Marx and Nietzsche: The German Rebels (of (Genealogical)-(History) and (Economic)-(Punishment))

Leo Deng

PHIL353W Nietzsche Term Thesis

5/1/23 (to be expanded...)

Professor Patrick Miller

Introduction

Two of the most prominent figures not only in Germany but in canonical philosophy at large are Marx and Nietzsche, both employing grand, extra-historical theories of humanity. Interestingly, they have a core premise in the foundations of their philosophies that is shared: the interaction of humans as calculating animals for some kind of exchange. How do their conceptions differ and why are their ultimate conclusions so different? For Marx, this is the buyer and seller relationship that evolves when humans can calculate ways to have more economic leverage over another;[1] for Nietzsche, this is “the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor” that is the source of punishment as a way of repaying debt that becomes a means of mnemonics, making humans become calculating animals—animals of thought.[2] Their different explanations of this relationship of exchange are predicated on how they tell their distinct versions of prehistory, which are in fact very similar as reflected by their approaches to history (historical materialism vs. genealogy). However, these conceptions ultimately differ because Marx posits labor and collection as human meaning, while Nietzsche posits power. T­hus, by comparing Marx’s labor theory of value with Nietzsche’s will to power, we can see why their portraits of history are so different and subsequently, their diametrically opposed conclusions of oppression of the masses (Marx) and the slave revolt of society (Nietzsche).

History/Genealogy & Prehistory

First, we encounter prima facie how similar these two thinkers trace their prehistory to an inevitable interaction between humans that suggest the idea of exchange. This is especially uncanny because, by definition, prehistory is the untraceable determining phenomenon of history if history is all that is traceable. Thus, prehistory is a realm inherently without evidence, rendering nothing but a “myth” or a “story” as the only method to theorize and explain prehistory, making the possibilities for this myth truly infinite depending on the person, which is why Marx and Nietzsche’s similarity stand out prima facie. From a Nietzschean perspective, prehistory is even more important than history because it is the 99% of phenomena that determined or made the genetic code of humans, while history is the mere 1% of “tinkering” with it.[3] This significance of prehistory can be broadened to not only Marx but all philosophers or thinkers concerned with history because they can replace ‘genetic code’ with whatever dominant, integral attribute they deem to constitute all humans. For Marx, that would be material ‘value.’ Thus, by retrospective analysis, which I believe both thinkers did too (as one likely conceives of and refines their theories of history before going to the more difficult task of prehistory), their similar approaches to history—or more accurately the idea of ‘progress’ or ‘change’—reflect why their prehistories are also similar.

For Nietzsche, his method of history is clearly genealogy (per the title On the Genealogy of Morality) as he introduces in the Preface of the Genealogy. Although he focuses more on the question of morality—rightfully so—in the preface, he clearly emphasizes, too, that we should “fix on the question of what origin our terms good and evil actually have.”[4] According to Nietzsche’s own italicization, the origin of a concept or phenomenon is what we should trace back to in order to fully explain it: that process of finding out all of a certain concept’s existences (within different contexts) and manifestations in the journey towards its origin is genealogy. On the other hand, Marx’s method is historical materialism, where he traces the development of ideas, and subsequently relations of man, through epochal changes in society’s material conditions. The most important of those conditions for Marx is economics: the relations of the value of entities that exist in the material world, how they exchange, and how the structure of the economy (that is primarily altered by humans) changes how one can or is allowed to exchange.[5] So, these similar methods towards history explain a similar prehistorical story because both methods are meritorious in that they attempt to trace all prior determinants of a concept to be evaluated. Therefore, the untellable story of when the first ‘human’ interaction ever happened seems like the perfect starting point for both genealogy and historical materialism.

Human interaction as a concept is fairly nebulous as it coincides with how we differentiate species between an evolutionary ‘leap’ and thus, the first ever exchange between humans is a perfect first ‘human’ interaction because it implies calculus or thought in both parties of the exchange. Both thinkers agree with this definition of humans as Marx says, “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness”[6] and Nietzsche says, “Man designated himself as the being who measures values […], as the ‘calculating animal as such.’”[7] Here is where we arrive at the seminal juncture that is the kernel of the projects of these two great thinkers: the relationship between buyer and seller (Marx) or creditor and debtor (Nietzsche). The extrapolations after these conceptions are where the stark contrast between these theorists’ ideas begin, our first impression shattering. Already, the different terms used by Marx and Nietzsche signify differing perspectives on the relationship—one of neutrality and one of leverage. Marx’s neutrality of “buyer and seller” reflects his focus on value itself while Nietzsche’s “creditor and debtor” implies an existing leverage that shows his focus on power. Thus, we need to dig deeper into both philosophers’ central focuses to answer how their conceptions of exchange differ and why the conclusions of their overall projects are irreconcilable.

Value/Meaning

The difference between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s philosophical focuses and their underlying theories of what determines those focuses can be culminated into one analogy: the labor theory of value is for Marx what the will to power is for Nietzsche. Thus, by analyzing and comparing these theories, we will find the root of their different conceptions of meaning that makes Marx attribute power as secondary to valuation in the relations between people, while Nietzsche attributes power as primary in the relationship. Notably, this also causes ‘consciousness’ or ‘calculus’ to take opposite positions in each relationship. For Nietzsche, humans become the calculating animal after—or through—exchange while for Marx, humans needed to think or evaluate before coming into exchange.

Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power is predicated on the fact that everything in life is a power struggle. All life is predisposed to this will or drive to overcome or fight for a position of more power as a discursive meaning to life—“everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process wherewith ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.”[8] Willing, in a sense, becomes synonymous with living for Nietzsche because he believes all life needs a meaning to live, which is how the will to power manifests: not willing is the same as death.[9] Thus, modern human meaning, which very much gets involved with morality and the ascetic ideal (turning of the will to power against itself), is completely different from meanings of all other lifeforms, and becomes of utmost peculiarity and importance for Nietzsche in the Genealogy. So, by taking the will to power as his worldview, Nietzsche must apply it to his story of prehistory, too. So, if people (before morality) were fundamentally geared towards a will to power, it must show in the creditor-debtor relationship. For Nietzsche, it immediately shows as soon as the debtor fails to fulfill their promise[10] to their creditor since the only way to repay the creditor is through punishment—to be able to exercise cruelty on the debtor. Why does this cruelty show the will to power? Because within punishing people, there is a “pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought.”[11] Therefore, “compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. —”[12] This cruelty has no morality, rightfully so as it is discussed in prehistory,[13] as it is merely the natural phenomenon of a predator enjoying its prey. Later in Nietzsche’s argument, this idea of cruelty and the will to power will play a seminal part in critiquing the slave revolt of society because their sickness springs from the hypocritical denial of them. Cruelty (the outward expression of power), thus, exists before exchange and is realized into punishment afterward that makes the human the calculating animal.

In contrast, Marx’s conception of the labor theory of value is based on the fact that all things in the world have a use-value and the advent of exchange creates a world of antagonisms between people. As we did for Nietzsche, we will begin with Marx’s worldview taken from history and see how he applies it to his prehistorical story. For Marx, all things in life have a use-value, whether living or not, that is determined by its potential for utility dependent on labor-time expended on it: “Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.”[14] I say “living or not” because commodities can be a living person, too; for example, James Swindal gives the great example of himself—a university professor—that is a commodity to be consumed by students through his teaching, but not just the content of his teaching itself, it is also the congealed values of experience Swindal has over his lifetime of teaching, general life experience, connections and interactions with renowned philosophers (like Jürgen Habermas), and more that make up the totality of his use-value, which is always in-flux and transforming.[15] This is a great example of how the labor theory of value operates: use-value = value (labor) + congealed value (past labor and useful manifestations of it). Thus, the use-value of Swindal dictates the price of his class (or more accurately, the salary he gets paid in relation to other professors); however, there is clearly a missing attribute to price—this is where exchange comes into play. Exchange-value is the other factor, only coming into play after capitalist exchange with the idea of the free market.[16] Marx argues that a new meaning to a commodity was given: man originally sold in order to buy (commodity-money-commodity) and in the advent of capitalist exchange, the seller realized they could buy in order to sell (money-commodity-money). The commodity during feudalism, and before, had its original purpose in exchange by giving a value to get something else with a different value (e.g., trading food for iron); only when man realized that the commodity could be a tool itself for an unlimited singular aim of money and capital, as opposed to multiple limited aims of subsistence, was capitalism possible through speculation, internal creation of value, and—most importantly—exchange-value becoming more dominant than use-value in the price of commodities.[17] Thus, the important rupture in history is this specific type of exchange being figured out, while humanity has had a primitive form of exchange between the beginning of history and the first capitalistic exchange—with property as a concept developing separately, but colliding with value during the first exchange. So, Marx’s prehistorical story had to explain property, which had to be the foundation for a spontaneous inevitability for humans to want to exchange their propertied commodities for subsistence. This foundation was the idea of primitive accumulation, which “is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.”[18] Thus, the tracing of Marx’s prehistory shows the means of subsistence as the secondary drive of the original exchange that springs from a world of values.[19]

Now we see the different positions of a general drive (meaning) and man’s consciousness (evaluating or thinking) between Marx and Nietzsche. Marx presupposes his story of the first exchange of man with the labor theory of value and thus, man needed to think beforehand for primitive accumulation, and then ideas of economic leverage (that can manifest as power) come into play, especially after the historical moment of the first capitalistic exchange. Nietzsche presupposes the exchange of man with the will to power, so exchange was a natural result of the chain of overcoming between humans that resulted in evaluation, calculus—thought. At this point in the analysis, it seems that critiques of each other would be natural: Marx could criticize Nietzsche for not believing in a material source of power (or drive), while Nietzsche could say that primitive accumulation doesn’t need human ‘thought’ as animals have done ‘accumulation’ for power before. Thus, both philosophers’ prehistorical stories seem to be mutually exclusive as their contradiction comes from fundamentally different views of meaning. I will not make the claim that these theories are mutually exclusive; however, analyzing them as if they are requires an exposition of meaning, which is useful for this essay. For Marx, his embrace of materialism is explicit in his novel idea of dialectical materialism[20] and thus, all forces have a material source for their existence—the source of human meaning is labor, the realization of value and its valorization (which will be explained by dialectical synthesis). For Nietzsche, meaning is identical with the will to power and thus, we will have to dig deeper into the will to power to see its attributes.

Will to Power vs. Dialectical Materialism

The will to power as meaning is more implicit throughout the Genealogy in ways already described; Nietzsche hints at a book he was working on in the last pages of the Genealogy— “The Will to Power, Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values” that would clarify the concept.[21] I will draw from this, now, unfinished book, for his later, explicit expositions on power; I will do so with caution in alignment with statements he would say in the Genealogy because the manuscripts were assembled by his sister after he went insane.[22] In Book Three, Section II “The Will to Power in Nature,” he states his denial of causality—famously formed in 1.13 of the Genealogy in the myth ‘lightning flashes’—in clear terms: “Two successive states, the one “cause,” the other “effect”: this is false. The first has nothing to effect, the second has been effected by nothing. It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power.”[23] This aligns with his rejection of a ‘subject’ who has ‘agency,’ which is one of the fundamental ills of slave morality—the illusion of “free will” that separates the “sin from the sinner” that can instill guilt in people, that they could have done otherwise—when in fact, all things are just forces (i.e., forces of power). He then says, “the connection between the inorganic and the organic must lie in the repelling force exercised by every atom of force. ‘Life’ would be defined as an enduring form of processes of the establishment of force,” and that “interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.”[24] In this sense, there is no such thing as an ‘objective’ interpretation that the mechanistic physicists and the empiricist (ultra-ascetic) scientists believe to be doing, which he critiques both in The Will to Power and the Genealogy/Gay Science respectively. He goes on to critique Darwinism’s belief that something’s utility dictates its origin when in fact, it is the contrary, that its origin dictates its utility, which is being progressively reinterpreted and its utility changing. This is Nietzsche’s foundation of progress, that “the feeling of increase, the feeling of becoming stronger, is itself, quite apart from any usefulness in the struggle, the real progress: only from this feeling does there arise the will to struggle—.”[25] This is also reflected in the human body itself, which aligns with his critique of Locke’s empiricist theory of perception,[26] where this is an “aristocracy in the body, the majority of the rulers (struggle between cells and tissues).”[27] Finally, to clear up any confusion about the idea of ‘willing’ in the will to power because it may sound like an agency, he says, “Freedom of will or no freedom of will?— There is no such thing as ‘will’; it is only a simplifying conception of understanding, as is ‘matter.’”[28] Nietzsche very astutely shows that ‘will’ is just another word assigned to the phenomenon he is analyzing (just like ‘matter’ is for materialists)—the fact that all things (forces, beings, so-called ‘subjects’) are just happening. Thus, happening is the will to power that is the meaning for all life; so, when Nietzsche sees modern humanity’s ultimate rejection of this will (the guilty conscience, asceticism, nihilism, leftism, modern science)—a dangerous trembling towards not willing—he justifiably bases his entire philosophical project on trying to prevent this.

In contrast, Dialectical materialism as meaning, notably a departure and absolute rejection of mechanical materialism, is an explanation of the forces of progress in nature and humanity that buttress the human act of labor, which is our basis for meaning. Most simply, dialectical materialism takes Hegel’s dialectical idealism—the driving force of history being the “spiritual, mental, or ideal forces” [29] between the things, people, ideas, political events, etc. that culminate in historical epochs that overcome each other—and flips it on its head.[30] This means instead of ideas, spontaneously springing from the consciousness of man, it is the material contradictions that lead to this driving force of history and all interactions in life in dialectical materialism—this was precisely Marx’s mission to push back against idealism in his famous remark in The German Ideology:

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. […] We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.”[31]

By using “heaven,” it feels as if Marx is alluding to the same disagreement Aristotle had with Plato, where forms are in the material itself for Aristotle, making this move against Hegel the general challenge against philosophers who presume a mythical power of the idea, when in fact there must be a source of ideas, of consciousness, of the brain, of man—namely sourced ultimately to material. Thus, humans, their ideas, and up through aggregation of the masses and their interactions (between nation-states, economies, etc.) are either abstractions, thoughts, or phenomena that arise from the clash and conflict between material that have antagonisms with each other.[32] Although there has been much criticism written on this method, the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” pattern shared by both Hegelian and Marxist dialectics is worth illustrating and clarifying how dialectical materialism works: the thesis presents an idea(Hegel)/thing(Marx) that is negated by an antithesis (clash of opposites) and is finally, its remnants of the clash too, are unified in a new product of synthesis (unity of opposites).[33], [34] With this robust foundation to meaning and how progress is made, labor becomes the most meaningful act for humans as it is the act of production—it is intentionally creating new syntheses through this dialectical process. Bringing it all back to the first quote by Marx I used on consciousness, I will show how that quote finishes: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness. […] They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.”[35] Therefore, the right to production and labor—within the dialectical process—becomes the core of Marx’s philosophical project.

Conclusion

Both Marx and Nietzsche rigorously develop different theories of meaning that explain similar phenomena differently such as ‘progress’ and ‘intention,’ so they come away with very different philosophical projects. Nietzsche argues intention is always for power[36] and progress is the accumulation of feeling the increase of power, while Marx argues intention is production (labor) and progress is the dialectical clash of products (the synthesis of production) that leads to new production. So, not only is the prima facie shared exchange interaction between humans have opposite placements of thought (consciousness/calculus) and drive (subsistence/power) between Marx and Nietzsche, the inner workings of their theories of meaning show why. Dialectical materialism always evaluates consequences secondarily (after material interactions occur), while the will to power evaluates consequences as the change in the world after an interaction charged with a desire for power. So, it makes sense that their projects in terms of ultimate aims are diametrically opposed to each other, and they are irreconcilable because principled critiques of each other would show that—down to the foundation—they disagree, even if people try to make surface-level similarities between the two (critique of religion, morality, philosophy itself, etc.). Those critiques simply forget the way they critique those ‘similar’ entities are fundamentally different.

Ultimately, conscience (thought) seems to precede exchange for Marx while it succeeds for Nietzsche. Thus, these different outlooks—combined with their respective outlooks on meaning (intention and progress)—orient each thinker to their different accounts of history and subsequently, their diametrically opposed conclusions of oppression of the masses (Marx) and the slave revolt of society (Nietzsche). Marx (and Engels) famously proclaims capitalism’s inevitable demise in the Communist Manifesto, calling for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the logical conclusion of capitalism’s contradictions within the dialectical process.[37] In contrast, Nietzsche problematizes the slave revolt that has imposed morality as a universal code of practice that, in reality, hurts humanity even more by turning cruelty unto oneself when aiming for the ‘good,’ calling for a self-affirming redeemer (Zarathustra) and species (Übermensch). These aims then are irreconcilable from the foundation up, as I have shown. Also, this is clearly exhibited in their political manifestations—likely because the political sphere brings attributes of these philosophies to a particular acuteness[38]—through Hitler’s “tod dem marxismus!” (“death to Marxism!”) banners and Marxist-Leninists’ criticism of fascism and constant fear of reactionary “right opportunists” within their party who need to be purged. Nevertheless, these monumental thinkers’ ideas will continue to combat each other, among many others, for the creation of new ones as long as philosophy lives on.

[1] Karl Marx, “Chapter Four: The General Formula for Capital,” in Capital: Volume One, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htm. [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 3rd edition (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 41. The contractual relationship is first the root “of an equivalence between injury and pain” and then what I say in the sentence. [3] Patrick Miller, “First Class on Genealogy of Morality Essay 2” (PHIL353W Nietzsche, Duquesne University, February 14, 2023). [4] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 4. [5] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 150-155. These are the pages where Marx introduces his, then, novel idea of historical materialism, starting with “the relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which each has developed its productive forces, the division of labor and internal intercourse,” and going through the different epochs of ownership from tribal to ancient communal to feudal and so on… [6] Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” 150. [7] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 47. [8] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 52. [9] Patrick Miller, “Class on the Ascetic Priest” (PHIL353W Nietzsche, Duquesne University, March 28, 2023). [10] This is another one of Nietzsche’s signifiers of a human being that’s different from animals—the ability to tell time, imagine the future, and make a promise. Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 36-40. [11] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 42. My italics. –L.D. [12] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 42. [13] As opposed to the ‘cruelty’ desired by the slaves Nietzsche discusses in essay 1 in history, which is tied to their hypocritical attitude towards the masters. [14] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Reprint edition (London; New York, N.Y: Penguin Classics, 1992), 129. I use a different publishing of Capital here for consistency with quotations I have taken in my notes on Marx, so it is purely for citation accuracy to locate the exact quote I used. [15] James Swindal, “Class on Preface to the First Edition and Chapter 1 of Capital” (PHIL593/493 Marxism and Critical Theory, Duquesne University, September 22, 2022). [16] It is only after capitalism because even in times that profit was an existent idea, price was still largely dictated by its use-value, in other words, use-value=exchange-value until capitalism. [17] Marx, “Chapter Four: The General Formula for Capital.” See Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism and György Lukács’s idea of reification for more on the dominance of exchange-value. [18] Karl Marx, “Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital: Volume One, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm. My italics. –L.D. [19] Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, by Friedrich Engels, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 70-81. These pages that constitute the chapter “Estranged Labor” is his (in)famous, amateur critique of capitalism for alienating man from the meaningful aspects of his life, altering one’s means of subsistence into a narrow aim to be satisfied in the bare minimum as opposed to a time when subsistence and meaning to life were one in the same. I will not delve into this issue because it exceeds the bounds of this essay’s purpose but wanted to show the origin of Marx’s theorizing on subsistence. [20] It is integral to note that dialectical materialism was a term Marx never used and is mostly cited towards Engels’s formulation of Marx’s leftover work after his death along with the entire tradition of Marxism that follows. [21] Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morality” and Other Writings, 121. [22] Patrick Miller, “Will to Power Book,” April 27, 2023. Citation of an email. [23] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Later prt. edition (New York: Vintage, 1968), 337, https://ia803205.us.archive.org/27/items/FriedrichNietzscheTheWillToPower/Friedrich%20Nietzsche%20-%20The%20Will%20to%20Power.pdf. [24] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 342. [25] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 344. My italics. –L.D. [26] Here I refer to the critique that Locke has an underlying egalitarian influence toward theorizing perception where all images have an equal staying power in the mind and fades in memory, while for Nietzsche it is clear that perception itself is oligarchic/aristocratic in a power-struggle fashion—we want to perceive some things more than others: some will stick in our memory more than others. [27] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 348. [28] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 354. [29] John Weiss, “Dialectical Idealism and the Work of Lorenz von Stein,” International Review of Social History 8, no. 1 (April 1963): 75, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000002248. [30] This phrase, after my own retrospective research, is influenced by Marx’s own words in the afterword of the second edition of Capital: Volume 1 where he says, “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. […] With him [Hegel] it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Karl Marx, “1873 Afterword to the Second German Edition,” in Capital: Volume One, vol. 1, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm. [31] Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” 154. [32] Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Marxist Internet Archive, 1883), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/dialectics-nature.pdf. [33] Engels, Dialectics of Nature. Opposites as used in this text and many more afterwards (Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Mao’ On Contradiction, etc.) is to label the forces that are clashing. [34] Julie E. Maybee, “Hegel’s Dialectics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/hegel-dialectics/. [35] Marx and Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” 150. [36] He also explicitly states this in The Will to Power aphorism 663: “All events that result from intention are reducible to the intention to increase power.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 349. [37] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978). The dialectical explanation of the socialist revolution largely lies outside this small, political pamphlet. The argument is much more economically and philosophically rigorous in analyzing the contradictions in capitalist society and the very function of capital itself. [38] As opposed to, e.g., idiosyncratic post-structuralist philosophers who combine aspects of both Marx and Nietzsche.