"Justice" in this sense is missing from the "kind of state of character" Marx claims constitutes capitalist individuality. The latter is characterized by what Aristotle defines as "injustice," i.e. it is "that state which makes them act unjustly and wish for what is unjust." So the capitalist's relation to the wage-labourer is "unjust" in this sense. ******************************* MB)
Well said, Ted. A capitalist's freedom is a wage-labourer's unfreedom. The employer's freedom is synonymous with the employer's *power over* the hired, the wage-slaves. To paraphrase Malcolm X, there are house wage-slaves and field wage-slaves, still the *power over* the producers is the basis on which the social relations of class society rest. It is political power. *************************************
Kaufmann then, Ted:
"While Nietzsche's repudiation of hedonism is emphatic, he himself may be called a proponent of the Good Life. His earlier philosophy had put him into the inconsistent position of exhorting man that he 'ought' to live such a life. His conception of the will to power enables him now to say that the man who lives such a life is the powerful man, while the man who does not is weak - and if only he had the strength, he would live the Good Life, for it is what he, too, desires ultimately."
Nietzsche claims the psychological source of the inappropriate moralistic "ought" is unmastered instinctive sadism.
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One key to Nietzsche passes through the Marquis de Sade, at least that's my opinion. I think Nietzsche had familiarized himself with de Sade's works and philosophy of Nature. What the divine Marquis revealed through his take on the TRUTH was an underlying tendency on the part of humans to dominate, usually referred to as sadism when connected to de Sade's name and work, although de Sade would say that this tendency is part and parcel of humanity's connection to the other animals within Nature. The repression of these "natural" instincts was an abomination to de Sade and that was what the citizens of the French Revolution needed to understand, if they were to throw off the chains of Christianity and the Ancien Regime. Clericalism was a lie! Embrace de Sade's "Nature".
Freud would say that civilization itself was largely built on repression brought on through the development of the civilizing behaviour of societal organization.
What I think Nietzsche was getting at was the need for human beings to actually have an ego, in the Freudian sense, to repress the nihilism of the id, which in turn would mean the repression/mastery of sadistic tendencies. At the same time, he argued for the recognition and response to instinct within the human order.
Communists like Marx would argue that many of humanity's cruelest acts are products of societies with people brought up, socialized, if you will, within systems of class domination and brutality. What Freud proposed was to adjust to these societies and accept them as "the best of all possible civilizations"--stop being discontented. What Marx argued was that if we really wanted to live as freely as our productive capabilities promised, we should overthrow class society and create a classless one, where we wouldn't be obliged to suppress the socialization of sadism anymore. The producers should become the masters of their own social relations.
Mike B)
"The peculiar character of the Social Democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into a harmony."
Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1346
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