📚

How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

15.05.2024 Jonas ÄŒeika (2021)

The book is about philosophy, Nietzsche and Marx to be exact, how one (Freddie) perceived socialism that was current to him (negatively), and how various philosophers (nerds) and steadfast ideologues (jocks) attempted to synthesize the ideas of both of those titans of philosophy.
I was disappointed with this book, compared to J. ÄŒeika's videos with very in-depth historical background this book is very famished in this regard, it was quite frustrating how he talked about the philosophy alone, where the projects of Marx and Nietzsche relied on writing books designed to be read by non-academics, focused on transcending the barriers of philosophy to influence the reality more than anyone did or could before, I would much rather hear about what was happening around those thinkers and how their thought changed the immediate surroundings of people who believed their ideology, my expectations were that more of it's contents would be on how philosophy lead to action and how can that be compared to philosophizing and action of the 21rst century.

The title of the book is "How to Philosophize [...] for the Twenty-First Century" for g. sake.

For this is the truth: I have departed from the house of the scholars, and the door have I also slammed behind me. Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table
- Freddie Niecki

Additional gripe I have in this book, having read it after Varufakis' Technofeudalism is its Marxist dogmatism, visible in the strongly held belief that only the working class can negate capitalism, especially as it's a hard opinion to keep holding onto, as Varufakis stated in his book, today capital is not negated by the working class at all whereas it's quite successfully warped by platforms like Amazon or Facebook, private ownership, means of production, markets and wage labor are all twisted by the direct action of those platforms in such a way they are hard to call them by their old names, whereas working class mostly failed in subverting those over 150 years of struggle.
Sure the book released a year before Technofeudalism but this dogmatism shouldn't be there or at least should be elaborated upon, if the book really was written to be future proof for the 75 years ahead of us as the title claims.

There is also some really interesting apologia in defense of Nietzsche as a thinker twisted beyond recognition by Nazis by the means of published post-mental breakdown dubiously editorialized notes (the editor was his sister, a first class schmoozer, who somewhat sympathetic to Nazi cause). I remember in high school, in my writing and literature textbook Nietzsche was presented as a nihilist (!) thinker that Nazis venerated, that portrayal was frustrating for me even back then where I knew very little about the guy.

An anti-nihilist thinker providing a framework to live by in times where destructive nihilism raged presented as a nihilist, someone who wrote that textbook had their ideas backwards!

My favorite part of the book was a short section about soviet futurists and their ideas for the society they wanted to construct, days after the successes of the Bolshevik revolution, It's a thing I mention again and again for example in my book blog about "In search of aliens" it was a completely different way of doing futurism than the way it's done in the 21rst century, examples of modern futurism are the Kurzwelian way or even for something even more recent the e/acc futurism, in the modern strains of it humans are not on the helm of progress and future is decided by exponential extrapolations.
After all this famous quote from the communist manifesto was a call to arms to get control back over that progress not give into the inertia of its direction.

Modern bourgeois society [...], a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
- Charlie Marx

An example of that Marxian/Nietzschean futurism given in the book, is the first USSR sci-fi novel, it's about a socialist success on the red planet, "Red star", Soviet futurists as well as people extending their thought out of Marxist baseline towards broader emancipation are put forth as examples of people who carried out a successful synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche in their lives, quick summaries of these people's lives, views and achievements are a fantastic part of this book, it is a pity that there were only 15 pages of that not 50+.

Expand Meta Yappfiesta

J. ÄŒeika is a youtuber recording fun videos about philosophers, from Hegel through Heidegger and Foucault to Fisher, concerning late modernism and postmodernism, leftist ideas and history of the left. I have been enjoying his videos for the best part of the last 5 years. His old screen-name was Cuck Philosophy when it comes to my somewhat leftist perspective on the world, he is probably the guy I'd put the most blame onto, first video of his I have ever seen was the one about critique of the codified human rights as something that is holy and that deserves to be venerated, that video really moved me, it was a cheap-shot aimed directly to my soft ideologically immature core. So when I was thinking about what to read next and around the time I got a notification about a new video I scrolled through his catalog and saw the one I glanced over -- the one announcing the release of the book he wrote.

It's the first book I have ever read that was authored by an E-Celeb, entire complex world of books has opened up to me with this one, maybe I will read Pewdiepie's "This book loves you" or Tate's "Andrew Tate: Escape The Matrix: 92 Laws Of Success, Money & Fame"? Who knows, anything goes.