"Yet where arises the urgent cry for the overman? Why does prior humanity no longer suffice? Because Nietzsche recognizes the historic moment in which man takes it on himself to assume dominion over the earth as a whole. Nietzsche is the first thinker [ignoring Marx's entire critical project] to pose the decisive question concerning the phase of world history that is emerging only now, the first to think the question through in its metaphysical implications. The question asks: is man in his essence heretofore prepared to assume dominion over the earth? If not, what must happen with prior humanity in order that it may 'subjugate' the earth and thus fulfill the prophecy of an old testament. Must not prior man be conducted beyond himself, over his prior self, in order to meet this challenge? If so, then the 'over-man' properly thought, cannot be the product of an unbridled and degenerate fantasy that is plunging head long into the void. We can just as little uncover the nature of the over-man historically by virtue of the modern age. We do not seek the essential figure of the over-man in those personalities who, as major functionaries of a shallow, misguided will to power are swept to the pinnacles of that will's sundry organizational forms."
(Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: volume 2)
"I teach you the over-man. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?"
"All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the over-man: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame."
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)
"... Man was born and History began with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of Master and Slave. That is to say that Man -- at his origin -- is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can only exist where there is Master and Slave."
"...[a] Slave without a Master, [a] Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner."
"...the Bourgeois problem seems insoluble: he must work for another and can work only for himself. Now in fact, Man manages to resolve this problem, and he resolves it once more by the bourgeois principle of private Property. The Bourgeois does not work for another. But he does not work for himself taken as a biological entity either. He works for himself taken as a "legal person," as a private Property-owner: he works for Property taken as such--i.e., Property that has now become money; he works for Capital."
"In other words, the bourgeois Worker presupposes--and conditions--an Enstagung, and Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private Property, of Capital, which--while being the Property-owners own product--becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference however, that enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)"
(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)
(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)
"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world-historical' existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.'
"...Capital, though organizing the world can never go beyond its own limit."
(Kojin Karatani, Transcritique)
"The thesis [Man] and antitheses [Capital] and their proofs therefore represent nothing but the opposite assertions, that a limit is, and that the limit is equally only a sublated one; that the limit has a beyond with which however it stands in relation, and beyond which it must pass, but in doing so there arises another limit, which is no limit. The solution of these antinomies ... is transcendental, that is."
(Hegel, Science of Logic)
"This 'alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an 'intolerable' power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity 'propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the 'propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers – the utterly precarious position of labour – power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life – presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world-historical' existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.'
(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)
"Marx’s definition of the proletariat as Subjektivitaet (substanceless subjectivity) recovers, as many present day thinkers do not, the meaning of the subject in the Greek term hypokeimenon. ... Marx doesn’t mean that the subject is ‘substanceless’ in the same way that idealist notions of the ‘self’ are substanceless (i.e. cut off from the original greek meaning of the term and based upon reflection), nor that the subject is foundationless per se (as anti-Aristotelian notions of the subject would have it). It plays instead on a double meaning of the word as not only ‘substanceless’ in the political sense (i.e. the proletariat is united in a set of egalitarian economic aims and not selfish individual ‘interests’) but also in the sense of without (possessing) substance, i.e. without property..."
(Nina Power, Philosophy's Subjects)
"The workers shall live one day as the bourgeoisie do now -- but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: thus poorer and simpler but in possession of power."
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power)
"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)
