Jonas Čeika - How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle

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A Repeater Books paperback original 2021

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Jonas eika 2021

Jonas eika asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN: 9781913462499

Ebook ISBN: 9781913462659

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Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

Dedicated to Rachel, and my family in Lithuania .

Thank you to Logan OHara .

CONTENTS

Yet the earth is in violent upheaval with the need to create.

Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements

Introduction

The way I understand the philosopher, as a terrible explosive that is a danger to everything

Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.

Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge

Last year, at a DMV office in Florida, among several license plates displayed on a wall, one in particular stood out to me: it was an image of Martin Luther King Jr. along with text that read, living the dream. The implication was that, what was once for King Jr. just a dream, had now been realized, and no longer had to be fought for an illustrative example of how a rebellious thinker and activist (who during his life was seen as a great danger to the state and was violently smeared and hunted down) is neutralized, made servile, turned into a legitimator of the present state of things in the Third Reich, even when this bermensch was characterized by two of Nietzsches most hated things a German and an anti-Semite!

In the popular imagination, reading Marx alongside Nietzsche might seem bizarre: arent they so diametrically opposed to one another that reading them in each others light would only lead to contradiction and confusion? The extent to which their irreconcilability has been exaggerated is only one of the many reasons to unite them, because it is to a large extent the grotesque deformations mentioned above that have created this exaggeration. Fans of Nietzsche have tended to be averse to Marx, and to a large extent, this is the fault of self-proclaimed Marxists themselves, so many of whom have presented versions of Marxism that are cold and inhuman, deterministic and vulgarly mechanistic, or statist and bureaucratic all characteristics which Marx himself violently opposed. History has been made into an independent force, as if ruling over people from the outside, when Marx emphasized that history is nothing but individuals pursuing their goals. Historical analysis has been made into a matter of prophecy, a deterministic metanarrative, something nave which people can no longer believe in. Marxist action has been made into the activity of bureaucrats and party politicians, when it is always the working class itself that is the author of its revolutionary activity. Marxist philosophy has been made into a closed system, a rigid framework to force onto the world; and socialism has been made into a static blueprint, rather than the process by which the world is transformed.

But if we use Nietzsche to excavate Marxism, we can uncover all the Nietzschean aspects of Marx that have been purposefully denounced, overlooked, or ignored throughout the failures and deformations of Marxism in the twentieth century. I propose a Nietzschean Marxism, which, paradoxically, comes to be more Marxist than many forms of Marxism claiming to be Marxs direct heirs. What must be restored is the human element active human beings, their lived experience and their most personal concerns and there is no modern philosopher who provides this element more fiercely than Nietzsche. Our philosophy not only centres the concerns of everyday, living, suffering human beings; it exists and develops through them.

Its not an accident that when nominally Marxist institutions wanted to make Marx more pliable, it was often precisely the elements that tied Marx to Nietzsche that they violently opposed. One of the most notable features of Nietzsches philosophy is its emphatic aversion to servitude , to being made servile, and it is precisely this that was targeted by so many enemies of Marx disguised as his disciples. Poor Marx, even more so than Nietzsche, has been made to suffer through many horrific surgeries and mutations. Through theoretical distortions and practical misapplications, he has been transformed from a thinker who wants to transcend modernitys categories altogether, into a thinker who merely wants to reform some given sphere of modernity: a social democrat, a moralist, a historical determinist, even a nationalist. So many people have dedicated their careers to digging up Marxs corpse and making use of one limb or another, not to emphasize what is most powerful in him, but precisely to neutralize what is most powerful, thereby allowing him to become servile. He has been made into a legitimator of parliamentary parties and states, a prophet with a metanarrative, a preacher of justice, equality, and fairness, and an ideologue. In light of Nietzsches rebellious spirit and aversion to servitude, it is unsurprising that he was so popular among Russian revolutionaries leading up to and during the Russian Revolution, but was then denounced and expunged the more that the USSR exhausted its capacity for political transformation in the process of making Marx servile it is very useful to prevent Nietzsche from interfering.

In 2020, when the Philippine government held a hearing on a new proposed bill amendment, whose supposed purpose was counterterrorism, it listed Marx alongside Nietzsche as a threat to the state this wasnt an ignorant move. A critic of the bill from Quezon City said that, given its ambiguity, it could mean that [a]ny member, a student who wants to join a political organization, who wants to discuss Marxism, Leninism, Friedrich Nietzsche, and his concept of bermensch , or the superman, is suspect. Very well! The humour of such a bill does not preclude its reasonableness. Marx and Nietzsche are, after all, the two great giants of modern emancipation. They wouldnt really be Marx and Nietzsche if they were not considered suspect by most states. In the subtitle to his work Twilight of the Idols , Nietzsche characterized his thinking as a philosophizing with a hammer. So let us use Marx as a hammer, not as a legitimator, because genuine revolutionaries do not need to be granted legitimation. Value-creators of the future, they legitimize themselves.