Tag: Philosophy

In Brief: Revolution is Inevitable
In Capitalism and the Death Drive, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that “revolution is impossible today” because any resistance to the neoliberal order either quickly dissipates or becomes absorbed by corporate mass consumerism.¹ Commodified Che Guevara T-shirts come to mind, as do counterculture movements like punk rock and Burning Man.

In the age of social media our personal absorption into the commercial sphere is even more ubiquitous; we put ourselves under surveillance and freely subject our activity to data harvesting and resale. Han writes:

System-preserving power has now taken on a smart, friendly form, and it has thereby become invisible and unassailable. The subordinated subject is not even aware of its subordination. It believes itself to be free. This technology of rule is a highly efficient way of neutralizing resistance.²

In the absence of polling data, this view is likely mainstream even on the left where it is echoed by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher.³ While nobody would rule out revolutions in economy and culture, it is that all-important political revolution that feels forever achingly out of reach.

It is easy to forget about the movement of tectonic plates once accustomed to the ground under our feet. Even Lenin was once discouraged about the prospects of revolution—with similar doubts over the level of adequate resistance to Russia’s ancien régime. But the absolute monarchy of the Tsar was doomed once industrial production began melting away the feudal relations in countries to Russia’s east and west. This caused Tsarist Russia to lose badly in wars against Germany and Japan. The question of revolution was never an “if” only a “when.”

To understand why revolution is inevitable, we need only turn to one of the most important paragraphs that Karl Marx ever wrote:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.⁴

For Marx, a social revolution is not simply a change of government, policy or cultural norm—it is a complete change of ruling class. Notice that he does not speak of “adequate resistance” when he lays out the conditions of revolution. Revolution appears as a tectonic economic shift away from the existing ruling class, first and foremost.

This occurred in the West when royal authority and the landed aristocracy became an impediment to merchant capital accumulation. It happened in Russia and China after their industrialized neighbours attacked, pecking at the morass of decaying feudal orders. It happened intercontinentally, across the Global South, as colonial regimes experienced diminishing returns from ransacking the economic productivity of their subjects.

The revolutionary potential of the West has been non-existent for almost a century now. The last time it emerged was during Great Depression. This was when the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union garnered the appeal of unemployed masses and western governments swiftly countered with a barrage of social democratic compromises, including public works projects and social security payments.

The next economic catastrophe will not experience the same social democratic outcome. Liberal capitalism emerged as the political analog to economies dependent on territorial expansion and the steady opening of new markets to capital interests. Almost single-handedly, China is now melting down the western dependency on rent-seeking profits. Vertical integration of supply chains, overproduction of renewable energy, suppression of private financial capital, managed deflation and strategic technological development are saturating the world with low-cost goods and medicines and high quality open source software. The addressable market for western conglomerates is shrinking, evermore reliant on debt and speculation to fund operations. Western governments are flailing, pouring money into the furnace of war and doubling down on fossil fuels in the faint hope of maintaining dominance with atavistic 20th century strategies.

The liberal paradigm cannot conceptualize this technological levelling of the global economic pyramid. It is collapsing inwards like a dying star. Drone warfare has seen ragtag armies grind the world’s mightiest militaries to a halt. Cheap solar panels bring miniature power plants to even the most remote of African villages. Open source A.I. is shredding the U.S. Big Tech profit model to pieces. Multiparty “democracy” has factionalized society into camps of superficial enemies, denying even the possibility of long-term strategic planning. Rampant inflation is quietly brandished as an escape from heaving debt loads handcuffing public and private entities. U.S. dollar dominance is declining with the overuse of criminal sanctions. Social media has turned “free speech” into a vector of weird conspiracies, sensational propaganda and pornography. “Free market” ideology has become the ramparts of financial monopolies and homelessness and hardcore drug addiction.

In short, the social relations of the West are in open contradiction with the new productive forces being unleashed. This is the smoke signal for revolution.

The technological levelling described above means that the liberal order will not be able to rejuvenate itself with a social spending package and a war, as it did during the Great Depression. The rent-extracting platforms of the current ruling class of CEOs and financiers are cracking. When they finally break, the only way out will be a political order that subsumes the new powers of production and seizes the means of finance, construction, resource extraction and strategic industries. Only then will it be possible to fix the underlying mechanical problems hampering our historical progression on a livable planet.

As it disintegrates before our eyes, movements rejecting liberalism will grow. We must embrace long-term planning, direct democratic implements, international cooperation, green development, abundant housing and services, livable communities and expedient public infrastructure. The capitalist ruling class will be supplanted as a political authority or else destitution will result. Some countries have discovered this already and some will take fascistic detours before arriving at the right destination. It is inevitable.

Thanks for reading!
1. Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive (Polity Press, 2019): 15. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 17. ↩︎
3. The inescapable totality of capitalist consumerism is one of the primary focuses for each of these thinkers. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
24 Jun 26
The Faux Philosophy of Ayn Rand
The concept of “laissez-faire” capitalism has been around for nearly 300 years. It was first devised by French Physiocrats who believed that the only legitimate functions of the state were preserving physical security, civil liberty and property. Karl Marx gives both the capitalist state and laissez-faire economics a thorough description in Capital, demonstrating the role of state intervention in capital accumulation, the subordination of the state to ruling class interest and the destabilizing effects that unregulated markets have on mediating class interests.

From the Marxian point of view, laissez-faire capitalism is neither politically feasible nor is it socially desirable—a pattern largely validated by history. To the present, we see a tightening grip of oligarchic capital over the state and societal backlash to international trading agreements, institutional lending, the demise of private sector unions and Western deindustrialization spurred by the free movement of capital. The fetishization of “free market economics” was not always inevitable.

Yet anyone engaged in political discourse today will inevitably come across capitalist supporters espousing exactly these laissez-faire, minarchist type dogmas. The contemporary incarnation of this vulgar libertarianism traces to the Cold War era and the school of Austrian economics. Fascism and Nazism had erupted as outgrowths of distressed capitalist systems in Europe, prompting many anti-fascists to take a socialist turn. Seeking to rehabilitate capitalism’s image, liberal economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises re-framed the “capitalism vs. socialism” debate as one of “free markets vs. government planning,” instead of class conflict between workers and elites.

At the time, this Austrian framing served as a sharp contrast to the centrally planned Soviet economy, the capitalist war economies of fascist belligerents and Keynesian policies in the West. By refusing to engage with the Marxist critique of class power, an idealistic conception of unfettered capitalism could drip freely from the pens of Hayek and von Mises—one where any problem inherent to capitalism could be be solved by being more capitalist-y. This idea was later taken up by Ayn Rand and given a romantic treatment at the heart of her hugely influential Objectivist philosophy.

A Free Market Utopia

Although she is often dismissed as an unserious polemic in the academy, it is plain to see why Rand is a great favourite of the ruling class that owns the economy. In The Virtue of Selfishness she lays out her economic brand as “a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start.”¹

This formulation was illustrated in novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, where her rugged protagonists—replete with chiseled jaws, angular frames and aggressively Aryan names—are oppressed by bureaucrats and crony capitalists with beady eyes and balding heads. Whereas Marx had shown that state formation is primarily shaped by an ownership class keen on extending its economic power, Rand casts the state as a product of the shiftless masses, the expression of a Nietzschean herd only capable of irrational self-harm and jealous thoughts.

Rand’s worlds are curiously devoid of capitalism’s seamiest actors; sex traffickers, dodgy landlords, financial speculators and predatory lenders aren’t found in her work. There are creative entrepreneurial savants and they agonize against the ubiquitous grain of government leeches, thieving associates and parasitic family members. For example, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart are despised out of envy over their exceptional talent and competence, which other characters think is unfair and worthy of destroying.

Rearden is subject to staged riots and government blackmail—even his wife attempts to emotionally destroy him and his brother stages a double-cross to infiltrate his prodigious enterprise and sabotage it from within. Taggart, on the other hand, must contend with her own brother constantly undermining her sage decision-making while also seeking to exploit it.

There are also principled objectors who consciously withdraw from economic participation. Genius architect Howard Roark opts for hard labour at the granite quarry instead of compromising his artistic integrity with conformist hacks. Hugh Akston, a renowned philosopher in Atlas Shrugged, chooses to flip burgers rather than see his rational teachings go unappreciated. And brilliant inventor John Galt lays track for a railroad rather than lend his true talents to a deadbeat society.

It’s interesting that Rand, the queen of laissez-faire, devised so many heroes that hold their creative ingenuity above crude market interests—although their integrity seems to pay off in other ways. For example, they are able to manifest rippling muscles without exercise and exert sexual dominance over their lower-order rivals with ease.

Rand stated in her newsletter, “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason.” Working backwards, it would be irrational for her characters to betray their integrity as that would violate their egoistic virtues which can only be expressed in a laissez-faire society expunged of collectivist ideas. As a result of this reasoning, the climax of Rand’s two novels have her protagonists committing acts of terrorism that force systemic changes to smothering collectivist regimes.

The Ideal Loner

To be fair, these books are a romanticism, and Rand’s characters are deliberately single-gear caricatures. To cite one reviewer who gave Atlas Shrugged a positive appraisal, her protagonists are all “healthy, attractive zealots that put in 80 billable hours a week, drink cocktails and have sex-fests every night.” They incur no moral dilemmas, have had no traumas, no children, no phobias and encounter almost nobody worthy of friendship.

These are idealized versions of people—but, besides Rand, whose ideals do they embody, really? If capitalism is the vehicle of egoism and egoism the vehicle of reason, Rand demonstrates that the only people capable of reasoning a pathway to success are devoid of feeling or want of companionship. The rest of us, subject to the spectrum of human experience and emotion, are doomed to mediocrity, beady eyes and Rogaine in the medicine cabinet.

When we appear as participants in the market, our own complex individuality is stripped down to that of “buyer” or “seller.” Likewise, we can spot a glaring flaw in Ayn Rand’s love-letters to capitalist individualism: it only works when the complexity of human sensuousness and social relations are torn down to the studs. She’s taken the narrow viewpoint of a market participant and has tried to build a comprehensive philosophy around it.

In his climactic speech of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt argues that trade is the object of the mind, and “man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not.” But Rand’s formulation here is too reductionist to be accurate.

Becoming Human

In the process of becoming independent subjects, we can point to language being the bedrock of human consciousness. Language is not traded for but is freely received in a social context. It is a collective product that connects individuals to the cooperative group necessary for survival. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, language plugs the individual into the symbolic order and enables subjectivity, transmission of knowledge and abstract thought production.

Through language, a social consciousness acts upon the individual and the individual, in turn, acts upon the social consciousness. Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology: “Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness…for language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. Consciousness is therefore from the very beginning a social product.”

If this seems like a stretch, consider the cases of feral children raised without human interaction. It is clear that consciousness does not develop in the void of language and human contact. Survival is not guaranteed either, unless the child is taken up by a pack of animals. Both survival and mental content must be given at an early age if they are to be utilized later on. Rand’s oversimplification of individuality was first established in The Fountainhead when Howard Roark says in court, “but the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought.” This is literally true but it denies a key aspect of the constant exchange between ourselves and the environment.

There is a social consciousness that exists within the minds of society’s members and it comprises that collection of thoughts not specific to an individual. National borders, social status, cultural norms, the value of paper money—these are all examples of constructs within the social consciousness that do not live or die with any one person. Marx and Lacan posit a social consciousness that begins with language. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung came to similar conclusions about the the collective unconscious, represented by the superego and universal archetypes.

In a book review, Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle explain that dreams possess a “dual quality” of “individual experience and social claim” that roots “dreamers in the greatest and most charged religious, political and social debates of their times.”² In other words, the most intensely private thoughts of individuals—their dreams—reveal both the economic epoch and social unconscious temporally in existence. Rand’s insistence that “nothing can be learned about man by studying society” simply doesn’t hold water.³

It follows, then, that the principal struggle laid out in The Fountainhead, “the individual against the collective,” can be rejected as a false premise. One becomes an individual by way of the collective, just as the collective exists by way of the individuals that form it. Marx writes in The Grundrisse: “The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.” In other words, it is working together rather than apart that leads to individual flourishing.

Indeed, one cannot become a writer without readers, a parent without children, a critic without artists, a husband without a spouse, a worker without an employer, a professor without students, a friend without a friend, a buyer without a seller. Rejecting the social dimension of human nature will result in the type of emotional stunting that clearly afflicts the Randian hero. Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s protege and former lover, picked up on this later in life when he criticized Rand: “You have taught people to repress, repress, repress.”

Toward Socialism

Perhaps a crushingly lonely laissez-faire dystopia is the best possible system for the statuesque workaholics of Rand’s imagination. But for an individualism congruent with human nature, it is a shame that Ayn did not discover Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Contrary to Rand, Wilde says that “Socialism itself will be of value because it will lead to Individualism” and this will “disturb the monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”

Socialism rests its case on the real premise that no person can exist without another, that no human potential is reached alone and no prosperity is achieved independently. While the market flattens us into the one-dimensional traders of Rand’s novels, Wilde says that “art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has ever known.” Art, creative invention and scientific discovery express the full knowledge of human existence and our passion for the universal truths of nature.

Living for others—something Rand denounces as an altruistic evil—is precisely what capitalism requires to function, as billions of workers and consumers toil on a decaying planet for the benefit of a tiny global elite. Wilde: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hard upon almost everyone.”

Free and voluntary exchange between people is only possible absent a capitalist class structure that subordinates us to impersonal market forces and positions us into a cutthroat competition against machines, fellow workers and corporate owners. Wilde continues, “were the machine the property of all, everyone would benefit by it. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.”

The proper conditions that Wilde refers to is a democratic economy of common ownership. Supporting independent creative pursuits under a regime of minimized work days, automated production, the dissolution of “intellectual property” and freely accessible housing, education and health care will never be in the interest of the capitalist ruling class. In capitalism—laissez-faire or otherwise—profit is the object of the economy. Instead, we need individual flourishing to become the object of the economy. That will only be achieved through socialism.

Thanks for reading!
1. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1964), 33. ↩︎
2. Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle, “Review Essay: Dreams and Dreaming in the Early Modern World,” in Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 67, No. 3: 920-5. ↩︎
3. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1986), 15. ↩︎
03 Jun 26
Hitler’s Philosopher
Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.

In Untimely Meditations Nietzsche alerted readers that most written works were little more than “the smoke and vapour of the brain.”¹ For a book to avoid the flames, it must contain a fire within itself. It is easy to dismiss Nietzsche’s body of work as slippery, with an undue level of contradictions that negate its possibility as a system of thought. But this is characteristic of a reactionary right that prefers romanticization to reason.²

The Enlightenment era championed progressive leaps in scientific method, rule of law, technological invention, standard national institutions and conceptual human rights. Karl Marx is the apogee of Enlightenment philosophy because he discovered the objective material and social conditions enabling the progression of human history. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is the pinnacle of the reactionary Counter-Enlightenment opposition. The Counter-Enlightenment generally held that core human characteristics like ascetics, nature, religion and emotion were washed away by 18th and 19th century waves of industry and empiricism. Nietzsche believed that only a rigid social hierarchy—a radical aristocracy—replete with slavery and the relegation of women to childrearing could provide fertile ground for his ideal man, the Übermensch.

For most of us today, there are elements tracing to both Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thinking that are appealing. Conservatives borrow from the industriousness that modernity unleashed, while upholding the importance of pre-modern religious ideals and social hierarchy. Socialists might admire Romantic commitments to beauty and culture, while they hang onto empirical measures of history and positive human rights. Liberals hold institutions and negative rights in high esteem, while appreciating the role of emotion in public discourse. Nietzsche, with his passionate treatment of culture, hierarchy and human vitality, therefore offers a grab-bag of ideas that almost anyone can pull one or two shiny parts from while ignoring the rest.³

A Nietzschean Left?

Jonas Čeika managed to do this in his book How to Philosophize With a Hammer and Sickle, though he is not the first socialist to do so.⁴ Other left-wing figures such as Gilles Deleuze and Emma Goldman have gone down similar roads with Nietzsche, even though there is not any profound reason for doing so. It is easy to extol Nietzsche’s romantic anti-capitalism and lofty Übermensch ideal because these would seem at home under communism where, in Leon Trotsky’s words, “the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx.”⁵

Speaking of the latter, Marx has long-since reconciled the gap between between pre-modern, Counter-Enlightenment virtues and the objective nature of the modern capitalist mode of production. Marx himself was not an anti-capitalist like Nietzsche; he was a post-capitalist who believed that the boundaries crossed by capitalist technologies and social relations were the keys to unlocking a harmonious socialist future. The attempted construction of a Nietzschean left is therefore either discordant or illogical in the light of dialectical materialism, which affords Nietzsche little more than a corner of society’s superstructure.

The Overman

Nietzsche’s detours through an idealized caste system, slavery and perpetual “life-affirming” warfare are not merely the means to the Übermensch end; they are part of the end itself.⁶ This is because Übermensch—or “overman” in English—would have nobody to sail over if the harried masses weren’t ripe for subjugation and influence. This is expected from a Marxian perspective, which emphasizes the role of human relationships in determining the experience of individuals and the overall structure of society. In order to exist, a master must have a slave, just as an employer must have an employee and an overman must have an underman.

The domination of commoners by elites is the plough by which Nietzsche’s imagined master morality is cultivated. Although he understood both capitalism and Christianity to be deracinating to culture and morality, these sentiments are not progressive—they are radically regressive, rooted in admiration for the heroic conquerors of antiquity that enslaved entire populations. Whereas mainstream conservatism is informed by feudal Christian traditions and values, Nietzsche drifts much further to the right wing of the spectrum with his admiration for the pagan slave empires of antiquity.

The Fascist Impulse

It has been said that Benito Mussolini abandoned socialism in the disillusioning aftermath of the First World War, just after exposure to Nietzsche’s work. It is therefore unsurprising that Italian Fascism is just as slippery and reactionary as Nietzsche’s polemics—and Friedrich’s fingerprints are all over Mussolini’s governing ideology.

Like Nietzsche, Mussolini glorified antiquity and adopted the Roman fasces as his party’s symbol. Inspired by the concept of “master morality,” he sought to create a Third Rome—La Terza Roma—which would subordinate weaker nations like Greece and Ethiopia by natural right. The city of Rome was to be transformed into a mecca of imposing monuments, piazzas and open-air theatres celebrating the revival of the ancient Roman masters. Far from Marxian classlessness, Mussolini’s corporatist policies created a rigid caste system whereby one’s social standing and rank as a landowner, industrialist, military officer, farmer or worker was practically designated at birth. Women were erased from the public sphere as the rearing of soldiers became their sole duty to the state.

Given Nietzsche’s undeniable influence on Italian Fascism, it is no wonder that Adolf Hitler gifted Il Duce “an elaborately bound and privately printed volume of the complete works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche” for his 60th birthday. While the written works of left wing writers like Bertolt Brecht, Helen Keller, Jack London, Marx and Friedrich Engels, met the flames in Nazi Germany, Nietzsche was worshipped. Of particular interest to Nazi theorists was On the Genealogy of Morality, which asserts an iconoclastic view on the origin of civilization:

Some pack of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, which, organized for war and with the power to organize, without forethought, sets its terrifying paws on a subordinate population which may perhaps be vast in numbers but is still without any form, is still wandering aimlessly.⁷

The reference to “blond beasts of prey” is more than a passing allusion. Nietzsche elaborates on the Aryan identity of this conquering race—this “master race”—of aristocratic antiquity which was finally destroyed by a Jewish “revolt of the slaves” and “blood-poisoning.”⁸ According to Nietzsche, the slave morality operates by inverting what is strong, beautiful and learned into something fearful, ugly and ignorant. By transvaluing ancient Roman and Greek master morality, Judaic priests tamed the empire and then destroyed it. The portraits of three Jews—Jesus, Mary and Joseph—adorning millions of European walls stand as the legacy of this triumphant Jewish slave revolt.⁹

It is popularly claimed that the Nazis hijacked Nietzsche’s teachings and misappropriated them for their own sinister purposes. There is some merit to this claim but only in part. For example, despite his screed lionizing the Aryan conquerors of antiquity and bemoaning their Jewish subjects, Nietzsche was plainly not an anti-Semite. He believed that history had turned the Jewish people into “the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe” and held them to be essential ingredients to breeding his imagined postmodern aristocracy.¹⁰ Additionally, he did not view the Aryan master race from quite the same racial footing that the Nazis did. For Nietzsche, it was a cultural designation, an exercise of master morality exemplified by Nordic Vikings but also the Brahmin caste of India, Greco-Roman slaveholders and medieval Arabic and Japanese nobility.

Nietzsche endorsed Napoleon Bonaparte as a historical example of an Übermensch, capable of terror and genius, who unified Europe along strict hierarchical lines, military discipline and exemplary cultural values. Hitler saw himself as Napoleon’s successor because he unified Europe by force, raised slave populations from the defeated nations, preserved the Prussian aristocracy and promoted a Wagnerian high culture brimming with Nordic valkyries screaming into battle. For the Nazis, the commitment to a transvaluation of Judeo-Christian values went beyond good and evil.

Master Morality and the Holocaust

Nietzsche wrote: “For strong people disaster does not come from the strongest, but from the weakest.” Whereas the strong possess unapologetically life-affirming values, the weakest exalt life-denying values and the veneration of their pitiable existence spreads like contagion. The Holocaust, with all its attendant atrocities against Jews, Romani, socialists, sexual minorities and the disabled, was merely a slave revolt in reverse. What the Holocaust represented was a master’s revolt against the slaves from antiquity, the shiftless vagabonds, the egalitarians, the weak and infirm, the homosexuals that perverted good breeding. If the Holocaust is today remembered as “the terror of terrors,” this poses no dilemma as far as Nietzsche is concerned: “The more valuable type [of man] has appeared often enough in the past…Very often he has been precisely the most feared; hitherto he has been almost the terror of terrors.”¹¹

While Mussolini hewed to a vision that was more classically Nietzschean than Hitler, to claim a misappropriation of Nietzsche’s work by the Nazis is simply dishonest. Nazi ideology was grounded in a defensible interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, updated to include the latest “discoveries” in eugenics and “racial science.” The gravest misappropriation committed by the Nazis was the inclusion of “socialism” in their party’s National Socialism title. This was a sleight of hand used to convey the Nazi disdain for decadent liberal capitalism while preserving electoral viability in a period when German support for market forces was at an all-time low. A more accurate party title, such as “The New European Aristocrats,” just wasn’t going to resonate with the average German voter.

It is a fact that Nietzsche’s passionate attacks on modernity continue to attract significant attention despite the irrational, dark and mystical depths it treads. He strikes at the emotional chords of those frustrated by modern capitalist society. Marx, on the other hand, had a scientific approach to philosophy and helped to develop a praxis for human emancipation. Attempting to reconcile these two schools of thought is akin to attempting reconciliation between oil and water. There is a reason why Marx flatly rejected emotional reactionary politics: it is a dead-end in every sense of the term.

The historian J. Arch Getty wrote, “Lenin deserves a lot of credit for the notion that the meek can inherit the earth, that there can be a political movement based on social justice and equality.” In the final analysis, are these emancipatory values not superior to Hitler’s embodiment of the Nietzschean “terror of terrors”?

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator” in Untimely Meditations. ↩︎
2. See John Richardson’s, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford University Press, 2002) for more on reading Nietzsche’s polemics as a system of thought. ↩︎
3. Conservative commentators like Jordan Peterson are also notorious for doing this. ↩︎
4. The most interesting aspects of Jonas Čeika’s How to Philosophize With a Hammer and Sickle (Repeater, 2021) are his inquiries into a hypothetical libertarian socialism. ↩︎
5. Leon Trotsky quoted in Čeika’s, How to Philosophize With a Hammer and Sickle, 200. ↩︎
6. See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: “For war trains men to be free.” ↩︎
7. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky, eds., Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 227. ↩︎
8. See Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals for excerpts. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 182. ↩︎
11. Nietzsche, The Antichrist (Alfred A. Knopf, 1918). ↩︎
05 May 26
How Iran Can Win, According to Sun Tzu
“Under heaven thunder rolls.”

—I Ching

Donald Trump once commissioned a ghostwriter to put his name to a book called The Art of the Deal—but he’s clearly never read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Consider a staple teaching from Master Sun: “So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperilled in every single battle.”¹ Doubtless, the Pentagon has very capable military commanders, tacticians and a massive arsenal of weapons at their disposal. In matters of war, the balance of power heavily favours America’s legions of imperial soldiers. But with Trump as their commander-in-chief, they fly blind in terms of strategy.

In his political career, Trump has branded himself as an “America First” isolationist, allergic to “forever wars” that divert resources from the homeland. He has boasted about ending eight wars, a Nobel Peace Prize-worthy effort. When he did not receive said prize, he declared himself to be untethered from thinking about peace. After Venezuela amassed a citizens militia to deter American invasion, Trump opted to kidnap the president and threatened to kill his successor unless she complied with U.S. demands. The revolution in Venezuela is now in tactical retreat but the ink is not yet dry on the results of Trump’s acts of violence. Before even knowing what he had accomplished in Venezuela, aircraft carriers were positioned in the Middle East to set about duplicating the Venezuela operation all over again. This time it was in partnership with Israel and against the much more formidable opponent of Iran.

He Who Wishes to Fight

They began with a familiar decapitation strategy, taking the more audacious step of murdering Iran’s head of state rather than merely kidnapping him. They hit 500 targets and launched cyberattacks to encourage a domestic uprising against the government in Tehran. From interviews, Trump evidently believed that the combined external and internal pressure on Iran would bring a compliant leader to the foreground—an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez. But Trump confusingly oscillates between stated objectives in Iran, his motivations for attacking the country are unclear and he has struggled to define his relationship with war in general. In short, this is a man who does not know himself. And he does not know his enemy either.

Although the Venezuela operation was a tactical success for U.S. planners, the hardcore Chavista apparatus remains in place to live another day. Assassinating the Ayatollah Khamanei, on the other hand, galvanized grief and anger across the Shia world. It was an abrasive action that could not be interpreted as a “limited strike” by Iran’s theocratic government—much to Trump’s chagrin. The Iranians responded by setting in motion a battle plan that they had transcribed for weeks beforehand: regional conflict targeting the energy infrastructure of Gulf countries and closing the Strait of Hormuz. This plan was no secret, yet Trump astonishingly went on the record stating that the Gulf escalation was the “biggest surprise” of the conflict. Which brings us to another valuable lesson from The Art of War: “If you don’t know their strategy, you should avoid battle with them.”²

Iran’s escalation was clearly not accounted for by U.S. strategic planning. Only afterward did Trump realize he’d need a mass evacuation of American citizens, a British base for operational support, Ukrainian assistance to counter Shahed drones and more arms production to prosecute the war effort. His “big wave” aerial bombardment appears to be only an ad hoc response to the failure of a domestic rebellion to materialize and Iran’s refusal to capitulate to illegal U.S. and Israeli aggression.

Since Trump does not know his enemy, he may not be aware that Iran is fighting from “deadly ground”—a place where death is assured unless it can be fought out from. By constantly reneging on diplomatic agreements, assassinating leaders at will, surrounding their country with military bases and demanding the forfeiture of missiles, the United States has given Iran no choice but to fight in order to achieve deterrence against their enemy: “When you cannot press forward, cannot retreat backward and cannot run to the sides, you have no choice but to fight right away.”³ And so they have.

Iran is surrounded by American bases.

Opportunity in Chaos

Iran has adopted the sort of high-risk strategy to be expected from an army on deadly ground. But it is logical according to The Art of War: when outnumbered by a massive opponent “first deprive him of what he likes” and focus strikes on “what is weak.”⁴ The disabling of the Gulf state infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz satisfy both criteria, as Iran is able to strangle the oil and gas supply from small countries that form the weak underbelly of the Persian Gulf. These countries are within range of Iran’s abundant store of short range range missiles, creating outsized pain for a fossil fuel-addicted world.

Iran’s strategy going forward will be to “find out where [the enemy is] sufficient and where they are lacking.”⁵ They will accomplish this by testing Israeli and American defences with low intensity but consistent missile and drone barrages in order to deplete interceptor inventories and conceal Iranian launch sites as much as possible. Expect Iran to refrain from ineffectual large attacks unless U.S.–Israeli defensive gaps appear. Only if missile defences are diminished will they be able to strike for a maximum psychological impact—like the Tet Offensive of the Vietnam War.

Karl Marx observed that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”⁶ Iran is at an extreme disadvantage with their heavily sanctioned economy now pitted against the military might of much wealthier opponents. The only reason they are in this fight is because of the deficiencies of current U.S. leadership. Of the eight types of decadence that compromise commanders according to The Art of War, Trump suffers from no less than five of them: insatiable greed, jealousy of the wise and able, making friends with the treacherous, a liar with a cowardly heart and talking wildly without courtesy.⁷

Iran’s path to victory is narrow but existent. It relies on their ability to absorb cruel and punishing aerial bombardment with clever military decoys and camouflage; to achieve critical depletion of the enemy’s missile interceptors; to inflict unsustainable economic pain on the West. All three criteria will have to be met before a strategic victory and future deterrence becomes a possibility. Failing to meet these goals will either result in the destruction of Iran’s 2,600 year old civilization by civil war or the bare survival of a weakened Islamic Republic that is sure to be in conflict again soon against bloodthirsty enemies. Regardless of the outcome in Iran, The Art of War has this to say about the fate of the United States: “Even if a country is large, if it is militaristic it will eventually perish.”⁸

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (Shambhala, 2003): 85. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 121. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 158-9. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 451. ↩︎
5. Ibid, 116. ↩︎
6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎
7. Tzu, Art of War, 224. ↩︎
8. Ibid, 254. ↩︎
05 Mar 26
Ask the Editor: The Meaning of Jeffrey Epstein
To the editor,

Will Trump’s past association with Jeffrey Epstein take him down, as it did to Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson in the UK? Who else might be involved and why is everything so slow to come out? I’ve been hearing about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for years but have only followed the story over the past year.

Respectfully,

Robert.

Hi Robert,

It is impossible to judge whether the full magnitude of the Epstein ring will ever emerge. When this story first made headlines, it seemed plausible that the crimes were only the work of a perverted billionaire who used people like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates and various Hollywood celebrities to shield his reputation. Since Trump was returned to the White House he has made blunt attempts to suppress the Epstein story—even labelling it as a hoax. Predictably, this tactic has backfired and instead made Epstein an even greater object of scrutiny.

Setting the prurient details of the pedophile ring aside, the number of prominent people that Epstein had personally met and spent time with is strange. Over the summer, Chris Hedges recorded an illuminating podcast with Nick Bryant, the investigative journalist who first published Epstein’s contact list and flight logs. They cover the obscure relationship that Jeffrey Epstein had with Ghislaine Maxwell, his mysterious source of wealth and the possibility that he was an intelligence asset running a honeytrap operation. The “friendships” that Epstein was desperate to make and his connections to the Israeli government certainly add weight to that possibility.

The political ramifications are fairly straightforward. Trump’s proclivities are well documented and long-known at this point. It is unlikely that his involvement in Epstein’s crimes will move the needle for anybody unconvinced by prior evidence. Outside of the Trump cult, don’t be surprised to see a few more heads roll as more details about Epstein’s past associations come to light.

The meaning of Jeffrey Epstein should not be partisan scorekeeping. These are crimes committed against flesh-and-blood working class children whose victimization was enabled by capitalist class power. Intelligence asset or not, it is no coincidence that Epstein first accessed wealth before building a sex trafficking ring. Mark Fisher once described capital as “an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”¹ As capitalism turns both nature and humanity into venal objects, those who live by the labour of others are the most ripe to feel entitled to the bodies of workers and their children.

The crimes are obscene but that is not why it runs in the collective consciousness. What the Epstein saga and other conspiracy theories reflect is a deep-seated insecurity that we have about our position in the hierarchy of capitalist production. The glaring lack of justice for working class families preyed on by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell is an illustration of class domination; an economy where labouring bodies transform the world into a playground for the rich.

In sols,

Your editor.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009): 15. ↩︎
13 Nov 25
Ask the Editor: “I’m Afraid of Dying”
Dear editor,

I’ve been surrounded by death recently. At least it feels like that. My mentor from college passed away from metastatic breast cancer a few months ago. She was in her thirties. Then it was a cherished family friend; in her sixties, also cancer. Most recently a co-worker’s heart gave out on the job. That was only two months ago. I have felt doom since then. It is affecting my sleep. What if I don’t wake up in the morning? Any moment my life could be torn away from me. Will I receive a cancer diagnosis? Brain aneurysm? Could my heart explode next time I am on the treadmill? What happens afterward? I’m afraid of dying.

Thanks,

Charlotte.

Dear Charlotte,

I find the present age a little too scientific about this issue. Regularly attend the doctor, have blood analyzed, wear a helmet on the bike and don’t think about mortality. That’s a long ways off. And it might be. But it might not be. In my own experience, grief is almost “not supposed to be” discussed past the funeral and, for pensive people, this prohibition may exacerbate the death anxiety. In order to live with the uncertainty of existence we must dispel the image of a hungry grim reaper hanging about our shadows with a gleaming sickle.

Freud saw death as a drive to “restore an earlier state”—the state of inorganic being. And Marx said that “death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity.” Both are true in that rational Enlightenment sort of sensibility but they have all the comfort of a cold steel bed.

Religious beliefs aside, I’ll point out that the ancient philosophers tended to be more confrontational with this subject than those that came later. At the height of Christendom all attention was paid to the afterlife and in modernity all attention is paid to rigid inquiry. For this subject I turn to to the Epicureans who lived by the adage: “Death is nothing to us.” As atomic beings, once we lose our senses, we lose our ability to perceive, worry or fear anything. It is therefore irrational to worry about non-existence as there is nothing that can be feared in that state. What you are experiencing is neither an authentic fear of death nor a fear of loss. We do not lose our lives, we only cease to live them.

It seems to be the suddenness by which your loved ones and colleague stopped living that has aggravated your grief and catalyzed anxiety. There may be unfulfilled wishes that flummox you. Epicurus said: “He who is in least need of tomorrow will approach it with the greatest pleasure.”¹ This is where I believe you should channel your conscious energy. What provides you enjoyment? Try to arrive happy every night to bed. There are likely social pressures and internal judgements that you are facing. Consciously and humbly work through them. Do you have unfulfilled goals and aspirations stoking this “need for tomorrow”? It is important that you locate these because they are the true sources of anxiety. The fear of dying is relieved once you temper the need for tomorrow and render it no more than a pleasant want.

In sols,

Your editor.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson, eds., The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (Hackett Publishing, 1994), 103. ↩︎
30 Oct 25
Ask the Editor: “What is Postmodernism?”
Dear editor,

Here’s something I’ve heard applied to Donald Trump, woke liberal activists and everyone Jordan Peterson doesn’t like: postmodern. It’s also a label placed onto some of my favourite films, buildings and artwork, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Andy Warhol prints.

What is postmodernism? Is it good or bad?

Cheers,

Sora.

Dear Sora,

In his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson argued presciently that the radical structural changes to the economy underway in the 1980s created a western culture disillusioned by progress, marking a break with modernity in the process.¹ 33 years later, the disillusionment has deepened and postmodernism rules the public sphere

After the medieval period was destroyed by the riches of exploited labour and resources from the Americas, modernity followed in its wake. Modernity is characterized by Enlightenment philosophy, secularization and science, liberal democracy, romantic and realist artwork and International Style architecture. It is debatable whether we have truly exited modernity but postmodernism can at least describe its latest evolution.

The most consequential casualty of the postmodern turn is the belief in progress. This has given space for right wing populists around the world to lash out at the previous order and ruling institutions. Lacking any philosophical grounding, there has been a tidal wave of contradictory political expressions coming in from the right: nostalgia for past glory while undermining the institutions that facilitated it; trickle down tax policies and trade protectionism; conspiracy theories and “alternative facts;” religious affirmations and hedonistic menageries of drugs and sex. Anything goes, and this is the hallmark of postmodernism. Because there is no grand narrative of history or final destination for humanity, nothing has to make sense beyond the present moment. Postmodernism did not produce identity politics; on the contrary, identity politics relied on the modernist narrative of a society gradually abolishing social prejudices. The triumphalism of postmodern politics has destroyed the “woke” idea, and liberals abandon it as rats flee a sinking ship.

Many of the postmodern elements seen lately in politics have existed for years in the realm of culture. The parade of cinematic reboots and remakes, nonlinear story structures, imitation of past styles without context and a fusion of high and low art are a few postmodern characteristics that Jameson identified. Postmodernist culture like film, music, artwork or architecture, relies on extensive reference to the past because of an inability to apprehend the future.

Postmodernism isn’t good or bad. It is simply the cultural analog to our current economic structure and material life. Finding resonance with postmodern culture is expected as we, too, are products of late capitalism. Just as we see postmodernism dominate the society of a nihilistic West, futurism dominates the society of an optimistic China. Only when the West has consciously apprehended its economic levers will it be able to determine its future and set foot to a new era yet again.

In sols,

Your editor.

Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

Footnotes:
1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991). ↩︎
15 Oct 25