You can engage with Nietzsche and Marx at the same time (as Robert Wood said) in the sense you can engage with Ambrose Bierce (whose Devil's Dictionary has some sexist stuff but also acerbic gems on capital/labor relations, religions, state power, etc) & HL Mencken, while also engaging with Marxism at the same time, even if the writers' views don't always neatly fit together.
The World Socialist Website's position is unfortunately that Nietzsche was a proto-fascist, an "anti-Marx" like Charles Brown says, plain and simple. Nevertheless, there is a "left-Nietzschean" tradition that I'm fascinated with personally that includes Emma Goldman, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, early syndicalist theory (very old IWW pubs I have quote Nietzsche quite often sometimes), and then maybe our best recent exponent, Foucault (among others). These guys were about as anti-fascist as you could get, but were inspired profoundly by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche wrote odious stuff about women; so did HL Mencken. Yet both also wrote some brilliant passages on other topics extremely amenable to leftist and Marxist philosophy: namely, atheism, the nature of power relations and how power distorts "truth,", and (what may come as a surprise) Nietzsche's own virulent hatred of German nationalism (a "herd mentality" to him, like Christianity) and Nietzsche's hatred of anti-Semitism, conveniently forgotten by later Nazis. The Nazis jettisoned aspects of Nietzsche, cherry picking the rest of his texts for their own uses. Bataille wrote excellent polemics against the Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche.
There has been a tug of war over Nietzsche's corpse between the right and left since Nietzsche's passing. The Nazis glossed over Nietzsche's anti-German stuff and attributed a lot of things to him he didn't say, mostly thanks to Nietzsche's sister who betrayed his legacy after he died. Yet Nietzsche, it is true, often explicitly polemicized against socialists and anarchists as well -- even though Emma Goldman based an entire series of lectures and essays on Nietzsche that she felt were completely amenable to her own anti-authoritarian ends.
This and more is collected in the great book _I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition_ by John Moore, ed., that details Nietzsche's influence on the early anti-capitalist/syndicalist movement and extensively quotes Goldman's formulation of Nietzsche as an important social iconoclast, arguing for a transvaluation of all values that included Church and State. Mass feelings of nationalism and patriotism she felt were will within Nietzsche's "herd morality" complaints.
It's a complicated subject and one I've been obsessed with for a couple of years now. I keep meaning to write my own essay on it after months of bookmarking and highlighting quotations here and there. I have Foucault to thanks for this. Nietzsche, like Foucault and even Marx, also changed their own personal beliefs over the course of their lives, adding to difficulties in theoretical consistency in this area. But the idea that Nietzsche is by default an enemy of the left is pure bullshit. He provided much useful stuff that's yet to be fully exploited by our side (anti-capitalists).
Another note: HL Mencken's biography _The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche_ was printed by the left-anarchist See Sharp Press. The book is prefaced with a brilliant essay by anarchist Chaz Bufe that explains clearly where Nietzsche converges with anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist thought, but also where Nietzsche grossly diverges from it. Bufe's explanatory preface should be printed as its own pamphlet; it's that valuable.
In short, don't discount Nietzsche wholesale, the way Richard Wolin and the World Socialist Website do. Nietzsche is extraordinarily useful. The left-Nietzschean tradition teases out one aspect of Nietzsche; the right teases out another. But what the left has teased out is excellent ammunition for our armory, just as we find usefulness in things Bierce and Mencken wrote.
-B.
wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
"I'm not sure why one can't engage with Marx and Nietzsche at the same time. Many of the Italian Marxists of the 70's did it without damage."
Charles Brown wrote:
"Of course, one _can_. It is just my opinion that Nietzsche is a sort of anti-Marx. So, in engaging Nietzsche, one is substantially disengaging Marx and vica versa. It's like 'engaging' water and oil at the same time."