You have to remember that Nietzsche was writing in an era when the alternative could've been comparative eugenics. George Bernard Shaw writing in the same time period didn't just toy with eugenic ideals he embraced and extended them as socialist.
Good post. As paradoxical as it sounds Nietzsche offers a powerful critique of any sort of insular parochialisms that are so common among reactionaries. Paraphrasing Zarathustra but he says something along the lines that 'the greatest friend is also the greatest enemy' and that they should 'offer a whole different world' to you. Plus things like the genealogical method lends itself well to asking the fundamental question of: what produces people to be the way that are--a question that is necessary for any socialist, anti-capitalist understanding of the world.
There is a lot to be said about Nietzsche, how to understand his work, and what we can do with it. I would be hesitant to completely dismiss everything with just an offhand comment on a niche website. I guess the main problem we are faced with with Nietzsche is that on the one hand these works are supposedly existential in the sense that they deal with a fundamentally human condition (the becoming-reactive, the problem of nihilism, etc.) that almost becomes a liberatory-sounding project of something that is 'beyond' the all-too-human. On the other hand you have Nietzsche the person whose aristocratic ideals, and parasitical-Bourgeois intelligentsia class position bleeds through onto almost every page (see Lukacs' The Destruction Of Reaon). Suffice to say that it demands some work--and luckily there is a lineage of leftists inspired by Nietzsche (Bataille, Deleuze, a whole bunch of anarchists, et. al.)
You have to remember that Nietzsche was writing in an era when the alternative could've been comparative eugenics. George Bernard Shaw writing in the same time period didn't just toy with eugenic ideals he embraced and extended them as socialist.
Instead of calling for the physical elimination of degenerates Nietzsche promulgated a theory of Züchtung (breeding) that espoused a moral transformation of society in a lamarckian psychological not biological evolutionary way . To Nietzsche, the value of choice in making sociocultural changes lies not in defining the other as alien and ultimately inferior and worthy of destruction, but recognizing that bad traits are inherent throughout a cultural landscape and choosing instead to confront those systems and values that produce bad traits.
Good post. As paradoxical as it sounds Nietzsche offers a powerful critique of any sort of insular parochialisms that are so common among reactionaries. Paraphrasing Zarathustra but he says something along the lines that 'the greatest friend is also the greatest enemy' and that they should 'offer a whole different world' to you. Plus things like the genealogical method lends itself well to asking the fundamental question of: what produces people to be the way that are--a question that is necessary for any socialist, anti-capitalist understanding of the world.
There is a lot to be said about Nietzsche, how to understand his work, and what we can do with it. I would be hesitant to completely dismiss everything with just an offhand comment on a niche website. I guess the main problem we are faced with with Nietzsche is that on the one hand these works are supposedly existential in the sense that they deal with a fundamentally human condition (the becoming-reactive, the problem of nihilism, etc.) that almost becomes a liberatory-sounding project of something that is 'beyond' the all-too-human. On the other hand you have Nietzsche the person whose aristocratic ideals, and parasitical-Bourgeois intelligentsia class position bleeds through onto almost every page (see Lukacs' The Destruction Of Reaon). Suffice to say that it demands some work--and luckily there is a lineage of leftists inspired by Nietzsche (Bataille, Deleuze, a whole bunch of anarchists, et. al.)