Freedom Above Things: Nietzsche and the Artistic Critique of Capitalism

Abstract

This article has two analytical objectives: to read Nietzsche’s thought as an instance of the ‘artistic critique of capitalism,’ as theorized by Boltanski and Chiapello; and to connect that reading to illustrative historical examples of left-wing movements on which Nietzsche’s artistic critique exerted an influence. It thus brings into question the orthodox Marxist interpretation (associated primarily with Lukács and Mehring) of Nietzsche as a reactionary apologist for imperialism and capitalism. Certainly, Nietzsche’s political philosophy is explicitly elitist and antidemocratic, and thus in no way mounts a ‘social critique’ of the inegalitarianism and exploitation characteristic of modern class society. However, Nietzsche’s opposition to industrial discipline and standardization and his championing of the struggle against generic alienations align him in a profound way with the liberatory impulse of the artistic critique.

Keywords

critical theory Nietzsche social theory capitalism Marxism

[W]e need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose our freedom above things that our ideal demands of us…. – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1974)

This article takes as its starting point the critique of Nietzsche developed by Georg Lukács in his wide-ranging polemic on German thought, The Destruction of Reason (1980). For Lukács, Nietzsche is best understood as a reactionary ideologist for capitalism and imperialism, part and parcel of a wave of irrationalist post-Hegelian German thought that would culminate in Nazism. Nietzsche’s ouevre represents an implicit assault on Marxism – implicit because it seems Nietzsche never read Marx – reflecting the unease of the ‘parasitical intelligentsia’ toward modern culture and their elitist antipathy to historical progress:

The fight against democracy and socialism, the imperialist myth and the summons to barbarous action are intended to appear as an unprecedented reversal, a ‘transvaluation of all values,’ a ‘twilight of the false gods’; and the indirect apologetics of imperialism as a demagogically effective pseudo-revolution. (Lukács, 1980: 321)

This orthodox Marxist reading of Nietzsche dates back to the work of German Social Democratic Party theoretician Franz Mehring, for whom ‘Nietzscheanism is a healthy guzzle for the literatis vulgaris, one which … provides a thrill and allows one to play a little Sturm und Drang, but … enables them under every circumstance to feast from the fleshpots of capitalism’ (quoted in Aschheim, 1992: 43–44). As historian Steven Aschheim (1992) comments, the standard Marxist line at the turn of the century considered Nietzschean thought to be a kind of pseudo-radicalism that, while indulging in ostensibly revolutionary rhetorical flourishes, failed in any significant way to critique capitalism or class society. On the contrary, for Mehring, Lukács, and others, Nietzsche’s thought explicitly sanctioned social hierarchy and domination and was therefore fundamentally reactionary.

In retrospect, this was not an entirely tendentious reading of Nietzsche. His philosophy naturalizes and justifies exploitation and domination of the many by the few, linking them to a vitalist ontology centered on the ‘will to power,’ as when he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, ‘“Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will of life’ (1966: 259). Several recent commentators have drawn upon this stream in Nietzschean thought in interrogating its specifically political ramifications.

As Mark Warren points out in Nietzsche and Political Thought (1988: 211), the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche, while clearly distorted, was not entirely a misappropriation, given the undeniable affinities between aspects of Nietzsche’s thought and Nazi ideology, most notably his vision of the mastery exercised by a cultural elite over the common herd. Similarly, Bruce Detwiler notes that Nietzche’s

talk of master races and supermen, his occasional advocacy of breeding experiments, his praise of war and destruction, his willingness to discourse on the positive value of cruelty, his professed ‘immoralism,’ his radical elitism, and his denigration of compassion and rationalism all become rather ominous when given a political cast. (1990: 2)

Lukács’ (1980: 327) emphasis on Nietzsche’s exaltation of the ancient Greek slave economy is especially relevant in light of such political interpretations. Along the same lines, the recent effort by University College London students to launch a ‘Nietzsche Club’ aroused controversy – and was even banned – because of its far right leanings, with publicity posters proclaiming, ‘Equality is a false God,’ and denouncing ‘political correctness’ (Hines, 2014).

At the same time, many commentators have pointed to the internal tensions that characterize Nietzsche’s body of work, the availability to interpreters and commentators of many contrary readings. For Karl Jaspers (1997: 10, 222), for instance, ‘self-contradiction is the fundamental ingredient in Nietzsche’s thought’; Jaspers links this to Nietzsche’s implicit anti-humanism, his critique of the notion of a ‘self-identical’ ego incapable of self-contradiction. Indeed, Nietzsche eschewed any project of systematization, and Lukács errs in reading into his work a reactionary systematicity that it lacks. Historian Seth Taylor notes the diverse appropriations arising from that very lack of systematicity: ‘[Nietzsche] was at once a materialist and an antimaterialist, at once an individualist and the prophet of the dissolution of individualism in dionysian ecstasy, at once a social activist and an aesthete frowning down on German society’ (1990: 27).

In the immediate aftermath of Nietzsche’s death, he was primarily received as a forward-looking, radical thinker rather than as a conservative or a reactionary, his work compared by conservatives to Marxism in terms of its potential threat to the existing social order. As Aschheim remarks vis-à-vis turn of the century German Nietzscheans, ‘Far from representing the reactionary … sectors of society they were characteristically emancipationist… Socialism, anarchism, feminism, the generational revolt of the young – these were all touched by the libertarian magic of Nietzsche’ (1992: 6; see also Thomas, 1983). It was the libertarian spirit in Nietzsche, then, which particularly influenced the cultural and political avant gardes of the period.

In the spirit of hermeneutic openness described by Jaspers, Taylor, and other commentators, and in light of the diverse modes of historical and theoretical reception of his work exemplified by its initial emancipationist influence, this article proposes, contra the orthodox Marxist understanding, a reading of Nietzsche as a critic of capitalism, but of a very particular kind. Nietzsche’s work falls under the category of what French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, in their book The New Spirit of Capitalism (2007), term the ‘artistic critique of capitalism.’ This category overlaps to some extent with ‘romantic anticapitalism,’ without necessarily implying the nostalgia that is central to most forms of the latter (Sayre and Löwy note, ‘The Romantic soul longs ardently to return home, and it is precisely this nostalgia for what has been lost that is at the center of the Romantic anti-capitalist vision’ [1984: 56]. Lukács [1980: 341–342] himself suggests ‘certain … affinities’ between Nietzsche and romantic anticapitalism, though he ultimately rejects an identification of the two and, moreover, fails to take account of any emancipatory potentialities of the ‘romantic’ and artistic elements in Nietzsche, which constitute the focus of the analysis below.). For Boltanski and Chiapello, unlike the social critique of capitalism, which targets inequality and exploitation, the artistic critique focuses on the ways in which the system produces soulless rationalization and alienation and thwarts autonomy and expression.

On Boltanski and Chiapello’s account, the artistic critique developed initially among 19th-century bohemians. As they write, it is

based upon a contrast between attachment and detachment, stability and mobility… On the one hand, we have the bourgeoisie, owning land, factories and women … and thereby condemned to meticulous forethought, rational management of space and time, and a quasi-obsessive pursuit of production for production’s sake. On the other hand, we have intellectuals and artists free of all attachments, [who] made the absence of production (unless it was self-production) and a culture of uncertainty into untranscendable ideals. (2007: 38)

The artistic critique, then, arose as a response to capitalist rationalization, appealing to a humanism that was seen to be threatened by the rise of industrial power and discipline. Its fundamental impulse is toward a kind of liberatory escape from the strictures that hinder the possibility of genuine creativity and expression.

In its late-19th and 20th-century development, the artistic critique drew on and combined influences ranging from Marx and Freud to Surrealism and, indeed, Nietzsche (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 170). It inspired many of the movements of the 1960s in the advanced capitalist countries, most notably the rebellion of May 1968 in France, and has been central also to the development of contemporary feminist, environmentalist, and anti-racist politics. Critics of orthodox Marxism often lean on some dimension of the artistic critique in championing the more humanist texts of the early Marx or in advocating a greater engagement on the part of Marxist theory with questions of identity, ecology, and difference (see Sim, 2013).

The remainder of this article will develop the connection between Nietzsche and the artistic critique both theoretically and historically. Theoretically, I will illustrate how Nietzsche’s thought exemplifies several key dimensions of the artistic critique. Historically, I will offer a number of instances of left-wing movements that were influenced by his artistic critique. This dual method allows a bridging of textual and ‘contextual’ analysis, approaching Nietzsche’s ideas in terms of both their ‘internal’ meanings and their ‘external’ historical effects. (By contrast, very worthy studies like Landa’s [2007], itself in sympathy with Lukács’ critique, are limited insofar as they focus largely on textual interpretation to the neglect of historical context and influence.) By way of conclusion, I will remark upon what contributions Nietzsche can offer to Marxist and critical theory.

Nietzsche and the Artistic Critique

A central dimension of the artistic critique as developed by Boltanski and Chiapello is the critique of industrial discipline: ‘the duration of work, enslavement to factory discipline, and meagre pay no longer allow for the realization of a properly human existence, which is precisely defined by self-determination and a multiplicity of practices’ (2007: 427). Such discipline reduces the subject’s spatial and temporal freedom, enclosing her in a workplace for the majority of her waking life and imposing a strict rationalization aimed at the maximization of efficiency. This aspect of the artistic critique has informed worker demands for a reduction of the working week and day, such that ‘existence could once again find expression in activities other than waged work’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 427). It was also central to the May 1968 upsurge, as students and skilled employees in particular increasingly resisted the imposition of Fordist discipline in the workplace.

This line of critique resonates with the Nietzschean critique of work, as discussed by Michael Roberts (2016). Nietzsche described industrial work as a form of enslavement, denouncing it in aphorism 18 of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals as ‘[m]echanical activity and what goes with it – such an absolute regularity, punctilious and unthinking obedience, a mode of life fixed once and for all, fully occupied time’ (1989: 134). One would be hard pressed to distinguish this passage in any significant way from the account of ‘estranged labor’ found in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, e.g., ‘labor is external to the worker … he does not affirm himself but denies himself … does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind’ (1988: 72). Roberts points to similar passages in The Gay Science, Twilight of the Idols, Daybreak, and other texts, noting that, for Nietzsche, ‘an ample amount of free time is the principal condition for the good life, because leisure makes possible the cultivation of the human being through the pursuit of aesthetic activity’ (2016: 3). Thus Nietzsche advocates a distance from economic production and its rationalizing imperatives, and values in its stead the free enjoyment of aesthetic activity.

The second aspect of the artistic critique of interest here is the critique of standardization or massification, by which Boltanski and Chiapello mean the ‘loss of difference between entities, whether these are objects or human beings’ (2007: 439). This encompasses an opposition to both industrial mechanization, with its rationalizing rhythms and mass production of identical goods, and to the massification of increasingly conformist human beings, who are in turn more and more vulnerable to elite control and manipulation. Per the artistic critique, mass production makes for the following: ‘The lack of difference concerns the proliferating objects that fill the lived world: cotton fabrics, furniture, knick-knacks, cars, household appliances, and so on … In another respect, however, each is utterly identical to all the others in the same series’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 439). The corollary to this is human massification, through the routines both of production and consumption. With respect to consumption, effective marketing amounts to the colonization of individual desire: ‘my desire for some particular object and someone else’s desire for an identical object belonging to the same series’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 439). With respect to production, individual human workers are utterly replaceable, especially on the Taylorist assembly line.

The logic extends to other domains of social life: the interchangeability of infantry fighters in mass warfare; the disappearance of the individual within the democratic crowd; the loss of the capacity for free thought on the part of the totalitarian subject; and the indoctrination by media of the passive consumer. The key Frankfurt School treatises, Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man, place front and center this dimension of the artistic critique (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 441). In the former, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 136) condemn the obliteration of difference by the late capitalist culture industry: ‘The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction.’ In the latter, Marcuse (2002) diagnoses the late capitalist absorption of previously radical social forces, presenting an ‘opposition between a free consciousness, capable of knowing its own desires, and the man of “advanced industrial civilization,” “cretinized” and “standardized” by mass production and “comfort,” rendered incapable of acceding to the immediate experience of the world, wholly subject to needs manipulated by others’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 441).

This aspect of the artistic critique contrasts a tragic authenticity with the inauthenticity of a life characterized by seriality and conformism:

On the one hand, then, we have the human being who, accepting her ‘facticity’ and ‘contingency,’ courageously faces up to the ‘anxiety’ of ‘being for herself’ … On the other hand, we have the one who, fleeing anxiety by becoming submerged in everyday ‘banality,’ takes refuge in ‘chatter,’ as a debasement of speech, and allows herself to be entirely determined by others. (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 440)

As is clear, many of the philosophical reference points in Boltanski and Chiapello’s account of the artistic critique are bound up with the existential thematics of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger.

Nietzsche’s critique of mass culture is especially relevant with regard to these questions of standardization and massification (see Kellner, 1999). Nietzsche viewed the state as a ‘cold monster’ securing its domination over the people with the help of the press. In the section ‘On the New Idol’ of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche advocates a withdrawal from the state and mass society: ‘Their idol smells foul to me, the cold monster… Smash the windows instead and leap into the open! … where the state ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous’ (2006: 36) As Kellner (1999) remarks, ‘mass politics led to herd conformity, the loss of individuality, and mass manipulation and homogenization.’ Analogously, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity was precisely that it was bound up with the logic of massification, inculcating in its subjects a ‘slave morality’ that deprived them of the capacity for free action and expression. In aphorism 235 of Human, All Too Human, he claims that Jesus Christ ‘promoted the stupidifying of man, placed himself on the side of the poor in spirit and retarded the production of the supreme intellect’ (1996: 112). Ultimately, for Nietzsche (1989), the Judeo-Christian tradition exalts the lowly, weak, and common, at the expense of the noble and powerful few.

More broadly, mass culture exercises a homogenizing influence, sapping people of energy, creativity, and individuality. Kellner (1999) highlights the specifically vitalist aspect of this analysis, noting that Nietzsche’s ‘assault on religion, morality, mass culture, and the banality of modern societies is thus unleashed from the standpoint of an ideal of the free and uninhibited flow of life energies, an unrestrained expression of instinctual powers.’ Those few who do retain their expressive and instinctual vitality are analogous to the figure in Boltanski and Chiapello who boldly accepts his agency in the face of the radical contingency and groundlessness of existence.

The members of the herd, on the other hand, are those caught up in banality, chatter, completely determined by the social structures that surround them. Nietzsche’s term for this figure of conformity is the Last Man: ‘No shepherd and one herd! Each wants the same, each is the same, and whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the insane asylum’ (2006: 10).

So what of the response to industrial discipline and the loss of difference? Here Boltanski and Chiapello develop the most important feature of the artistic critique, namely the overarching struggle against what they term ‘generic alienations.’ ‘Specific alienations’ refer to oppression or disadvantage inflicted on a particular social category: ‘these are specific to a group or category unjustly suffering oppression which other groups do not suffer’ (2007: 433). Some straightforward examples include the exploitation of labor by capital, the oppression of marginalized racial groups by privileged ones, and the domination of women by men.

The struggle against generic alienations refers, by contrast, to

emancipation from all forms of necessity, whether these derive from settlement in a social environment stabilized by conventions (e.g. membership of a nation), or are inherent in inscription in an objective world (ties of filiation, type of work performed presupposing a specific skill), or the possession of a particular body (impossibility of being everywhere at once, age- or sex-related determinations). (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: 433)

The distinction calls forth association with Camus’ definition of ‘metaphysical rebellion’ in The Rebel: ‘The slave protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man’ (1991: 23). Boltanski and Chiapello include in this category the valorization of uncertainty; the cultivation of a multiplicity of identities; and the call for a freedom from endowments, debts, or life plans derived from or imposed by others:

Viewed thus, liberation is predominantly conceived as setting free the oppressed desire to be someone else … to be who one wants to be, when one wants it. This leaves open the possibility of a multiplicity of identifications adopted in the way one adopts a look and, consequently, of escaping identitarian affiliation to a nation, region, ethnicity, and especially … the family. (2007: 434)

The struggle against generic alienations amounts to the demand for a total liberation that resonates deeply with Nietzsche’s call for unbounded creative proliferation. As he declares in aphorism 107 of The Gay Science, ‘we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose our freedom above things that our ideal demands of us…’ (1974: 164). The notion of ‘freedom above things’ is especially important here – it suggests a project of liberation from all forms of external determination. As Kellner (1999) comments, Nietzsche’s ‘free individual’ must be liberated from ‘societal determinism’ in all of its forms, including ‘morality, religion, and society and free to fully develop one’s own potentialities.’ Aesthetic creation is crucial insofar as art, per aphorism 853 of The Will to Power, is the ‘real task of life’: ‘Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 452).

Moreover, the anti-humanist dimension of Nietzsche precisely points to the opening up of the subject toward Boltanski and Chiapello’s ‘multiplicity of identifications.’ According to aphorism 490 of The Will to Power, ‘The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? … My hypotheses: (sic) The subject as multiplicity’ (1968: 270). Similarly, in Ecce Homo (1989), he refers to the multiplicity of his philosophical and discursive styles, a la the ‘self-contradiction’ pointed to by Jaspers; as Sooväli (2015: 437) comments, ‘the whole of Nietzsche’s work – that is, his different styles, voices, philosophical perspectives etc – testifies to the irreducible multiplicity of the subject.’

Ultimately, Nietzsche counterposes to the Last Man the figure of the self-creating ‘sovereign individual’ (1989); per aphorism 335 of The Gay Science, ‘We … want to become those we are -human beings who are new. unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’ (1974: 266). Such a figure aims, precisely, at emancipation from all forms of external necessity.

Historical Reference Points: Nietzsche’s Influence on Radical Critics of Capitalism

Having noted these precise affinities between Nietzsche and features of the artistic critique as articulated by Boltanski and Chiapello, I now move on to illustrate the historical influence of these aspects of Nietzsche’s critique on the diverse contexts represented by three left-wing cultural and political movements: avant-garde and socialist circles in prewar Germany, Situationism in May 1968 in France, and American anarchism.

As Seth Taylor argues in Left-Wing Nietzscheans (1990), the pre-war German Expressionist circles around the periodicals Der Sturm and Die Aktion, which brought together left-wing intellectual critics of Wilhelminian Germany, were influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of German culture. Die Aktion, the more political of the two, announced in its first issue that it

favors, without taking the part of a particular political party, the idea of a great German left. Die Aktion wants to promote the imposing thought of an organization of the Intelligentsia and would like to restore once again the long forbidden word Kulturkampf to its old glamor. (Taylor, 1990: 48)

In this way, the journal linked politics and culture, and its writers viewed Nietzsche as in line with a broad-based Enlightenment tradition as against the narrowness of Prussian nationalism. This provincial and militarist nationalism they saw as arising from primarily cultural rather than structural forces, in particular the philistinism of the mass man who represented social, religious and political conservatism, as opposed to the individual who represents will and Geist – a la Nietzsche’s freie Geist – in his opposition to established law, morality, and tradition. It bears mentioning that the Expressionists constituted a cultural rather than a political movement, and their deepening engagement with practical politics during and after the First World War also brought with it a reorientation from Nietzsche toward Marx (Taylor, 1990: 59).

Young radicals within the German Social Democratic Party at the time, however, sought to integrate Nietzsche with Marx. While Nietzscheanism was never a mainstream tendency within the political life of the party, these young members, referred to as the Jungen, were, in the words of historian Steven Aschheim,

attracted to Nietzsche partly because of his devastating indictment of the status quo and partly because he provided a counter-language, a rhetoric of total regeneration and vision of the New Man which could channel the revolutionary impulse, while at the same time keeping the content of that impulse vague, indeed open and unclassifiable. (1992: 166)

The Jungen argued that Nietzschean ideals could be rendered ‘universal property’ – that ordinary workers could become ‘new men’ given the increased freedom and leisure time under socialism; this amounted to a rejection of Nietzsche’s elitism that combined his artistic critique with a Marxist social critique of capitalism. Their perspective was prescient insofar as it targeted the bureaucratism and conservatism of the Party, both in terms of its organizational structure and its vision of the future – they aimed to inject into this a dose of voluntarism, in the sense of a greater concern with individual freedom and human action. The Jungen were clearly motivated by a libertarian, anarchist impulse that became more conscious and explicit over time. As historian R. Hinton Thomas remarks, ‘Before Erfurt [a Party congress and program] they had been revolutionary social democrats rather than anarchists. Thereafter they were essentially anarchists’ (1983: 15). Indeed, Nietzsche’s thought was also influential for those more unequivocally in the anarchist camp, for whom its voluntarism and anti-statism belied Nietzsche’s avowed antipathy toward anarchism.

In analogous fashion to the Jungen and the anarchists, the French student and worker uprising of May ‘68 incorporated libertarian and cultural concerns into its radical politics. Inasmuch as students, intellectuals, and professionals were central players in the movement, they were motivated by an artistic critique of alienation and unfreedom. Activists rebelled against the stultifying economic, political, and educational bureaucracies characteristic of what Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) refer to as the ‘second spirit of capitalism,’ namely the Fordism of the postwar period (just as the counterculture in the United States was launching its own attack on mainstream institutions [see Sennett, 2006]; also see [Zhao, 1998] on the ‘Nietzsche fever’ among radical Chinese students in the 1980s).

The intellectual influence of Nietzsche on the 68ers was mediated by the Situationists, who played an active role in the university occupations and street protests. One reference point in this mediation was the theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre, active with the Situationists in the early 1960s, who argued for a strong compatibility between the existentialist thematics in Nietzsche and Marx’s account of alienation (Schrift, 2014). Arising from avant-garde cultural circles, the Situationists saw as their project the resistance to what leading theoretician Guy Debord referred to as the ‘society of the spectacle’: ‘The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life’ (1983: 42). The commodity spectacle engendered a dull, conformist society, rendering individuals incapable of creativity and self-expression. The Situationists thus aimed to inject into Marxist theory and practice – the mainstream manifestations of which were primarily oriented around the social critique of capitalism – a deeper engagement with the artistic critique, through a concern with alienation, desire, aesthetics, and freedom. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner write, ‘Whereas Marxism focused on the factory, the Situationists focused on the city and everyday life, supplementing the Marxian emphasis on class struggle with a project of cultural revolution and the transformation of subjectivity … and the constitution of liberated zones of desire’ (1997: 81).

Crucially, Situationist practice was infused with a ‘Nietzschean vitalism … which attempts to enhance, intensify, and increase life energies against the banal death culture of the existing society’ (Best and Kellner, 1997: 92). This concern with vitality and expression resonated in many of the myriad examples of street art and graffiti from May 1968. Nietzschean themes proliferate, including the critique of Christianity and asceticism; an emphasis on dynamism, spontaneity, and action; antipathy toward mere ‘adaptation’ and survival, tantamount to conformity to a life-denying culture and society; and an opposition to cultural philistinism. Moreover, they point to the possibility of a socialization or democratization of the Nietzschean figure of the master. What follow are several illustrative examples of May 1968 graffiti (cited in Knabb, 2006), one of which notably quotes directly from Nietzsche himself:

If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.

Culture is an inversion of life.

Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.

We must remain ‘unadapted.’

The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.

In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

‘You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.’ (Nietzsche)

We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.

The libertarian spirit on display in these slogans calls forth association with the turn of the century German anarchists and points to the influence exerted by Nietzsche’s thought on 20th-century American anarchism, illustrated here by reference to activist-intellectuals Emma Goldman and Murray Bookchin. In the early 1900s Goldman gave many lectures on Nietzsche and offered his books for sale through her journal Mother Earth (Radical Archives, 2010). Against those who viewed Nietzsche as fundamentally elitist, she argued that he called for an aristocracy of the spirit rather than one based on blood or wealth. She was influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of morality as an instrument of social control. As she stated in her lecture, ‘Victims of Morality’ (1913: 6), ‘Though Morality may continue to devour its victims, it is utterly powerless in the face of the modern spirit, that shines in all its glory upon the brow of man and woman, liberated and unafraid.’ And she argued that part of the reason class society persisted was that ordinary people clung to their masters and to their own subjugation, caught up in the spirit of mass conformity.

As Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (2012) points out in her book on the American receptions of Nietzsche, Goldman and other critical American intellectuals saw his ideas as a weapon against the lingering strains of Puritanism in American thought and culture, especially as regards Puritan sexual ethics. Nietzschean libertarianism urged people to think, to go beyond conventional wisdom and morality, to liberate themselves, in the words of Goldman, from ‘man-made law’ and ‘truth grown false with age’ (Ratner-Rosenhagen, 2012: 178). By contrast, ordinary people remained victims of slave morality, as manifest in the frenzy of patriotism that arose amidst America’s entry into World War I. As Ratner-Rosengarten (2012: 179) recounts, ‘[Goldman] insisted that patriotism was another manufactured notion of affiliation and obligation that turned one’s homeland into a sentimental idol while demanding that the individual submit his labor, if not his life, for the state’s aggrandizement.’ Goldman’s activism against the war then, was colored with Nietzschean influence, and she paid a steep price for her agitation: arrest and deportation.

A later American anarchist activist and intellectual, Murray Bookchin, while very critical of ‘lifestyle anarchism’ that was divorced from class (see Bookchin, 1995), urged that anarchist class politics be supplemented with a concern with agency and freedom: ‘workers must see themselves as human beings, not as class beings; as creative personalities, not as “proletarians,” as self-affirming individuals, not as “masses”’ (Bookchin, 1974). Central to this, for Bookchin, was the critique of industrial discipline:

[the] economic component must be humanized precisely by bringing an ‘affinity of friendship’ to the work process, by diminishing the role of onerous work in the lives of producers, indeed by a total ‘transvaluation of values’ (to use Nietzsche’s phrase) as it applies to production and consumption as well as social and personal life. (Bookchin, 1974)

Bookchin, like the German Jungen and anarchists, aimed to open up the category of overman to ordinary people, as when he described one Spanish anarchist leader as ‘an admirer of Nietzschean individualism, of the superhombre to whom “all is permitted”’ (Sunshine, 2005). It is the way in which such Nietzschean concepts as ‘transvaluation of values,’ ‘overman,’ and the struggle against ‘slave morality’ point to an emphasis on action, expression, individuality, and liberation – crucial reference points for the artistic critique – that was especially picked up on by the American anarchists.

Conclusion

This article has aimed at two analytical goals: a reading of Nietzsche in terms of central dimensions of the ‘artistic critique of capitalism,’ as theorized by Boltanski and Chiapello; and a connection of that reading to illustrative historical examples of left activists and movements on whom Nietzsche’s artistic critique exerted an influence. I sought to thus bring into question the orthodox Marxist reading, associated primarily with Lukács and Mehring, of Nietzsche as a reactionary apologist for imperialism and capitalism. Certainly, Nietzsche’s political philosophy is explicitly elitist and antidemocratic, and thus in no way mounts a ‘social critique’ of the inegalitarianism and exploitation characteristic of modern class society. However, Nietzsche’s opposition to industrial discipline and standardization and his championing of the struggle against generic alienations align him in a profound way with the liberatory impulse of the artistic critique.

This liberatory impulse has been picked up on historically by Left Nietzschean activists. The corrective they apply to it is precisely to supplement its artistic critique with a social dimension and thereby divest it of its aristocratic elitism, to recognize, as Max Horkheimer did in a 1942 exchange among Frankfurt School exiles in Los Angeles, Nietzsche as an enemy of bourgeois decadence and conformism. As Horkheimer stated, ‘Beneath [Nietzsche’s] seemingly misanthropic formulations lies … not so much this [elitist] error but the hatred of the patient, self-avoiding, passive and conformist character at peace with the present’ (Wiggershaus, 2001: 145). On Horkheimer’s reading, in the society of the future, the potential represented by the figure of the Übermensch would be open to all.

But this is only part of the picture. The Nietzschean concern with agency and liberation can itself serve as an important corrective to the tendencies within Marxism toward economism and a deterministic structuralism. This was, I would suggest, what Theodor Adorno meant in the same exchange when he distinguished Marx from Nietzsche insofar as Nietzsche is concerned with the ‘totality of happiness incarnate’ (Wiggershaus, 2001: 147).

It is this brand of ‘essentialist’ and ‘static’ Marxism (Roberts, 1995) that is on display in large sections of Lukács’ Destruction of Reason (1980) – for example, in his close adherence to the model of base and superstructure and in his very binaristic rejection of most forms of allegedly bourgeois thought that arose after 1848, including the work of Weber and Simmel. A similar error is made by Marxists associated with the World Socialist Web Site like David North, whose recent book on the ‘pseudo-left’ (2015), reviewed in the pages of Critical Sociology (Saccarelli, 2017), represents a polemical assault on the Frankfurt School and other philosophically inspired variants of Marxist theory. North (2015), echoing the tone and style of Lukács, writes,

[T]he connection has become much clearer between the reactionary pseudo-left politics of the middle class and the theories of Nietzsche, Brzozowski, Sorel, De Man, the Frankfurt School and the many forms of extreme philosophical subjectivism and irrationalism propagated by postmodernists (Foucault, Laclau, Badiou et al.). Pseudo-left politics—centered on race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference—has come to play a critical role in suppressing opposition to capitalism, by rejecting class as the essential social category and emphasizing, instead, personal ‘identity’ and ‘lifestyle.’

North, like other Marxists of decidedly orthodox hue, wants to turn back the clock, refusing to take into account significant shifts in the nature of capitalism that have taken place since the heyday of classical Marxist thought. Those changes have included, among countless other phenomena, the proliferation of consumer society and the networked individualism of the Web, the rise of the service sector, the sharpening of ecological crises and struggles, and the rise of new social movements fighting for racial and gender equality. To pretend that none of these developments has been of real significance and instead call for a single-minded theoretical and political orientation toward the master category of Class smacks of the worst sort of dogmatism, especially when combined with denunciations of laudable organizational efforts like Greece’s Syriza and France’s New Anticapitalist Party as ‘pseudo-left.’

By contrast to this dogmatic rejectionism, critical theorists must engage meaningfully with the ways in which Marxist thought has been hybridized with other intellectual traditions in the context of transformations within global capitalism. Like the other philosophical tendencies that have exerted an influence on 20th- and 21st-century Marxism – including psychoanalysis, existentialism, and post-structuralism – Nietzsche’s artistic critique of capitalism should be approached not as an irredeemable ideological opponent, but sympathetically, in terms of its potential to enrich liberatory theory and practice.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Stefan Bargheer, Doug Kellner, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. Special thanks to Michael Roberts and Christine Payne for their comments and encouragement, and their tireless work in organizing the conference for which this paper was initially prepared.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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