“The Genealogy of Morals”: A Communist Manifesto?

This is the final part of my reading of, and critique of, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, focused on the third section, and through it, on Nietzsche’s overall thrust in the work.

The best way I can think of to summarise what Nietzsche is doing in this last section is this: that he explaining the workings of the class system, of oppression, of the methods by which the ruling classes maintain control, and piercing through the lies and evasions which it usually uses to cloak this – and replacing them with the simple and profound lie that those who suffer do so because they are inherently set up to suffer.

He repeatedly speaks of ‘the sick’: “Those people who are, from the outset, failures, oppressed, broken”. Now it’s an open and interesting question how far some people are born with a greater disposition to suffering, a greater sensitivity – or, more likely, born with a greater sensitivity to all forms of experience, and then unfortunate enough to have a childhood that sets up mental loops that turn this into ongoing and inescapable negative experience.

But it’s clearly not the primary explanation for who suffers and whose dreams are broken on the rack. The obvious primary explanation is that some people’s lives are destroyed and curtailed and kept in a cage by social rules, in order to maintain and gratify the power of others. The sick, that is, are not sick – they are injured, and injured by those who Nietzshe calls ‘the strong’, “the successful and victorious”.

If we keep this in mind – if we ‘read between the lines’ of Nietzsche’s sometimes lurid prose to see the role of class (economic class as well as sex class), we can see Nietzsche as sketching out for us the contours of how morality, religion, asceticism, function to defend class interests.

Part 7: The Sexuality of Fascism, the Economics of Puritanism

In previous posts I’ve talked about the similar processes by which sexual and other actions are constructed into ownership, and how this generates structural antagonisms, class struggles, within society.

It’s a truism that ideologies will reflect these antagonisms. What I particularly want to talk about now is how ideologies can be traced across both sex classes and economic classes. This post will focus on ‘asceticism’ as a shared feature of both sexual puritanism and economic nationalism/fascism, what could broadly be called ‘conservative’ ideologies.