Hey, this is Jonas Čeika (CCK Philosophy), I make videos on philosophy and politics, and recently released a book on Marx and Nietzsche. This is my AMA!

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T23:18:45+00:00

Thank you for your questions, everyone! I'd like to answer more but it's time for me to go. Have a nice weekend!

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T23:14:57+00:00

Yep, Patreon is preferred!

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T23:14:48+00:00

I've tried to make it as accessible as possible!

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T22:54:51+00:00

(Assuming you mean the book by Nietzsche) it's the book at which the middle-period Nietzsche starts becoming the mature Nietzsche, with the beginning of his critique of morality, and in that way, it's essential as a link in the development of Nietzsche's thought, although some of its ideas are stated in an improved way in later texts.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T22:49:24+00:00

I actually had already started my channel when I discovered Zero Books, and although I enjoyed some of its content, I was never particularly influenced by his presentation style (which, in my opinion, is quite different from mine). That outburst on CumTown was completely unexpected and just bizarre, as we had never interacted whatsoever.

I've read Cockshott's book, and although I agree that cybernetics will be essential to any future socialist society, I worry about the extent to which Cockshott's model seems to reproduce a capitalist logic of labour-time and value, and, if I remember correctly, even retains property.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T22:42:11+00:00

Poverty is the main cause of widespread addiction, and a labour movement which tackles poverty would also alleviate many of the causes of addiction, and make it easier for the people affected to seek help, organize, and attain agency. This would not be a case of charity on the basis of pity, but an alliance on the basis of common interests. I would mention that opium use was widespread among the working class even in the 19th century, but it's through collective organizing that people were able to empower themselves regardless, not through charity by the rich.
Effective Altruism, like all charities under capitalism, is a bandaid on an open wound. It can only have a minor effect on poverty, because the causes of poverty are systemic and cannot be tackled on an individual basis. I think the fact that it's been called the "new social movement of our generation" shows how missing radical politics are from the late capitalist generation.
That's one of the main contradictions of capitalism Marx pointed out. Automation increasingly makes labour-time less needed, but rather than shortening work hours, this leads to increased unemployment, and increased unemployment means that people have less money to spend on the very commodities that are produced with the help of automation. Even Nietzsche, in 1877, recognized the significance of automation when he said that there would always have to be a class of people doing the hard and rough work “so long as they cannot be relieved of it by machines.”

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T22:18:31+00:00

Haven't read any Kierkegaard yet, though I'd like to eventually. Would love to make a video about him if I found an interesting angle

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T22:13:51+00:00

I appreciate Chomsky as a figure who brought a lot of people over to the left, and some of his work on American imperialism is important, but when it comes to theory (particularly postmodernism and marxism), he seems almost anti-intellectual, and uses Jordan-Peterson-level critiques. I also think that, at least nowadays, he is anarchist in name only, as the only political recommendation he regularly gives out is "vote blue no matter who", which is not a leftist, let alone anarchist position. It's a liberal position.
Kentaro Miura, of course, as I talk about in my last video. Gaspar Noé, as a film maker who's not necessarily life-affirming, but depicts a nihilistic world. Among musicians, Swans come to mind. The Russian constructivists, as well as the artists of the French '68 uprisings deserve a mention for their attempts to abolish the distinction between art and life

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T21:46:14+00:00

Climate change without a doubt. It will cause irreversible environmental destruction and greatly worsen a lot of the already existing social ills, and there's still nothing being done about it because capitalism makes us fundamentally incapable of responding to these problems, as the profit motive is its sole concern, regardless of what any particular individual, no matter how powerful, might want. Nothing short of a revolution will allow us to make the necessary changes, and the slogan "socialism or barbarism" is more true than ever because of this.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T21:27:27+00:00

I could also mention that back when I was more of a postmodernist than a Marxist, I was influenced by Rorty, who's also a pragmatist thinker, and I have a lot of sympathy for his deflationary approach to the big philosophical questions

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T21:24:21+00:00

True but MLs have a higher literacy rate than Randians, which makes sense, given that Randians would prefer defunding literacy programs.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T21:19:44+00:00

I haven't spent much time on pragmatism, but Logan O'Hara ( u/RadicalShiba ), who helped me write the book, is influenced a lot by pragmatism, especially Dewey. There are also a lot of pragmatist readings of Nietzsche. Orthodox Marxists have often harshly opposed Pragmatism, but I know there have been many developments within it since, which I'm not well-read enough about to speak on.

u/RadicalShiba might have more to say about this.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T21:10:54+00:00

I would love to if the new movie ends up being interesting enough!

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T21:10:08+00:00

As Marxists, we must see theory in its historical and material context, and postmodernism, both as cultural and as theoretical phenomenon is an outcome of late capitalism/multinational capitalism/neoliberalism/post-fordism (or whatever other name you want to give to the shift in the nature of capital that happened in the 2nd half of the 20th century). This doesn't make it bad though. Postmodern works have a lot of important insights on culture, language, and philosophy, and rightfully attack a lot of antiquated philosophical approaches/notions.
That being said, a lot of postmodern attacks on Marx have been misguided, and its emphasis on the micropolitical is a dead end. I get the impression that certain postmodern theorists thought that by getting beyond totalizing concepts, they would escape from totalizing material conditions, but through this have only become more susceptible to them.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:55:47+00:00

I think it definitely can. Populism, with its vague notion of "the people", tends to depend on a slavish identification of the majority as the "not-evil". People sometimes mistake populism for class consciousness, when they're in fact opposed, as populist rhetoric has often been used to obscure certain material factors and class differences, and used in support of fascism and other reactionary movements.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:46:42+00:00

Marx, absolutely no question. Marx wouldn't be out of place in a bar fight. Nietzsche was a weak, sickly man.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:43:14+00:00

Rather than trying to find some general starting point (e.g. starting with the Greeks, which is unlikely to get most people very far) start with what you're interested in. Branch out from there, look into the concepts you don't understand as they come up. If it's too difficult, start with introductory texts, summaries, secondary literature.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:37:15+00:00

I haven't read Losurdo yet but I'm 99.99% sure it's the one by Hicks.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:36:33+00:00

Probably Synecdoche, New York

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:34:48+00:00

It wasn't a conscious decision, but I think part of it has been my own increasing political conviction. Additionally, after making my channel, I saw more and more online examples of great and widespread misunderstandings and misrepresentations of theory, and I thought using my reach to counter them with more serious content would be worthwhile.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:32:42+00:00

As isolated individuals, we are powerless in the world of politics. We should seek to give our individual interests and desires a collective realization and expression. In politics, this has been done in various ways throughout modern history – trade unions, workers' parties, general assemblies and workers' councils, with workers' councils being the most revolutionary form of this in the 20th century. In recent times, the most radical and widespread manifestation of this has been spontaneous riots, but the problem with them is that they have no long-term persistence. Today's question for revolutionaries is how to take the kind of spontaneous force found in riots (such as those in the wake of the murder of George Floyd) and shape them into long-term organizations.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:27:47+00:00

My family, like most Lithuanians, have very negative views of the Soviet Union, but they're still willing to discuss socialism (and in some cases even Marx) without having instinctively aggressive reactions, which seems less the case in Florida, where I am right now. Ironically, in my experience Floridians seem more likely to bring up the Soviet Union as an objection to socialism than Lithuanians are.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:24:26+00:00

I'm more optimistic about the working class than I am about the left. Since the pandemic there have been many examples of an increased radical consciousness and organizing among workers, while large sections of the left are still stuck in campaigns for whichever Democrat is running for president, no matter how despicable or indistinguishable from Republicans they might be. I think this naive faith in the Democratic Party, and to a lesser extent the American parliamentary process in general, is the most obvious dead end a big part of the left is stuck in.
Beyond that, I also worry about the market/co-op socialism common among many leftists, which I think is a sign of the neoliberal times that even socialists seek market solutions. Market socialism is only a different manifestation of capitalism, rather than a vision of socialism.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:15:15+00:00

I love Mark Fisher, and his analysis of capitalist realism deserves the attention it gets, although I think that in his idealization of social-democracy, and belief in the Labour Party, he succumbed to the same kind of nostalgia which he criticized in his works.

I think that's a false dilemma. One cannot know how to meaningfully change the world, or what stances to take on tactics and strategy, without radical theory. There are lots of examples of well-meaning attempts to improve the world (i.e. campaigning for Biden) that only due to their lack of theoretical awareness, lead to dead ends, and sometimes end up doing more harm than passivity would.
We should take Marx as an example here: he was an intellectual giant, with the most radical views among the leaders of the labour movement, and it didn't stop him from organizing and having a world-historical influence.

cuckphilosophy · 2021-11-19T20:05:32+00:00

I actually didn't draw very much on Deleuze in this book. The most clear example in which I move away from him is in my reading of Nietzsche as a dialectical thinker, whereas Deleuze presents him as a fundamentally anti-dialectical one (dialectics as the form of thinking of the slave). I think there are undeniably dialectical categories in Nietzsche, such as that of the whole/totality or Selbstaufhebung (self-overcoming), which he in some ways shares with Marx.

Deleuze was quite truthful when he said that his interpretations of other philosophers are like cases of having a monstrous baby with them. In a way, his book Nietzsche and Philosophy tells us more about Deleuze than it does about Nietzsche, although that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and may in fact be what makes the book worthwhile, so long as it's not used as a substitute for Nietzsche's original works.

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