How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle Quotes

“The forces which dominate us, despite their immense power, are never concrete, visible, tangible — we live under the shadow of their abstract domination. Our activity is for the most part instrumental, but the ends which we are made into instruments for never seem to appear, as if we go through our entire lives chasing after a ghost — some mirage of happiness, fulfillment, shadow of something that would, for once, be valuable in itself. Modernity feels like a permanent transition, but all it ever transitions into is another cycle of its own self-perpetuation.”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“At every step, we must demand not only more than they are willing to concede us, but more than they are capable of conceding us, such that the limitations of the present society are exposed and pushed towards their breaking point. After all, at the moment, it is the ruling class which demands of us more than we can give - what is "reasonable" to it is the sacrifice of thousands upon thousands to a global pandemic and impending climate catastrophe. In such a case, being unreasonably ambitious is the bare minimum. One may doubt whether a global revolutionary movement is still possible, but one cannot doubt that it is necessary.”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“A document of legitimation cannot be transformative -- it must be as formal and static as the regime it is legitimating. Thus, many branches of radical thought are kept from growing, others are cut off, some bent and broken, and still others isolated. Through the formalizing processes of the German Social Democratic Party, the Second International, and finally the Soviet Union, Marx was transformed from a source of infinite self-transformation into a monument -- static in form and content. The turning of a thinker into a monument is equivalent to their death -- as it is in death that one's potentiality is cut off and it is finally said what one "was" -- reduced to bones, to the rigid and the inanimate. The thinker becomes a statue, and statues, as Lenin once reportedly said, are "for pigeons to shit on." If the statue is successfully established, its weight grows in accordance with its influence; and then, one must heed Zarathustra's warning to "be careful lest a statue fall and kill you!”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“All of these statist manifestations of Marx had rivals who tried to preserve Marx's revolutionary potential, to wield him as a hammer against these regimes, but, over time, they were marginalized and conquered, and sometimes, to add insult to injury, portrayed as Marx's enemies, both by the open anti-Marxists and those who used Marx to defend existing capitalist regimes. This same vulgarization was committed against Nietzsche by those Nazis who proclaimed the arrival of the Ubermensch in the Third Reich, even when this Ubermensch was characterized by two of Nietzsche's most hated things -- a German and an anti-Semite.”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“Socialism and life-affirmation are not fantasies or ideals that we dream up or pluck from the sky to then impose onto the world. Rather, they are real immanent historical possibilities, made possible, and even necessary, by already-existing conditions. The tendencies which move towards socialism and life-affirmation already exist, just as the tendency towards the blooming of a flower already existing in its seed, and there is not a day on Earth that individuals do not struggle to extend them. At the same time, there is nothing inevitable about such development, as countertendencies always threaten to crush the seed before it grows. All we need is to kindle the tendencies of affirmation, to further them, and unleash their unfolding until they realize their most joyful potential. I end on this note to emphasize that, strictly speaking, this work of philosophy does not end on the book's final pages. If it ends at all, it will end beyond all books, where the philosophical problems brought up here are tackled at their source: the social relations that produce and maintain them.”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

“The eternal recurrence steps in at this point and manifests itself as a question: if life, in all of its details, "every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great" must return to you, what kind of life would you prefer to return to? Would you prefer to spend your present in resignation, so that each time it returns you would have to live in wretched complacency once again, made worse by how unsatisfactory it is, with the thought that you could have changed things for the better gnawing at you? Or would you prefer to live out your present in a tragic battle, struggling no matter how dim the light of hope is, and know that, even if you failed in the end, you are certain that you did all you could?”
― Jonas Čeika, How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century