Marx vs. Nietzsche: Comparing Philosophies and Ideologies
Comparison: Marx and Nietzsche
While Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were contemporaries, the distance between their respective philosophies is immense. However, we can find some similarities in certain points.
Historical Perspective
Marx maintained a linear view of history, a conception in which the various stages of economic history lead to a final stage: Communism. This conception of historical evolution was marked by a series of laws of historical progress, inspired by Hegel. On the contrary, Nietzsche found the return to the original Greek idea of historical circularity, advocating the eternal recurrence of all things. In Nietzsche, there is no inevitable progress, but a circling around the same, although not always aware of it.
Scientific Inclinations
Both Marx and Nietzsche exhibit a longing for scientific understanding. This is much more persistent in Marx, which extends from the Natural Sciences to Social Sciences. In Nietzsche’s assessment of science is sometimes ambivalent, but there is a notable estimation of scientific progress and the advancement opportunity this provides. Strictly speaking, Marx has a theory of knowledge, but was in the empiricist positions earlier than idealism. Marx agrees with Nietzsche that the senses are the original source, primary and authentically true knowledge.
Idealism and Interpretation of History
The same conception of history in Marx implies the existence of an abstract ideal that history and humanity are to come. Nietzsche considered that the Marxian interpretation of history is nothing but a new projection of the Platonic afterworlds society of his time.
Class Struggle and Society
The Marxian vision of society is characterized by class struggle. The Proletariat will exploit the self-contradictions of the capitalist economy to the point that this system will succumb. The proletariat, exploited and alienated by capitalism, will take over and, after a period of transition, destroy all bourgeois structures. In Nietzsche, the working class was seen as a group that suffered, and with their new religion, socialism, wanted to crush the heroes, kings, and poets, i.e., those who have decided to make the world according to the possibilities and not have bowed to the circumstances.
Social Conscience and Power
Marx has a social conscience of human phenomena. That is, all phenomena that happen to humans are the result of a form of organization which in turn is indebted to the economy that has occurred. Nietzsche, on the contrary, believes that society and culture depend less on a given distribution of ownership of the means of production, but a grammar of power that is embedded in our language and we have not noticed.
Masters of Suspicion
Both agree to be “masters of suspicion,” understanding that they are thinkers who believe that not only is there a difference between reality and appearance, but the appearance or what it shows is designed to produce a hoax. If we carefully examine the world around us, we are not only confused, but we can be manipulated and used against ourselves.
Deception and Language
Marx’s suspicion leads to the manifestation that the capitalist system has a whole superstructure so that the worker does not find its alignment. Nietzsche’s suspicion is even more subtle, because the system of deception is in the language and you have to break their own conventions of language which has grown to over poetry recreate a language where the power is on the act to be, where it has no permanent address the changing value.