Daniel Tutt reviews Jonas Čeika’s ‘How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st Century Left’ (Repeater Books: London, 2021).

Nietzsche’s philosophy has shaped theoretical debates on the Left ever since he died over 120 years ago. This is owed, at least in part, to Nietzsche’s popularity among working-class readers. According to surveys and sociological studies of German workers at the turn of the 20th century, Nietzsche tended to trump Marx in terms of popularity, a trend that likely remains true today. However, Nietzsche’s popularity has also split workers. Different methods of reading the philosopher have emerged. For some Nietzsche was anathema to their interest in greater equality and for a life beyond the degradation of wage labor, while others embraced Nietzsche’s aristocratic agenda in ways that would often divert them from the cause of working-class liberation.¹ 

The question as to whether Nietzsche can be combined with Marx poses a philosophical conundrum, given that both thinkers offer up a political project that draws on similar social and political problems. But while the basis of Marx and Nietzsche’s political visions could not be more diametrically opposed, the reality of this difference has become a debate on the Left. Nietzsche’s politics are often interpreted as indeterminate and metaphorical, with Nietzsche scholars on the Left tending to claim that his unabashed anti-egalitarian, anti-revolutionary, and reactionary commitments are ultimately marginal to any assessment of his philosophy.  

This reading and method of interpreting Nietzsche has grown popular on today’s Left, and was set by the academic trends that emerged in French philosophy after the Second World War among philosophers Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. It was also brought about by Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a resolutely metaphysical, and thus not a primarily political thinker. The German American translator Walter Kaufmann suggested Nietzsche be read as an apolitical thinker completely decontextualized from the historical and political concerns that drove his thought. Kaufmann thereby removed Nietzsche’s deeply-embedded, reactionary political thought and whitewashed Nietzsche’s political inflections and intentions, even removing certain words that advocated the annihilation of the weak and the failed.² 

Where Kaufmann emphasized the psychological and the aesthetic insights of the thinker to the total neglect of the political, the French readers of Nietzsche tended to reduce him to an indeterminate and metaphorical thinker, whose aphorisms can be read in multiple, even contradictory ways. Derrida famously dedicates several pages of writing to an in-depth analysis of the possible meanings of a random note in Nietzsche’s journal late in life, which read: “I have forgotten my umbrella.”³ The phrase could spell the secret key to the entirety of Nietzsche’s esotericism, or it could mean nothing. These methods of reading and interpreting have made any possible Marx-Nietzsche rapprochement a seemingly easy synthesis.   

The latest popular intervention in the field of Left-Nietzscheanism is Jonas Čeika’s How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st Century Left published in 2021 with Repeater Books. What distinguishes this book from the tradition of Left-Nietzschean interventions in the lineage of French theory (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida) is that the author aims to reopen a more explicitly political core of Nietzsche’s thought to serve as the basis for a renewed, Marxist-Nietzschean Leftism. But the political core of Nietzsche that Čeika offers is not developed or unearthed in its full depth, and misses a serious confrontation with Nietzsche’s politics. This results in a lopsided combination of Nietzsche with Marx that risks incorporating certain Nietzschean political strategies that ultimately will prove to be a dead end for any 21st century socialism.  

The book develops what I call an “elective affinity” reading method by attempting to combine two radically divergent philosophies—Marx and Nietzsche—and proceeds to make their thought compatible around key points of supposed commonality. Elective affinity is a reading method that analyzes the philosophical concepts and ideas of Nietzsche as detached from the historical and social forces that drove his work. It then seeks to combine the insights of the two philosophers that could not be more dissimilar in political analysis and practice, thereby rendering these differences to be non-substantial or indeterminate. It is true that Marx and Nietzsche are driven by similar concerns over the division of labor, dialectics, socialism, and morality but upon further scrutiny, it becomes clear that their critiques and political visions could not be more divergent. 

Importantly, this is not to say that 21st century socialist philosophy should not draw from Nietzsche when considering socialist practice and theory; it is, rather, that in drawing from Nietzsche, we must not neglect or deny the central role that anti-socialism, political economy and undeniable political reaction plays in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. To neglect this radical reactionary core in Nietzsche will risk the development of a Nietzschean-Marxism that embeds certain Nietzschean orientations that may prove damaging to any 21st century thinking of socialism. Just as working-class readers developed their own singular methods of reading Nietzsche in the early 20th century, socialists today can benefit from reading Nietzsche without any apologetic agenda that seeks to cover over his reactionary radicalism. This is why books like Čeika’s, which combine a scholarly argument but are written for a broader popular audience, are important for thinking about socialist praxis in our time. But the Left can only truly learn from Nietzsche once we have more fully analyzed the extent of his aristocratic agenda and examined how this agenda influenced his major concepts. 

Can Nietzsche Be Synthesized with Marx?

To frame his understanding of Nietzsche’s politics, Čeika says that “Nietzsche’s work lacks an explicit political program because he identified modern politics themselves as nihilistic; because he sought a world which transcended politics.”⁴ This is a contradictory account of Nietzsche’s politics: we are led to believe that Nietzsche did desire to transform the world beyond politics, and that his vision is in line with Marx’s vision of political transformation because both thinkers present a version of politics that is beyond the “cold abstractions of both commerce and the state.”⁵  But how can Nietzsche’s politics intend to bring about a “new-found, human” (or superhuman) “control over the Earth” (“the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”)⁶ while holding an agenda that does not involve any explicit political program?

Despite his admission that Nietzsche aims to invent a new man capable of exerting control over the earth, his praxis is to be understood as “anti-political,” by which Čeika means that for Nietzsche, politics are something to be superseded. With this idea of anti-politics, Čeika aims to influence a particular readership, namely a Left-Nietzschean readership who might suspend Nietzsche’s actual political agenda and envision a hypothetical, socialist Nietzsche. He says the book is written “not to a hypothetical Nietzsche that became a Marxist,” but to “today’s living Nietzscheans, who have perceived, more than Nietzsche could have, the full extent of capital’s dominating tendency and its globally destructive force.”⁷ But as we will come to see in our analysis of the function of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, when we consider the precise way that Nietzsche critiqued conservatives in his time, the sort of anti-politics Nietzsche preaches was specifically meant to shut down class-based politics and, specifically, to mute politics centered on working-class liberation. Unless we pay attention to the design of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, we end up reading his concepts in a dehistoricized way. We risk understanding his philosophy as abstract in ways that we would seek to avoid when analyzing Marx. We read Marx as a thinker whose ideas and concepts were engaged in the class struggle of his time, a struggle that we have inherited and continue to confront. When Nietzsche is brought into our analysis, however, his political thought is somehow de-linked from the struggles of his time and his insights are treated as purely philosophical. 

To his credit, Čeika is concerned with answering the question of whether Nietzsche’s reactionary views and anti-socialism are deeply central to his thought. Unfortunately, he answers that they are not central to his thought, thereby leaving the reader to assume that if they were to be judged this way it would risk shutting down the entire project of uniting Marx with Nietzsche in the first place. Regardless, the position of the book is that Nietzsche’s “anti-politics” are compatible with Marx’s political praxis, and that Nietzsche’s understanding of socialism was limited to the utopian socialist movements of his time as well as vulgar socialist philosophers such as Eugen Dühring. We are led to believe that Nietzsche, much like Marx and Engels—who also critiqued Dühring—waged his critique of socialism as a fundamentally moral doctrine, “defined in terms of equality, rights, and justice. But that is not the socialism of Marx, it is not our socialism.”⁸ On this basis, Čeika says we can align Nietzsche’s views on socialism with Marx’s views because both saw moralistic socialism as a “disguised religious fanaticism and life-denying asceticism.”⁹ But these assumptions avoid the extensive literature on Nietzsche and socialism as well as the numerous references to socialism in Nietzsche’s writings, which go far beyond a critique of moralistic socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche critiqued the socialists and the anarchists on the streets of Paris in the Paris Commune of 1871, and consistently wrote about the condition of the working-class during the Second Reich under Bismarck.

Any attempt to fuse Marx with Nietzsche must seriously consider the ways in which both thinkers responded to the concrete events of the Paris Commune. Both Marx and Nietzsche derive distinct understandings of the problem of the liberation of the working-class from the events of the commune. For Nietzsche, the commune is referenced in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as the rising of a barbaric slave class, and Nietzsche continues to develop a wide-ranging set of theories about the importance of pacifying the political agency of the working-class. But when we read Nietzsche via a model of elective affinity we might assume, as Čeika does, that Nietzsche’s insights into overcoming guilt in the Genealogy of Morality are somehow applicable to the liberation of the workers in the Paris Commune, or that Nietzsche might have supported the liberation of workers from what he calls their “miserable condition” in Daybreak.¹⁰ The fusion of contradictory philosophical insights completely untethered from historical or social contexts are a hallmark of the Left-Nietzschean, elective affinity reading method.

As an example of the danger of elective affinity, Čeika argues that Nietzsche’s radical critique of the division of labor, had he only been familiar with Marx’s communist vision, would possibly have led him to align with Marx. He writes that the “forms of socialism [Nietzsche] was familiar with in his time were not radical enough to attack the division of labour itself.”¹¹ This is highly misleading and it ignores any treatment of the  elaborate discussions of socialism throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre. It also refuses to grapple with his views on political economy, or the fact that Nietzsche possesses a reactionary agenda against the working class and its liberation. With this example, we are shown the strategy of Left-Nietzscheanism; it must dehistoricize Nietzsche by turning his politics into an open, indeterminate question so as to activate his philosophical concepts from the perch of a detached position. As Marxists committed to historical materialist treatment of ideas and concepts, we owe Nietzsche and Marx a more thoughtful consideration of how their ideas and concepts interact with the political contexts of their time. Thus, when dealing with Nietzsche’s political thought and seeking to forge it with Marx and Marxism, it is imperative that we understand the significance that anti-socialism played for Nietzsche. Moreover, we must understand that anti-socialism was not a marginal concern for Nietzsche’s philosophy, but a major thrust of his thought.  

The Problem of Moralistic Socialism for Marx and Nietzsche

Let us approach the question as to whether Nietzsche and Marx align out of a shared critique of moralistic socialism, as Čeika and many Left-Nietzscheans assume. Marx and Engels offer arguably one of their most pointed critiques of moralistic socialism in the Communist Manifesto, when they take on “true socialists” such as the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, and the quasi-religious socialists Moses Hess and Wilhelm Waitling. These thinkers sought the conditions of socialism in the misty abstractions of universal truth, not in the practical force of the workers’ movement and proletariat. 

The problem with moralistic socialists owes not only to the absence of any serious critique of political economy in their work. It is tied to their failure to theorize a revolution of society from the standpoint of the proletariat. The true socialists err not only in their philosophical outlook; they err because they understand socialism as a purely-contemplative movement, detached from the working class. The true socialists leave no room for theory to actualize in social and political struggles because the basis of their theory is abstracted from the concrete struggles of workers, and they have no account of the way that the masses can be seized by revolutionary theory. 

At a superficial level of comparison, we might say that Nietzsche would critique the true socialists for their abstract, quasi-religious understanding of socialism. But this is not the core of what Marx and Engels claim is problematic in moralistic socialism; the core problem of moralistic socialism, again, is that the true socialists cannot locate the working class in any conception of revolutionary theory. With this in mind, let’s examine how Nietzsche’s political thought squares with this critique by looking at his extensive commentary on the very same class that Marx and Engels argue theory must galvanize towards revolutionary agitation, namely the working class. Unlike the true socialists, Nietzsche was a perspicuous reader in political economy, and he commented widely on the problem of the working class. 

As Dmitri Safronov has elaborated in his recent work Nietzsche’s Political Economy (2023), Nietzsche possessed a fundamental hostility towards any future revolution from below and to any changing of the condition of private property. For Nietzsche, the propertyless class represents the “greatest danger to society,” and any notion of a revolution that would be led by the working class’ demands would only promise the compounding of ressentiment and entrench new forms of psychological slavery on humanity.¹² 

Without a fuller appreciation of the breadth of content in Nietzsche’s politics, it is hard to understand how Nietzsche’s vitalist insights, his embrace of amor fati, and aesthetic notions of becoming can truly offer a revolutionary view of the past in any substantive political register. But Čeika finds Nietzsche’s insights into history to be “essential to socialists” as they offer an affective strength to not be resentful towards the past. At the level of social and political memory, this remains a curious claim given Nietzsche’s profound skepticism over the legacy of the egalitarian revolutionary tradition that was opened in the modern period with the French Revolution, and which continued into the 1871 uprising of the Paris Commune, of which Nietzsche remarked it was among the saddest days of his life.¹³ 

For Nietzsche, the French Revolution was unequivocally seen as the first modern slave revolt, and he commented on the movements for the abolition of slavery in his time both in Europe and the United States, which was undergoing a bloody Civil War over the ending of chattel slavery.¹⁴ Safronov points out that for Nietzsche, “the abolition of slavery has little to do with moral enlightenment and more with perpetuating more subtle forms of impersonal and anonymous slavery.”¹⁵ Nietzsche thought the egalitarian movements from below, such as the universal movement for male suffrage and the abolition of chattel slavery, would give rise to new psychological forms of enslavement.

But this assessment did not merely remain at the level of a written critique. Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois morality is meant to be enacted, i.e., the Overmen are invited to introduce new types of inequality. Moreover, Nietzsche sought justification for newer forms of inequality, with which modern slave morality had allegedly lost touch. For example, Nietzsche redefines the notion of the “underprivileged” beyond political or economic forms of privilege with his emphasis on physiological inequality.¹⁶ In Beyond Good and Evil, when discussing the “multitude,” or the working masses, Nietzsche refers to the working masses as “unvollständige Menschen” (“incomplete individuals”) in the sense that their physiological flaws result in psychological frailty. Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, as Safronov shows, is based on the idea that capitalism suppresses a spiritual hierarchy. Thus, part of what Nietzsche’s critique is meant to bring about is a new reality of rank and distinction bound up with differences in physiological disposition. The secret truths of this new ranking order are to be ushered in by a small group of individuals who force it upon an amorphous majority. Nietzsche’s obsession with physiology as the basis of the realization of his project is evident when we look at his more unabashedly reactionary followers such as far-Right internet personality Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert) who elevates Nietzsche as the modern prophet of superior breeding and racial difference. 

These insights may be useful for academic investigations into psychology and even psychoanalysis, but taken up as a political project, they have the practical consequence of adding psychological and physiological differences—not only economic and cultural differences—between individuals as the primary basis of inequality. Nietzsche’s political project is meant to restore a missing balance that modern slave morality has disrupted in physiological rank. This project only complicates and further weighs down the goals of class emancipation and the ending of wage labor. Moreover, Nietzsche’s entire political orientation is bent on retaining conditions of enforced labor for a subjugated class, and a profound skepticism over abolishing private property. Nietzschean Leftists, should they aim to incorporate Nietzsche’s insights into physiological and psychological ranking in their understanding of socialism, risk sidestepping Marx’s insights into the basis of class conflict at the center of social life under capitalism. Nietzsche’s emphasis on physiological difference adds new, ascriptive identity markers based in physiology to any understanding of equality, and this obscures the importance of overcoming the class-based relations of exploitation and domination that socialists should advocate.  

Nietzsche’s views on political economy make him diametrically-opposed to Marx and Engels in thought and practice. Without a serious and historically informed analysis of Marx and Nietzsche, the “Left-Nietzschean” project risks gleaning shallow insights from the two thinkers (at best) or incorporating reactionary concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche unbeknownst to the Left-Nietzschean (at worst). 

In What Way is Nietzsche Reactionary?

Čeika suggests that any Nietzsche-Marx rapprochement hinges on whether Nietzsche can plausibly be understood as a reactionary. While he admits that Nietzsche held some reactionary views here and there, he suggests that these views are marginal to the wealth of insights that he offers to contemporary socialists. He further argues that Nietzsche overcomes any reactionary baggage if we isolate how he understood dialectics, particularly how Nietzsche appropriated the Hegelian notion of aufheben, or the idea that a form can be abolished while simultaneously preserving a core of its substance. Nietzsche’s dialectic involves an element of “lifting up” in the final negation, and this overcoming “is the reason Nietzsche is decidedly not a reactionary, at least if we understand a reactionary as being someone who wants society to return to a previously existing condition.”¹⁷

“Reactionary” philosophy is defined here very narrowly as simply any attempt to resurrect a glorified past. Nietzsche’s philosophy is thus exempted from this definition of reactionary because he apparently does not ascribe any romantic, historical glorification to the Greeks or any past historical age. Nietzsche is thought, rather, to offer an affirmative embrace of the future and of the present– amor fati! Despite the problems with this rather narrow definition of reaction, we are led to the view that Nietzsche possesses a dialectical understanding of capitalism, for which Čeika finds support in a passage from Twilight of the Idols entitled “In the ear of the Conservatives.” 

In this passage, Nietzsche speaks to the politicians and parties that aim to take humanity back to an earlier standard of virtue, and he warns, “no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into decadence.”¹⁸ In Čeika’s reading of this specific passage, the kernel of Nietzsche’s aufheben of decadence is understood to be in line with Marx’s notion of aufheben, “according to which capital has to expand before it can be abolished.”¹⁹ In other words, Nietzsche’s understanding of overcoming decadence (aufheben) by stepping into it further is conflated and made to be in alignment with the general Marxist idea that capitalism as a system generates contradictions that undermine itself. This is the same move we saw before with the assumption that Marx and Nietzsche share a similar critique of socialism. Now they share a similar philosophical and political conception of dialectics as an overcoming of capitalism, as well.

However, Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming decadence is not bent on any overcoming of capitalism, and this is evidenced when we analyze the precise aphorism in question, which Čeika claims does not express reactionary views. In what follows, we will demonstrate that Nietzsche’s “whispers in the ear of conservatives” were indeed expressive of a right-wing political position. We can realize this when we situate our understanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher working amidst the crisis of the bourgeois class following the Paris Commune, and the rise of imperial conquest and European colonization. In this milieu, the European bourgeoisie had lost all hope that they lived in the best of possible worlds, and these decadent social conditions gave way to what György Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason, calls “a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, et c.”²⁰ In this context, Nietzsche’s philosophy performed a specific social task of rescuing and redeeming the bourgeoisie as a cultural and social class. Lukács shows how Nietzsche’s philosophy offered a road for the bourgeoisie of his time that avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the class struggle.²¹ Thus, Nietzsche’s anti-politics, contrarily to how they have been defined in Čeika’s work, must be understood as a class project in line with furthering the material interests of the bourgeoisie, and designed to shut down proletarian consciousness and revolutionary possibility. 

We can further assess the intent of Nietzsche’s “whispers” by understanding his critique of Bismarck, wherein he broke with the German politician from an explicitly right-wing position. Lukács notes that Nietzsche’s break with Bismarck involved two points: the first was a break from the project of democratic representation, which Nietzsche saw as constituting an “increasing stultification of democratic man, and the consequent stultification of Europe and belittling of European man.”²¹ The second break stemmed from Nietzsche’s claim that Bismarck did not understand the true gravity of the coming age of imperial wars. Nietzsche held to the importance of upholding the Prussian military state in the face of the coming catastrophe: “The upholding of the military state is the ultimate means of adopting or sustaining the great tradition with regard to the higher type of person, the type that is strong.”²¹    

It is hard not to read Čeika’s political account of Nietzsche’s thought as representing what Domenico Losurdo refers to as the “hermeneutics of innocence,” a reading method that makes Nietzsche’s political substance nonexistent or marginal, and based on this misreading seeks to then forge a Nietzschean Marxism.²² 

Nietzschean Marxism: A Lopsided Political Praxis

Nietzschean Marxism can be problematic when it is built on a depoliticized understanding of Nietzsche. These problems are not merely philosophical; I want to argue that Nietzschean Marxism can have practical effects on the direction of socialist political thought and praxis. How are we, as socialists, to engage bourgeois forms of equality? How are we meant to transcend or incorporate aspects of equality in our conception of socialism and of a future socialist society? The way we understand and advocate for equality entails an engagement with philosophy, and this has direct bearing on the sort of demands that socialists advocate for the working-class. If socialist philosophers advocate a lifting of living standards for the working-class through expansion of the social safety net, are they succumbing to the slave morality of bourgeois morality? A Nietzschean Marxism will tend to cast profound skepticism on the raising of working class living standards due to this aversion not only towards equality, but towards rights as such. 

The Nietzschean suspicion of rights is a long-standing motif in Left readings of Nietzsche, and it can be seen in more recent Left-Nietzschean works by Deleuze and Foucault. Both read Nietzsche’s  Genealogy of Morals as setting the bar for liberation based on a continual disobedience towards institutions. Čeika similarly urges the Left to eschew a commitment to rights: “the reason that such rights are required in the first place is evidence of a fundamentally alienated society, a society based on a gulf between the rulers and the ruled, consisting of citizens whose social powers are removed from their immediate control.”²³ Such strong skepticism towards bourgeois rights is warranted to an extent, but the problem comes about in the way Left-Nietzschean skepticism proffers a skepticism over rights in the very notion of a communist society to come. As Igor Shoikhedbrod convincingly argues in his work on Marx’s interpretation of liberalism, “[it is] a mistake to conclude that the historical achievements of capitalism, including the granting of formal legal rights, would be annihilated under communism. Abolishing elementary formal rights would mean reverting to pre-capitalist social relations, in which the direct domination of the master, lord, or patriarchal community actively inhibited the free development of individuals.”²⁴ 

Marx does not chide equality and rights as such, as we know from his commentary on the way that each mode of production implies a new legal relation. Marx saw that rights are necessary, but not sufficient for political emancipation. In Left-Nietzschean praxis, the necessary basis of rights is thrown out the window, and this has the practical consequence of making the Left vulnerable to anarchistic practice, untethered from institutions entirely. The downside to this individualist praxis is evident in Foucault’s statement in his famous debate with Chomsky: “individual members of the proletariat desire a proletariat revolution for their own sake, that they may have more power.”²⁵ The Nietzschean praxis not only dissuades commitments to rights, it construes of revolution in a highly unmediated and individualist way; on offer is a ludic and joyful rebellion, but one that is detached from the development of working-class interests and skeptical of parties, institutions and leadership. 

This suspicion of rights has the practical effect of presenting a conception of liberation that risks forcing socialists to shift their demands away from the arena of the state entirely, and this in turn kneecaps large-scale political mobilization within the parliamentary or democratic system. Nietzschean Marxism can very often cast shade on the prospect of building a workers’ party, on forming leadership within the socialist movement, and it can often lead to libertarian-socialism and anti-institutional forms of anarchism. We should always remember that Marx consistently advocated for political demands such as that of limiting the hours in the working day.

A deeper appreciation of the political core of Nietzsche produces different conclusions regarding how both Marx and Nietzsche relate to one another. For example, both thinkers consider the liberal-democratic version of equality as hollow. However, Nietzsche prefers the liberal bourgeois order to any socialist doctrine of equality. Nietzsche’s praxis is thus bent on social transformation in ways that are anathema to any direction of collective, egalitarian achievement. He is particularly wary of any threat to private property.²⁶ The question for Left Nietzscheans, given they have absorbed so many elements of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian agenda but construed this agenda as tertiary to his core concepts and insights, remains this: Will the development of a Nietzschean-Marxist praxis fall sway to a formula for revolution that ultimately represents “a declaration of war on the masses by higher men,”²⁷ as Nietzsche put it? In other words, when we make Nietzsche the primary philosopher for the Left, we risk forcing a type of elitist adhesion to political leadership, which moreover risks a form of leadership that retrenches existing elite hierarchies, and even celebrates the status quo in terms of class power, precisely by obscuring the truth of class oppression. Due to these problems, Nietzschean Leftism must be combined with a rigorous class analysis from a Marxist perspective, and after this has been done, the Nietzsche problem will become apparent to the Left. 

A socialist Left that has abandoned equality runs a risk of damaging the philosophical compass that shapes its commitments to institutions, and ultimately to the development of a strategic political vision. These days, the liberal discourse on equality, rights, and representation is already tarnished and rendered suspect. Liberals have abandoned any notion of equality other than equality determined on the market. The hollowness of liberal appeals to market equality is why the discourse on rights and equality are necessary for achieving forms of working-class emancipation such as the achievement of new forms of leisure, labor rights and increases in social welfare. Nietzschean socialists will often lead the Left to assume that bettering the material condition of workers will risk miring the proletariat in forms of ressentiment that are intractable. This argument forms the backbone to the widely-read essay “Telling the Truth About Class” by G.M Tamás, which re-casts Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment in support for avoiding a conception of socialism that would aim to build working-class culture and equality. Even though Tamás does not espouse a Left-Nietzschean project as a Marxist, the influence of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian thought has been negatively absorbed into his core conception of socialism in problematic ways. 

We can benefit from Nietzsche’s politics as a theoretical surplus of insights only after we have carefully understood the reactionary agenda at the heart of his work. As Marxists, it is best not to apologetically gloss over the extent to which Nietzsche’s thought is forged in response to the revolutionary tradition, to anti-egalitarianism, and to a highly developed anti-socialist politics. When we miss that, we miss out on understanding how his indirect apologetics for capitalism and support for adhesion to status quo class relations truly works. We must develop a new reading method for Nietzsche, which avoids the apolitical and whitewashed versions of his thought that we have inherited from the post-war Nietzsche industry. This can only begin when we have a more historically-grounded confrontation with Nietzsche, one that makes no apologies for his sophisticated opposition toward the revolutionary tradition that he sought to extinguish, and in which we find our compass for political action. 

Daniel Tutt is a writer and philosopher based in Washington, DC. He is the author of How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books.

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1. Geoff Waite, “The Politics of Reading Formations: The Case of Nietzsche in Imperial Germany (1870-1919),” New German Critique, Vol. 29 (Spring/Summer, 1983): 185–209.
2. Matthew Sharpe, “Golden Calf: Deleuze’s Nietzsche in the Time of Trump,” Thesis Eleven 2021, Vol. 163 (April 2021): 71–88.
3. Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
4. Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the 21st Century Left (London, Repeater Books, 2021): 68.
5. Ibid, 67.
6. Ibid, 15.
7. Ibid, 68.
8. Ibid, 79.
9. Ibid, 81.
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 206.
11. Ibid, 201.
12. Dmitri Safronov, Nietzsche’s Political Economy (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2023), 242.
13. See Domenico Losurdo,  Aristocratic Rebel: Political Biography and Critical Balance Sheet, trans. Gregor Benton (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020), 27. Commenting on the rumors that the communards on the streets of Paris had burned down the Louvre, Nietzsche writes in a letter to his friend Gersdorff on 21 June 1871: “I was for some days completely destroyed and drenched in tears and doubts: all scholarly and philosophical aesthetic existence seemed to me an absurdity, if a single day could wipe out the most noble works of art, or whole periods of art.”
14. See Losurdo, Aristocratic Rebel, Chapter 12, “Slavery in the United States and in the Colonies and the Struggle between Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists” (pp. 383 – 415). Here we not only learn of the ways in which Nietzsche embraced the claim, stretching back to his early work The Birth of Tragedy, that slavery is an intrinsic feature of any great civilization, but that contemporary movements for equality as well as the ending of chattel slavery were all cast under profound suspicion and ridicule.
15. Ibid, 178.
16. Dmitri Safronov, Nietzsche’s Political Economy (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2023), 166. “Nietzsche’s ‘underprivileged’, writes Safronov, “are not just the politically or economically underprivileged. (NF-1886:5[71], §8, §14). Instead, Nietzsche thinks of the ‘under privileged’ in the context of the distinction between the more ‘whole human beings’ and the ‘ordinary people’. In Beyond Good and Evil, when discussing the ‘multitude’, he refers to them as ‘unvollständige Menschen’ (‘incomplete individuals’) in the sense of their physiological flaws resulting in psychological frailty (see BGE: §§257–258). His argument problematises none other than the manner in which such underlying— psychological and physiological—differences between individuals become embedded in the social fabric of society and reinterpreted by slave morality using the terminology of economic and political inequality.”
17. Čeika, 145.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 108.
19. Čeika, 149.
20. György Lukács,  The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (New York, Verso Books, 2022), 316.
21. Ibid.
22. Domenico Losurdo,  Aristocratic Rebel: Political Biography and Critical Balance Sheet, trans. Gregor Benton (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020).
23. Čeika, 108-109.
24. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), 87.
25. Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, “Human Nature: Justice versus Power,” 22 October 1971, Eindhoven Institute of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, transcript, https://chomsky.info/1971xxxx.
26. Safronov, 146.
27. Ibid, 243.