Nietzsche decried the social philosophy of the utilitarians as equivalent to pigs in a sty – passive, philistine, and ultimately concerned solely with their own contentment.
Rejecting the old morality
Nietzsche’s later Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals clarify his argument that we should break with conventional morality. Both provide a history, and a criticism, of Western morality, in which “good” is necessarily paired with its opposite, “evil”. Nietzsche believed that this form of moral thinking was at the root of all our current systems of morality, and was itself based on little more than the preferences of ancient, aristocratic orders. Starting with ancient Greece, “master” morality arose as the primary system of moral thinking, dividing the world up into the “good” and the “bad”, the “life-affirming” and the “life-denying”. The aristocratic virtues of health, strength, and wealth all fell into the good; the contrasting “slave” virtues of illness, weakness, and poverty were the bad. But in response to the morality of the masters, the slaves themselves developed their own moral system. This new slave morality took the antitheses of the master morality, and presented them as good in themselves. The values of the master morality became inverted: where the master morality praised strength, the slave morality praised weakness, and so on. This allowed slaves to live with their true position in life without being overwhelmed by self-hatred and resentment. By denying, for example, the natural inequality of people in favour of a spurious, ideal equality between slaves and masters, slave morality offered a means for slaves to think as if they were equal to their masters – when, in simple reality, they were not. Nietzsche associated this slave morality particularly with Christianity and Judaism, which he portrayed as offering illusory solutions to the problems of life. Thus Spake Zarathustra offers, in place of the toppled deities of organized religion, the figure of the “overman” (Übermensch in German). Humanity is merely a bridge between animals and the overman to come. But the overman is not a finished being, and still less the literal, biological evolution from humanity. An overman is a man who has mastered himself and can seek his own truths, remaining “faithful to the earth” and rejecting those who offer “otherworldly truths”, of whatever kind.
Nietzsche railed against the replacing of “life-affirming” virtues with “life-denying” virtues – a historical change that he blamed on the development of monotheistic religions.
Anti-political thinking
Such intense individualism has led some to suggest that Nietzsche was an anti-politician. Although political in tone, Nietzsche’s rejection of morality suggests a nihilism that had little to do with understanding how a public sphere operates. He wrote only of individuals, never of movements or organizations. He was, in this sense, “beyond Right or Left”, as French philosopher Georges Bataille argued. Yet he has come to have a deep influence on political thinkers of the Right and the Left. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, emphasized Nietzsche’s concern with the will to power. Deleuze placed the will to power as the drive to differentiate, to make all things different, and the centre of an “empirical” rejection of all transcendental or otherworldly claims about the existing world. Nietzsche became a philosopher of difference, in Deleuze’s hands, and also of resistance to constraints. Conventional morality led only to “sad passions” that “disparage life”. Nietzsche has subsequently come to occupy a critical place among post-structuralist thinkers concerned to overhaul systems of domination – including those purporting to liberate, such as Marxism.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Nietzsche was born in Prussia to strongly religious parents. After completing his studies in theology and philology, he rejected religion. At the tender age of 24, he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at Basel, where he met and befriended Richard Wagner, who was a marked influence on his early writings. His academic concerns drifted away from philology and into questions of philosophy. Nietzsche took a nihilistic position that stressed the meaninglessness of existence, but argued that Greek tragedy overcame this nihilism by affirming its meaninglessness – a theme that would recur throughout his later writings.
Beset by illness, Nietzsche resigned his teaching post in 1879 after a bout of diptheria and moved frequently around Europe, continually writing, but with limited reception. He suffered a severe mental breakdown in 1889, and died shortly after at the age of 56.
Key works
1872 The Birth of Tragedy
1883–85 Thus Spake Zarathustra
1886 Beyond Good and Evil
See also: Immanuel Kant • Jeremy Bentham • Georg Hegel • Karl Marx
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Syndicalism
FOCUS
The heroic myth
BEFORE
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish the Communist Manifesto, as revolutions sweep across Europe.
1864 The International Workingmen’s Association, the “First International”, is founded in London, uniting socialists and anarchists.
1872 A split between anarchists and socialists leads to the collapse of the First International.
AFTER
1911 Admirers of Sorel form the Cercle Proudhon group to promote anti-democratic ideas.
1919 Novelist Enrico Corradini claims Italy is a “proletarian nation”, seeking to unite Italian nationalism with syndicalism.
At the turn of the 20th century, Europe had well-developed capitalist societies. Alongside the incredible concentrations of industry and wealth that capitalism had created, a great new social force had emerged – the industrial working class. Political parties laying claim to the votes of the workers had formed, and these became stable organizations with increasing electoral significance. However, as the parties became entangled in parliamentary politics, seeking to eke out minor concessions from the system, they appeared to many radicals to be merely another prop for existing society.
Georges Sorel sought to challenge this bureaucratization in what became a unique body of work, synthesizing influences from Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and French philosopher Henri Bergson. In his major collection of essays, Reflections on Violence, he rejects objective science as simply a system of “fictions”, constructed to impose order on a reality that was inherently chaotic and irrational. He believed that to treat human society, the most chaotic of all parts of that reality, as if it were something to be rationally understood, was an insult to the power of human imagination and creativity.
"It is to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world."
Georges Sorel
The power of myth
In place of objective science and theories about society, Sorel proposes that great myths could be used to change reality. Indeed, by believing in heroic myths about themselves and about the new world to come, the masses could overthrow existing society. Parliamentary democracy had failed, since it merely provided the means for the “mediocre” new middle classes to rule over the rest of society – including those socialists now committed to parliamentary politics. Rationality and order had been substituted for freedom and action. Orthodox Marxism, too, contained the seeds of middle-class rule, in that it attempted to offer a “scientific” understanding of society in which economics determines history.
To break the hold of bourgeois rationality, a myth has to be both believed and put into action. Sorel sees violence as the means through which myths can become real. He details examples of such myths and movements – from the Christian militants of the early Church, through the French Revolution, to the revolutionary syndicalists, or trade unionists, of his own day. Syndicalism was the most militant wing of the trade union movement, rejecting political manoeuvring as a corruption of workers’ interests. The general strike – a mass stoppage of all work – was the pinnacle of syndicalist strategy, and Sorel sees it as the modern myth that will found a new society. “Heroic violence” is
to be welcomed as the ethical and necessary route to establishing the new world.
Sorel’s work is ambiguous. He rejects political classifications, and his thought does not sit easily on either the political left or right, though it has been used by both.
The miners’ strikes in the UK during the 1980s were an example of mass protests that came to be imbued with a heroic power, much in the vein of Sorel’s radical thinking.
GEORGES SOREL
Born in Cherbourg, France, and trained as an engineer, Georges Sorel retired in his 50s to study social problems. Self-taught as a social theorist, he initially identified with the “revisionist” wing of Marxism associated with Eduard Bernstein, before seeking a more radical challenge to parliamentary politics. His essays won a growing readership across the French radical left. At first, he supported revolutionary syndicalism and the foundation of the French union federation (CGT), opposed to parliamentary politics. But he became disillusioned, and turned to the far-right movement Action Francaise, believing an alliance of aristocrats and workers could overturn middle-class French society. He later denounced World War I, and supported the Bolsheviks in Russia. By the end of his life, he was ambivalent about both Bolshevism and fascism.
Key works
1908 Reflections on Violence
1908 The Illusions of Progress
1919 Matériaux d’une Thérie du Prolétariat
See also: Karl Marx • Friedrich Nietzsche • Eduard Bernstein • Vladimir Lenin • Rosa Luxemberg
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Socialism
FOCUS
Revisionism
BEFORE
1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish the Communist Manifesto.
1871 The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) adopts Marxism, voting to accept the Gotha Programme – a radical socialist manifesto.
AFTER
1917 The October Revolution overthrows the capitalist system in Russia.
1919 A communist revolution in Germany is put down.
1945 A Labour government is elected in the UK on a platform of welfare reform to create a mixed economy.
1959 The SPD formally repudiates Marxism at the Bad Godesberg Conference.
By the early 1890s, the left-wing German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had reasons for optimism. A decade of illegality from 1878 had merely strengthened its support. As the leading party of European socialism, its progress was followed by leftists across the continent, and debates within its ranks set the intellectual framework in which the movement operated. When it was legalized in 1890, the SPD looked to be set for power.
Yet there was a problem, as leading SPD member Eduard Bernstein pointed out. The party was dedicated to a socialist future and its policy was guided by Marxism. But as the party became more established, and without the pressure-cooker conditions of illegality, its day-to-day activities lacked direction. While SPD members still pronounced on the need for the transformation of society, in practice it followed a gradualist path, eking out changes through parliamentary legislation.
"In all advanced countries we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organizations."
Eduard Bernstein
Bernstein challenged this contradiction head on. From the 1890s, he argued that many of Marx’s predictions – such as the inevitable impoverishment of working people and their march towards revolution – had failed to come true. Rather, capitalism was proving to be a stable system under which minor reforms could be won, leading step by step to socialism.
Gradual change
The publication of Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism in 1899 fuelled a row within the SPD that would define the key argument for socialist thinkers over the next century. Was capitalism to be accepted, and minor improvements won – or was it to be overthrown? At the heart of this debate was an argument over what happened in workers’ heads. For Marx, the working class would lead society into socialism once it realized its potential to do so. But in reality, “class consciousness” – awareness of class – had led not to revolutionary conclusions, but to workers voting, in increasing numbers, for a party that offered piecemeal reforms within the capitalist system.
Bernstein proposed abandoning the idea that workers would come to revolutionary conclusions. Instead, socialists should examine workers’ existing beliefs about the world, and work outwards from that point. This was the first theoretically robust case for a “reformist”, or gradualist, socialism.
Orthodox Marxists responded ferociously, and Bernstein’s views were never formally adopted by the SPD in his lifetime. It was not until the Bad Godesburg conference of 1959 that the party formally renounced Marxism. Nonetheless, its actual political activity had long been following the lines Bernstein had advocated, whatever its declared intentions.
Workers in Germany have won the right to strike for better pay and conditions. Bernstein saw that the working class could win significant concessions within capitalism.
EDUARD BERNSTEIN
Bernstein became a socialist at the age of 22, joining the Marxist wing of Germany’s socialist movement. With the passing of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1878, which banned socialist organizations, he fled to Switzerland and then London. He joined other exiles including Friedrich Engels, with whom he developed a close working relationship.
Bernstein returned to Zurich to become editor of the newspaper of the newly united Social Democratic Party (SPD). After the party was legalized in 1890, he began to argue in the paper for a more moderate, “revisionist” form of socialism. He returned to Germany in 1901 and was elected a member of the Reichstag the following year. His opposition to World War I led him to break with the SPD in 1915, founding a new organization, the USPD. He was re-elected as an SPD member of parliament from 1920 to 1928.
Key works
1896–98 Problems of Socialism
1899 The Prerequisites for Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy
See also: Karl Marx • Vladimir Lenin • Rosa Luxemburg
IN CONTEXT
IDEOLOGY
Anti-imperialism
FOCUS
United States interference
BEFORE
1492 Partly financed by Spain, Christopher Columbus explores the New World.
1803 Venezuela is the first Latin American country to revolt against Spanish rule.
AFTER
1902 Cuba gains formal independence from the US, which retains the Guantánamo Bay naval base.
1959 Cuban dictator General Batista is ousted by Fidel Castro’s 26 July Movement.
1973 Chile’s elected ruler, Salvador Allende, is overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, and replaced by a military dictatorship or junta. By the 1980, juntas have seized control across Latin America.
By the 19th century, Spain and Portugal’s ability to defend their colonial possessions had weakened. The examples of the French and American Revolutions helped to promote a succession of uprisings throughout colonial Latin America against rule from Europe. By the 1830s, most of these colonies had achieved formal independence. Only Puerto Rico and Cuba remained under direct rule.
José Martí became one of the leaders of the Cuban struggle for independence. But as the fight against the Spanish empire wore on, through a series of uprisings and wars in the second half of the 19th century, Martí became keenly aware of a far bigger threat to the sovereignty of Latin America.
"Rights are to be taken, not requested; seized, not begged for."
José Martí
To the north, the United States had waged its own battle for independence when the Thirteen States declared their freedom from colonial rule in 1776 and won the American War of Independence by 1783. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, the unified republic controlled much of the northern continent, and was looking outwards. In the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, US president James Monroe had affirmed that the United States would remain opposed to European colonialism and would treat any further
efforts by the Old World to extend or establish colonies in the Americas as an act of aggression. Critically, the Monroe Doctrine identified both North and South America as falling under the protection of the United States.
A new colonial power
Latin American revolutionaries at first greeted the Monroe Doctrine with enthusiasm. The Venezuelan leader, Simón Bolívar, believed initially they now had a powerful ally in their fight for freedom. But as it consolidated its power, the US increasingly used the Doctrine to assert its control over its own “sphere of influence”.
Towards the end of his life, Martí argued for a common Latin American response in defence of their hard-won liberties. He saw a threat to democracy in the form of a new, potentially colonial power to the north. In doing so, he helped articulate a common theme of Latin American anti-imperialism for the next century or more: that the US would pursue its own economic and political interests, whatever the impact on Latin America.
Martí died in 1895. Three years later, the US won control of Cuba from Spain. Since World War II, the US has been blamed for supporting military coups and dictatorships in the region.
In 1973, Chile’s presidential palace was hit – and its socialist president Salvador Allende killed – in a military coup, one of several in Latin America that have been backed by the US.
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