"The laborers should (sollen) some day live as the bourgeois now do."[1] It is a forecast that can have sense only as great social changes are supposed to have taken place, notably as mechanical inventions have been allowed to work a result that they have never had under our régime of laisser faire, as John Stuart Mill long ago confessed. He drops the significant remark that there is hard coarse work that some men must be on hand to do, so long as machines cannot do it in their stead,[2] and he observes that the tendency of civilization is to produce the machines: "ever less physical force is necessary: wisely we let machines work, man becoming stronger and more spiritual."[3] It may be supposed too that the struggles of the laborers themselves will have contributed to the result, and within limits Nietzsche can hardly have failed to justify such struggles—at least so long as the present régime of laisser faire lasts; he speaks once of revolt as the nobility of the slave.[4] He has this to say about exploitation: "What is it that we find revolting, when an individual man exploits others for his own purposes? The presupposition is that he is not of sufficient value. If, however, we suppose him to be valuable enough (e.g., as a prince), the exploitation is endured and gives a kind of happiness (cf. "submission to God"). We protect ourselves against exploitation by lower beings than we ourselves are. So I protect myself against the present-day state, culture and so forth."[5] Still more strongly: "When an inferior man takes his foolish existence, his cattle-like stupid happiness as an end, he makes the onlooker indignant; and when he goes so far as to oppress and use up other men for ends of his own, he should be struck dead like a poisonous fly."[6] After such passages we can hardly imagine Nietzsche sanctioning industrial exploitation as it often exists today, or
- ↑ Will to Power, § 764.
- ↑ Werke, XT, 143 (the italics are mine).
- ↑ Ibid., XIV, 97, § 207. He even says that in the next [our] centurymankind will have won, by the conquest of nature, more power than it can use, and suggests, among other changes, that economic relations may then be ordered without the usual anxiety about life and death (ibid., XI, 376-7, § 572).
- ↑ Zarathustra, I, x.
- ↑ Werke, XIV, 61, § 118.
- ↑ Ibid., XIV, 61-2, § 119.
