[lbo-talk] Nietzsche, Marx, morality and power

[ravi]

On 9 Jun, 2007, at 12:31 AM, Eubulides wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "ravi" <ravi at platosbeard.org>
>
> Not at all being disrespectful my friend, but I suspect a good chunk
> of leftists outside the U.S would find the last paragraph any where
> from amusing to incomprehensible. That politics is a power struggle
> is obvious. But moral struggles aren't [necessarily] about politics.
> If leftism is (as I have claimed earlier) the attempt of the
> improbable ideal, in the same vein as life, etc, then morality is the
> non-deterministic(*) wedge, the diagonal slash if you will, that
> makes life, leftism and all that milk and honey possible. If we are
> to resist falling prey to reading Nietzsche as cliches then the same
> is appropriate for moral leftism as well.
>
> ================
>
> If you substitute aesthetics -perhaps more precisely, a  
> physiognomic desire for
> creative effulgence in cognitive and emotive performances- for  
> morality I'll
> happily agree. As long as you don't regard my claim as a mere  
> cliche, you know,
> like the one asking us to imagine Nietzsche with good  
> digestion....Moral
> vocabularies/idioms are fetters when it comes to political  
> struggles, imo.
>

But I am not speaking here of mere vocabularies ( 1/2 ;-) ), but of a  
way of life and of action, of rejection of a sort of wilful  
ignorance. How unfettered would the world after the "seizure of power  
by the working class" be, especially if it is built on power  
politics? At least in my experience, leftists outside the US  
recognise (and quite explicitly at that) the moral foundations of the  
very possibility of [human] existence and survival, contrary to [what  
I understand as] Nietzsche's unipolar physical anthropology. And  
despite all the claims of the acolytes, it seems to me even from my  
paltry reading of Marx that he too was quite aware of this. And  
unlike the dude (WD? WK? Sorry!) I was responding to, I think that is  
to Marx's credit. I am afraid what Nietzsche offers in contrast is  
just a lot more sophisticated precursor (sophisticated especially in  
his -- IMHO -- correct identification of certain aspects of 'slave  
morality') to Rand.

	--ravi

(Little did I envisage the day when I would be defending Marx against  
Nietzsche!)