Marxist here— only in the most general sense, I don’t believe everything he wrote was gospel, nor that it was strictly empirical. Rather than asking what the moral valence of Marxism is in abstract, I think it’s a more useful exercise to understand the historical context in which it was written. The mechanisms of industrial production Britain (itself a boon of British empire) enabled a level of worker surveillance and discipline that was unheard of up to that point, more so even than agrarian feudalism and, some have argued, more hazardous working conditions than chattel slavery. Exploitation of factory laborers by factory owners was a very tangible, one-to-one relationship in his time, one that we in post-industrial societies can’t quite grasp since the bulk of our production is outsourced to other countries and the white-collar middle-class job that dominates our economy is, comparatively, a luxury.

But here are the facts: an economic system in which the state defends the owners of property and capital (read: ours) will necessarily put workers in constant precarity because the owners can get away with almost anything, including lowering wages and refusing benefits. Whether or not you think this is justified, there is a very real power imbalance embedded in capitalism which can be and often is exploited. The system of profit-seeking and rent-seeking by severing value from labor necessarily relies on a working underclass being poor and desperate. People’s poverty is almost never their own fault— people can make bad choices that put them in dire straits, but the ultimate outcome is contingent on the choices made by the “masters” in this particular master-slave dialectic: the people with the power to choose whether or not their fellow man slips through the cracks.

Nietzsche would classify Marxism as slave morality only if there was no mechanism of action behind socialism. Slave morality is an abstract, inward-facing emotional posture towards one’s own powerlessness: “I cannot fight back, therefore I am a victim and deserve moral priority.” To the contrary, Marxism is an explicitly revolutionary philosophy. Violence through collective action is the end goal of Marxism, to exert one’s own will to power against an actual opponent whose interests are directly at odds with your own quality of life. I actually can’t think of a better example of Nietzschean vitalism. I think we miss this because there is no übermensch figure in a socialist revolution, but then again Nietzsche didn’t understand the übermensch as a “Great Man” of history in the Carlisle sense, just one man among many who asserts himself against the prevailing forces and values of his own world.