Abstract

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality suggests aristocracies inadvertently produce a dangerous “slavish” counter-type of moral agency grounded in resentment and exhibiting a morality of resignation. Throughout the text, he conflates biological and political registers, speaking of human types as “species” (die Spezies) and classes as “races” (die Rassen), thus implying all human kinds are socially constructed and that their primary cause is political organization. It’s in this sense that Nietzsche is a “radical aristocrat.” Against the conservative view that social hierarchy mirrors a fixed order in nature, he recognizes hierarchies create the types they seek to preserve, precisely against natural contingency. This poses a practical dilemma for aristocracies: how maintain an underclass without provoking the slavish psychology and morality that undermine aristocratic values? In other texts, Nietzsche develops an answer with his interpretation of the Hindu law of Manu. Every aristocracy must create the illusion that classes are natural castes rather than political constructions. Caste-systems are cultural and ideological institutions designed to protect class-systems by giving class identities the appearance of fixed “species”: deeply-internalized forms of psychology and moral agency that reinforce class positions by being more rigidly-defined and easily socially recognized. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon subversively redirects this theory away from Nietzsche’s reactionary aims toward revolutionary ones, applying its logic to the racialized hierarchy of colonization. Fanon also blurs the line between the social and biological, referring to colonizer and colonized as different “species” (espèces) and suggesting social position causes class-groups to develop the deep psychological and moral identities characteristic of castes. For Fanon, race is the primary way colonized societies materially support caste-ideology. Though socially-determined, race-concepts are anchored in visible differences, giving the class position of the colonized a false appearance of naturalness. However, against Nietzsche, who blames the oppressed for slave morality, Fanon insists “the colonizer creates the colonized.” Slavish psychology originates in the ruling class who, to save their good conscience, reinterpret privilege as merit by adopting a Manichean view of the colonized as essentially evil, leading to deep-seated hatred for them as a racialized caste. The colonizers’ primary psychology of resentment in turn produces a secondary psychology of resentment among the colonized, shaping both into opposing “species,” identities grounded in each other’s exclusion, pressing the colonized not (as Nietzsche thinks) toward moral revolt but toward political revolution. Fanon’s critical reconstruction of Nietzsche’s caste-theory has three important consequences. First, Nietzsche’s analysis implies, against his own hopes, that aristocracies necessarily produce their own downfall. Second, if race is politically constructed as a disguised form of class, racism cannot be overcome independently of the class structures it was created to disguise. However, third, if caste-systems produce not just racist attitudes, practices, and social structures but also the racist as a species of psychological identity grounded in resentment, then while class politics can resolve racism’s historical origins, it will not prevent its continuation among existing members of that type. Consequently, anti-racist politics cannot be reduced to issues of either class or race alone.