Marx said in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." In short, it is the right of masters to create values, and in fact they do.
A Nietzschean Marxist would be an oxymoron only if one were to adopt all ideas of Marx (such as the idea of history as progress) and Nietzsche (such as support for biologism and opposition to democracy) at the same time, but there is no reason to do so.
On 6/11/07, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> In fact, this has always been a political rather than a moral question for
> leaders of popular uprisings. In most cases, they have responded to rather
> than manufactured mass demands for retribution against the the old regime -
> Stuarts, Bourbons, Romanovs, Chinese landlords, Batistianos, etc. This
> widespread popular sentiment that justice be done has also corresponded to
> the cold political calculation at the top that the best way to thwart a
> counter-revolution is to swiftly deprive it of its symbols and apparatus.
It is very much possible that it is when the dominant ideology of justice changes from retribution to prevention and rehabilitation, with retribution becoming a residual ideology stirred up only to support the dominant ideology, that prisons become enormous and surveillance ubiquitous.
On 6/11/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Retribution is _so_ backward looking.
Walter Benjamin said that revolution is backward-looking and social democracy is forward-looking. I think he's right.
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself
is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears
as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes
the task of liberation in the name of generations of the
downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence
in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to
Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed
virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been
the rallying sound that had reverberated through the
preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign
to the working class the role of the redeemer of future
generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest
strength. This training made the working class forget both
its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished
by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of
liberated grandchildren.
That said, torturers cannot be dealt with in the framework of retribution. At the end of a rightly criticized essay, Ward Churchill wrote: "No matter what its eventual fate, America will have gotten off very, very cheap. The full measure of its guilt can never be fully balanced or atoned for" ("'Some People Push Back': On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," <http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html>). Substitute the ruling class of America for "America" here, and it makes sense. Some debt is just too big to be ever repaid. -- Yoshie