and Switzerland. Nietzsche never married and struggled his whole life with chronic sickness, repressed homosexuality and, in his later years, isolation. He finally had a total mental collapse in 1888. This was usually attributed to syphilis but more recently it has been argued that it was the result of a manic-depressive psychosis. He was subsequently cared for by his sister Elizabeth who set up the Nietzsche Archiv in Weimar where she falsified his writings to propagate a version of his work that later served the ideological needs of German nationalism and racism. A more balanced view of Nietzsche’s work only emerged after the Second World War.

3. Modernity is exhausted and sick: lost all rigour, sense of hierarchy and creativity. It is a society that ‘no longer has the strength to excrete’ (WP32) This society has chosen comfort, tolerance, equality, humanitarianism and Truth with a capital "T". The affirmation of these values, based largely on Christian compassion, breeds ill-health and decadence. The decadent is one who consciously chooses that which is harmful to his vital instincts. Decay is part of a process but modernity has chosen to deny the process. Decay is rejected and masked by critical socialist labels like “oppression”. Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “God is dead” signals both a predicament and an opportunity. Firstly, the unsustainability of the worldview and values that had underpinned the West for almost 2, 000 years. The Christian worldview collapses internally from the critique of science and a new realism. The demise of religious faith allows contemporary society to unburden itself of the decadent Christian morality that still constrains and deforms its human potentials. Man is a value creating animal, needs horizons and unconditional beliefs to provide meaning. This atmosphere had formerly been supplied by religion and Christian philosophical synthesis but this was no longer believeable.

4. Nietzsche endorses Hegel’s account of the triumph of reason. The Reformation emancipates individual conscience only to see this turn into religious doubt. But, unlike Hegel, this does not produce a new secular culture of reason and freedom. This decline creates an ideological vacuum that cannot be retrieved by the values of the enlightenment. These are also dogmas. They turn out to be illusions born not out of truth but out of fear of meaninglessness. The task before modern man is the question of whether humans can face this fear and live without illusions, or at least with the recognition that these meaningful frameworks are only their own creations. Thus the project of enlightenment turns out not to be opposed to Christianity. Both science and religion are forms of ascetic values that require too much instinctual repression and the subordination of life to life-denying values. Nietzsche calls the contemporary cultural condition of exhaustion and meaninglessness: nihilism. This is caused by the demise of hierarchical societies that were inexhaustible, creative and did not require metaphysical values. Modernity transfers its faith to reason but nihilism means too much faith in reason. This encourages us to seek after coherence, unity, a goal and meaning at the expense of vital instincts. But when this quest bears no fruit we become listless and discouraged. This leads to disorientation, weariness and indifference. We are no longer the centre of things but nor can we abide our own necessary egotism which Christian morality has taught us to disgust. We also come to realise the shabby origins of our own decadent highest values. However, nihilism also has a potentially positive side; maybe it is a sign of strength, self-control, a capacity to live without illusions. The 19th century is more realistic, honest, vulgar and animalistic. It may be able to overcome the fear that arises from the recognition of natural inequality, order of rank and instinctual barbarism that is all too human and an inseparable constituent of all civilisatory achievement.

5. Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity does not accuse it of being a system of false beliefs. All religions and philosophies are the same. Frameworks of illusion required in order to live. ‘Truth is a type of error without which a particular type of living being could not exist’ (WP para 493). The Socratic-Christian worldview created the illusion of a true world and end for man-this spiritualised and suppressed meaninglessness. For Nietzsche, this “truth” is just an agreement reached about what lies were to be counted as true. Christianity is not the truth but a “necessary” lie; just another framework of illusions to render the suffering of the masses meaningful and deliver power to the priests. However, in modernity this quest for transcendental truth has gone too far. The denial and asceticism integral to the Christian worldview is taken over into the Enlightenment ideals of knowledge and science. Christianity seeks truth in transcendence but the quest for truth ultimately displaces the very idea of transcendence and with it the rest of the Christian edifice. Nietzsche does not judge in terms of truth or falsity, goodness or evil. His test of an adequate philosophy turns on whether it can be lived. Absolute values do not exist. All we have are fictions useful or not in the struggle of life. Truths enable us to act in a chaotic world. But they should not become idols nor be mistaken for reality. The “will to truth” should serve not truth but life. Not surprisingly, Nietzsche has often been interpreted as a relativist. Yet, he clearly thinks that insight into what actually serves life is a “truth” transcending the frameworks of illusion. This is a tension that points to other tensions