A Critique of Nietzsche and Nietzschean Ideology

From the Marxist Perspective

Nietzsche’s Life and Material Circumstances

We as materialists must always remember that ideas do not just happen, they do not appear fully formed like Athena from the split skull of Zeus, rather they emerge from material reality. We must therefore understand that the philosophy of Nietzsche was not some metaphysical Athena that shot forth from his skull, but a product of the material reality he existed in. Let us, then, examine the circumstances of Nietzsche’s life and philosophizing. Nietzsche was, in the words of Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, “an utterly lonely man{1}.” Nietzsche’s life was one of social isolation and his close companions were few; his father and brother died when he was very young and his relationship with his sister- his only remaining familial companion in adulthood- was often strained, as one can observe in their exchanged letters, owing to stark political differences.

He once wrote of his loneliness, in a letter to his friend Franz Overbeck dated July 2 of 1885, “I hold up before myself the images of Dante and Spinoza, who were better at accepting the lot of solitude [than I]{2}.” To Seydlitz in February of 1888: “I am now alone, absurdly alone…{3}” To Gast in 1883: “Forgive me for writing so often. I have so few people to confide in now{4}.” Yes, this was a profoundly isolated man, socially isolated in his having only two real companions (Overbeck and his sister) and only liking one of them, physically isolated within a series of dismal apartments and boarding rooms described by Stefan Zweig as “…small, narrow, modest, coldly furnished…” in which he wiled away his lonely hours with unceasing philosophical composition.

Nietzsche’s terrible isolation was the material catalyst that formed the shape in which his written and interpersonal manners grew. The two developed, however, in different shapes, branching in different directions from the same root. In his interpersonal manner, Nietzsche appears to have been perfectly lovely and indeed quite courteous, keeping to himself but associating very amiably with anyone who offered him a brief respite from his isolated circumstances. A Dr. Paneth (whose first name has not been recorded), a Nietzsche reader who met the philosopher by chance in Nizza, describes his interpersonal manner in a letter dated to December 26, 1883: “There is not a trace of false pathos or the prophet’s pose in him, as I had rather feared after his last work. Instead his manner is completely inoffensive and natural. We began a very banal conversation about the climate, living accommodations, and the like. Then he told me, but without the least affectation or conceit, that he always felt himself to have a task and that now, as far as his eyes would permit it, he wanted to get out of himself and work up whatever might be in him{5}.”

But, as the letter itself hints to, his written manner was a torrent of vitriol and fury. With essentially nothing else in his life to do, all of Nietzsche’s rage and discontent at his inane life came out in written work which fiercely declared a philosophical order that turned his isolation from the rest of society into a form of nirvana, declaring individual isolation virtuous, connection to the rest of humanity harmful, and all previously existing institutions and orders dead. Stuck in and overcome by isolation, he strove to convince himself it was a good thing. Nietzsche, cut off and alone, spat upon the rest of humanity and created for himself a fiercely individual ideological order in which his own will and subjective ideals reigned supreme.

We must also, of course, examine the material political-economic circumstances of Nietzsche’s world. Nietzsche was a resident of Prussia, a German country characterized at this time by Prussianism: the militaristic, nationalistic, and moralistic social norms set by the Prussian crown and bourgeois state. The Prussianist political culture valued aristocratic traditions, loyalty to the Prussian state and “nation,” military service and conquest, adherence to traditional morals, and identity with the national and traditional institutions of the Prussian people (e.g. religion, “German” culture and identity, etc.). Nietzsche was the betraying son of Prussia, the Brutus to the Prussian Caesar; from the very beginning of his life as an intellectual he challenged and rejected Prussianist norms.

In his young life, Nietzsche gained the ire of his teachers with refusal to focus his intellectual efforts on those avenues deemed worthy by Prussianism. He adored and wrote on the work of poet Friedrich Hölderin, prompting a teacher to demand he study “more German” writers{6}. He was a drinker from a young age, and briefly an associate of poet, drunkard, and general societal deviant (as compared to the stern politicoreligious order of Prussianism) Ernst Ortlepp{7}. All of this constituted his early rebellion against the Prussianist order.

In his adult life, his rebellion became more intellectual. A large part of his philosophy can be called a retort to Prussianism. The Prussianist order valued social hierarchies and institutions, Nietzsche valued only the individual. The Prussianist order saw the realization of the self in service to the volk and state, Nietzsche saw it in the assertion of total self-sufficiency and self-rule. The Prussianist order believed in conquest and war on a global scale, Nietzsche saw the only serious concerns for philosophy within the life of the individual. The Prussianist order believed in adherence to a set of socially defined virtues, Nietzsche believed in adherence to the authority of one’s own individual will. The Prussianist order espoused the universal importance of traditional institutions and religion, Nietzsche outright rejected the authority of institutions over the self and declared God (although he was probably referring metaphorically to the authority of religion, not to a literal God, as he seems to have thought a literal God never existed to begin with) dead.

Isolated socially and living under a political-economic order he fundamentally rejected, Nietzsche’s work was the scream of an outcast against the society that cast him out. His work was, when he was still alive, lucid, and producing it, singular, unique, and not popular. But it would come to occupy a central place of prominence in the superstructure of bourgeois ideology, as we shall examine later.

At some point, the historical record and the nature of the disease make it unclear precisely when, Nietzsche contracted syphilis. The disease, as it sometimes does in its tertiary stage, attacked his brain and gradually eroded his neurological function. He became less and less capable of functioning normally as the pathogenic assault on his brain advanced, and he eventually fell into the care of his sister and her husband. His work continued to be published, but he no longer had any say in the process. This leaves his ideology somewhat up in the air in terms of interpretation. What is genuine representation of Nietzsche’s thought? What is the product of syphilitic delusion? What was produced by others, butchering and stitching together unfinished manuscripts to make Nietzsche- by this point a fashionable if controversial figure- look as if he had supported their ideas? Who is to say? Because of this unavoidable unclarity in how one should interpret Nietzsche’s work, a wide range of different factions have taken bits of Nietzsche and adopted them. The result of this is that snippets of Nietzsche have proliferated themselves throughout the whole of bourgeois thought, and as a result all manner of different strains of thought have resulted from the interpretation of Nietzsche- schools we may term “Nietzschean” in one way or another- and now make up much of the system of bourgeois ideology. These different offspring of Nietzsche’s thought will be dealt with in a later chapter.

A Note on Nietzsche and Fascism

It is widely believed that Nietzsche was, in his philosophy and his attitudes, a forerunner of the German fascists of the NSDAP. Even though my purpose here is to criticize Nietzsche without mercy I still must defend him when he has been slandered, for this is without doubt untrue. Nietzsche was many things but an ideological forerunner of the Nazis he was not, indeed in many places he expressed clear disdain for the very tenets they and their Italian fascist contemporaries upheld. The German and Italian fascists believed in the nation before the self, where Nietzsche was (as we shall explore later) an individualist of the most explicit type; for Nietzsche, nothing was before the self and things larger than the self- including the nation- were either insidious traps or hazy illusions. The fascists further expressed their belief in the supremacy of the national whole through the supremacy of the national state- in Mussolini’s words, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” was the political philosophy of the German and Italian fascists. Nietzsche, however, had nothing but disdain for the state! In “On the New Idol,” one of the passages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he decries the state as a false god, as “traps for the many” set by “annihilators.” And, most importantly, Nietzsche differs starkly from the German fascists on the point of antisemitism; that is, he was fiercely and unabashedly opposed to it. In his words, in an 1887 letter to his sister, “It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings.” On every significant philosophical point- the nation and the individual, the state, the question of antisemitism- Nietzsche differs clearly and absolutely from the German fascists.

The confusion seems to have come from Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who was a fascist and indeed a member of the NSDAP in her later life. Her reactionary views were often the catalyst of conflict between her and her brother- this is why he needed to so strongly refute antisemitism in his correspondence with her. Much of Nietzsche’s work was edited (heavily) and published after he was too incapacitated by the aforementioned neurological syphilis to have any influence over the process. Instead, she and her equally noxious husband were the ones who held and controlled his manuscripts, butchering and altering them to heap phony intellectual approval onto their despicable and absurd views. They turned his image into a puppet, a fascist caricature, which they used ruthlessly for their own ends- ends quite different from his. It was Förster-Nietzsche who established the first center for Nietzsche studies, which- with funding from the NSDAP government- was used to falsely paint Nietzsche as an intellectual supporter of the regime{8}. But, it must be clear, most modern translations of Nietzsche have been freed of this malignant influence and thus the lasting influence of his thought is without them, has nothing whatsoever to do with fascism.

There is a great deal to criticize in Nietzsche’s work, and herein I will try to dismantle much of it. But there are enough real flaws that we need not be concerned with phony ones. Nietzschean ideology, both as formulated by him and as it exists today in the bourgeois ideological superstructure, is not directly or meaningfully connected with Hitler’s German fascism and genuine criticism of it should not be concerned with this erroneous accusation.

Nietzsche’s Individualism and Elitism

The dominant and defining characteristic of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought is a pervasive and extreme individualism; his worldview sees the individual as the sole meaningful or valuable unit of humanity, with great disdain for any kind of multi-person unit. He is sometimes called a nihilist for his belief that nothing outside the individual has intrinsic value, but this is not accurate. A true nihilist believes nothing has intrinsic value, Nietzsche espoused that nothing except the individual and the individual’s interests had value. He was not a nihilist, he was an extreme individualist.

In addition to being, as alluded to in the preceding chapter, a product of his isolated and lonely conditions of life, this intense individualism can be understood as grounded in Nietzsche’s philosophy of time. Nietzsche was very concerned with a concept called eternal recurrence, this being the notion that, in the words of Nietzsche himself, “Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, — a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process{9}.” In clearer terms (for Nietzsche was nothing if not poetically abstruse) this means that all that occurs has occurred before and shall abruptly begin again at the beginning only to repeat yet again forever ad infinitam. Whether or not Nietzsche believed fully and literally in the eternal recurrence is a matter of some controversy and debate, but he certainly at the very least considered it a possibility worth considering and was influenced in his thought by the belief that he lived, at least possibly, in an eternally recurrent universe.

And, in an eternally recurrent universe, what is the point of anything outside the self? Certainly it would be foolish for an individual in such a universe to seek to contribute to anything larger than themselves, anything that may outlast themselves, for it may at any moment cease to exist as all of reality resets. So, for Nietzsche, it must have made sense that the only task worth setting out to do was to realize the self and make one’s own life as rewarding as possible so that going through it over and over and over, forgetting each time that it had repeated of course, would be as bearable as possible a prospect.

So that is why Nietzsche was powerfully individualist, let us examine the nature of his individualism. He rejects philosophical concerns with groups and with the idea of humanity as a multi-person whole with common interests. Particular objects of his disdain are attachment to religion or to countries and their states, churches and states being the old and new idols he decries as allowing the “superfluous” to “steal the works of the inventors and the wisdom of the sages” and being “invented for” the “all-too-many,” the “superfluous,” those too weak to follow their own will to power who instead use institutions like states to feed off others{10}. He is against believing in or defining oneself as belonging to a national or country group at all, saying “those speaking German- that is something… But those of the German race! What is German as a quality… that is yet to be found…{11}”. He believes instead in the radical individual, the Nietzschean hero, the Übermensch, who rises above their attachments to institutions, groups or ideals outside themselves and becomes defined by their own will. For Nietzsche, the driving force of the human psyche (and indeed all life) is the will to power, the instinct to pursue one’s own total self-realization and absolute power over one’s own existence, and all attachments to constructs or concepts other than oneself and one’s acquisition of power are only obstacles in the way of the pursuit of the will to power because, as he says, “he who cannot obey himself [and his will to power] is commanded{12}.” The Nietzschean hero, the Übermensch, is the one who raises themselves above all such attachments and becomes concerned solely with the pursuit of their own will to power. (Note that, although übermensch is often mistranslated as “superman,” über is in fact the German for “over” and so the more accurate understanding of the term is “over-man,” or the man who is over or above all other concerns but himself.) Per the notes of Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche’s ideology is for “the few human beings who raise themselves above the all-too-human mass{13}.”

For Nietzsche, the individual is not part of the larger wholes of humanity or society but is a singular free subject with the objective of following its will to power and becoming an Übermensch, and all larger concerns are obstacles in the way of the will to power. More than obstacles, in fact, they are walls, built up by the enemy of the individual’s will to power, the “superfluous” or “rabble” who seek to sustain themselves without putting in the work to follow their own will to power by chaining up the would-be Übermensches of the world in institutions, states, churches, etc.

And there, in the almost paranoid fear that drips from his writings of the “rabble,” the “superfluous,” the rest of humanity as the inherent enemy of the heroic individual, lies the most troubling aspect of Nietzche’s individualism- his deep elitism.

It is perhaps not surprising that one who rejects outright his own connection to the rest of humanity would be disdainful of others, but it is surprising to one with a healthy attitude to others to see how overt and noxious Nietzsche’s disdain really is. It manifests most grossly in “On The Rabble,” a passage of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which contains such noxious ideological fungi as: “Life is a well of joy, but where the rabble drinks too, all wells are poisoned. I am fond of all that is clean, but I have no wish to see the grinning snouts and the thirst of the unclean.” To Nietzsche, for the heroic individual on the path to Übermensch status being made to associate with those less in tune with their own will to power is not just an obstacle but a gross and almost unbearable torture. Those who fail in pursuit of the will to power, furthermore, are for Nietzsche base beasts not even worthy of looking upon.

His vision of the self-enlightenment of the Übermensch via self-definition as separate from any wider institutions is, as we see when we look upon its foul naked face in “On the Rabble,” a desire to distinguish himself from the common people for whom he held great disdain. In the universe Nietzsche conceived of, the masses are foul and noxious beasts with ugly snouts and wicked grins and for an individual to be happy is for that individual to define themselves as above (über), superior to, better than the rest of humanity. Again in “On the Rabble,” the self-insert character of Zarathustra, prophet of Nietzsche’s worldview as a quasi-religion (note that his name is stolen from the prophet of another religion, although that prophet’s name today is more usually rendered as Zoroaster) says, “…verily, I had to fly up to the highest spheres that I might find the font of pleasure again. Oh, I found it, my brothers! Here, in the highest spheres, the font of pleasure wells up for me! And here is a life of which the rabble does not drink.” (Here he is describing the titular self-insert prophet’s pursuit of enlightenment through isolation in the mountains, which seems quite clearly to be a metaphor for Nietzsche’s own desire to be isolated from humanity). Once again, one sees that Nietzsche’s idea of self-actualization is to be separate from and above the masses, whom he sees as repulsive, weak, and- judging by how he talks of them in “On the New Idol,”- parasitic. This is nothing more than gross elitism, a bald hatred of humanity and of the masses.

Once one understands the nature of Nietzsche’s individualism plainly and clearly as the elitism it is it is instinctually repulsive, but- far more importantly- it is also factually unfounded. First of all, there was not when Nietzsche wrote and there is not today any evidence that eternal recurrence is an actual phenomenon. Of course, if the universe were eternally recurrent there wouldn’t be any evidence, as there would be no trace of previous iterations of the universe if the entirety of reality reset each time recurrence occurred, as it supposedly does. But here I invoke Hitchens’ Razor: a claim raised without evidence for it can be rejected without evidence against it. Let us not dilly-dally around trying to refute fantasies so disconnected from reality that logic and evidence do not even affect them. The fundamental ontological law of the universe is not eternal recurrence, it is- as the brilliant work of dialectical materialists from Marx to Mao has proven- the Law of Contradiction, the law that all material things contain contradictions and dialectical conflicts between the contradicting factors through which the things are changed into new forms with fewer contradictions are what drives the universe and all progress and change within it{14}. The universe does not go through the same tired motions forever in a stagnant cycle, it moves- sometimes in great leaps, sometimes tortuously slowly, with occasional backwards lapses but nonetheless certainly- in a general forward trend toward having fewer and fewer contradictions. In a Nietzcheesque eternally recurrent universe the future effectively does not exist, and so it is reasonable to focus only on the individual in the present. In the real universe, however, we know that the future does exist and furthermore that the more we struggle to resolve antagonistic contradictions in society in the present the sooner a less contradictory and thus more fulfilling and joyful future society will come.

Therefore, we may say that to care about and work for the good of things beyond the self and things that will outlast the self is not absurd, it is logical. Struggling for the greater good of the working majority in the present will bring forth the resolution of the contradictions of capitalism through the triumph of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and therefore struggling for that larger than the self now will bring greater self-actualization for unknowable multitudes of people- possibly including the self, if the revolution comes soon enough- in the future.

Nietzsche’s elitist individualism, then, is not in service to the liberation of the self- it is in fact an obstacle to it. It is not a force of liberation from social contradictions, it is only a product and a manifestation of the contradictions and inequalities of class society- for without the toiling masses, the “rabble,” who would there be for Nietzsche’s Übermensch to rise above? By refusing to live, work, and struggle among the oppressed and exploited masses- those slandered in Nietzsche’s work as the “superfluous” and the “rabble”- one is refusing to participate in the great dialectical process of the material progress of human society, refusing to play one’s role in and thus delaying the liberation of the whole of humanity, including the self. Individualism is only a hindrance to the individual, if one really wants themselves liberated they should commit themselves to the cause of the masses!

Nietzsche’s Idealism and Subjectivism

Out of Nietzsche’s individualism and its component elitism arises his idealist and subjectivist approach to ontology and epistemology.

Being that he rejects outright the notion of abiding by the standards of any institution or concept larger than the self, Nietzsche of course cannot tolerate the notion of objective truth, as that notion requires some authority (be it science, dogma, or what have you) to verify said truth. So, naturally, his epistemology is an individualist subjectivism. As he overtly states in a note from 1888 translated by Kaufmann, he reckons “…facts do not exist, only interpretations{15}.” For Nietzsche, one may interpret reality however they want by whatever absurd measure they wish and regard it as truth for their purposes. In Nietzschean ideology each individual has their own truth, their own interpretation by which they may live, which is under the supremacy of their own individual will to power. “Truth” for each individual is only a subjective concept subordinate to the supremacy of the will to power, the drive to become a totally liberated Übermensch. This is the subjectivist epistemology of Nietzschean ideology.

And by extension, if reality is taken to be nothing more than one’s own interpretations, then the metaphysical standards by which one interprets become the arbiters of reality. Thus Nietzsche’s ontology is idealist in nature; as far as he is concerned one may define one’s own reality and one’s own way of existing in that reality by one’s own ideals, without caring for material fact (as it apparently, for Nietzsche, does not exist). One’s existence, unchained from such external authorities as fact or religion, is governed only by one’s own ideals of interpretation and, above all, personal will to power. This is the idealist ontology of Nietzschean ideology.

It must be noted that Nietzsche’s idealism was in its time a new and unique approach to ontology. It is only somewhat similar to the classical idealism of Plato or of traditional theist philosophy. Plato’s forms or Christianity’s “mind of God” are similarly metaphysical ideals which define reality, but unlike Nietzsche’s notion of epistemology and ontology based on personal interpretation and one’s own individual authority and will to power these earlier systems of idealism were intended to be universal and unchanging. Plato’s forms, for a Platonist, are the same everywhere and for everyone. Nietzsche’s idealism, however, is individualist and subjectivist; for Nietzsche and the various modern forms of Nietzschean thought the ideals that govern truth and knowledge are personal and subjective, meaning that each person has their own reality and their own truth based on their own interpretations under their own authority.

Nietzsche’s idealism and subjectivism are, of course, continuations of his individualist rebellion against the Prussianist order. The old idealism, the kind of universal idealism favored by religious figures, was part of the bourgeois superstructural ideology of Prussia- the old idealism as manifested in Christian philosophy’s view of the “mind of God” being of course the total ontological supremacy of the God of Prussianist religion that Nietzsche declared dead. And more fact-based epistemologies and ontologies were, to Nietzsche, just new forms of the same. His formulation of a worldview entirely built around the heroic individual was a continuation of the rebellion against Prussianism and its social structures embodied by his theory of the Übermensch. This distinctive view of ontology and epistemology as personal, metaphysically governed, and subjective may be termed, for our purposes, Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism.

It is ironic, given its beginning as a new and rebellious strain, that Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism is, arguably, Nietzsche’s main contribution to modern bourgeois ideology and has become an oppressing ideological order very much like the Prussianist and religious one it once rebelled against.

Of course, it goes without saying that it is an incorrect view of the universe. Reality, for all the attempts of Nietzsche and his innumerable successors to reduce it to personal interpretation, is a hard material certainty which is experienced by all of us collectively, based not on our personal feelings but on our real material conditions. If reality were the stuff of interpretation and not of fact, then the hungry could become well-fed by interpreting their bellies as full and the sick become well by interpreting their bodies as healthy. Yet this does not occur, for no amount of erroneous interpretation can alter facts. Reality is the stuff of facts, and interpretations can only either obfuscate or illuminate these facts but cannot change them. Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism is nonsense.

But, unfortunately, being nonsense has not prevented it from becoming influential. When it was introduced by Nietzsche, this viewpoint was small, controversial, and was a rebellion against the dominant ideology. But as Nietzsche in his later life and after his death became a fashionable figure, Nietzschean ideas proliferated through academia and through all of culture, and Nietzschean ideology in its many divergent forms began to become part of the bourgeois idelogical/cultural superstructure. In today’s era of imperialism and neoliberalism it is an integral part with a central role, which the next chapter shall explore.

The Role of Nietzschean Ideology Today

The superstructure of capitalism can be envisioned (metaphorically, of course) like a great wall, surrounding the masses and controlling our movements and limiting our freedoms. The wall is being perpetually modified in its construction as old buttresses wear away and new ones must be erected. The buttresses, of course, are ideas. As older ideas within the canon of myths and ideals composing the system of culture and ideology by which the bourgeoisie hold power wear out, new ideas are incorporated into the wall to bolster its strength. And as Prussianism faded out of favor with the ruling class and Nietzsche became fashionable in his native Germany and then around the world, several of his ideas began to be incorporated into the larger systems of bourgeois ideology. As the conditions of capitalism continued to change, some borrowed and somewhat evolved Nietzschean ideas became more and more relevant in the system of pro-capitalist ideology- until the modern day, wherein Nietzschean ideology is now an integral and important component of the superstructure.

Two specific Nietzschean ideas are in the modern era central features of the ideological landscape of capitalism, products of the two aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy explored in the second and third chapters. Firstly, the archetype of the Nietzschean hero or Übermensch. Secondly, Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism.

The Nietzschean Hero in Bourgeois Ideology

The Übermensch, the archetype of the self-defined and detached-from-others mighty individual, is a core myth of the current cultural system. Since its introduction by Nietzsche, this Nietzschean concept has been repeated and built off of so many times and by so many that it has been ingrained into the culture at large.

Take the work- if one can call it that- of Ayn Rand for an example. Rand’s protagonists are essentially Nietzschean heroes! Howard Roark of The Fountainhead, defiant of all social standards of art or aesthetics, the heroic-individual architect who insists on building his buildings his way, is in Nietzsche’s terms following his own will to power and abandoning attachments to all institutional authorities and dead gods- he is a Nietzschean Übermensch! And Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt- his crowning philosophical ideal being the right of the individual to act for themselves alone and eschew all meaningful connections to other people- may as well be a caricature of Nietzsche himself! Rand’s protagonists are reincarnated Zarathustras, and their ideas are Nietzsche’s made even more elitist and misanthropic for the purposes of the new neoliberal era.

And one can easily see the way Rand has influenced the superstructure, what with liberal politicians spouting her words like gospel from the pulpits of the neoliberal capitalist-imperialist religion{16}. And the idea of the Nietzschean hero, the idea that a Nietzschian Roark-type figure is the ideal for living, has been propagated in many other ways too. The idea of the “self made millionaire,” impressed upon the children of the proletariat to force them to believe in the lie of capitalist “meritocracy,” is an archetype of the Übermensch. This mythologized individual, this Übermensch the Nietzschean hero, has become an iconic recurrent character in the great pantomime of the bourgeois superstructure. Thanks to Nietzsche making such brazenly misanthropic individualism philosophically fashionable, the bourgeoisie have turned Nietzschean self-enlightenment through self-definition into the expectation of all, and the proletariat are defamed for not achieving it even though it is impossible for them to do so.

It is easy to see, upon examination, why the ideal of the Nietzschean hero has become so useful for the maintenance of the bourgeois system. It is because of a relatively recent event within the world of the collective ideology of society: the death of the ideal of the future. In earlier phases of the capitalist epoch, when its contradictions were less acute, it was a common belief to humanity that we were on an upward path, that we were developing towards a glimmering common future as a species. But- as was examined in the work of Mark Fisher (although his work must be forcefully criticized for its anti-communist, postmodern, and accelerationist elements- and itself drew to an extent on Nietzsche!)- at some point in the development of our modern neoliberalism, as finance capital became the all-consuming and all-controlling hegemon of all social and ideological spheres it is today, the ideal of a collective better future for humanity as a whole was removed from our cultural consciousness, replaced by the capitalist “realist” conviction that the present system is the only system still possible, that no new system can be established and that any efforts towards such a goal will fail, and that indeed the very act of challenging the status quo is absurd{17}. In short, people have begun to believe there is fundamentally no escape from the flaws of the present social system. This can be observed in the changing vision of the future in mass media- in the early to middle 20th century, media like the original Star Trek showed the bright future of humanity. Today, when media shows the future of the human race it is as dystopian- if it accepts that there is a future at all. We are taught to believe that an end to the current system of capitalist tyranny is at best impossible and at worst doomed to become an apocalypse.

Of course, the death of the concept of the future has left us all depressed. The superstructure of capitalism forces us to swallow the bitter pill of believing that the current abominable system is the best and only conceivable world, that it will either continue on forever unchanging or only get worse, and that hope for an alternative is no longer an option- the enforced cultural pessimism Fisher called Capitalist Realism (“realism” here being somewhat ironic, as dialectical science of course renders this view incorrect). The inevitable effect of this prevailing attitude is depressive, causing us to sink into a deep melancholia at the prospect of humanity going without change, improvement, or progress for generations, stuck forever in its present miseries- it is well documented that rates of depression are rising. In order to prevent the masses from rebelling against the system which administers this cruel drug, the superstructure further prescribes a sedative- the myth of the Übermensch.

It is alright, we are told, that humanity as a whole has no future because those of us who are worthy of great things will achieve them through our own will to power and need not worry about others. “If you want to escape your own suffering,” whispers the beast of bourgeois ideology, “forget about that of others. Or better yet- capitalize on it! Game the market and become a mighty Nietzschean hero of stocks and properties by forgetting your attachment to the rest of the human race and elevating yourself through your own [so-called] hard work of investment and exploitation!” And so the children of the proletariat are taught to work in the hope that one day they will become the boss that forces others to work. And so our schools tell us that the goal of life is to pursue “SUCCESS”- which means to give up your humanity by becoming a financial Übermensch. And so our children are told that sharing is the bogeyman of communism, that empathy is weakness, that they should devote themselves only to the selfish ideal of Nietzschean “SUCCESS.”

I would like, here, to analyze a case study of a particular man who has become a propaganda totem of the religion of the Übermensch as espoused by bourgeois culture: Elon Musk. It may seem absurd, to the sort of people who read this sort of writing, to name him as any sort of “hero,” Nietzschean or otherwise, but to a not insignificant section of the petit bourgeoisie Musk represents the Randian-Nietzschian hero the superstructure has taught them to aspire to. He is a genius, a Prometheus who has brought down from the heavens the mystic fires of reusable spaceships, electric cars, etc. etc. And he has used his genius to follow his own will to power on the path to glory by applying it cleverly to venture capitalism, while eschewing social standards with his childish sense of humor (see the flamethrower incident) and various nonsensical antics (see his apparent simultaneous flirtations and animosities with socialism, or rather with his own grievously incorrect idea of what socialism is).

But, of course, this image of Musk is a lie. Musk is not a genius, rather he is an exploiter who profits from and takes credit for the work of the unnamed geniuses in his employ (he didn’t even found the company he is famous for founding!{18}). He didn’t become the goliath of finance capital he is today through his own supposed genius, but through the exploitation of his employees and through assets inherited from his Apartheid-capitalist ancestors. And he is not some rebel against society! In fact, he and his capital are like all imperialist finance capitalists and finance capital integrated into the same hegemonic bourgeois system as the state (Nietzsche’s new idol!)- so integrated that, infamously, a US-engineered coup in Bolivia mysteriously occurred at just the right time to benefit him financially back in 2019.

The hollowness of this example illustrates the hollowness of the bourgeois myth of the Übermensch as a whole. There is nobody in the world who actually has the genius and independence to free themselves of all social attachments and follow only their own will to power; by existing in society all of us are inextricably and interdependently reliant on other parts of humanity and beholden to them. The absolute, totally self-ruling individual is an idealist fantasy; the material reality of humans is an interconnected system of many semi-independent parts which only function as parts of the whole- like cells in the great body of society. The self-made millionaires are not self-made, they are made via the exploitation of others. The Nietszchean ideal of living is not in reality achievable, and the Musks of the world are not examples to aspire to- they are parasites! Cancer cells, growing fat and abusing the rest of the body of society!

We do have a future as a collective, then, and we can be freed from the current way of things- what we must do to end the stagnation of the present system and go forward to a better one is cut out the tumors! While the nonsense of the bourgeois superstructure’s Nietzschean ideology is empty, dialectical materialist analysis of real facts has in countless cases{19} shown through real scientific thinking that stands up to the test of reason that we can and inevitably must move forward all together toward a better system. Our inevitable future is a system in which communities of people fully, equally, and totally democratically exercise all power over their own lives, their society, and their labour and its products- a communist global political-economic system. We can achieve a better future for all, and must do it by restoring the conviction that humanity is a common whole- the conviction Nietzschean thought has eroded. The way we shall reach this future is to cast aside the individualist myth of the Übermensch and unite the working masses together to take collective control through a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, thereby build socialism, and destroy utterly such bourgeois ideology as the mythology of Nietzscheanism through Cultural Revolution.

The Nietzschean myth that the individual’s freedom or enslavement is only a consequence of its own ability to enact its will to power has, it should be briefly noted before we move on, a second important role in maintaining capitalism. The notion that each of us is an aspiring Übermensch and we shall either succeed or fail based on our own strength or weakness underpins the all-too-popular notion that depression is a problem of weak or “chemically imbalanced” individuals, not a symptom of societal contradiction. The Nietzschean voice of the superstructure tells us that the depressed have simply failed to make themselves happy by following their will to power, that with drugs and therapy and all that rubbish they can get back on track. So why bother trying to institute wider social rebellion against depressing systems? Of course, anyone who has plumbed the depths of depression can attest that this is nothing but an insidious ruse. Depression, as a reaction to being bludgeoned over the head perpetually by the notion that you have no future, is not an illogical illness but an obvious emotional reaction to societal abuse. I take my pills like a good patient, and yet I wake in the morning faced with the prospect of the dead future and find nothing has changed in my psyche. If depression just randomly happens to some people, why is it on the rise? Shouldn’t levels stay the same, if it truly is just a random internal fluke of each person who has it? Surely the expansion of it implies a similarly expanding external cause? Like, perhaps, finance capital and its dictatorship over society? Depression is a societal problem, not an individual problem, and the solution to its increasing influence over all of humanity is a revolt against the capitalist system which engenders it. And so the myth of the Übermensch, calling on us absurdly to take our destiny in our own hands and ignore wider societal problems, obscures this fact and thus serves in yet another way to preserve capitalism against its necessary overthrow. Once again, it is clear we must combat Nietzschean ideology and its individualist mythology of Übermenschen in order to combat capitalism.

Nietzschean Individualist Idealism-Subjectivism and Postmodernism

Postmodernism is today one of the major ideological forces standing in the way of the popularizing and putting into action of genuine Marxism. As has been observed by certain comrades in the recent criticism of certain positions of the editorial of the now defunct revolutionary newspaper Incendiary, the real scope and prominence of its danger can be overstated. It is not the most dangerous of the trends working against true Marxism within the broad “left,” rather that title goes to pseudo-Marxist revisionism as peddled by such factions as the CCP, CPUSA, and CPGB-ML. Nonetheless, however, there is a malignant and severe philosophical danger inherent within postmodernism, and as such its modern prevalence is something we should regard as a threat to our cause.

What is this philosophical danger? The fundamental, total refusal to accept the existence of truth! By their nature, those identified as postmodernists are a varied bunch in their views. But what unifies them, and indeed gives them their name, is a rejection of the so-called modernisms. Coming out of the enlightenment and the steadily increasing level of trust in and knowledge about scientific methods of reasoning that it produced, the philosophical period of modernism produced a set of epistemology which put forward the obvious but profoundly important and correct idea that useful and universal factual knowledge can be gained through reasonable and logical means. These included latter forms of rationalism, empiricism and its offspring/extension positivism, and- most importantly and most correctly- the beginnings of Marxist Dialectical Materialist epistemology and ontology (which would later be advanced into its modern form by people like Mao). The postmodernists- people like Foucault, Butler, and Lacan- were and are only really unified by a rejection of this underlying principle of modernist epistemology: the existence and value of a universal factual truth. They sow doubt around the very foundations of the pursuit of such a truth- for Lacan, language itself is a fundamentally flawed method of communication and thus no attempt at unifying people behind something universal and mutually understood is even possible. And from there, they suggest that all the trappings of society are not, as Dialectical Materialist science tells us, based on any empirical material conditions but instead are arbitrary and incidental- for Butler, the entirety of gender as a concept is simply a ghost that has sprung randomly and without purpose from our minds and the flawed system of our language and is without any cause in the material world. And they challenge too the idea of social systems and political power as being real material things- Foucault saying that power is not a product of fundamental material things but is itself a fundamental metaphysical resource drawn upon directly which underlies society as its own self-justifying system of subjective ideological “truth” and its implications: power/knowledge{20}. With this rejection of universal, factual, or material truth, the postmodernists have hoisted the flag instead of personal subjective “truth.” In the world of the postmodernists, each of us has our own experience of the world (which many of the modern “leftist” postmodernists interpret to be entirely based upon our metaphysical racial, sexual, and gender identity- more on their incorrect conceptions of gender and its nature later on), each of them is equally valid, and each of them constitutes truth for the person whose experience it is. As far as they are concerned, to assert a universal truth that is factual and undeniable is to chauvanistically silence others’ equally valid truths- indeed, Foucault and his most ardent adherents have even gone as far as to denounce science and medicine as oppressive or even white supremacist for trying to assert factual truth! I am sure we have all heard an infuriatingly pseudo-sophist liberal acquaintance declare that “we all have our own truth”- this is the motto of the postmodernists.

Now, this postmodernist epistemology is not truly new, but a regression to a premodernist way of thinking- Nietzschean Individualist Idealism-Subjectivism! The postmodernist mantra that each of us is living in our own experience is just Nietzsche’s decree that only interpretations exist, but with a dose of liberal identity politics and faux social justice mixed in. And just like the original version of Nietzsche’s worldview, it is terminally flawed. The material building blocks of the universe are the same no matter who is looking at them- water molecules are always made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in a polar covalent bond no matter which sea one draws them from. A body which loses enough blood will cease functioning, no matter whose body it is. Sit in a pool of boiling water and, no matter how much you tell yourself that the heat is only your experience of the water and someone else may experience it differently, you still burn and so does anyone else. Some people may experience truth less accurately owing to certain disabilities- a person with severe enough nerve damage may not feel the heat- but their inability to immediately observe the universal truth does not make it less true for them than for others. They will still burn, and with a powerful enough microscope they will still see the rapid atomic motion in the water that characterizes heat. Postmodernism is a load of nonsense.

But I have called it, more than nonsense, dangerous. How is it that? Simply put, because in a universe where there is no real universal truth- as the postmodernists believe this universe is- there is no reason and no way to make any attempt at meaningful social change. How can one say “we must end oppression!” if one claims that oppression is only a subjective experience of some people, and therefore that it is not an objective concrete phenomenon, so one cannot possibly hope to objectively and concretely end it. Once cannot unify the masses for a common cause if one genuinely believes the absurd assertion that the masses do not even share a common truth or reality. This is why all the fields of supposedly progressive philosophy that have been infiltrated by postmodernism have become merely stagnant and impotent schools of academia. Many a postmodernist has talked of “revolution,” but not a one has ever done anything to pursue the overthrow of a state or the seizure of state power- the real goals of a real revolution. For in their asinine world, to try and make real objective change is to chauvinistically assert one’s own reality over everybody else’s. So instead they stagnate, and furthermore they spread their impotent and stagnant philosophy to others like a cancer- infecting and crippling the serious philosophical studies of feminism, antiracism, and gender philosophy with their nonsense.

The RGA put it well: “Real unity is established only on the basis of the interests of the proletariat in proletarian revolution. Narrow self-interest and subjectivism are two persistent errors that communists must steel themselves against, yet from the day we are born we are encouraged by all the poisons of bourgeois society to adopt a worldview that is not in our true class interests, a suicidal ideology that encourages us to place ourselves as disconnected individuals at center stage, where all human interaction and all analysis is degraded to being guided by the slogan ‘what do I get out of it?’ Everyone in the project of revolutionary communism contends with changing this, remolding the world and ourselves in the process{21}.” While postmodernism remains a powerful force within the “left,” the “left” is stagnant and useless- a mere conglomeration of individuals each pursuing their own self-interest, not a unified collective with a common cause. We must cut it out and replace it with genuine, revolutionary, scientific and universal Marxism.

Postmodernism, then, is a Nietzschean strain- and it is a Nietzschean strain by which the bourgeois intellectuals who propagate it (through universities and false activists) undermine and eviscerate the cause of revolution. Once again, it becomes clear that the philosophical phenomenon of Nietszchean ideology is a dangerous element of the bourgeois cultural/ideological superstructure that must be combated, and ultimately must be destroyed by Cultural Revolution.

Against Nietzschean Ideology!

Let us get now to the meat of the subject. I have shown the problem of Nietzsche’s influence and the plague of Nietzschean ideology, of the set of ideas in bourgeois society’s philosophical/ideological and cultural superstructure which arise from the influence of Nietzsche’s thought, so let us move to a concrete exploration of how it exists and manifests in various forms, and some conjecture as to how to combat it (although, I must note, the purpose of this text is to call attention to the problem more than to assert the definitive solution- that solution can only be found through the process of mass revolutionary struggle against the problem. These are but suggestions.).

Types of Nietzschean Ideology

We can divide Nietzschean thought today into three general strains, two of which are relevant. Firstly there is pure Nietzscheanism, the actual thought of Nietzsche and those who are directly and explicitly his students. This explicit following of Nietzsche is only really present in certain academic circles, and does not concern us.

The two other strains are more broadly Nietzschean, the trends of thought which are drawn from his ideas and the philosophical changes they heralded but not necessarily explicitly supportive of all his ideas, his legacy, or his name. They can however still justifiably be called Nietzschean, as they exist because of ideas he popularized and thus would not exist or at least would be very different without him. Now, of course Nietzsche’s ideas are not wholly original, no philosopher’s are. Nietzsche’s individualism and rejection of societal institutions was likely influenced by, to name two, Schopenhauer and Stirner. But Nietzsche took his ideas to a point of active extremism beyond Schopenhauer’s passive and pessimistic ideal of denying oneself the human will to life and a point of popularity beyond Stirner’s esoteric anarchism, and so their proliferation can be primarily traced to him. As such the ideological trends that today continue on the themes of the Übermensch and Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism are unmistakably Nietzschean, that is, they constitute his legacy as it exists under the control of the capitalist system. They are the broader legacy of his thought, shaped by the wider superstructure into useful mass ideology for capitalism but still unmistakably stamped with marks of his worldview. They form, in this way, a single large problem.

The two strains are drawn from the two ideas of his which, as explored in the preceding chapter, are most prevalent in the superstructure: the myth of the Übermensch and the epistemological and ontological worldview of Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism. The one drawn from the myth of the Übermensch we shall call hyperindividualism; it is the ideological trend in the present society and culture to overemphasize the importance, uniqueness, independence, etc. of the self or individual and to disdain or outright to deny the existence of humanity as a whole, common interests of humanity, unity between people, or care or concern for others. The one issuant from and predicated upon Nietzschean idividualist idealism-subjectivism is of course postmodernism, which is as explored above fundamentally the offspring of Nietzsche. Postmodern thought has had several influences and different iterations, but its heart and how it can be understood here is as the application of Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism to societal questions- with disastrous philosophical consequences.

From these two great boughs, or sometimes the mixture of the two, branch off the myriad forms of Nietzschean ideology that exist and threaten the proletarian cause today.

Below are observed some of these forms, with commentary on possible means of combating them.

Anti-Factualism

is the most basic manifestation of the ideologically harmful influence of the postmodern strain of Nietzschean ideology. What I mean by anti-factualism is the upholding of the most basic and fundamental of the theses of the various postmodern schools: that “we each have our own truth” and that universal truth is detestable as a concept. This is the simplest and most pervasive form of postmodernism.

Each of us knows a few anti-factualists, or at least a few people under anti-factualist influence. We have all observed- no doubt with annoyance- the liberals who talk in saccharine tones of feeling and perspective when discussing social issues, but who never dare talk of real facts- they are happy to say that Black people feel oppressed, that we should be mindful of the trans perspective, but they roll their eyes and gnash their teeth at the Marxist who dares say that the oppression of such people is a product of real concrete conditions which must be concretely changed. They will protest against racism, but will never dare raise a weapon against the material conditions that cause it- they march in the streets for vague and ill-defined goals, but seem happy to accept without question the authority of the racist state whenever it concerns them, for when the cops come knocking they are all smiles. So too are we familiar with the “apolitical” types who reduce all argument to mere spectacle and meaningless intellectual exercise, entering discussion like leeches and teaching all around that the lies of the oppressor and the truth declared by the oppressed are just “opinions,” all equally valid and all deserving of the same respect as quasi-truth, and that in the end discussing is alright but actually reaching an answer as to who is objectively right and who is objectively wrong is somehow wrong or in bad faith.

These kinds of people are like an acid, a corrosive agent that attaches itself to the political thoughts of those around them and eats away at them until anything useful or productive is gone.Without the belief in or the goal of reaching an objective truth that can be upheld and put into action, all political thought and indeed all thought of any kind is reduced to a meaningless theatre, an unceasing charade in which ideas are nothing more than gladiators competing for the entertainment of the debaters, never going anywhere or achieving anything, never even really defeating each other. If all ideas are only opinions and can never be proved wrong or right, then thinking becomes nothing more than a vapid form of entertainment. In the world of the anti-factualists, forward motion of any kind is essentially impossible.

The liberal and “apolitical” anti-factualists are bad enough, but worse still are the ones who think themselves radical. Some time ago in a bookshop, I encountered a volume by the title Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact. This book demonstrates, at its nakedest and most severe, the damaging effect of the postmodern thesis at the heart of anti-factualism upon philosophy. The book, as one may guess from the subtitle, sets out to debunk the very premise of science. Its reason for doing this is a desire to dispense with the Bering Land Bridge Hypothesis, in order to preserve author Vine Deloria’s insistence on the myth of Indigenous American society as having existed perpetually on their current homelands. In place of historical and scientific inquiry in pursuit of objective facts, Deloria instead upholds, as the back of the book calls it, “an alternative view of the continent’s history as seen through the eyes and memories of Native Americans”- by which is meant that Deloria has sought to replace objective fact with subjective mythology as the arbiter of “truth.”

Deloria does not seem aware of the full implications of his rejection of reason, but it is vital to understand them. As was discussed in earlier chapters, this kind of postmodern thinking entirely negates the very concept of making material progress towards progressive goals. Despite Deloria’s involvement in indigenous politics and the Red Power movement, if his rejection of reasonable methods for discerning objective fact were taken to heart, there would be no way to resolve the oppression of indigenous people. If we do not believe in scientific fact, if we call it a “myth,” then we cannot meaningfully understand societal reality and thus cannot possibly understand how to change it.

The attitude at the heart of the thinking of pseudoradical anti-factualists like Deloria is one borrowed from classical postmodernist Michel Foucault, the idea that science itself is an oppressive “biopolitical” institution of discipline which must be resisted. But this belief is patently absurd. Science is not an institution, it is a set of methods- the only universally valid methods- for obtaining useful knowledge, and anybody can apply those methods to anything they like; anybody can do an experiment or collect observations in order to calculate information about the universe. Perhaps certain institutions have abused their own distorted versions of science in pursuit of oppressive goals, but to abandon all scientific reasoning because of this is to throw out the baby- and any hope of achieving social progress- with the bathwater.

But all this talk of the problems with anti-factualism is only treading ground I have already tread several times herein. One understands by now that it is a problem, the real point here is to propose a method of combating this strain of thinking which can be tested through experimentation and struggle in practice by communist organizers.

Based on personal experience, it seems the best way of dealing with the liberal and “apolitical” anti-factualists is to reject compromise. Compromise- compromise with opponents, compromise of principles- is their bread and butter, and when one accepts compromise with them while talking to the masses then the engagement rapidly goes from being a serious espousal of Marxist thinking towards the practical goal of organizing to being mere sterile gossip and argument. We must not compromise, but remain stalwart and frank in espousing the facts of Marxist scientific thought and unapologetically denounce incorrect attitudes as opponents of progress, not harmless different opinions- remember, failing to rebut incorrect ideas is the sixth type of liberalism outlined by Mao in “Combat Liberalism.” When we see wrong ideas circulating among the masses, we must reject outright calls to tolerate “opposing opinions” and instead declare outright that they are wrong and teach correct lines instead. Truth is not a coward, it does not change itself or hide itself away when it is challenged. Truth is an uncompromising thing which moves stalwartly towards the future. We must not delay its motion, but instead present and uphold it with full ferocity and frankness and denounce and debunk all falsehoods and opponents of truth, so that truth may spread and guide the struggle of the masses towards the communist future.

With regards to self-identified radicals who engage in anti-factualism, I rather suspect we will find it is simply best to ignore them. They are not real radicals; they never have more than a tenuous connection to any real efforts at mass organizing. Instead they congregate together at universities and in sterile academic organizations, fruitlessly obsessing over their nonsense with little regard for the material reality outside. Trying to enter these spaces to critique them will, I suspect, prove a useless exercise and it is not as if there is any relevance to what these types do anyway. Let us leave the useless to their uselessness and do useful things with our time.

Nietzschean Influence in Gender Philosophy

It is an unfortunate fact that the philosophy of gender, in its evolution past the level of simple barbaric binary biological essentialism, has been guided all too much by the Nietzschean strain of postmodernism. The masses of people sidelined and maligned by the traditional rigid gender binary, with its antagonistic contradiction against the fluidity of real human identity, have screamed out for freedom and thus philosophy has needed to develop to explain our conditions and guide our progress towards liberation. There have developed two approaches to the development of this philosophy: the Nietzschean and the scientific.

The Nietzschean approach is defined by its application to the gender question of postmodern subjectivism (the same thesis as that of anti-factualism, albeit in a more specific and complex form) and individualist epistemology and ontology. This is the familiar explanation of our existence all too many of my fellow Queer people gravitate too, because while it is lacking in evidence or logic it is tremendously validating of our desire to be individuals under our own authority, to be freed of the shackles of social restrictions like the binary. It goes like this: gender is entirely personal, having to do solely with one’s identity in one’s own mind, which is a product solely of one’s internal character. The way one exists in one’s identity and the way one understands one’s identity is a personal phenomenon, disconnected from society and solely concerning and concerned with oneself. Oppression based on one’s Queerness of gender, furthermore, is a phenomenon of personal bigotry motivated only tenuously by a wide variety of immaterial causes: religion, traditionalism, or the idea of “capitalism” which is fundamentally misunderstood by the Nietzschean adherents. Queerness and anti-Queerness are seen as phenomena that occur within or between the subjective psyches of individuals, without connection to the material conditions of society as a whole.

This view is easily shown to be flawed. It does precisely what the RGA have influentially criticizes postmodernism for: “… [it] puts identity as principal over political line. That is, it treats the opinions expressed by individuals who face oppression as the indisputable truth. It should go without saying that this method of analysis denies reliable access to the truth by throwing out the possibility that the opinion of the individual or group in question could be contradicted by a scientific analysis of capitalism-imperialism, as informed by a deep and broad examination of the facts of history{22}.” This view, in its insistence upon deifying the personal subjective thoughts of each trans person, prevents understanding of the real material commonalities and underlying conditions of us all. If gender is the personal subjective identity of a single soul, then why does it occur in different ways in different social circumstances? The present society of the United States produces only men and women as broadly accepted categories and nonbinary individuals as rebels against the basic system of the binary which is enforced in this society, while the historical culture of the Bugis of Indonesia recognizes five distinct categories: the oroané, makkunrai, calalai, calabai, and bissu.Do the differing notions of gender in different societies not indicate that gender itself is in some way a product of society as a whole? Further, it has been shown that the social roles assigned on the basis of gender have evolved as humanity has moved from one political-economic epoch (e.g. feudalism) to another (e.g. capitalism){23}. Does this not suggest a causal link between the makeup of society and the nature of gender?

Of course, the believers in the Nietzschean view will reject my “conflation” of gender itself and the social roles applied based on it, for to them gender exists alone and apart from any of its connected material characteristics. But this is folly. For if we, as the Nietzscheans do, separate from the supposed central concept of gender all the aspects which are supposedly not directly part of it- its expression, the roles and behaviours associated with it, its place in language, etc.- what then is left? A tiny, immaterial, indescribable, subjective, metaphysical kernel. What is this thing? Without any connection to anything in the material world or society, how can it even be said to exist in a material universe? It cannot. There is no central metaphysical ideal of gender around which the observable aspects of gender are built up, rather the observable aspects of gender themselves collectively constitute gender (this must be accompanied by an important disclaimer that I am not saying one’s gender must be visible to be genuine. While gender is defined by its expression in the social sphere, if one who is driven to certain expressions of gender but must hide them owing to circumstances that person’s gender identity with those expressions is still legitimate as the expressions and the desire to enact them still exist, whether or not they are actually observed by those around the person). Therefore, since those aspects can be shown to be grounded in society, gender is not a subjective individual phenomenon but rather a social phenomenon. The Nietzschean/postmodern view of it is wrong.

The Nietzschean/postmodern view of gender, of course, also runs into the same inability to foment progress as other applications of Nietzschean ideas to social issues. For if we fail to see the common social conditions underlying the existence of all Queer people, how can we possibly hope to understand those conditions or to change them for the better, to liberate ourselves? Ergo the influence of the Nietzschean view is harmful to the Queer masses, as its position as the dominant philosophical system for understanding our issues makes us unable to formulate a plan for liberation.

In dialectical conflict against the petit-bourgeois individualist Nietzschean camp with this wrong view exists the camp of the Maoists with our correct, scientific view. Gender in the scientific view is a set of social and psychosocial roles in which one participates or is psychologically driven to participate, by which one’s identity is partly defined. In the present epoch of capitalism, gender is governed and restricted by a socially institutionalized rigid and enforced binary, the function of which is to enforce the control of capital over the proletariat{24}. The majority of people in the present society identify and enact gender within the confines of this enforced system, as the bourgeois superstructure- of which it is a part- has ingrained it into the ideology and culture of society and the people in general. A Queer minority, trans people, characterized by some instinctual rejection of the role assigned one by the superstructural binary (whether they identify with the other binary role or a different one altogether), can be understood as being rebelling (though not consciously, nor by choice, but naturally and inherently) against the contradiction between the enforced binary and the fluid nature of humans’ natural roles (or, for simplicity’s sake we may just term this the Contradiction of the Opressive Gender Binary). The liberation of trans people, then, requires the resolution of this contradiction, which means the destruction of the institution of the binary and the whole bourgeois superstructure and thus of the capitalist base which it sprouts from and serves, in order to establish an order where each individual’s gender is made up not of what is assigned to them but of whatever psychosocial and social roles they naturally gravitate to- be those purely “masculine,” purely “feminine,” or anything else under the heavens†.

The way to combat the harmful influence of the Nietzschean view within the Queer community is to work toward the further development and growth of the scientific view. We must never let our opposition to Nietzschean postmodernism appear as or act like bigotry toward the Queer people under its influence; instead, we must provide to those people a more correct, more productive philosophical system for understanding our existence and pursuing our freedom. This is a difficult and important task, for the truth is that the development of a scientific view of gender philosophy is in its early stages still. The version I have outlined here is but an embryo of the final thesis, perhaps a flawed one which will be replaced by a clearer understanding in the future. Therefore it is a paramount task for Marxists, most especially Queer Marxists like myself, to work on developing this understanding through study and through struggle. Limited strides have been made, for example in the writings of the Stonewall Militant Front, but continuing to develop Marxist scientific gender philosophy is of urgent and paramount importance.

It is in fact more important to develop and express the scientific understanding of gender than to combat the Nietzschean one, and this is why: espousing the scientific view both promotes a correct and decent view of Queer issues and combats all incorrect views at one and the same time, both lifting up Queer people and tearing down the sordid ghouls of Nietzsche that haunt bourgeois ideology. Attacking Nietzschean ideology directly as our main focus risks pulling the foundation out from under Queer people without replacing it fully with a better one. It fails in supplying a proper philosophicasl system for Queer liberation, and it can lead to good communists who are not transphobic, appearing to some, when they make this mistake, as though they are- look at the recent criticism of the editors of Tribune of the People and Incendiary. In the end we must always remember that transphobia is a grave enemy, indeed probably a worse one than postmodernism, and that our goal in combating postmodern gender theory is to help trans people by creating a better theory of the trans person’s situation, not to attack trans people or question trans existence. Therefore let our slogan be:

Combat Nietzscheanism through the promotion and development of the scientific view of gender and the path to trans liberation!

Randianism

The essence of Ayn Rand’s idealized individual is, as I have said, the Nietzschean Übermensch updated and increased in sheer disdain for the rest of humanity to match the present age. The legacy of Randian ideas in the politics and economic culture of capitalist society, then, constitutes an especially brutal manifestation of the hyperindividualist strain of Nietzschean ideology. The attitude of Randianism is a prevalent one in the culture of the bourgeoisie and their financial institutions (especially in the US), not so much inaugurated by Rand as merely given voice by her, which holds that the individual can only live freely by completely giving up selflessness or care for the collective of humanity and acting solely for personal gain, that all individuals should strive to do this, that the ones who do not are simply weak and that the ones who do should not feel bad for the way they disdain and mistreat the rest of humanity because they have freed and glorified themselves. This is, again, the Nietzschean myth of the Übermensch at its extremest extent, going beyond simple elitism and individualism to an overpowering selfishness and utter lack of care for others- the values extolled by Rand and her ilk. This outlook today is the ideology of the most brutal of the stockbrokers, the bankers, the finance capitalists. It is the ideology through which the capitalists justify the immense violence of capitalist exploitation, especially in the imperialist context in the third world, to themselves, and is the attitude taken to heart by many of the most diehard believers in the cult of investment. It can be summed up in a slogan we have all heard: “every man for himself.” Each individual must strive to become a selfish Übermensch, a John Galt if you will, and doing this means ignoring the plight of others.

Another way in which the Randian strain adapts Nietzsche’s myth of the Overman to the present system is to reduce it, as well as everything else, to the workings of the capitalist system. For Nietzsche the Übermensch was meant to reject and to rise above all the institutions of humanity and wider society: the state, the nation, etc. etc. But the Randian Übermensch, as part of a cultural superstructure which insists upon the inevitability and inescapability of capitalist political economy, has reduced this to a doctrine of the strong escaping the weak through social institutions, specifically through rising through the upper ranks of the capitalist class and becoming a master of finance capital. This is just one way in which Nietzsche’s ideology, once subversive, has engendered offspring which are purely establishmentarian.

The underlying premise of this view is a belief central to the philosophy of Nietzsche and his predecessor Stirner: that there is no such thing as humanity. Humanity is seen as, as Stirner would say, a “spook.” The Randian culture of the neoliberal global economy instead promotes the idea that there are only individuals, adrift in isolation in the sea of capitalism in which we can either sink or swim but cannot help each other. As Thatcher put it, the Randian thesis is that “there is no such thing as society;” we are alone, and only selfishness makes sense.

Under this cultural premise, two phenomena are proliferated. Firstly, the big bourgeoisie feel that the cold hard “realism” of selfishness justifies their unequal rule over society, and the petit bourgeoisie who aspire to become big bourgeoisie accept selfishness as the way to achieve happiness. The rich feel content in their wealth, and a set of the poor devote themselves to investing and profiting in order to rise above the rest and abandon their neighbours because the Randian view has convinced them of the virtues of selfishness. In this way the culture of the neoliberal system maintains the constant existence of a bourgeois class to run it on behalf of finance capital. Secondly, as it is shouted out at the proletariat by this class, the Randian view prevents the notion of a unified humanity being generally accepted and thus prevents a unified revolt on behalf of that humanity for a better system. Under the superstructural power of Nietzschean and Randian ideology, we are only weak individuals trapped alone in the matrix of the capitalist system, tethered not to each other but to the capital that either exploits us or that we come to own, with nothing tying us together and nothing giving us shared power or identity, our only hope being to spit upon others and rise to the position of Übermensch through selfish capitalistic greed.

It goes without saying that combating this pervasive attitude is necessary. While the lie that each individual is isolated and best-off alone, that nothing unites us except the chains of capitalism, prevails and is enforced by the bourgeois Cultural Hegemony, we cannot hope to build any sort of a mass movement for improvement of the lot of humanity as a whole. What we must do, therefore, is radically re-assert that humanity is a whole with common interests, and we can move toward a common future. The Randian mindset of the bourgeoisie and its power over the proletariat must be combated through the promotion of a collectivistic proletarian mindset. The following principles must be extolled and instilled in the masses:

1. Humanity as a species is a unified unit or society, and each of its members benefits from that which benefits the whole; individuals are not isolated and unconnected to others
2. Thus it is through the common cause of bettering things for humanity as a whole that all may profit, while the concept of abandoning others to profit yourself is a lie
3. The capitalist system causes a small unit of humanity (the bourgeoisie) to turn against the whole and exploit the rest for individual gain
4. The overthrow of the capitalist system and the bringing of social power into the hands of the working majority (which the rest shall, under the rule of the workers, ultimately come to join) can herald a social order in which we all work together and benefit fairly from common struggle, instead of the exploitative current individualist order

By promoting and upholding a common proletarian identity in opposition to the hyperindividualist order of Randian bourgeois culture, we can lead the masses to unite as a common whole with a single goal: the construction of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and ultimately communism. Thusly shall we combat Nietzschean Randianism and promote proletarian revolt.

Solipsistic Nihilism

I have long been of the opinion that one of the most prevalent counterrevolutionary ideas amongst proletarian youth which must be rooted out in order for them to unite in the communist struggle, perhaps the very most prevalent, is nihilism. Faced with the depressing realities of capitalism and the still more depressing ideological myths of capitalism (the death of the future and the supposed natural order of Randian selfishness, to name two), one can choose either to rebel against that which hurts or to sink into escapist nihilism and no longer care. Many, many young people in the US- especially, in what I have observed, those amongst the most oppressed nations in the prisonhouse- choose the latter.

Recently, as I have been studying Nietzsche and noticing the extent of Nietzschean ideology in the present superstructure, I have further realized that this prevalent nihilism is of a particular Nietzschean type. It combines the two strains of the postmodern and the hyperindividualist into a current of thinking that soothes the pain of life under capitalism by convincing those under its sway that it is irrelevant. I call this attitude a solipsistic nihilism because, though those under its influence are not genuine solipsists, they often act as though they were; they do not take anything seriously except themselves. The solipsistic nihilist looks passively or even with amusement upon the miseries of others, as though they are mere fictions to which they themselves have no connection (the influence of the myth of the Übermensch, of hyperindividualism), and ignores the perspectives of others even if those others proveably know more than them in favor of believing only their own emotional intuitions, misperceived as facts (an instinctual form of Nietzschean individualist idealism-subjectivism, of postmodernism).

A particular instance of a solipsistic nihilist I knew personally some years ago should here be examined as a case study.

This individual, whom I shall pseudonymously term A, was characterized by a complete lack of respect or reverence for anything. Everything was a joke to A. He often seemed like a bigot in the extent to which he would mock with crude amusement any discussion of rights for Black people, trans people, gay people, what have you. In all the time I knew him, however, I never heard him express in a non-joking manner genuine hatred for anyone, nor do I believe he felt it. Instead, he was simply incapable of seeing the pain of others as serious, as even real. Again, this was not an actual solipsist- I doubt he knew the word- rather he acted in a way that was solipsistic, as if he were a solipsist. Similarly one can be sure he had not read Nietzsche, but nonetheless he was enacting the ideas introduced to the superstructure by Nietszche and thus I call his way of acting and thinking Nietzschean. He was his own Übermensch, always very confident of his own rights and righteousness and sticking up for himself in the face of adversity, but never doing anything to aid anyone else, not even his friends. To him, only his own experiences mattered and were serious reality.

It would be easy to write off A as simply a nasty person, but I believe this extreme detachment was actually a coping mechanism. A was a young Chicano man in a poor community, who was well acquainted with several gay people and poor women. He was, in other words, a witness to all manner of oppressions endemic to the contradictory society of capitalism. And while we would hope anyone in such a position would react with righteous rage against that system, I think we must pity A who, as an escape, instead began to disassociate himself from the world around him and come to only truly and fully believe in himself and his own experiences, so he did not need to feel the pain of others.

This is how solipsistic nihilism happens: people, often youths on the fringes of capitalist society- the poor, oppressed national minorities, etc.-begin to define their philosophy of life by the Nietzschean cultural ideals of Übermenschian individualism and subjectivistic thinking in order to numb themselves. This is why nihilism is such a widespread ideological problem among the proletarian youth in the US (and I would suspect other places, though I have not done the investigation to say for sure). This is also why it is a terrifyingly potent counterrevolutionary force, for its nature is that it arises in just the same conditions that would produce revolutionaries and instead produces shambling apolitical zombies who no longer fully believe in the world. It robs the proletariat of those who may have, if just one tiny thing had changed, been some of its great champions. It may be said with great surety, then, that solipsistic nihilism amongst the youth must be combated urgently and with all possible dedication.

Doing this means, yet again, working against the ideological myth of the death of the future. We must convince the nihilist that their escapism is foolhardy, for there is a more real way to escape from the pain of capitalism: revolution! The liberation of humanity through the uprising of the proletariat, the creation of a socialist society, and blossoming from that ultimately a classless communist world order for the whole of humanity!

Now, how we convince them of this is a more difficult question. The obvious answer is that we must promote and spread the scientific philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, but one rather fears that a person like A would only laugh at it. Given the extreme self-interest inherent to a solipsistic nihilist, perhaps it would make sense to promote communist thinking to them by showing how their own lives would improve under socialism- but would they believe us? Perhaps, knowing that the kernel of human empathy must surely exist inside them somewhere, we ought to struggle aggressively trying to bring it out and then promote communist ideology to them. It is difficult to say what method of appealing to nihilists will bring them around, but we must find a way.

This way, of course, must be found through struggle and the applying of the three withs: living, working, and struggling with the people. The proletarian youths plagued by solipsistic nihilism populate colleges, high schools, retail and service jobs, etc. Communist youth in these circles must therefore go amongst them, scientifically study them and their ways of thinking, and then develop through struggling with them a method for purging from them the counterrevolutionary Nietzschean ideological poison of solipsistic nihilism.

Conclusion

It would be a mistake, and I should be clear that this is not what I am doing, to blame all the ills of bourgeois ideology on one man. Ideas do not emerge after all from individuals alone but from individuals in the context of their material circumstances- as I said in chapter 1, ideas are not Athenas. That being said, it is simple fact that one can trace the genealogy of certain very prominent trends in bourgeois ideology back to ideas first popularized in the name of Nietzsche. In this sense it is therefore reasonable to group these trends together under the label of Nietzschean Ideology.

Thus, we can see that Nietzschean ideology- the branching strains of thinking that have sprung from the seeds planted by Nietzsche and certain predecessors of his (Stirner, Schopenhauer, etc.), and of course by their material circumstances- is a distinct, significant problem in the bourgeois superstructure that must be distinctly combated in the name of the coming socialist revolution.

Comrade Antonio Gramsci talked about the need of proletarian intellectuals (a term which, in his usage, means basically the makers of culture) to produce a distinct cultural identity of proletarian thought and culture as a combating force against the cultural hegemony of the bourgeois superstructure{25}. This is just what is needed to fight the spectres of Nietzsche and his thoughts- a trend of decidedly proletarian thoughts and ideas to combat them, first challenging their dominance in the public mind in order to allow for Maoist ideas to take hold and foment the socialist revolution, then after that revolution to be put into militant action in the total annihilation of the bourgeois superstructure through Cultural Revolution. In retort to the myth of the Übermensch, we must uphold a proletarian collectivist view of all the oppressed workers of the world together as a single force with a shared goal and a shared destiny. In retort to Nietzschean idealism-subjectivism, we must uphold the factual, universal, and scientific ontology and epistemology of Dialectical Materialism and its political-economic application, Historical Materialism. We must promote these views against Nietzscheanism, and apply them specifically in opposition to each form of Nietzschean thinking that manifests.

Let my point not be misconstrued, however. I am not putting this forward as the primary cause for communists. To do so would be idealistic- the very thing that Nietzsche was! No, the primary concern of the communists is of course the material class struggle and its waging through People’s War in order to bring about socialism via establishing a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat in every country in the world. However, as the phenomenon of Base and Superstructure examined by Marx in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy shows, it is a fact that ideology and culture, being products of hard material reality, can then turn around and either reinforce or challenge the material conditions which produce them through their effects on the psyche of humanity and thus on material human behavior. Let us therefore, in order to support the larger material cause, struggle against Nietzshcean ideology!

FOOTNOTES AND SOURCES

†When I talk about the destruction of the oppressive gender binary, I am not suggesting transness subsume cisness. Rather I am referring to the elimination of the institutions by which people are expected to be cis in favor of a system wherein gender is from the very beginning defined personally by the individual- a system in which, I imagine, the two terms will both eventually become meaningless and instead, while people may still have distinct notions about their own gender, there will be no difference between assigned gender and assumed gender as all gender will be assumed whether it would have been cis or trans under the former model.

1. The Portable Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
2. Letter to Overbeck, pg. 441, The Portable Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
3. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, preserved by Wikisource transl. Anthony Ludovici
4. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, preserved by Wikisource transl. Anthony Ludovici
5. Editor’s Preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Walter Kaufmann
6. Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Ronald Hayman
7. Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation, Joachim Kohler
8. http://fnietzsche.com/nietzsche-archiv
9. Notes on the Eternal Recurrence, Complete Works vol. 16, Friedrich Nietzsche, transl. Oscar Levy
10. “On the New Idol,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
11. Notes (1873), The Portable Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
12. “On Self-Overcoming,” Thus spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
13. The Portable Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
14. On Contradiction, Mao Tse Tung
15. The Portable Nietzsche, transl. Walter Kaufmann
16. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/04/7-pols-who-praised-ayn-rand-075667
17. In my opinion the best introduction to Fisher’s criticism of the bourgeois superstructure and the concept of Capitalist Realism is to spend some time browsing his blog, kpunk. The posts from the blog are also available as a book, and the ideas from it are further explored in his short book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? I warn the reader now: these are bleak reading, and sometimes quite severely ideologically and historically incorrect.
18. https://interestingengineering.com/the-short-but-fascinating-history-of-tesla#:~:text=How%20did%20Elon%20Musk%20start,and%20Marc%20Tarpenning%20in%202003.
19. Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the first few chapters of Mao’s On New Democracy, Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune, and a good few more
20. “Foucault’s Concept of ‘Power/Knowledge’ Explained,” Zachary Fruhling
21. “On Identity Opportunism,” Red Guards Austin
22. “On Identity Opportunism,” Red Guards Austin
23. Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is one such work documenting this, though like Fisher’s work I cite it with a disclaimer that I don’t agree with all of it and neither should the reader.
24. I explored this concept in “BLOW UP THE BINARY: A Nonbinary Communist’s Manifesto.”
25. “Chapter 4: Cultural Hegemony and Cultural Revolution,” Contributions of the Peripheral Marxists, Matthew Liles