Nietzsche and Marx Foresee Modern AlienationEssay Preview: Nietzsche and Marx Foresee Modern AlienationReport this essayNietzsche And Marx Foresee Modern AlienationBeyond typical philosophers solely focused on acquiring knowledge, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were equally dedicated to actualizing their vision of a better society and way of life. Before our present state of modernism, Nietzsche and Marx were already prophesizing our societal flaws based on past wrongs done to humanity. The Spanish Inquisition, the African Slave Trade, and the Holocaust are all clear testaments to the detrimental effect that separatism and alienation have on all humans alike. Marx and Nietzsche voice the changes that need to be made in order for humanity to finally push itself another crucial step closer to equality and freedom.
Marx is a harsh critic towards the Bourgeois Socialism that still to this day dominates our western concept of government. The class separatism between the proletariat and the bourgeois are still very distinct and continuously more is being done to hold the workers down. Marxs description of the bourgeois methods of entrapment on the workers to generate their own surplus value can be correlated directly to modern figures in the political and economic world like: John Kerry and the major corporations of Nike and General Motors.
Democrats establish themselves as being the modern day heroes of the workingman, but have little exposure to any people belonging to a lower economic class. In the eyes of Marx, political powerhouses like John Kerry are only trying to temporarily make the system acceptable while still keeping the Bourgeois in power. Though Kerry is firmly planted as a bourgeois, rather than falling in and out of the system as Marx describes, he still proposes ideas and policies that appeal to the working class in order to keep them oppressed within rigid social classes. Marx sees the offerings of welfare, social security, minimum wage, and other types of social programs as an attempt to make the working class seem more enjoyable. In this oppression, the pursuit of the American dream is lost, people are alienated in their class, and the forces of power remain the same. Marxism views Kerry as a hypocrite in fear of an undeniable revolution. With Kerry as a prime example, Marx shows the necessity for any member of the proletariat to revolt and destroy the class system.
Marxs anticipation of modern economics seems to foresee the development of a new class. The industrial revolution developed big businesses into a major force and technology breakthroughs, much like in Marxs time, have made a demand for white collar workers specialized in software programming, research and development. Nike, GM, and Dell, to name a few, with new additions to the work force, have blurred the line further between boss and laborer. As Marx perceives, the proletariat constantly grows and establishes itself as the majority as a result of increasing positions of power.
Where Marx is very perceptive at addressing humanity from a holistic perspective, Nietzsches focus is much more on the individual and the moral codes that each human honors. In the work force the addition of job benefits and new positions seem to aid the workers quality of life, when in actuality it is only further establishing the bosses reign. Similarly, in Nietzsches study of right and wrong, he finds that human morality has also become a distraction from the unknown. Nietzsche shows us how we use our morals to make the world around us explainable. The human race, especially philosophers are victims to the idea of “rationally at all costsÐ a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists
Although the use of such a concept of ‘reproduction’ is in view from the viewpoint of Nietzsche, we don’t see that from a critical point of view. That is, we don’t see a contradiction of Nietzsche’s ‘ideology of social progress’ to the philosophical standpoint of “modernity” which he is taking from a social science point of view and which he clearly does not acknowledge nor respond to (or the fact that his own views have made a major contribution to popular and Marxist debates on modernity). The result is that the moral codes (and therefore, ethics) that Marx teaches are a direct result of his study of philosophy of life and history.
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This analysis of the individual is, therefore, not of Marx, but of an unrepresentative Marxist. However, the idea of an “ideology of humanity” is not antithetical to Marxism.
The idea that communism, socialism, feminism, and all progressive alternatives, all of which Marx defines as ‘revolutionary’ in his historical analysis of our future world are essentially an attempt to remake it in Marxian terms for the past, which has the potential to be both more stable and greater in future, is the concept articulated [by Marx]. He points out to how the development of new technological technologies can only work for the present situation, a problem which should be treated with caution.
For an ideal Marxist to be able construct an ethical and social world free from the threat of repression by his critics, the ‘ideology of the masses’ that Marx uses (and which is a form of modernity) consists of this notion that all of the ‘experience of the individual’, such as the individual’s own sense of belonging, is merely an image of the individual, and that all of these experiences are essentially ‘part of the same historical experience’, and not merely ‘in a ‘self’.
Ideology of humanity, he said, is an ontological analysis of the history of human beings. As Marx said in his 1891 essay On Democracy.
In terms of the social world, social evolution was a long and arduous process, both from a theoretical or scientific point of view and a political and historical point of view, but also from a moral and scientific viewpoint. He argued that this process (and thus his view of it) is the natural consequence of the ‘natural’ causes (or in Marx’s words the “natural” moral causes with which the evolution of the individual is connected) in society, and this is why the morality of the individual is essential to all human actions.
It is not surprising to find Marx in the position described