“To make better sense of this confusion, it is useful to glance at the various texts and authors that Nietzsche took to be representative of socialism. Once this has been accomplished, the validity of his claim that 19th-century socialism was simply the latest ideological incarnation of crypto-Christian morality, repackaged in secular form, can be ascertained. Notwithstanding the incredulity of Losurdo, even the German Social-Democrat and later biographer of Marx, Franz Mehring, who had little patience for Nietzsche (despite his indisputable poetic abilities), confessed: ‘Absent from Nietzsche’s thinking was an explicit philosophical confrontation with socialism.’ (Mehring added, incidentally, much to Lukács’ chagrin, that ‘(t)he Nietzsche cult is … useful to socialism … No doubt, Nietzsche’s writings have their pitfalls for young people … growing up within the bourgeois classes …, laboring under bourgeois class-prejudices. But for such people, Nietzsche is only a transitional stage on the way to socialism.’ Other than the writings of such early socialists as Weitling and Lamennais, however, Nietzsche’s primary contact with socialism came by way of Wagner, who had been a follower of Proudhon in 1848 with a streak of Bakuninism thrown in here and there. Besides these sources, there is some evidence that he was acquainted with August Bebel’s seminal work on Woman and Socialism. More than any other, however, the writer who Nietzsche most associated with socialist thought was Eugen Dühring, a prominent anti-Marxist and anti-Semite. Dühring was undoubtedly the subject of Nietzche’s most scathing criticisms of the maudlin morality and reactive sentiment in mainstream socialist literature.
This is a point worth dwelling on for a moment. It is generally accepted, even among those who oppose Nietzsche most vociferously, that the philosopher never read Marx or Engels. Nevertheless, a few years ago the scholar Thomas H. Brobjer meticulously examined Nietzsche’s personal library and speculated that he would have in all likelihood recognized Marx’s name from several books in his collection — though this conclusion rests on a number of less-than-certain probabilities riddled with dubious qualifiers like probably, likely, may, perhaps, might, etc. (…) Whether or not this is the case, however, Nietzsche never wrote about either of them, so it is impossible to know exactly what he thought of their theories, at least as reported by their contemporaries (allies and adversaries). It is fruitless to attempt to guess what his opinion would have been had he read them, of course. History does not deal in counterfactuals.”
“of Marx, Nietzsche could have known at most only the name, if he had in fact read the entire thick tome by … Karl Eugen Dühring … Through Dühring’s other writings and the personal proximity of his own brother-in-law, (socialist) [!!] Bernhard Förster, Nietzsche knew what was for him — understandably — an especially unappetizing variation of socialism: the anti-Semitic one.” Mazzino Montanari
“Furthermore, as Brobjer himself notes in his article, assuming Nietzsche actually read Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, he would have seen the name of his former mentor and later nemesis Wagner listed among the ‘socialists’. Recalling not only the anti-Semitic sentiments of Wagner, but also those of his revolutionary masters Proudhon and Bakunin, adding in the figure of Dühring, it becomes clearer why socialism would have seemed so repellant to him.”
“Dühring’s review of Capital is highly amusing. The whole article is embarrassment and funk.” Engels to Marx, 1868
“I again remind readers … of that apostle of revenge from Berlin, Eugen Dühring, who makes the most indecent and disgusting use of moral clap-trap of anyone today, even amongst his kind, the anti-Semites.” Genealogy
“In fact, the language of ressentiment in Nietzsche stemmed entirely from his encounter with Dühring. Not by accident does the term appear as a contraction of its romantic equivalents, reactive sentiment (reaktiven Gefühls), which the philologist knew only too well.”
“Often mischaracterized as a defender of ‘master morality’ against the mawkishness of ‘slave morality’, Nietzsche in reality fought for an as-yet-unseen form of life that would arise out of the latter. He saw the sense of guilt that weighed upon humanity’s conscience as pointing beyond itself, which could herald and potentially give birth to the new. ‘Bad conscience is a sickness, there is no point in denying it, but a sickness rather like pregnancy’, the philosopher wrote. That is to say, the sickness is only passing — symptomatic of a broader historical process with which it is bound up. Echoes of Marx’s immortal lines from his Civil War in France can almost be heard: ‘The proletariat has no ideals of its own to realize, but to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.’”
“In a similar fashion, Marx understood the bourgeois epoch to be characterized by perpetual flux, the annihilation of existing conditions to make way for those arising out of them: a ceaseless motion of becoming. Materialist dialectic, by standing the doctrine of its Hegelian predecessor on its head, was no less negative or pitilessly destructive than its Nietzschean counterpart: ‘In accordance with the Hegelian method of thought, the proposition of the rationality of everything that is real dissolves to become the opposite proposition: All that exists deserves to perish. But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of Hegelian philosophy, that it once and for all dealt the deathblow to the finality of all products of human thought and action.’ Moreover, the concept of freedom was always understood by Marx as the freedom to become what one will be, rather than the ontological notion of freedom promulgated by romanticism and postmodernism as the freedom to be (e.g., a Jew or a Muslim, a sculptor or a painter, heterosexual or homosexual) what one already ‘is’.”
“Obviously, it would be a mistake to conflate Marx and Nietzsche’s concepts of ‘becoming’. But hopefully this parallel, however approximate and imperfect, will serve to ward off the petty squeamishness of those who gasp at Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘innocence of becoming’ (i.e., Losurdo, Dombowsky, others). Its destructiveness should be thought no more terrifying than Hegel’s description of history as the ‘slaughter-bench’ on which ‘the happiness of nations, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals are sacrificed.’”
“(T)he communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, Marx clarified in The German Ideology (1846), nor do they express this contradiction theoretically in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all.”
“Unfortunately for Nietzsche, for whom Dühring was the quintessential socialist, mainstream socialism in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s was hardly any less crude. Engels thus felt it necessary to warn his readers that, unlike Dühring, his own notion of communism was ‘not in any way to be confounded with that crude leveling-down which makes the bourgeois so indignantly oppose all communism’.”
Notes
“The skilled Danish critic (Georg Brandes, a Jew and liberal critic, discoverer of the German philosopher’s ‘aristocratic radicalism’) did not take Nietzsche’s barbarism seriously, not at face value, (but) understood it cum grano salis, in which he was very right.’ Mann, Thomas. ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Light of Recent Events’, Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942-1949. (Wildside Press LLC. Washington, DC: 2008). Pg. 99.”
Brobjer, Thomas H. ‘Nietzsche’s Knowledge of Marx and Marxism’, Nietzsche-Studien, № 31: 2002.
Seclusão Anagógica 