{I recently had considerable time to read on airplanes and in airport lounges.}
Jonas Ceika is a Norwegian philosopher and YouTube entrepreneur. He is also, it seems, a Marxist, and he has written a book titled How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century. Among other things, Ceika sets out to debunk common misreadings of the two nineteenth-century giants; he also attempts to show that they were, if not exactly philosophical bedfellows, at least more similar in their views than has been thought. Ceika suggests that we read Marx through the lens of Nietzsche’s nihilism, and that we read Nietzsche through the lens of Marxist social radicalism: “If we use Nietzsche to excavate Marxism, we can uncover all the Nietzschean aspects of Marx that have been purposefully denounced, overlooked, or ignored throughout the failures and deformations of Marxism in the twentieth century.”
Those “Nietzschean aspects” to which Ceika refers compose “the human element—active human beings, their lived experience and their most personal concerns—and there is no modern philosopher who provides this element more fiercely than Nietzsche.” In view of that, writes Ceika, “I propose a Nietzschean Marxism, which, paradoxically, comes to be more Marxist than forms of Marxism claiming to be Marx’s direct heirs.
As Ceika says, “Marx has been made to suffer through many horrific surgeries and mutations. He has been transformed from a thinker who wants to transcend modernity’s categories altogether, into a thinker who merely wants to reform some given sphere of modernity: a social democrat, a moralist, a historical determinist.” When Marxism was made into an ideology focused solely on power—that is, when Lenin appropriated Marx for his own purposes—the human element, the humanism of Marx’s thought, was lost. Ceika’s attempt to rescue it is welcome, though likely wasted on Americans who, by and large, have preferred to caricature Marx rather than grapple with his actual ideas.
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Speaking of Marx: Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism is a three-volume doorstop of Marxist theory, beginning not with Marx himself but with a whirlwind tour of the elements of Western philosophy that served as background to Marx’s thinking. Kolakowski was born, raised, and educated under a Communist regime, from which he eventually deviated and which he ultimately rejected. His magnum opus was originally published in 1976, translated into English in 1978, and reissued as a single volume in 2005.
The striking thing about Kolakowski’s work, aside from the obvious erudition it displays, is its lack of vitriol or invective rhetoric. Main Currents of Marxism is not a polemic; it is a thoughtful, measured analysis of Marxist thought in historical context, including the myriad “Marxisms” that competed for the mantle of the great man’s rightful heirs. Nor was Kolakowski an apologist for Marx; he believed that the brutalities and tyrannies of Leninism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism were logical outgrowths of Marx’s thought, which is not to say that Marx would have endorsed them.
Jonas Ceika (above) would almost certainly have nothing but disdain for Leszek Kolakowski, an ex-Marxist and a lifelong atheist who converted late in life to Christianity. Kolakowski, though, remains one of my intellectual heroes, someone with whom I do not always agree but cannot help but respect. As I slowly work my way through Volume One (“The Founders”) of Main Currents of Marxism, I believe I am in good hands.
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We Shall Be Masters, by Chris Miller, is not about Marx; the subject of the book is Russia’s “pivot to East Asia, from Peter the Great to Putin.” The Russian psyche, as well as Russian foreign policy, has long been torn between its historic ties to the West and its heritage from the East—Russia was under the rule of Tatars (Mongols) for some two hundred and fifty years, and it borders China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Japan. Even as Peter the Great and then Catherine the Great sought to Westernize Russian ways, and while Slavophiles and “Old Believers” sought to preserve Russian traditions against Western influence, the Far East always beckoned, if only because it seemed less intimidating than the West. It is hard to overstate the humiliation Russians felt when they were defeated by Japan in 1905, or the loss of confidence in Tsar Nicholas II that resulted.
Miller’s book, then, is about “the promise of the East” and the repeated disappointments Russia has suffered over its expansionist dreams. Miller claims that Putin, in pursuing a strategic alliance with Xi Jinping’s China, is following in his predecessors’ footsteps; but he suggests that any such alliance will be limited and short-term, and that, in the long run, Russia’s ambitions in East Asia “are likely to be unattainable”.
You can read We Shall Be Masters to help understand current events and Russia’s foreign policy, or you can read it simply as a foray into Russian history; it is informative in either case.
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