To refrain from wounding, violating, and exploiting one another, to acknowledge another's will as equal to one's own: this can become proper behavior, in a certain rough sense, between individuals when the conditions for making it possible obtain, ie, the actual similarity of the individuals in power and values and their coexistence in one greater body or class. But as soon as one wants to extend this principle, to make it the basic principle of society, it shows itself for what it is: the will to negate life, the principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think radically, to the very roots of things, and resist all sentimental weakness. Life itself is essentially assimilation, injury, violation of the foreign and weaker, suppression, hardness, the forcing of one's own forms upon something else, ingestion and -- at least in its mildest form -- exploitation. ... Even that body to which we referred above, the body within which individuals may treat each other with equality, as in a healthy aristocracy -- even this body itself, if it is alive and not dying off, must do to all other bodies those things which its members refrain from doing to one another: it will have to be the will to power incarnate; it will have to want to grow, to branch out, to draw others into itself, to gain supremacy. And not because it is moral or immoral in any sense but because it is alive, and because life simply is will to power. But there is nothing that ordinary Europeans today are less willing to learn than this; everywhere today, and even in the guise of science, there is grandiose talk about future social conditions where there is to be no more "exploitation." To my ears that sounds as though they had promised to invent a kind of life that would refrain from all the organic functions. "Exploitation" is not a relic of primitive or defective societies; it belongs to the nature of living things, it is a basic organic function, a consequence of the will to power, which is the will to life. This may be a novel theory, but it is the basic fact underlying all history. Let us be honest with ourselves at least this far!
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 259.
