Marx, Nietzsche and the Workshops of History

Abstract: Marx and Nietzsche are often compared as practitioners of a hermeneutic of suspicion. I want to pursue this comparison by focusing on an overlooked similarity between the two. In strangely similar passages, Marx (in Capital) and Nietzsche (in the Genealogy of Morals) introduce explicitly theatrical scenarios into the course of their discussions, complete with what Marx calls dramatis personae, where we witness a descent into a workshop (in some sense underground) in order to learn the secrets of production - the production, in both cases, of value. But neither scenario conforms to the structure of the discovery of a concealed truth – in fact, each challenges this structure directly. By looking at the specific nature of these theatrical descents, we can come to a better understanding of the task of the philosopher in both Nietzsche and Marx, as well as the distinctive position of historical knowledge within a hermeneutics of suspicion. Marx, Nietzsche and the Workshops of History Marx and Nietzsche have often been compared, contrasted, synthesized, or placed into positions of rivalry. NOTES: I would like to thank Alistair Welchman for his inspiration, help, and encouragement in every stage of writing this piece. András Gedö provides an excellent summary of many of the attempts to combine and contrast these two thinkers; see András Gedö, “Why Marx or Nietzsche?” Nature, Society, and Thought, 11 no. 3 (1998) 331–346. Bathrick and Breines demonstrate very thoroughly the various historical reconstructions that Marx and Nietzsche both need to undergo to permit the sort of methodological rapprochement I am proposing in this paper to be possible; see David Bathrick and Paul Breines, “Marx und/oder Nietzsche: Anmerkungen zur Krise des Marxismus,” in Karl Marx und Friedrich Nietzsche: 8 Beiträge, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Athenäum-Verlag 1978): 119-135. In this paper, I want to explore a methodological rapprochement between them by focusing on an overlooked commonality. In strangely similar passages, Marx and Nietzsche introduce explicitly theatrical scenarios into the course of their discussions, complete with what Marx calls dramatis personae, where we witness a descent into a workshop (in some sense underground) in order to learn the secrets of production – the production, in both cases, of value. I am grateful to Alistair Welchman for calling my attention to the similarities between these paragraphs. By comparing these passages, I want to illuminate an important similarity in their philosophical method, and to explore the distinctive position of historical knowledge within a hermeneutics of suspicion. Marx enters his workshop at the very end of part 2 of volume 1 of Capital. It is a key moment in the text. So far he has analyzed various factors of market exchange: first the commodity form, and then money. But he runs into difficulty when he begins to analyze capital itself, money that is advanced in order to make more money – money that generates surplus-value. How is it possible for money to generate more money? An analysis of the circulation of commodities cannot account for the production of surplus value. On the market, you get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. (Of course lying, cheating and stealing are time-honored features of market transactions, but Marx discounts this and chooses to employ the simplifying assumption that the market is both free and fair. The object of his critique isn’t capitalism at its worst but capitalism at its best.) As such, “surplus-value cannot be created by circulation, and, therefore…, in its formation, something must take place in the background, which is not apparent in the circulation itself.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887): 113. See also https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf The royal road to this “background” lies in the nature of one peculiar commodity that has the unique property of being able to create value. This commodity is labor power. In the labor market, a worker will enter into a contract with an employer to exchange his or her labor power for wages. Given Marx’s assumption of a free and fair market, the worker is paid a fair wage (which Marx establishes to be a living wage). It is in the immediate aftermath of this fateful transaction between employer and employee that Marx stages his theatrical intervention as a dramatic way of leaving the marketplace and entering the workshop, the site of production, to see just how surplus value, and therefore capital itself, is generated on the basis of this exchange: Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ―No admittance except on business. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself… and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but – a hiding Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 121. Before seeing just what happens in Marx’s hidden abode of production, let us turn to Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche guides his reader into his secret workshop (“this workshop where ideals are manufactured” GM I: 14) All citations to the Genealogy of Morals (GM) and Ecce Homo (EH) in this article are from Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969). The citation to Anti-Christ (A) is from The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, trans. Judith Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1 – 67. in the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals in order to discover the mechanism of (reactive) value production. Although Nietzsche uses the term ‘ideals’ [Ideale] rather than “values” here, the terms are close enough to be used interchangeably; indeed, he explicitly describes the “manufacture of ideals” detailed in this paragraph as a “revaluation of…values” (GM I: 7) and writes that “Israel, with its vengefulness and revaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals…” (GM I: 8). He had been contrasting the two origins of the value of the ‘good’, one coming from the spontaneous, affirmative “burning eruption” (GM I: 2) of noble, healthy types, and the other from the reactive, vengeful, leveling instincts of the base types. Nietzsche’s distinctive move is to view values physiologically, as the reflection of the conditions of life (or better, thriving) for a certain sort of person. Unequal to the project of willing healthy, affirmative values, the sour grapes strategy of the reactive types is to devalue the values of the strong and to mask their own impotence as a superior choice, as restraint. It is this (mendacious, base) revaluation that Nietzsche illuminates when he stages a descent into the workshop: Would anyone like to take a look into the secret of how ideals are made on earth? Who has the courage? -- Very well! Here is a point we can see through into this dark workshop [in diese dunkle Werkstätte]. But wait a moment or two, Mr. Rash and Curious: your eyes must first get used to this false iridescent light. --- All right! Now speak! What is going on down there? Say what you see, man of the most perilous kind of inquisitiveness – now I am the one who is listening. --- -- “I see nothing, but I hear the more. There is a soft, wary, malignant muttering and whispering coming from all the corners and nooks. It seems to me one is lying; a saccharine sweetness clings to every sound. Weakness is being lied into something meritorious, no doubt of it – so it is just as you said” – (GM I: 14) Nietzsche then goes on in a similar vein, to describe the horrors Mr Rash and Curious reports back to the narrator. These two scenarios are, at first glance, fairly straightforward enactments of what, following Paul Ricoeur, has been called the hermeneutics of suspicion, which (as with Freud’s depth psychology) centrally involves delving below conscious, public surface meanings to access a superior and explanatory though hidden (and perhaps “harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian…”) truth (GM I: 1). But Ricouer’s analysis was rather conservative, formulated as a search for meanings. Marx and Nietzsche, at least, are not looking primarily at meanings when they delve beneath the surface, but instead at workshops, sites of production: they are guided not by the question of what our values mean, but how they are constructed A similar argument can certainly be made for Freud, who focuses prominently on the mechanism of the dreamwork. As Deleuze argues in Anti-Oedipus, the unconscious is not a theater but a factory. Here, Nietzsche and Marx make factories their theaters. -- the theatrical setting gives the texts the character of bearing witness to an event. In both cases at hand, the event is the shameful origin of value: of reactive values (slave morality) in the one case and of surplus value (profit) in the other. But although the hermeneutics of suspicion might be new, this theater of descent is not: the subterranean passage to hidden mysteries is a standard trope of German romanticism, which in turn certainly derived it from the conventional epic descent into the underworld. There are references distinctive to each text as well – Nietzsche almost certainly has in mind the cave from Plato’s Republic, and Marx plays on the notion that he is revealing trade secrets. He writes later in the text: “even down into the eighteenth century, the different trades were called ―mysteries (mystères); into their secrets none but those duly initiated could penetrate” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 314). (Nietzsche and Marx both refer to Dante in the course of their discussions. It is tempting to see the sign on the threshold through which Marx’s dramatis personae pass -- “No admittance except on business” (which is in English in the original) -- as a snide reference to Dante’s gates of hell. Later, when describing the manufacture of “lucifer matches” by 6 year-olds working over 12 hours a day in “workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus,” Marx writes: “Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 167).) The German romantic cavern is even a site of production: industrial production in Wagner’s Nibelheim, and organic reproduction in early German romanticism, where precious stones were supposed to regenerate spontaneously from the earth. In Kaiser Oktavianus, Tieck describes the scene laid open to poetic vision: “Disclosed are the realms where gold, where ores grow, where diamonds, rubies sprout and peacefully germinate in their shells.” Quoted in Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 32. Marx and Nietzsche’s disclosures are of a very different sort, in fact a reversal (revaluation) of romantic categories. For a different view of Nietzsche and Marx in relation to different aspects of romanticism, see Günter Rohrmoser, “Metaphysik und das Ende der Emanzipation (Nietzsche – Marx),” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematicsche Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 12 no. 3 (1970): 229-266. The romantic production of value is buried because it is too wonderful – it has a magical element hidden from the prosaic mind of surface dwellers. For Marx and Nietzsche, what is fantastic is the surface manifestation – the production process is shameful and casts an unwelcome light on our lovely values, which turn out to be products of, on the one hand, ressentiment and on the other, exploitation: that is what is discovered in their workshops. The logic of the occlusion of ressentiment is strikingly similar to that of the concealment of exploitation. In both cases, the surface appearance is that of equality, and what is revealed in the depths is difference – class difference in the case of Marx, and the difference between reactive and active (physiological) types in the case of Nietzsche (lambs and birds of prey). Marx’s hermeneutic is also (momentarily) physiological, as he reads the signs of difference written on the bodies of [his characters: “we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae” as they enter the workshop. What appeared in the market place to be two free agents engaging in a free and fair exchange of wares (wages for labor power) is quickly revealed as a relationship marked by an extreme power imbalance that lays the ground for exploitation. Lacking any access to the means of production, any ownership of land or tools that would give them the right to the products of their own labor, workers have no means to sustain their lives except by putting their labor power at the disposal of someone else and getting only wages in return, i.e. no proportionate share of the value that they create. And therefore, as Marx says: “from the instant he steps into the workshop [Werkstätte], the use-value of [the worker’s] labour-power… belongs to the capitalist”. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 128. The human ability to create value has been prostituted Marx makes and defends the use of this term in this context in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. for wages of lesser value, and this disproportion between the value workers produce and the value they receive is maintained by the fact that the workers are compelled to perform surplus labor, in other words to work for longer than the time needed to produce the value equivalent to their wages; surplus value is therefore measured in time. During this time of (compulsory) surplus labor, they are producing profits not wages, and therefore enriching the capitalist rather than themselves. What looked like freedom is in fact slavery. Allen Wood gives a fine description of exploitation: “A exploits B whenever A lives off the fruits of B’s labor and is able to do so not because A makes any reciprocal contribution to social production but because the social relations in which A stands to B put A in a position to coerce B to work for A’s benefit.” See Allen Wood, Karl Marx (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981): 232. For Nietzsche too, the surface appearance, given the almost universally victorious perspective of ressentiment, is that of equality and freedom Here I am focusing Nietzsche’s analysis in GM I, sections 4 – 17, and the manner in which base valuation creates a perspective from which the human being appear to be “neutral substratum” – neither essential strong nor weak, but rather neutral, and therefore equal to all other human beings, and defined and differentiated only after the fact, by his or her free choices. I am not referring to the perspective of the English psychologists, which Nietzsche treats as historically recent. – it looks (these days) as if all men are created equal, and only subsequently define and differentiate themselves by their different moral choices. Some choose patience and restraint while others, sadly, choose brutality and self-aggrandizement. In other words, a human being appears to be a “neutral substratrum” of a subject, who is free to exhibit ‘goodness of heart,’ (which is meritorious) or the opposite (which is blameworthy), whichever they choose. Meanwhile, the dark workshop reveals that these patient men of good hearts are really “cellar rodents full of vengefulness and hatred” (GM I: 14) – i.e. ressentiment. Unable to take action, they revalue values to a make a virtue out of their own impotence, making their dejected condition seem like virtuous restraint borne out of a superior strength and principled choice; and to condemn those who fail to conform to these newly valorized weaknesses. What looked like love is in fact hate. These, then, are the secrets revealed in the dark workshops / hidden abodes of production for philosophers practiced in the art of suspicion. 2. Nietzsche, however, is quite forthcoming in admitting that the relevant conclusion can also be reached by reading Aquinas or Tertullian, or in fact “the Apocalypse of John, the most wanton of all literary outbursts that vengefulness has on its conscience” (GM I: 16). In fact, he starts quoting Tertullian immediately after the workshop episode. “How… did the Jews feel about Rome?” he proceeds to ask: “A thousand signs tell us…” (GM I: 16). That’s a lot of signs, and indeed, Nietzsche makes a clear and strong point of emphasizing not simply the ubiquity but also the legibility of these signs: the symbol of the opposition between the values of the weak and those of the strong, he writes, was “inscribed in letters legible across all human history” (GM I: 16). The secret “birth of Christianity out of the spirit of ressentiment” (EH “GM”) does not appear to be a particularly well-kept one. Christianity signed its “book of hate with the name of the disciple of love” (GM I: 16), but it does not require a revolutionary hermeneutic to tell us not to judge a book by the cover. For Marx too, the passage into the hidden abode of production had already been traversed by a team of factory inspectors, whose copious, damning, and public reports had made the conditions of industrial production a matter of public disgrace years before Marx wrote Capital. The practice of exploitation was clear enough, but so in fact was the theory, by Marx’s own account: after citing the factory inspectors’ observations concerning the tug-of-war over break time in factories, Marx notes that “it is evident that in this atmosphere the formation of surplus value by surplus labour, is no secret” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 164. -- and this very much includes the observation that surplus labor is measured by time: “‘moments are the elements of profit’” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 165. as Marx quotes the factory inspectors paraphrasing an industrialist. Marx later cites a Ricardian who does not “for a moment conceal the fact that the appropriation of unpaid labour is the secret of surplus value.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 413. The secret, oddly, is an unconcealed one. And the lack of mystery deepens, in Marx’s case at least – another open secret underlies this one. As I mentioned above, the surface appearance of equality between the buyer and seller of labor power concealed a profound class difference: the buyer of labor power is also in (exclusive) possession of the means of production, the workers have only their labor power to sell, and cannot enjoy any part of the profits their labor (alone) has created. The story of the origins of this inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, the true origin of capitalism, is what Marx famously calls the “the secret of primitive accumulation”. Here is the secret: the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand [the surface], as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 501. The bourgeois theorists, in their triumphalist historical narratives of liberation and private property, fail to note the expropriation of the peasant farmers from the land, precisely the historical event that defines the proletariat as a class (the key to class difference). But again we have a paradox; a secret that is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” is about as private as one “inscribed in letters legible across all human history.” Additionally, the blindness of bourgeois theorists on this issue is only rendered worse by Marx’s observation (chapter 33) that in the colonies, the process of primitive accumulation is not historical fact but current event: “The only thing that interests us [about the colonies] is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the labourer.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 541. These are the closing words of volume 1. Here, the very same secret that was written in letters of blood and fire is now also proclaimed on the housetops. Similarly for Nietzsche, the struggle between active and reactive values is still present: “there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided.” As with Marx the (already) open secrets of the past are contemporary elsewhere. The drama of the workshop presents a puzzle: after the elaborate performance of secrecy and descent, why do Marx and Nietzsche take such explicit pains to emphasize the obviousness of what they reveal? 3 It seems that the obscurity is not on the side of the object of inquiry, which is clearly not “hidden” in any conventional sense. The problem is that of the conditions of its visibility, or rather, legibility. This is a question that Louis Althusser addresses in Marx too, and in a related context. Althusser argues that classical political economists weren’t operating within a structure that would render visible the concept that Marx thinks is vital to an understanding of exploitation, and specifically the concept of labor power. (See Louis Althusser, “Part I. From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” in Reading Capital, ed. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970).) We can put Althusser’s point in the language of identity and difference I suggested above: there is a false equivalence in the notion that labor creates value and value compensates labor (wages). The bourgeois economists cannot see that they are different things, because they haven’t worked up to a notion of labor power. (And labor power, we might note, is a political category, and presupposes a history of violence.) Although Althusser poses this question very usefully, my discussion will diverge from his as to the source and motives of the “invisibility” of the specifically Marxist concepts. As such, we cannot refer the drama of descent to a conventional model of unveiling the truth, where the surface is an appearance or illusion that conceals a hidden truth, reality, or essence. Nietzsche is famously scornful of this model of philosophical inquiry, but I think it is equally inappropriate for understanding Marx: this conventional model has intellectual affinities to precisely the romantic theater of descent that Marx and Nietzsche are revaluing. We can further distance Marx and Nietzsche from this model by noting that what they discover in the dark is not some truth; In his classic essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” Foucault indicates that what is distinctive about the hermeneutic introduced by Marx and Nietzsche (and Freud) is that the sign interpreted is revealed to be nothing but a prior interpretation: “there is never, if you will, an interpretandum which is not already an interpretans” (64). More tellingly, “beginning with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, it seems to me that the sign is going to become malevolent” (65) and resist the new act of interpretive appropriation – something I will discuss further on. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: SUNY, 1990): 59-67. in Nietzsche, it is quite baldly a lie or (in keeping with the notion that what is discovered is not a representation but an act of production,) a value-laundering operation: “it seems to me one is lying”; the “black magicians” are making “whiteness, milk, and innocence of every blackness” (GM I: 14). (Topographically, Nietzsche prefers summits as a location for his “truths”.) Marx for his part discovers a startling assortment of dishonest business practices in his workshop, ranging from adulterations in bread to the falsification of a death certificate to conceal over-work as the cause of death. But again, Marx will not accuse capitalism of “cheating” – he wants to analyze it under ideal conditions. The structurally significant act of mendacity that he finds is the appropriation of surplus labor by capital, the theft of time implicit in the refusal to pay the workers the cost of 6 hours labor (fair wages) until they have performed 12 hours labor. But perhaps this is “just semantic” (as students like to say) – the “truth” that Marx and Nietzsche are concerned to disclose is the very fact that someone is lying. This would preserve the model of disclosure and only change the terms: Marx and Nietzsche disclose lies rather than truths. Still, I think there is reason to reject the whole model of disclosure. Engels’ famous anecdote from the Condition of the Working Class in England is telling in this regard: “I once went into Manchester with… a bourgeois [industrialist], and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful condition of the working-peoples quarters, and asserted that I had never seen so ill-built a city. The man listened quietly to the end, and said at the corner where we parted: "And yet there is a great deal of money made here, good morning, sir." … Every one of them [these bourgeois industrialists] is a Political Economist”. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, trans. Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (London: George Allen & Unwin, LTD), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17306/17306-h/17306-h.htm. Here is an instance of the spectacular failure of disclosure, and an indication that what I called the “blindness” of bourgeois political theorists is not a trope for ignorance. Nietzsche, for his part, begins the Anti-Christ, the text dedicated to exposing the mendacity of Christianity, by explicitly thematizing “the conditions required to understand” it, boasting that these conditions are incredibly strict: “This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them are even alive yet. Maybe they are the ones who will understand my Zarathustra. There are ears to hear some people – but how could I ever think there were ears to hear me?... The sort of predilection strength has for questions that require more courage than anyone possesses today; a courage for the forbidden; a predestination for the labyrinth” (A, P). Nietzsche expects his message to fall on deaf ears. Once again, the question is not that of the legibility of the object (or rather its audibility, as we’ve switched registers once more) but of the conditions under which it can be heard. 4. Before inquiring into these conditions I want to look more closely at the nature of the open secrets to which Marx and Nietzsche discover their age to be deaf. Returning first to Marx’s “hidden abode of production”, we can recall that Marx found difference, the class difference between the buyer and seller of labour-power, concealed beneath the mystifying equivalences of the free market. But what does this really mean? Surely it isn’t a secret, even an open one, that there are some people who need to work for wages and others with the desire and resources to hire them. What Marx discovers is class difference as a specifically historical category. Bourgeois historians see history only as the production of the same -- the liberation of the serfs and their entry into the level field of the market. They fail to see history as the production of difference -- the systematic and violent expropriation of these serfs from their only ever partial access to the means of production -- despite the fact that it is written in letters of blood and fire. What distinguishes Marx is his historical vision. In fact, he has indicated all along that history is the very specific blind spot of political economy: “Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions.... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 57, n. 34. Correspondingly, Marx is uniquely able to read economic categories – to “decipher the hieroglyphic” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 48. of the commodity form, for instance, or understand money or the act of exchange -- because he sees that they bear “the stamp of history.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 118. But the commodity with the most detailed and exhaustive historical imprint is the very one that leads Marx straight into the hidden abode of production, the commodity of labor power. The event of the sale of labor power “comprises a world’s history” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 118. – it is like a historical monad in which can be read the whole of human history, if only you have the right eyes. The weakness of this Leibnizian metaphor however is that it suggests some superior vision on the part of Marx, the historian able to decipher this hieroglyphic. But Marx certainly does not believe that he is endowed with any special insight; and he has considerable contempt for those who overlook history, as is evident in his snide remark that for political economists: “there has been history, but there is no longer any”. He is famously and crushingly contemptuous of the English failure to see the historical conditions of the act of commodity production, accusing them of using a bourgeois fantasy of individual, artisanal production in Robinson Crusoe as their anachronistic model for primitive labor. Marx writes “Even Ricardo has his stories à la Robinson. ―He makes the primitive hunter and the primitive fisher straightway, as owners of commodities, exchange fish and game in the proportion in which labour time is incorporated in these exchange values. On this occasion he commits the anachronism of making these men apply to the calculation, so far as their implements have to be taken into account, the annuity tables in current use on the London Exchange in the year 1817” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 56 n. 30) The English are deeply ahistorical thinkers, blithely importing the (deeply historically conditioned) economic forms of the present into the past. In terms of the themes we have been discussing, Marx describes the competitor bourgeois account of primitive accumulation (a grasshopper and ant story about the frugality and industriousness of the job-creators and laziness of the wage-workers) as “insipid childishness”. A very similar structure is at work in his discussion of “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”. He is (faux) astonished that anyone could believe such drivel. The elaborate litany of sarcasm and insults for which Capital is justly famous is of serious philosophical importance, signaling that if bourgeois economists are failing to take note of history, it’s not because the record isn’t glaring them in the face. In the Grundrisse (1857-61) Marx makes extensive use of the vocabulary of forgetfulness to express people’s failure to perceive the historical conditions of economic categories; this shifts almost exclusively to the simple accusation of stupidity in Capital. For a useful plea to take Marx’s rhetoric seriously, see Terrell Carver “Marx and the Politics of Sarcasm,” Socialism and Democracy 24 no. 3 (2012): 102 -118. Again, blindness is not ignorance. Nietzsche is similarly unsparing of both invective and condescension when describing “the only attempts hitherto to arrive at a history of the origin of morality,” those of the English psychologists who locate the origin of values in a forgotten equation between the good and the useful. Nietzsche calls their theories “upside down and perverse” (GM P: 4) and complains: “the historical spirit itself is lacking in them … precisely all the good spirits of history itself have left them in the lurch! As is the hallowed custom with philosophers, the thinking of all of them is by nature unhistorical; there is no doubt about that” (GM I: 2). The English account naively constructs the past on the model of the present, much like the Robinson Crusoe fantasy that Marx complains about. In this case, it is English utilitarian prejudices that are read back into primitive history. The English fail to see that notion of the good originally denoted the good themselves, the powerful with the “lordly right of giving names”, who affirmed themselves (as good) by affirming the pathos of distance that separates them from the base. Nietzsche complains about the “historical untenability” (GM I: 3) of the English hypothesis, but what fundamentally separates Nietzsche’s account from that of the English psychologists is that Nietzsche discerns difference: two (physiological) types, the noble and the base -- while the English see only one type. This is the specific factor that is missing from the English account of the history of morality: the existence of this difference and its role in the creation of value. Value for Nietzsche always involves difference; in the case of noble values it is an affirmation of difference (their difference from the base), while for base values it is a denial of difference; Gilles Deleuze has an excellent discussion of this point in his Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). the English cannot understand the emergence of value because they draw their assumptions from a post-leveled social reality: they do not think historically because they do not perceive difference. Nietzsche is absolutely lucid on this point: democracy is the enemy of history (GM I: 4): it effaces the differences without which our social reality is unintelligible. Those with a democratic prejudice cannot see that there really is a difference between the lamb and the bird of prey, the weak and the strong, and consequently, they cannot see the leveling instinct of the weak as an act of ressentiment, revenge against the strong. This level of social reality remains illegible. Nietzsche states that, unlike the English, he was about to decipher “the entire long hieroglyphic record… of the moral past of mankind” (GM P: 7). The (true) historian is the reader of difference. Both Marx and Nietzsche describe the historian’s job as a deciphering of hieroglyphs Although Nietzsche also presents himself as a reader of “signposts” too – including Napoleon, who Nietzsche is (uniquely) able to read, because he sees what historical lineage Napoleon reflects (GM 1: 16). : historians don’t see more, they see differently. The historian isn’t a horizontal thinker, looking backwards along a line, but a vertical thinker, able to grasp the depths that exist within a single cultural product, reading the historical conditions in the historically conditioned. The product Nietzsche cites in GM I is language: etymology is his paradigm for historical understanding in this essay, the prompt he suggests at the conclusion for future prize essays. For Marx, the product is the commodity (which in fact he denaturalizes, i.e. historicizes, by comparing it to language “to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language” (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 48)). The historian is uniquely able to comprehend the historical conditions for this distinctive form of social production and hence understand the commodity form. 5. Let us finally return to the question of the conditions of the legibility of the secrets in the workshop, which we now see to be the specifically historical dimension of value-production. In staging their descents, Marx and Nietzsche are confronting the practical problem of how to get other people to grasp the historical dimension of value that they themselves seem uniquely able to see. The explicit theatricality of their accounts calls attention to the non-trivial nature of the task of presentation here, the difficulty of which seems compounded by the repellent nature of the scenes that they are presenting, which surpass “the worst horrors of Dante’s Inferno”, as Marx says at one point. Nietzsche goes into a particularly dramatic mode to express the horrors that he finds: first Mr. Rash and Curious and then the narrator reach the point of being overwhelmed by the oppressive mendacity of ressentiment: “enough! Enough! I can’t take any more. Bad air! Bad air!” (GM I: 14). In his excellent analysis of the passage, Christopher Janaway points to these two reasons for staging this episode in dramatic form: (1) to make the past present and (2) to elicit disquiet on the part of the reader as a productive emotion. See Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy (New York: Oxford University Press 2007): 103. My argument supports both of these claims, as well as that of Daniel Conway (“Writing in Blood: On the Prejudices of Genealogy,” Epoché 3, nos. 1–2 (1995): 154) that genealogy entails a moment of “performance”. For his part, Marx describes the hidden abode of production as not merely deeply sad but also deeply frightening, inhabited by a series of monsters. He finds that capital has a “vampire thirst for the living blood of labor”, but also a “were-wolf hunger for surplus labor.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 176. He describes machinery as a “monster” with “demon power”, Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 262. and perhaps most tellingly compares the spectacle of industrial conditions to a “Medusa head.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 7. This has the effect of making the descent into the workshop into something like a heroic one, and in the preface to the first German edition of Capital, Marx explicitly calls for a Perseus. In Mulhall’s compelling analysis of the descent into Nietzsche’s workshop of values, he illuminates the sense in which the descent is a sort of education for Mr. Rash and Curious – the narrator is actively teaching Mr. Rash how to listen to the mutterings of the cellar rodents, how to interpret their lies, and how to tolerate the oppressiveness of their mendacity. Stephen Mulhall, “Nietzsche’s Style of Address: A Response to Christopher Janaway’s Beyond Selflessness,” European Journal of Philosophy 17 no. 1 (2009): 128. By the end of the episode, Mr. Rash has exceeded his teacher, who, in a reversal of roles, is now the one begging to leave: “Enough! Enough!” Mr. Rash, and possibly the reader, is being trained up for a task: having experienced up-close and in a highly visceral fashion the deeply repellent nature of base value production, Mr. Rash (and possibly the reader) is now ready for a certain amount of “pathos of distance”. He is ready to affirm difference in the manner of the nobles, to undo the leveling tendency of the ahistorical English and to construct an “order of rank among values” (GM I: 17). This is Nietzsche’s goal in staging a descent and initiating his hero-historian. He concludes the essay: “must the ancient fire [noble values] not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More: must one not desire it with all one’s might? even will it? even promote it?’ (GM I: 17) The answer to these questions is clearly: no, one need not desire, will or promote the ancient fire; the reassertion of noble values is a project (Nietzsche’s project, has he makes clear in the remainder of the paragraph) not an inevitability, and one must be somewhat laboriously convinced to undertake this project by the history lesson in the workshop. But the lesson was a peculiar one – Nietzsche didn’t sit Mr. Rash and Curious down with his copy of Tertullian, but instead invoked feelings of horror and disgust, a sort of shock therapy. Millgram too discusses Genealogy as providing a sort of “shock treatment” for intellectuals who will not usefully register the demands Nietzsche is making by reading the text in a theoretical fashion, although Millgram does not treat the theatrical scenario from GM I: 14 as an example of this treatment as I have done. See Elijah Millgram, “Who Was Nietzsche’s Genealogist?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 no. 1 (2007): 92 – 110. Slave values have won, as Nietzsche says, and to emerge from their blinkering influence, you need to be subject to a form of deconditioning, feel them to be as oppressive at they truly are. Only then do the scales fall from your eyes and you’re finally ready to see what Tertullian is really saying. What is at stake here is something like the primacy of practice over theory; in this case, the insight that studying history is not primarily a mode of reflection but of engagement. There are too many barriers to comprehension for the uninitiated to see the historical truth, the shameful origin of base values. Nietzsche does not confront those barriers at a merely cognitive level, but affectively as well. He provokes in his initiate the very will that reactive morality is attempting to repress: the affirmation of difference. Once affirmed, the initiate can then see difference “inscribed in letters legible across all human history” -- but only then. This explains the distinctive role of section 14, the descent into the workshop, within the larger conception of GM I. Section 14 does not advance the argument of the Genealogy in terms of content (theory); rather, the sudden shift into a theatrical mode of presentation gives historical discovery the practical character of a direct encounter. Janaway argues convincingly that the function of the episode is to elicit disquiet on the part of the reader as a productive emotion. Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 103. We now get to feel what previously we had merely thought, and this enables us to see what we had previously been blind to. The same structural shift from theory to practice is clearly in effect for Marx as well, In her book on Marx, Nietzsche and Modernity, Love points to a difference between Nietzsche and Marx here – Marx believing that theory should not be separated from practice, and Nietzsche believing that it cannot be – thinking simply is willing. In this case, Nietzsche’s “promotion” of difference is only trivially similar to Marx’s praxis, since all thought promotes something or other. I would actually say the same is true for Marx, given his theory of ideology: all beliefs are pragmatic, reinforcing (Nietzsche would say ‘willing’) some power structure. See Nancy S. Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): 30. who is also famously impatient of theory for its own sake. “The point is to change” the world that philosophers are content to describe, and Marx needs to initiate his readers into this project, so they can look at industrial production and think something other than “and yet there is a great deal of money made here.” The monsters that he confronts us with are, in this regard, very carefully chosen. Vampires are nocturnal: for capitalism to be a vampire does not simply mean that it is unpleasant or parasitic (on living labor), its parasitism is linked to the prolongation of the working day – the fact that it is time that is stolen from the workers; surplus-labor is extracted by forcing people to work into the night. Werewolves are metamorphic: what seems (again, by day) like a perfectly nice employer is transformed (again, physiologically) into an insatiable monster. The Medusa myth is perhaps the most compelling. Marx wrote: “Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters!” He chides us (in the Preface to Capital) for our lack of heroism, which he here equates with an obstinate blindness with respect to the conditions of industrial production. This blindness is magical, not rational, a wishing-away of what is clearly there. In taking us into the hidden abode of production and insistently describing the categories and workings of capitalism in terms of monstrosity, he is forcing us to occupy the role of Perseus. Perhaps the notice on the threshold -- “no admittance accept on business” is prophetic – we do have business down there too. We are forced not only to see the conditions of production, but to see them as monstrous, as something-to-be-fought. The chapter in Capital that is affectively equivalent to Nietzsche’s account of Mr Rash’s descent is the chapter on the “Working Day”, where Marx drops the theoretical orientation that has characterized his analysis so far and wracks up example after historical example of the complete and utter depredation of factory work, a description of the world of industrial production as a hell: it is impossible to read it without emotion and rage. (The heroic vocabulary is misleading on one account: capitalism will decline not because of any individual or collective “will” but due to laws “working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 6. In this text at least, Marx leaves his audience the somewhat less glorious task of “shorten[ing] and lessen[ing] the birth-pangs” of the inevitable shift to a more stable and just mode of production.) How does this cultivation of hostile engagement impact the history lesson we receive below, our recognition (if not affirmation) of class difference as a historical category? It is vital to keep in mind that class difference is not simply a historical category; it is a revolutionary one as well. Anyone who understands the nature of capitalist production can see that it “begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation,” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 536. its “gravediggers” as Marx and Engels describe them (in less Hegelian terms) in the Communist Manifesto. From the perspective of the surface, exploitation is just as much a secret as ressentiment, because capitalist ideology is just as hegemonic as Christianity, and its myths of democracy and equality are equally effective at obscuring its shameful past. Bourgeois apologists see the squalor of industrial production as the birth pangs of capitalism, not communism – the system working out some of its unfortunate but transient implementation issues. By analyzing capitalism in its normal rather than corrupt form, and displaying it as monstrous, we are inured to this particularly effective piece of ideology. When we encounter class difference, the clash between Mr. Moneybag’s interests and those of the owner of labor power, we are able to see this for what it is, a revolutionary tension, and we can register the full horrors of “The Working Day”. Having engaged our revolutionary attention, Marx is then able to proceed to his history lesson, the secret of primitive accumulation and we find we are among the few who are able to read its letters of blood and fire. Fredric Jameson argues that Marx’s “partisan commitment” to the future provides him with the only viable sort of platform for historical investigation: see “Marxism and Historicism,” New Literary History, 11 no. 1 (1979): 43-71. For Marx as well as Nietzsche, practical engagement is the condition of legibility of history. Without this, history is a closed book. In this, I am pointing to a deeper relationship between theory and practice in both Marx and Nietzsche than that indicated by Edward Andrew in his “Note on the Unity of Theory and Practice in Marx and Nietzsche,” Political Theory 3 no.3 (1975): 305 – 316. Andrew only points to the role of practice in completing and verifying theory, while I point to its role in making the theory comprehensible in the first place. 6. On the one hand, Marx and Nietzsche couldn’t be more different on this very point. Nietzsche wants us to affirm difference, and Marx wants us to commit to helping overcome it (not to restore subjects to their equal rights as bourgeois individuals but to liberate production – both are, at the end of the day, critics of liberal democracy). Marx is fighting the illusion of “naturalism” (the myth of the natural origin of capitalism) in order to establish the point that it is a social fact – naturalistic thinking is mystifying. I’m not denying that Marx is a naturalist in other and more profound senses of the term. Nietzsche on the other hand is trying to restore precisely naturalist categories to the social sphere: we might all look alike but some of us are lambs and others are birds of prey. Marx and Nietzsche have, in many important and interesting ways, diametrically opposed views and values. However, I’m not so much interested in the content of their discussion as I am in their method, and in particular the place of historical knowledge within a hermeneutics of suspicion. Marx and Nietzsche were hardly the first Germans to confront the problem of historical interpretation. Johann Gottfried Herder is a candidate for that, and he recommended sympathy as a guiding principle for a true grasp of history: “… go into the age, into the region, into the whole of history, feel yourself into everything – only now are you on the path toward understanding an utterance.” Quoted in Frederick Beiser The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). I have tried to demonstrate that Marx and Nietzsche, in a final (for this paper) revaluation of romantic values, exploited the notion of antipathy as a hermeneutic principle: Thanks to Elizabeth Millán for calling my attention to this distinction. Of course the notion of antipathy needs to be understood carefully with respect to Nietzsche. Clearly, he does not want to fall into the sort of simplistic, spiteful reactivity characteristic of base values. At the same time, there is clearly some bite in his tendency to expose “harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth[s]” (GM I: 1). A good treatment of the precise, subtle, and non-reactive sense in which Nietzsche understands his adversarial perspective can be found in Judith Norman, “Nietzsche contra Contra: Difference and Opposition,” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 189-206. they believe that an understanding of history is conditioned by a deeply hostile attitude. In proposing a hermeneutics of antipathy, I am exploring the extent to which the historian can achieve clarity about the past while being situated in the present. As such, I reject the view developed in Mueller-Vollmer’s otherwise superb study, which sees a utopian “Unzeitgemäßheit” as a condition for critique of the present in Marx and Nietzsche. See: Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, “Unzeitgemäßheit: Zur Struktur der Utopie bei Fichte, Marx und Nietzsche”, Karl Marx und Friedrich Nietzsche : 8 Beiträge, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Athenäum-Verlag, 1978): 78 – 97. This is the point staging a descent into the workshop, not to disclose some truth, but to offend us to the point where we never see things the same again. Judith Norman Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas