>Simply put, a lot of Nietzche's views in fact can't be
>"reconciled" with the left. Nor can a lot of Mencken's
>and Bierce's. Yet leftists employ tools from those
>authors anyway, whether they fit perfectly into a
>Marxist mold or not. (Marx quoted countless literary
>figures before his times to buttress his ideas, and
>they weren't all Marxist, either.) The whole of
>everyone's corpus of writing doesn't have to "be
>reconciled." Rather, one can go looting and pillaging
>around to get what's useful. Scholars know this
>routine well.
>
>Randolph Bourne thought Nietzsche was amenable in some
>way to his anti-capitalist concerns. You know, Bourne,
>the one who coined the phrase "War is the health of
>the State."
>
>In his essay "What is Exploitation?" Randolph Bourne
>tries to convince a friend of his, an owner of a
>factory, that whether he's aware of it or not there is
>a class war, a power struggle, going on in society
>between employer and employed. He writes:
>
>"But as long as the employer is entrenched in property
>rights with the armed state behind him, the power will
>be his [the employer's]. My friend, however, does not
>like these Nietzschean ideas about power. He is sure
>that workmen have just as much power to exploit him as
>he has of exploiting them. [...] He trusts rights. I
>trust power."
>
>[Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will, p. 288]
My books are in storage. Didn't Bourne also write some fantabulous critique of war? I seem to recall reading it yrs. ago.
Also, not an attack on you, but just a question. Although I am very sympathetic to the picture B paints of pillaging and looting ideas, I also once read, I thought, a rather compelling critique of my own preferred habit of mind -- and it was on the list. Something about how such an approach is quite typical of bourgeois liberalism perhaps? Or maybe it was ilestre, commenting at my blog? At any rate, if you know of authors who've written in that vain, ping me.
and don't forget, Audacia Ray, June 19th at http://blog.pulpculture.org