>
> CB: The thing is though, that when you read Nietzsche it does not
> seem very hard to make him compatible with the Fascists or Nazis.
> The difference is way too subtle for Nietzche to be some great
> liberating thinker. He seems such a petit bourgeois rebel.
>
> ^^^^^
>
>
Charles,
What do you say about the many Marxists, who over the years have been admirers of Nietzsche. Many of the Russian Marxists were admirers of his thought including the Bolshevik, Anatoli Lunacharskii who attempted to turn "Nietzschean amoralism" to socialist purposes. Even Trotsky betrayed a certain admiration for this "petit bourgeois rebel." The Frankfurters of course, almost to a man, were great admirers of Nietzsche, as was Lukacs. And naturally Sartre was too, greatly influenced by the great German too.
Jim F. _______________________________
Jim,
I have learned from your comments in the past about Lunarcharskii' attention to Nietzsche . What I say next is a speculative or an off the coff response, but, Lunarcharskii also was for "god building" in the empirio-critical trend. So, one thought might be that his attention to Nietzsche is part of the same wrestling with idealism . I think petit bourgeois rebelliousness and revolutionism were fairly widespread among Marxists and Bolsheviks. Much of Lenin's polemicizing is against petit bourgeois revolutionism. With all due respect to Trotsky, I myself have never been entirely uncritical of Trotsky. I tend to follow Lenin more than Trotsky, and they are not identical. At any rate, I always thought that a general characterisation of Trotsky's shortcomings would be petit bourgeois revolutionism, but I don't reduce Trotsky to that , and of all the many middle class revolutionist, Trotsky showed that he was in the sharper crowd, by joining the Bolsheviks in 1917. Trotsky repres! ents a petit bourgeois revolutionist who fairly successfully made it to authentically serve the working class.
In general, much of the personnel of the Bolsheviks came from the petit bourgeois, so the whole issue of the contradictions of this stratum in becoming solid allies and servants of the working classes is an important dynamic of the Party and revolution, and Lunarcharskii and Trotsky are sort of representative figures of this struggle. Lenin of course was from middle strata too, but Lunarcharski and Trotsky are closer to the norm in having their ups and downs of it.
I guess I would ask is there some way in which Lunarcharski and Trotsky put anything from Nietzsche into practice, and with what result ? And of course what specifically in Nietzsche is of interest to liberation struggle ?
Charles