Hope?

"Looking back, one may almost ask one's self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses."

(Friederich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life."

(Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction)

"The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightaway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

"A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labor, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.

"Bourgeois socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

"Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

"It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois -- for the benefit of the working class."

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it -- so high, indeed, that no fulfillment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil [in Pandora’s box].)"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Just as one might say about Revolutionary Ages that they run out of control, one can say about the Present Age that it doesn't run at all. The individual and the generation come between and stop each other; and therefore the prosecuting attorney would find it impossible to admit any fact at all, because nothing happens in this generation. From a flood of indications one might think that either something extraordinary happened or something extraordinary was just about to happen. But one will have thought wrong, for indications are the only thing the present age achieves, and its skill and virtuosity entirely consist in building magical illusions; its momentary enthusiasms which use some projected change in the forms of things as an escape for actually changing the forms of things, are the highest in the scale of cleverness and the negative use of that strength which is the passionate and creating energy during Revolutionary Ages. Eventually, this present age tires of its chimerical attempts until it declines back into indolence. Its condition is like one who has just fallen asleep in the morning: first, great dreams, then laziness, and then a witty or clever reason for staying in bed."

(Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age)

The Bourgeois and Christianity

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

(Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"Every enhancement in the type 'man' up to this point has been the work of an aristocratic society — and that’s how it will always be, over and over again: a society which believes in a long scale of rank ordering and differences in worth between man and man and which, in some sense or other, requires slavery."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"... 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."

"Now, one can in fact overcome the contradiction of a given existence only by transforming modifying given existence, by transforming it through Action. But in the Slave's case, to transform existence is, again, to fight against the Master. Now, he does not want to do this. He tries, therefore, to justify by a new ideology this contradiction in skeptical existence, which is, all things considered, the Stoic -- i.e. slavish -- contradiction between the idea or the ideal of Freedom and the reality of Slavery. And this third and last Slave's-ideology is the Christian ideology."

"Without Fighting, without effort, therefore, the Christian realizes the Slave's ideal: he obtains -- in and through (or for) God equality with the Master: inequality is but a mirage, like everything in this World of the senses in which Slavery and Mastery hold sway."

"Indeed, the Christian Slave can affirm his equality with the Master only by accepting the existence of an 'other world' and a transcendent God. Now, this God is necessarily a Master, and an absolute Master."

"[With adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire] we have found the solution to the problem that interests us: the Masters have accepted the ideology of their Slaves; the pagan Man of Mastery has become the Christian Man of Slavery; and all this without a Fight, without a Revolution properly so-called-because the Masters themselves have become Slaves. Or, more precisely, pseudo-Slaves, or, if you will, pseudo-Masters. For they are no longer real Masters, since they no longer risk their lives; but they are not real Slaves either, because they do not work in the service of another. They are, so to speak, Slaves without Masters, pseudo-Slaves. And by ceasing to be true Masters, they end in no longer having real Slaves: they free them, and thus the slaves themselves become slaves without Masters, pseudo-Masters. Therefore, the opposition of Mastery and Slavery is overcome. Not, however, because the Slaves have become true Masters. The unification is effected in pseudo-Mastery, which is--in fact--a pseudo-Slavery, a Slavery without Masters."

"This Slave without a Master, this Master without a Slave, is what Hegel calls the Bourgeois, the private property-owner. It is by becoming a private property-owner that the Greek Master, a citizen of the city, becomes the peaceful Roman Bourgeois, a subject of the Emperor, who himself is but a Bourgeois, a private property-owner, whose Empire is his patrimony. And it is also in relation to private property that the freeing of the slaves is carried out; they become property-owners, Bourgeois, like their ex-masters."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,-- overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,--this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!--This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things--the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption--against Christians. . . . These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality--this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all 'souls,' step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all that sort of thing became master of Rome..."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"...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.). However that may be, bourgeois existence presupposes, engenders, and nourishes Abnegation. Now it is precisely this Abnegation that reflects itself in the dualistic Christian ideology, while providing it with a new, specific, nonpagan content. It is the same Christian dualism that is found again in bourgeois existence: the opposition between the "legal Person," the private Property-owner, and the man of flesh and blood; the existence of an deal, transcendent World, represented in reality by Money, Capital, to which Man is supposed to devote his Actions, to sacrifice his sensual, biological Desires."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"And the same is true for nihilistic Skepticism: private property is its real basis and its social, historical reality. The nihilistic skepticism of the solipsistic Slave, who attributes a true value and a true being only to himself, is found again in the private property-owner, who subordinates everything, the State itself, to the absolute value of his own property."

(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)

"A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all."

(Gilles Deleuze, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium")

"Suppose the oppressed, depressed, suffering, and unfree people, those ignorant of themselves and tired out, suppose they moralize: what will be the common feature of their moral estimates of value?... those characteristics will be pulled forward and flooded with light which serve to mitigate existence for those who suffer: here respect is given to pity, to the obliging hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness — for these are here the most useful characteristics and almost the only means to endure the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

"It seems difficult for a philosophy of force or of the will to explain how the reactive forces, how the slaves, or the weak can win. If all that happens is that together they form a force greater than of the strong, it is hard to see what has changed and what a qualitative evaluation is based on. But in fact, the weak, the slaves, triumph not by adding up their forces but by subtracting those of the other: they separate the strong from what they can do. They triumph not because of the composition of their power but because of the power of their contagion. They bring about a becoming-reactive of all forces. That is what 'degeneration' means. Nietzsche shows early on that the criteria of the struggle for life, of natural selection, necessarily favor the weak and the sick, the "secondary ones" (by sick is meant a life reduced to its reactive processes). This is all the more true in the case of man, where the criteria of history favor the slaves as such. It is a becoming-sick of all life, a becoming slave of all men, that constitutes the victory of nihilism. We must again avoid misconceptions about the Nietzschean terms 'strong' and 'weak,' 'master' and 'slave': it is clear that the slave doesn't stop being a slave when he gets power, nor do the weak cease to be weak. Even when they win, reactive forces are still reactive. In everything, according to Nietzssche, what is at stake is a qualitative typology: a question of baseness and nobility. Our masters are slaves that have triumphed in a universal becoming-slave: European man, domesticated man, the buffoon. Nietzsche describes modern states as ant colonies, were the leaders and the powerful win through their baseness, through the contagion of this baseness and this buffoonery. What ever the complexity of Nietzsche's work, the reader can easily guess which category (that is, in which type) he would have placed the race of 'masters' conceived by the Nazis. When nihilism triumphs, then and only then does the will to power stop meaning 'to create' and start to signify instead 'to want power,' 'to want to dominate' (thus to attribute to oneself or to have other attribute to one established values: money, honors, power, and so on). Yet that kind of will to power is precisely that of the slave; it is the way in which the slave or the impotent concieves of power, the idea he has of it and that he applies when he triumphs. It can happen that a sick person says, Oh! if I were well, I would do this or that -- and maybe he will, but his plans and his thoughts are still those of a sick person, only a sick person. The same goes for the slave and his conception of mastery or power. The same goes for the reactive man and his conception of action. Values and evaluations are always being reversed, things are always seen from a petty angle, images are reversed as in a bull's eye. One of Nietzsche's greatest sayings is: 'We must always protect the strong from the weak.'"

(Gilles Deleuze, "Nietzsche", Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life)

"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)

"Let us not under-estimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a 'transvaluation of all values,' a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of 'true' and 'not true.' The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods."

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist)

"Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy."

"By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order. By demanding the negation of private property, the proletariat merely raises to the rank of a principle of society what society has raised to the rank of its principle, what is already incorporated in it as the negative result of society without its own participation. The proletarian then finds himself possessing the same right in regard to the world which is coming into being as the German king in regard to the world which has come into being when he calls the people his people, as he calls the horse his horse. By declaring the people his private property, the king merely proclaims that the private owner is king."

(Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

"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 Manuscripts)

"The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

Making the Modern American Proletariat

"Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, grappled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers."

(Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1)

"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers."

(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)

"A 2006 study by the department’s National Center for Education Statistics followed federal loan borrowers for 10 years, ending in 2003-4, and found that nearly 10 percent defaulted. (The average debt among the two-thirds of 2003-4 college graduates who use loans is about $20,000, according to the College Board.) And with more students borrowing, more students are potentially at risk."
"Garrett Mockler filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2004, after months of struggling to make payments on credit cards as well as on $40,000 in student loans. He was working multiple jobs as a teacher, dancer and choreographer in Los Angeles after earning a Master of Fine Arts in 2003."
"His lenders wanted more than $400 a month on top of credit card debt, Mr. Mockler said. 'All my bills started piling up,' he said. 'It was either pay one bill or pay another or not eat or not have a roof over my head.'"

(From "That Student Loan, So Hard to Shake", NY Times 8/24/08)

"...the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission."

(Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

"...[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)

"A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all."

(Gilles Deleuze, "Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium")

"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..."

(Karl Marx, The German Ideology)

Notes on the World Historical Individual: Cartesian Subjects / Proletariat / Overmen

"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)

"...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)