[lbo-talk] Nietzsche again

[Rakesh Bhandari]

We are interpellated as or wear the masks of legal subjects who are 
said to have freedoms to transact and challenge the legality of those 
individual transactions, considered disjointedly. It's in this 
juridical superstructure that we seem to live, yet for Marx it's a 
kind of virtual reality, a dissimulation of class based 
appropriation. In other words, he overturned the Western philosophy: 
truth was to be found in the cave not in the blinding light of the 
marketplace. Capital is the red pill. The system justifies itself for 
its basis in free and fair exchanges. Marx tears away the veil of 
justice just as he shows in his theory of primitive accumulation that 
capital did not have its origins in just transactions. But such 
deconstructive critiques only means that Marx stripped capitalism 
bare so that it could be judged in terms of its historical role, 
rather than hallowed in terms of transcendent ideals. In other words, 
he did not critique capitalism because it is unjust. He said that 
because it is not just we  can open ourselves to  the prospect of a 
new society (just as our understanding of the historicity of 
capitalism so opens us). Which does not mean that capitalism does not 
have a historical justification; Marx clearly thought that it did. 
That it still does is Meghnad Desai's argument; Marx can be made a 
conservative.  At any rate, it can be seen that Marx is miles away 
from the philosophical discussion of justice by Rawls and Nozick. The 
question becomes how to compare Marx's and Nietzsche's 
deconstructions of justice. Perhaps there is no common ground? Just 
different horses in different races?

Rakesh