The Man Who Wept for the Commune

Understanding Nietzsche: What the Enemy Got Right

The Marmaris Philosophy Circle MARFET is taking up Nietzsche on Friday, 4 September 2026, at the Marmaris House of Culture and Arts, with a talk by Ahmet Nohut: "Understanding Nietzsche — Living with Life-Affirming Values." Admission is free, at 18.18. That a philosophy circle opens this question in a culture house, in the evening, to everyone, is already a valuable effort; we thank MARFET and Ahmet Nohut. This essay was written as a contribution to and an assessment of that discussion.

Dear Young Comrades,

The talk's title is well chosen. The real reason Nietzsche is still read today is that he made saying "yes" to life a philosophical program: affirming not despite pain, but by taking pain in as well. This essay takes that "yes" seriously and adds a single question: when Nietzsche affirmed life, whose life was he affirming? Everyone's — or, in his own words, that of a "noble" minority? Without that question Nietzsche cannot be understood; once it is asked, understanding him becomes unexpectedly fruitful work for us.

Let us say it at the outset: Nietzsche is not one of us. We have no intention of concealing that, or of forcing him into an "actually left" reading. But the Marxist tradition never had the luxury of sorting thinkers into "ours" and "not ours" and leaving the latter unread. Marx's most productive interlocutors were Hegel, Ricardo, and Smith; none was a socialist. One of the most basic principles of dialectical thought is that the real content of a position comes to light in its relation to the position against it. That is why we read Nietzsche.

The essay is long; it proceeds in seven parts. First the facts, then the concepts, then the political position, then how the legacy was claimed, the Marxist debate, the epistemological question, and finally why he is valuable "in a dialectical universe."

Life story: facts and context

The legend in circulation about Nietzsche outruns the facts. So the chronology must first be set down properly.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, in Prussian Saxony. His father was a Lutheran pastor and died when Friedrich was five. His childhood was spent in a parsonage, in a devout milieu; the author of the sentence "God is dead" knew the idea of God from the inside. He received a classical education at Schulpforta, one of Germany's most selective boarding schools, and studied classical philology — the science of ancient Greek and Latin texts — at Bonn and Leipzig.

In 1869, at twenty-four and without having completed his doctorate, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel. That was extraordinary even in the academic world of the time. In 1870 he joined the Franco-Prussian War as a volunteer medical orderly, returned with dysentery and diphtheria, and his health never fully recovered.

In the Basel years he drew close to Richard Wagner, then broke with him — for artistic as well as political reasons. In 1879 illness forced him to retire from the university. The next ten years were those he spent writing between the Swiss mountains and the Italian coasts, in boarding-house rooms, amid severe migraines and failing sight. His books barely sold; he had the fourth part of Zarathustra printed in 1885 at his own expense in only forty copies and distributed them to his circle.

In January 1889 he suffered a mental collapse in Turin. (The story that he threw his arms around a whipped horse and wept is widespread, but cannot be confirmed by primary sources; it is best recorded as legend.) He spent the next eleven years wholly cut off from philosophical production, first in his mother's care, and from 1897 in his sister's. He died in Weimar on 25 August 1900.

Now let us set the chronology of his works beside Germany's political calendar:

Year	Work	Political context in Germany
1872	The Birth of Tragedy	One year after the crushing of the Paris Commune; the German Empire newly founded
1878	Human, All Too Human	Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law (Sozialistengesetz) takes effect: socialist organizations, publications, and meetings banned
1881–82	Daybreak, The Gay Science	The ban continues
1883–85	Thus Spoke Zarathustra	The ban continues; Marx dies in 1883
1886	Beyond Good and Evil	The ban continues
1887	On the Genealogy of Morality	The ban continues
1888	Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo	Last year of the ban; despite it, the SPD will take 1.4 million votes (19.7%) in 1890 and become the largest party by votes

This table contains a thesis, and it must be stated plainly: All of Nietzsche's mature works fit inside the twelve-year period when socialism was banned in Germany. That his works were written in the years when the working class in Europe first organized as a mass political force is not a coincidence but a context. How far that context seeped into the texts we will see in the third section.

One more date must be given: 21 June 1871. A month after the Paris Commune was drowned in blood, Nietzsche wrote a letter to his friend Carl von Gersdorff. He had heard — a report later shown to be false — that the Communards had burned the Louvre, and he wrote that it was the worst day of his life, that an entire cultural existence had been annihilated in a day, and that, shaken by the news, he felt "the absurdity of scientific and aesthetic existence." This letter is one of the clearest documents we have for understanding the philosophy of the next twenty years: for Nietzsche, the working class's march toward power meant the end of culture.

Five concepts: simplified but not diminished

Nietzsche is a thinker who does not build systems and writes in aphorisms; that makes him both attractive and easy to abuse. Still, five concepts are enough to carry the skeleton of his thought.

1. "God is dead" and nihilism

This sentence is not a declaration of atheism but a cultural diagnosis. In section 125 of The Gay Science it is a "madman" who says it, and what he says is this: Europe has in practice ceased to believe in God, yet continues to use the entire value system that rested on the idea of God — the absoluteness of good and evil, moral obligation, the belief that life has a meaning. The foundation has collapsed; the building is still made to look as if it stands. For Nietzsche this situation cannot last; sooner or later the values themselves collapse. That collapse is called nihilism: the highest values devaluing themselves.

The diagnosis is sound. Bourgeois society withdraws religion from the public sphere while still borrowing its morality from it; that tension is something every major thinker of the nineteenth century saw. Marx saw the same void from another place: in the famous sentence of the Communist Manifesto, capital "melts all that is solid into air" and profanes all that is holy. What Nietzsche and Marx share is treating this melting as real; where they part is where they look for its source. Nietzsche sees it as a crisis of belief; Marx, as the result of a transformation in the relations of production.

2. Genealogy and ressentiment

Nietzsche's strongest and most lasting contribution is methodological: genealogy. Not asking whether a value is true, but where it came from, under what conditions and for whose benefit it arose. In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality Nietzsche argues this: the word "good" was originally the name nobles gave themselves; its opposite was not "evil" but "base" or "common." Then the weak, from the hatred they had stored up against the strong — French ressentiment — produced a new table of values: humility a virtue, power a sin; the suffering sacred, the ruling guilty. Nietzsche calls this "the slave revolt in morality" and ties it historically to the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And in the same book he takes one step further: the modern heirs of this slave morality are democracy and socialism. The demand for equality is the worldly form of "equality before God"; it is the shackle the weak strike against the strong.

Here method and conclusion must be separated with care. The method — the question of the social origin and function of values — is also the method of historical materialism; when Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology that "the ruling ideas of each age are the ideas of the ruling class," they are performing the same operation. The conclusion — that the source of the idea of equality is hatred — is a direct attack on us and is empirically indefensible. The demand for equality arises in history as the claim of people who already produce in common that they should also own the products of that production in common; its source is not a feeling but the social character of labor.

3. Will to power

For Nietzsche the basic drive of living beings is not survival or pleasure but growth, expansion, domination: the will to power. Morality, science, religion, art — all are disguised forms of this will. Nietzsche presents it as a psychological hypothesis, but in section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil he tries to raise it to a cosmological principle: the world, "viewed from inside," is nothing other than will to power.

The historical source of this idea is not biology. In the second half of the nineteenth century the social experience of free competition and the compulsion to accumulate made the drive to unlimited expansion look like a natural law; social Darwinism is a product of the same experience. Nietzsche read capital's compulsion to grow without pause as the law of being. Marx described the same compulsion in Capital not as a universal principle but as the inner logic of a determinate and historical mode of production. That difference is not a detail but the distinction that determines the whole architecture of the two thoughts: one carries the spirit of capitalism into ontology; the other historicizes it.

4. The overman and the "last man"

Zarathustra declares that man is "something that shall be overcome"; the figure on the horizon is the overman (Übermensch): the one who, after the death of God, will create his own values. But Zarathustra's real anxiety is not that the overman will not come, but that the "last man" will come in his place — the human who loves comfort, avoids risk, is like everyone else, and invents happiness with a wink. Small pleasures, small health, a secured life.

It is often said that this figure catches the numbness of consumer society, and that is partly true. But the historical content of the text is more concrete. The "small existence" Nietzsche despises is named in section 57 of The Antichrist: what he hates most is the "socialist rabble" that spoils the worker's feeling of contentment with a "small existence" and teaches him envy and revenge. So the critique of the "last man" is not an abstract critique of comfort but the coding of the worker's demand for a better life — the eight-hour day, insurance, organization — as a symptom of degeneration. Historically, that is the most common bourgeois argument of the Anti-Socialist Law period.

5. Eternal return and amor fati

What Nietzsche called his "heaviest thought": if everything will repeat, infinitely, exactly as it is? Can you wish to live this life, this pain, this moment, endlessly, with nothing changed? If you can, you have loved your fate — amor fati. Nietzsche ties this idea to Spinoza; on a postcard to Overbeck in 1881 he says he has found a "forerunner" in Spinoza and that their basic tendencies are the same: to make knowledge the strongest passion, and to reject free will, ends, the moral world-order, and evil.

As an existential test this thought is powerful. As a theory of history it is conservative: nothing advances, nothing accumulates, everything turns. There is no accumulation of class struggle, no permanence of a won right, no development of the productive forces. We will return to this in the dialectic section, because the deepest divide between Nietzsche and us is not in morality but in the structure of time.

Political position: what the texts say

That Nietzsche was "actually apolitical," an aesthetic thinker "above politics," is a widespread academic position. That position does not fit the texts themselves. Three documents suffice.

The Greek State (1871–72, unpublished preface): Slavery belongs to the essence of culture. The existence of a high culture requires the majority to work under conditions of drudgery; the leisure of the minority is paid for by the slavery of the majority. Nietzsche writes this not as a critique but as a tragic yet necessary fact.

Beyond Good and Evil, §258: The basic feature of a good and healthy aristocracy is that it accepts with a clear conscience the reduction of countless people, for its own sake, to "incomplete humans, slaves, instruments." Society must exist for the aristocracy; not the reverse.

The Antichrist, §57: Nietzsche praises the caste order in the Laws of Manu; society is "naturally" stratified, each stratum has its own happiness, and socialists are the "apostles of the Chandala" — prophets of the untouchables — who wreck that order.

When the Danish critic Georg Brandes began corresponding with Nietzsche in 1887, he named his philosophy "aristocratic radicalism." In his reply of 2 December 1887 Nietzsche called the phrase "the cleverest thing I have read about myself to date." This is not a label stuck on him from outside; it is one he endorsed.

To prevent confusion, two further things must be recorded with the same clarity.

Nietzsche was not an antisemite. He regarded his sister's marriage to an antisemitic agitator as a disgrace; in a December 1887 letter to her he defined being "absolutely clean and uncompromising — that is, against" antisemitism as a matter of honor; the circle's antisemitism also played a role in his break with Wagner. In one of the last notes he wrote to Overbeck as he was losing his mind, the sentence "I am having all antisemites shot" appears.

Nor was Nietzsche a German nationalist. He continually scorned Bismarck's empire, the "Reich," German cultural chauvinism; he called himself a "good European."

But the conclusion to draw from this is not what is often supposed. Not being antisemitic or nationalist does not make one an egalitarian. Nietzsche's hierarchy is not a hierarchy of blood or nation but a master–slave hierarchy. He did not despise the Jew; but he wanted the slave to remain a slave. That is an older and more fundamental position than racism: the naturalization of class hierarchy. That is also the core thesis of Losurdo's book: Nietzsche's thought is a lifelong, consistent political answer to the revolutions of 1848 and the Commune of 1871; concepts like "herd," "slave morality," and "last man" are not literary metaphors but conceptual weapons aimed at the real workers' movement of the period.

Claiming the legacy: Elisabeth and "The Will to Power"

Whose hands a thinker's texts are in matters as much as what those texts say. Nietzsche is one of the most instructive cases.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was two years younger than her brother. In 1885 she married Bernhard Förster, an antisemite Nietzsche hated; the couple set out to found a "pure German" settlement in Paraguay: Nueva Germania. The colony collapsed economically; Förster killed himself in 1889. Elisabeth returned to Germany and, seizing all the manuscripts, letters, and notebooks of her by then dependent brother, founded a "Nietzsche Archive" in Weimar.

What followed is one of the best-documented falsifications in the history of philology. Elisabeth cut letters, fabricated fake ones, and hid what her brother had written against antisemitism. And from Nietzsche's unpublished, scattered notebooks she selected passages, arranged them in an order of her choosing, and published a book under the title "The Will to Power": 483 passages in 1901, 1,067 in 1906. The book was presented as Nietzsche's unfinished "masterpiece" and read as such for half a century. That Nietzsche wrote no such book, and had even abandoned a plan for a book under that title in 1888, could be philologically demonstrated only from the 1960s onward, when Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari published the notebooks chronologically and completely.

In the 1930s Elisabeth placed the archive at the service of National Socialism. Hitler visited the archive in 1934 and was photographed with Nietzsche's bust; he attended Elisabeth's funeral when she died in 1935. Nietzsche was proclaimed "the philosopher of the Third Reich."

Two separate lessons follow from this story, and they are independent of each other.

The first is philological: a quotation from "The Will to Power" is a quotation without a source. That book is Elisabeth's, not Nietzsche's. In serious Nietzsche scholarship today the compilation is cited only as evidence of the forgery.

The second is historical and more unsettling: Elisabeth's fraud did not turn Nietzsche into something he was not. Aristocratic hierarchy, hatred of slave morality, the thesis that the majority's slavery is the condition of culture — these, as we saw in the third section, are in the books Nietzsche himself published. The Nazis added nothing to him; they stripped him of his opposition to antisemitism and his hostility to Germany and took the rest. The rest was worth taking, because the rest was there. That is why the defense "the Nazis distorted Nietzsche" is inadequate.

The Marxist debate: Mehring, Lukács, Losurdo

The Marxist debate on Nietzsche is a hundred and thirty years old; summarizing three stops will suffice.

Franz Mehring (1890s): The theorist of German social democracy diagnosed Nietzsche early and set him in place as "the philosopher of big capital": his philosophy is that of a bourgeoisie afraid of the rise of the working class. But Mehring said something more: Nietzsche also exposes the liberal hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and can therefore be a way-station on the road to socialism for young intellectuals sick of liberalism — provided they do not stay there.

György Lukács (The Destruction of Reason, 1954): The most systematic critique. For Lukács, Nietzsche is the founder of the irrationalism of the imperialist age. His method is this: to sense capitalism's real contradictions, but to explain them outside reason, history, and class struggle — with concepts like myth, instinct, will to power — and thus to channel social discontent away from a revolutionary orientation toward the right. Lukács's basic claim: Nietzsche is a thinker who wrote his entire philosophy against socialism without ever reading Marx, because the problem that set the agenda of the age set his agenda too. The book has rightly been criticized for one-sidedness; it reduces Nietzsche's philosophical contributions almost wholly to their function. But the question it asks is the right one: historically, whose interests has this philosophy served?

Domenico Losurdo (Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico, 2002; English 2019): Losurdo reread Nietzsche's entire corpus — books, notes, letters — in the context of the political debates of the period and showed, in a study of roughly a thousand pages, that every one of Nietzsche's seemingly "apolitical" concepts is an answer to concrete political debates of his time — the Commune, social democracy, the women's movement, colonialism, the Jewish question. Losurdo's work is the strongest philological document we have against the postmodern reading that dehistoricizes Nietzsche; it is also more balanced than Lukács, because it acknowledges the real insights in Nietzsche's critique of modernity.

There are also readings in the other direction. Young Trotsky, in his 1900 essay "On the Philosophy of the Superman," written at twenty-one, analyzed Nietzsche's overman as an idealized reflection of bourgeois individualism, while also granting its critical force. Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, wrote that Nietzsche tore the mask from bourgeois morality with "ruthless" consistency and stood, with Sade, among the Enlightenment's "dark writers." Foucault carried the genealogical method into the analysis of power. These readings are not empty; but a criterion holds for all of them: the method taken from Nietzsche can be carried to the left; Nietzsche's answer cannot. Every left that tries to carry the answer ends, as experience shows, in individualism, a cult of the hero, or the pessimism that "the masses will never understand."

The epistemological question: perspectivism and reality

Beneath the idea of "affirming life" in the talk's title lies a theory of knowledge, and that theory is the most important divide between Nietzsche and us. This section is a little more abstract; but it must not be skipped, because its political consequences are direct.

Nietzsche's theory of knowledge is perspectivism: every piece of knowledge is produced from a point of view; there is no fact "in itself"; what we see as fact is the interpretation of a particular form of life, a particular will to power. In the 1873 text On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense he defines truth as "a mobile army of metaphors"; the famous formula in the notebooks is "there are no facts, only interpretations." The philosophical source of this position is largely Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism (1866); Nietzsche read it in 1866 and set Lange's neo-Kantian conclusion — that knowledge is a product of human organization, that the thing-in-itself cannot be known — into the ground of his own thought.

There is a strong core in this position. That knowledge is not a disinterested, neutral "view from nowhere"; that every knowledge claim is produced from a location; that ideology presents itself as "objective" — these are also basic premises of Marxist ideology critique. Lukács's concept of "standpoint" in History and Class Consciousness, Gramsci's analysis of hegemony, are kin to this core. The first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach also helps here: Marx says that the "active side" — the idea that knowledge is an act, a practice — was developed not by materialism but by idealism, yet that idealism did so "abstractly." Nietzsche's perspectivism is exactly that: he sees the active, situated, interested character of knowledge; but he ties that location not to material and social practice but to a biological-psychological will. He develops the active side abstractly.

The problem appears where this position folds back on itself. The proposition "there are no facts, only interpretations" is either itself an interpretation — then why should we follow it? — or a fact — then it refutes itself. This is not a logical word game but a real limit. And the political consequence is this: when a worker says their wage has been underpaid, the employer can say "that is your interpretation." Exploitation is not an interpretation but a measurable relation: so many hours of work, so much wage, so much surplus value. Labor time, wages, the rate of profit, worker deaths — these are magnitudes that do not change from one standpoint to another; what changes is the meaning and importance given to them.

What Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach called philosophy's "fundamental question" is decisive here: is there a reality independent of thought, and can it be known? Marxist materialism's answer is yes and yes — but that knowing is not once and for all complete; it takes place within historical practice, in ever more adequate forms. Nietzsche's answer, starting from the unknowability of the thing-in-itself, concludes that knowledge is an act of power. The divide between these two positions is not merely a topic for a philosophy seminar; every theory of knowledge that denies the measurability of reality works, in practice, against those who lack the power to measure reality. Those who have power already impose their own interpretation; the only foothold for those without power is being able to appeal to the measurable fact. That is the political asymmetry of perspectivism.

Hence the formula: Nietzsche's genealogy is a valuable tool for ideology critique; his perspectivism cannot be adopted as a theory of knowledge. Historical materialism accepts that knowledge is situated, but adds that positions are not equal: the position of the class that carries out production is a privileged position for seeing the social whole — not because it is more "neutral," but because it carries the contradiction of the whole in its own body.

Why is the enemy a teacher in a dialectical universe?

Now we come to the essay's real question.

First, the simplest but undiminished definition of dialectics. In the tradition from Hegel's Science of Logic to Engels's Anti-Dühring, dialectics can be summarized in three propositions: nothing is static, everything is a process; every process moves by the contradiction within it; every new situation is born not by destroying the old but by superseding it and preserving something of it. Hegel calls this last operation Aufhebung — there is no single English equivalent; it means both to cancel, to preserve, and to raise to a higher level. Marx says he extracted Hegel's method from its idealist shell and set it on a material base: contradiction is not among concepts but in the relations of production and among classes.

Here a striking fact appears: Nietzsche was an enemy of dialectics. In the "Problem of Socrates" section of Twilight of the Idols he charges Socrates with introducing dialectics into Greek culture: dialectics is the tool not of the noble but of the rabble; those with no other weapon resort to it; one chooses dialectics only when no other recourse remains; "with dialectics the rabble comes out on top."

This sentence must be read not as an insult but as a diagnosis. Nietzsche is right: dialectics is the tool of those who have no property, army, or tradition in their hands. Because dialectics asks the person who says "this is how it is" — "why is it so, how did it become so, how else could it be?" Those who own property need not ask that question; those who must ask it are those who have no place in the existing order. Nietzsche saw this and chose his side openly. We see the same fact and choose the other side.

So why is Nietzsche valuable for us in a dialectical universe? We offer three reasons.

1. The cognitive value of negation

In dialectics the content of a position comes to light in its negation. Liberal thought defends capitalism's moral foundation — freedom, equality, right, contract — and either cannot see or will not say what lies beneath that foundation. Nietzsche negates the same foundation from the right: equality, he says, is the hatred of the weak; freedom is the comfort of the herd; right is the shackle the weak strike against the strong. Marx negates the same foundation from the left: equality is the legal form of two parties equal in the market but unequal in production; freedom is the "freedom" to sell one's labor-power; right is property right determining all other rights.

The two negations undermine the same building; but what is to be built on the ruins is diametrically opposed. Nietzsche wants to rebuild the master–slave relation openly and consciously; we want to abolish it so that it can never be rebuilt. That is the first reason to read Nietzsche: learning that bourgeois morality is hollow from a thinker who has no stake in protecting it is easier than learning it from a thinker who wants to protect it. Adorno and Horkheimer's formula of the "dark writers" says this.

2. Knowing the other side's language

Nietzsche's heirs today live less in university corridors than in the discourse of digital monopoly capital. A techno-aristocratic discourse that codes the "founder" as overman, the employee as "last man," public regulation as "herd morality," and the demand for equality as ressentiment appeals openly to Nietzsche on Silicon Valley's right wing. Artificial-intelligence capital's cult of the "great man," the scorn for "those who slow things down," the casting of democratic oversight as "inefficiency" — these are capital speaking in the words of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old philosophical tradition.

Those who do not recognize this language take the person opposite them for mere arrogance. In fact that person is the spokesperson of a tradition that has defined the eight-hour day, the union, equal pay, and the oversight of algorithmic management as "the hatred of the weak" and sincerely believes it. Knowing where that belief comes from — from Paris in 1871, from Germany under the Anti-Socialist Law — changes the ground of the argument.

3. Seeing our own weakness

This is the hardest reason. Let us turn Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment for a moment onto our own tradition.

Hatred can be energy for a class movement; it cannot be a program. The real danger in what Nietzsche called "slave morality" is that the oppressed count their own oppression as virtue and stay there: turning victimhood into identity, treating suffering as the sole source of a claim to right, carrying powerlessness as moral superiority.

That was not the role Marx assigned the working class. Marx's worker is the subject of history not because they suffer but because they actually carry out the whole of social production; their demand is not mercy but power. In that sense Marxism is structurally exempt from Nietzsche's critique of "slave morality." But not every movement that thinks itself Marxist is exempt. A left that writes the poetry of its own oppression, complains instead of organizing, turns defeat into identity, is in the one place where Nietzsche is right. The bitterest thing Nietzsche teaches us is this: the victim position is not a political program; the task of the oppressed is not to prove their pain but to organize their power.

Comparative table: what Nietzsche saw, what we see

Nietzsche's claim	Historical-materialist assessment
"God is dead": Europe has lost the foundation of its values yet continues to use them.	The diagnosis is correct. But what collapsed is not God but feudal relations of production; bourgeois values — property, contract, competition — have long taken their place. Nihilism is not a crisis of belief but the subjective appearance of commodity relations reducing all qualitative values to quantity.
Every value has a genealogy; every value is the product of an interest.	Correct, and shared as method. The difference is the axis on which interest is sought: Nietzsche on the strong–weak axis, we on the producing–appropriating axis.
Equality is a slave morality born of the hatred of the weak.	Empirically indefensible. The demand for equality is the claim of those who produce in common to own the products in common as well; its source is not a feeling but the social character of labor.
The essence of being is will to power: to grow, expand, dominate.	This is the essence not of being but of capital. Nietzsche carried the inner compulsion of capitalist accumulation into ontology.
The "last man" — the comfort-loving, risk-avoiding mass — is a symptom of degeneration.	The numbness of consumer society is real; but what Nietzsche concretely targets is the worker's demand for eight hours, insurance, and organization. What is scorned is not comfort but right.
History does not progress; everything repeats in eternal return.	History does not progress linearly, but it accumulates: every class struggle hands on the productive forces and social consciousness to the next. A won right can be taken back; but the argument never starts again from zero. Not a cycle but a spiral.
Dialectics is the weapon of the rabble.	Yes. The diagnosis is correct; the choice of side differs.
Slavery is necessary for culture; the minority's leisure is paid for by the majority's drudgery.	In the history of class societies this is an observation. Nietzsche makes it a law; we say that at a certain level of development of the productive forces it can be abolished. In the age of artificial intelligence this debate is more concrete than ever.
"There are no facts, only interpretations."	That knowledge is situated is true; that positions are equal is false. Measurable reality — labor time, wages, surplus value — does not change from one interpretation to another; what changes is the meaning given to it.
Create your own values; do not take ready-made morality.	Meaningful as an individual call. But value is not created alone; it is produced socially. In a society where the principle "create your own values" rules, those who in fact have the power to determine them create value.

If we reduce the table to one sentence: Nietzsche is the honest defender of capitalism. His honesty is instructive; his defense is the enemy.

Three common mistakes

First: adopting perspectivism as a theory of knowledge. We gave the reasons in the sixth section: this position collapses when it folds back on itself and politically works against those who lack the power to measure reality. The distinction between using genealogy as a tool of critique and adopting perspectivism as a theory of truth is the most important distinction to preserve.

Second: mistaking "leaving the herd" for emancipation. What Nietzsche calls the "herd," in its historical context, is the organized worker; what he calls the "individual" is the employee with no bargaining power alone. Capitalism already individualizes; it does not need Nietzsche for that. For the laborer, power lies not in separating but in uniting. Nietzsche's figure of the "lonely creator" is only half true even for an artist; for a worker it is wholly false.

Third: dismissing Nietzsche as either "actually left" or "proto-fascist." Both belittle the thinker. Nietzsche is the most intelligent, most honest, and most consistent voice of a bourgeois culture shaken in 1871. Claiming him for ourselves and reducing him to a caricature are the same error: failing to measure the enemy's strength correctly.

Concrete suggestions

None of these will change the order. But in every encounter with Nietzsche — whether in your own thinking or in the person opposite you — they will leave you better equipped.

1. Read him in the right order and from his own pen. Do not start with Zarathustra; it is the hardest and most misunderstood book. Recommended order: the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (short, clear, hard); then Twilight of the Idols; then section 125 of The Gay Science and the ninth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil ("What Is Noble?"). Zarathustra last. In English, the Cambridge and Stanford University Press translations are a reliable start; in Turkish, the Say and İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları translations remain a sound beginning.

2. Set Marx beside him. The week you read the first essay of the Genealogy, read the "ruling ideas of the ruling class" section of The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. You will see directly how two answers to the same question — whose interests does this value serve? — diverge.

3. Do not quote "The Will to Power"; gently correct those who do. That compilation is Elisabeth's book. A quotation whose source is "The Will to Power" has no source. The Colli–Montinari edition (and its digital version, Nietzsche Source) is the standard.

4. Ask three questions in a reading circle. For every Nietzsche text: (a) Whom, concretely, does what he calls "the weak" or "the herd" in this paragraph correspond to in 1880s Germany? (b) If we made the same critique of values from the left, what would change? (c) Who owns this idea today — which company, which politician, which discourse? These three questions fill an evening's discussion.

5. Diagnose the other side's Nietzsche. "Founder spirit," "high-performing individuals," "intolerance of mediocrity," "politics of envy" — when you hear these words, name the philosophy behind them. Those who use this language usually do not know where it comes from; knowing changes the ground of the argument.

6. Read Lukács and Losurdo. The Nietzsche chapter of The Destruction of Reason is available in Turkish. Losurdo's book is large; but even the introduction and first chapter alone put the "apolitical" Nietzsche in doubt. For a reading group the two are a semester's work.

7. Not hatred, organization. Prove Nietzsche wrong in the one place he is right. Do not turn oppression into identity; present pain not as proof but power as organization. Bringing three people together at a workplace is more Marxist than ten pages of complaint — and it is the only real way to refute the charge of "slave morality."

Conclusion

When workers took power in Paris in 1871, a young professor in Basel wrote that he was living the worst day of his life. Over the next seventeen years he built — not in so many words, but consistently — a philosophy so that the worker would not march toward power again: equality is slave morality, leave the herd, the strong are right, nothing progresses. His books went unread; he lost his mind; his sister falsified his legacy; the falsified legacy became an empire's official philosophy; then the falsification was philologically proven — yet the real legacy was not as different from it as is often supposed.

Today that philosophy lives not as official ideology but as the story digital monopoly capital tells itself: "founder," "visionary," "winner." Opposite it stands the same thing again: the laborer who wants eight hours, wants a union, wants to oversee the algorithm's decision, and will not be content with a "small existence."

We read Nietzsche because we want to know the most intelligent form of the thought across from us. We read him because it is he, not the liberals, who tells us that bourgeois morality is hollow. We read him because "with dialectics the rabble comes out on top" is one of the truest sentences ever to leave a reactionary's pen. And we read him because in a dialectical universe nothing is thrown away: what the enemy got right is preserved and superseded; the enemy's answer is filed in history's archive.

As a contribution to the MARFET discussion, let us leave this. Affirming life — yes. But the life to be affirmed must be everyone's: the life of those who can work eight hours and live sixteen, who can consume the product of their own labor themselves, whose leisure is won not by another's drudgery but by common production. Nietzsche's "yes" was for a minority; ours gains meaning when it is for everyone. The most consistent form of affirming life is to organize so that it becomes livable for everyone.

When someone one day tells you to "leave the herd," the question to ask is clear: whom do you call the herd, whom the shepherd — and in whose name are you speaking?

In comradeship, Knowledge Commons