At first glance, Friedrich
Nietzsche’s pro-capitalist stance on private property and the process of accumulating
profit (or wealth) may seem to extend a vote of confidence to the business
manager as a type. After all, managers manage the private property of
stockholders (which can include themselves) with a fiduciary duty to do so to increase
shareholder value by maximizing profit. The notion of profit-seeking by
maximizing revenue and minimizing cost is arguably too simplistic. Squeezing a
workforce too much, for example, can backfire in the long term. Nietzsche was
concerned about such a thing happening even though he claims that the vast
majority of laborers must be kept to subsistence wages for culture to be
possible. He castigates petty, short-sighted managers who do not look out for
the spiritual and economic welfare of workers, and yet holds that those workers
must be slavish in the sense of being exploited by employers so culture can
emerge and be sustained by the rich. To be for such exploitation and yet
against petty cost-cutting managers renders Nietzsche’s socioeconomic
philosophy interesting as well as useful in terms of keeping a
capitalist economy from being reduced to the mentality of its bottom-feeder
producers. I first discuss the matter of exploitation and then turn to how
Nietzsche addresses his wider socio-economic philosophy more specifically to human-resource
management. Within the wider subject-heading of exploitation, very different
approaches, or mentalities, to human resource management can be discerned. In dichotomous
terms, there can be said to be a pathos of distance between enlightened
self-interest and selfish, short-sighted greed.
Nietzsche claims that capital
accumulation and economic inequality are necessary for adequate investment in
culture, such that not everyone must be oriented to satisfying basic needs.
Moreover, private property and accumulating money serve a more fundamental
function in terms of human being and becoming, the latter being construed
in terms of, growing. Nietzsche’s use of this term can be thought of in
terms of Aristotle’s appropriation from the natural world for his philosophy.
It has seemed to me in life
that some people may have a static orientation, whereas other people may
be inherently oriented to change, as in self-development. The static
orientation is based on being, whereas the default of dynamism can be
said to be based on valuing becoming. It may be that people wetted to a
static state of being feel threatened psychologically by change-oriented people
because the latter typically want the former to work on themselves too. In a
dysfunctional family in which most of the people value stasis, for example, the
person who values development may ironically be scapegoated precisely because any
change is rejected, even that which would make the family healthy. Translated
into Nietzsche’s socioeconomic philosophy, possessing assets, or private property,
applies to a person’s static nature, whereas accumulating wealth means that a
person is dynamic—changing.
To Nietzsche, capital
accumulations by titans, and those by wealthy people more generally, have permitted
the advent of culture in terms of there being adequate investments in it—something
that we moderns may take for granted even though much of human (pre) history
our species was oriented to meeting survival needs. Regarding a society having some
individuals rich enough to develop a cultural scene, Nietzsche insists that what
Marx calls the surplus value of labor of the vast majority of workers must be transferred
to the few—the capitalists—so they have enough money to invest in culture. A
city benefits even though most laborers work for subsistence wages. Nietzsche relates
capitalist enterprise to culture as follows:
“In order for there to be a
broad, deep, fertile soil for the development of art, the overwhelming majority
has to be slavishly subjected to life’s necessity in the service of the
minority, beyond the measure that is necessary for the individual. At
their expense, through their extra work, that privileged class is to be removed
from the struggle for existence, in order to produce and satisfy a new world of
necessities. Accordingly, we must learn to identify as a cruel-sounding truth
the fact that slavery belongs to the essence of culture. . . . The
misery of men living a life of toil has to be increased to make the production
of the world of art possible for a small number of Olympic men.”[1]
Slavery here is in the sense
that the laborers are held to such a minimum monetary compensation that they cannot
free themselves from working so their basic survival needs are met. For the privileged
class—the capitalists—to be removed from the struggle for existence is a late-arriving
novelty for our species, and thus the advent of culture can be construed as a
luxury rather than as an intrinsic aspect or manifestation of human existence. Put
another way, even though the dominance of the capitalists over labor, which I
submit is a better description than is the word slavery, “belongs to the
essence of culture,” culture does not belong to the essence of our species. So
even though culture raises the entire species from being oriented to satisfying
subsistence needs, the scaffolding that is constructed to reach the
rarified air can be viewed as artificial.
Neither is the exploitation
that is necessary for culture natural. Landa argues that the relevance of
Nietzsche for capitalism lies precisely in slavish exploitation. Even though
Nietzsche claims to have “stood far above any strictly material concerns, the
basic fact cannot be ignored that, if his ‘aesthetics’ necessitate slavery, . .
. if the production of ‘culture’ means the ruthless material subjugation of the
vast majority of people to the benefit of an elite, then a socioeconomic
theory of exploitation is inscribed into the very core of his aesthetic
theory of noble culture. And it precisely here, I argue, that Nietzsche’s
pertinence for capitalism lies, in the dreary fact of exploitation . . .”[2]
Although the economic elite undoubtedly benefit, however, it is the species
that benefits from culture. Put in terms of socioeconomics, a city benefits by
having some buildings devoted to culture rather than to the means of
production. Although this point renders the exploitation somewhat better
morally, Nietzsche’s criticism of modern morality means that he rejects the normative
objection that economic exploitation is unethical. Considering that the benefits
of accumulated wealth for culture benefit not just the rich and the exploitation
(i.e., economic “slavery”) is spared a damning ethical verdict, it is not
difficult to see why Nietzsche would be in favor of culture. Of course, apart
from Nietzsche, the holding of the vast majority of a workforce to subsistence wages
while an economic elite gets rich off the transferred surplus value of labor is
ripe for ethical castigation. Even if we reject Nietzsche’s socioeconomic account
of culture as a result, Nietzsche presents another rationale for being wealthy—one
that is existential in nature.[3]
Private property and
accumulating wealth correspond to being and becoming, respectively.
As such, Private property and capital accumulation are “firmly established by
Nietzsche as representing the rudiments of life itself.”[4]
Nietzsche claims that “those who have possessions are of one mind on one
article of faith: ‘one must possess something in order to be something.’”[5]
Does this mean that the subsistence-limited worker bees do not exist? Surely
not. Perhaps Nietzsche means to count as something rather than to be something.
This interpretation is in line with the businessman’s value-set wherein to
count as someone is a matter of how much one possesses (i.e., how wealthy one
is).
The capitalists would perhaps
be less familiar with Nietzsche’s rationale for the act of accumulating
possessions, including money: “But this is the oldest and healthiest of all
instincts: I should add, ‘one must want to have more than one has in order to become
more.’ For this is the doctrine preached by life itself to all that has
life: the morality of development. To have and to want to have more—growth,
in one word—that is life itself.”[6]
Here, becoming is put in terms of growth as a natural process of life.[7]
The will to power is for Nietzsche the will to life, and strength is the
self-confident embrace of the fullness of life in overcoming obstacles in order
to feel the pleasure of power. According to Landa, Nietzsche claims that to
“live truly and properly is therefore to Exploit, Possess and Accumulate . . .
Under this light, the will to power reveals itself as the metaphysical
extension of the will to money.”[8]
But do counting as something in virtue of having material possessions and
growing as a plant does count as metaphysical? Moreover, what use did
Nietzsche have for speculative metaphysics? Rather than being grounded in
existentialism, Nietzsche’s view of being and becoming may bear a
family resemblance to Heidegger’s claim that a person as a dasein, or one
that is, comes to realize oneself hammering in an open field; only in action
does a person realize oneself as one is as a that (i.e., an entity).
The action to which Nietzsche refers is only open to the capitalist, however,
in accumulating wealth, for the worker bees are enslaved to meeting their subsistence
needs and thus are cut off from becoming in the sense of growing.
Lest it be concluded that
Nietzsche’s view favors business managers, including executives, rather than
stockholders who are oriented to the long-term value of their stock, Nietzsche
spanks down the typical managerial primacy of immediate profit: “No doubt, the
wide-ranging, multi-faceted perspective of the philosopher, as compared with
the narrow view of the standard market-apologist intent on immediate gains,
endowed the former a much more flexible class position. . . . Since the
preservation of the class hierarchy and the prevention of a comprehensive
socialist alternative was the foundation of Nietzsche’s social vision, he was
at times perfectly willing to criticize naked exploitation of labor when that
meant dangerously exacerbating class enmity to the point of imperiling the
overall stability of the system. As in the following example: ‘What we now
refer to as justice, is from this point of view a highly refined usefulness,
which does not take into consideration only the present moment and exploits the
opportunity, but rather reflects with responsibility on the lasting
consequences, therefore taking care of the well-being of the worker as well, of
his physical and spiritual satisfaction, in order that he and his
descendants will continue to work for our descendants, and will be available for
a longer period of time than a single individual’s life. The exploitation of
the worker was, as one now understands, a stupidity, a ruthless enterprise at
the cost of the future, which endangered society. Now we have before us almost
a war, and the price for achieving peace, for sealing contracts and wining
trust, will at any rate be very high, since the foolishness of the exploiters
was great and long-lasting.’”[9]
A company’s management that can be characterized by the short-sighted, petty greed
of its managers is sub-optimal from the standpoint of maximizing stockholder
wealth in the long-term, and thus is not in line with being and becoming.
Even in terms of the wealth of non-stockholder executives, cutting labor benefits
that are already trivial so as to boost next quarter’s bonus detracts from
being able to retain workers whose efficiency can “grow” the company, and whose
sons and daughters may decide to work for the company. In short, to the extent
that the manager as a type cannot master (i.e., overcome) the instinctual urge of
greed manifesting as short-sighted, selfish pettiness, Nietzsche’s pro-capitalist
philosophy is not in favor of managers of such a pathetic mentality of weakness.
The philosopher’s (amoral) approbation is reserved for managers who apply
enlightened self-interest to management of stockholder wealth concentrated as a
company by looking after non-supervisory employees in order that they
will (and their offspring, if hired) continue to produce such that stockholder
wealth can grow like a tomato plant on a vine during a warm, wet summer.
It is ironic that it is a
philosopher who “chides economic liberalism on strictly pragmatic grounds and
promotes, against the irresponsible zeal to maximize profits at the immediate
present, the contraceptive measure of a ‘highly refined usefulness’ whose
purpose is to ensure that the very principle of profit will survive on
an enduring basis. To the extent that the ruthless practices of economic
liberalism, by over-exploiting the worker, become themselves a
potentially destabilizing factor jeopardizing the future, Nietzsche is willing
to show his teeth to the masters as well, and recommend what one commentator
readily celebrated as ‘an enlightened labour policy.’”[10]
Nietzsche’s esteem for the will to money as possessing and accumulating goes
not include the greedy zeal to maximize profits without adequate attention
being placed on resisting expedient measures that are oriented to temporarily
boosting quarterly profits and the stock price.
Beyond taking away employee
perks such as complimentary gym memberships even though exercise can elongate
how long an experienced employee can work, managers can detract from the
long-term monetary value of a company (and stockholder wealth) by being petty
with customers. When grocery-store companies decided to charge customers for
paper bags, customers rightly perceived the managers as petty. When petty
managers of airlines figured out that they could boost revenue by charging
customers for seats with extra leg-room and for checked luggage—even applying a
weight-limit to each suitcase—the business judgment was that any business lost in
the long-run from customers feeling “nickeled and dimed” by a greedy management
would be made up for by the more immediate revenue gained from the fees. An
example of a viable substitute in the long-term in North America could be high-speed
trains.
In contradistinction to banal,
incrementalist managers, Nietzsche’s esteem for self-confident strength, which says
in terms of its natural rather than contrived, self-interested generosity, what
are the parasites to me? A person having an overflowing surplus of power (and
wealth) and is oriented to life can be contrasted with the new bird of prey—the
weak who seek to dominate by petty cruelty. Whereas the self-confident, strong business
titan is oriented to the pleasure that is obtainable from a large, successful
business deal, the weak manager greedily clutches at cutting costs budget-item
by budget-item. Whereas courageous titans can be likened to the Greco-Roman
conquerors whose nature it was to gain land and captured slaves, petty, control-obsessed
managers can be likened to ascetic priests whose weak nature it is to inflict “Thou
Shalt Not!” as a weapon to beguile the self-confident strong.
Managers who market themselves
as leaders rather than managers while actually micro-managing subordinates are
nonetheless innately weak rather than strong. The “leadership versus management”
dichotomy itself may be a guise wherein petty managers seek to rebrand banal
management as something that is enlightened in terms of self-interest. To be
sure, Nietzsche points to the possibility of such self-interest being adopted
by managers in order to meet the spiritual and (basic) material needs of
workers so the best of them do not leave. Indeed, such economic self-interest should
extend to take into account generations of workers.
Therefore, even though
Nietzsche’s philosophy can be regarded as pro-capitalist because private property
and accumulating wealth enable a sense of being and becoming,
respectively, it cannot be said that the philosophy lauds the business manager
as a type. Rather, it depends on the underlying mentality of a particular manager
and even of a company’s management. Organizational culture can play a large
role in forming and maintaining managerial values, norms, and practices. The
culture of Enron was dramatically different than that of Ben and Jerry’s, for
example. Just because Nietzsche’s philosophy can be reckoned as pro-capitalist
does not mean that he would support any management. In fact, capitalism
itself need not be defined in praxis by its lowest common denominator. Nietzsche’s
philosophy can be utilized to keep that from happening, or to raise an economy based
on private property and the market-mechanism above the squalid mentality of its
bottom-feeder producers.
2. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 28.
3. This is not to say that Nietzsche was an existentialist. The Leibniz scholar, Patrick Riley, once asked me whether I thought Nietzsche’s philosophy falls under existentialism; he didn’t think so either. Neither is the philosophy nihilist; Nietzsche asks, “what is nihilism today if it is not” being “weary of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 480.
4. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 28.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Fabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 77.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 77.
7. Here Nietzsche is in line with Aristotle.
8. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 29.
9. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 30. Translating from Friedrich Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbanden (Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), Vol. 2, pp. 681-82.
10. Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 31. Landa quotes from Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker—The Perfect Nihilist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 91.
