How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century

Jonas Ceika

Nov 2021 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Jonas Ceika

About this audiobook

Modernity has been defined by humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.

In this timely and explosive book, philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Ceika (aka Cuck Philosophy) re-invigorates socialism for the 21st century. Leaving behind its past associations with bureaucracy and state tyranny, and it's lifeless and drab theoretical accounts, Ceika instead uses the works of Marx and Nietzsche to reconnect socialism with its human element, presenting it as something not only affecting, but created by living, breathing, suffering human individuals.

At a time when ecological collapse is hurtling towards us, and capitalism offers no solution except more growth and exploitation, How to Philosophise with a Hammer and Sickle shows us the way forward to a socialism grounded in human experience and accessible to all.

Ratings and reviews

Experience from a philosophy/theory "causal": Lots of quotations from the two writers, used to analyze each other's works. Probably useful in helping rehabilitate the image of one to the others fans. Felt scattershot, intended to cover all that the author felt worth saying about the subject until they ran out of material, with asides about contemporary matters (including origins of misconceptions) and recent events, but didn't come across as rambling - I found the tangents more interesting than the subject they were getting away from. The most obvious criticism (which is noted in the text itself) is that, like any work with scattered quotations of long dead writers from across their work, is that its impossible for unacquainted to tell if the author is using the long dead as his marionettes in the guise of analysis (and I suspect many leninists/stalinists would roll their eyes at Ceikas potshots, as they do with many things). Even if true, this does not make this book bad - I found the views are interesting on their own.

Honestly, this book makes me sad. I long for the return to dialectical materialism but this isn’t it chief. We live in an new era of monopoly capitalism, I say new, yet this era has been around since the dawn of WW1. Since then, we have had so many revolutions across the planet. What worked? What didn’t work. Instead this book seeks to remove the science of historical materialism. Returning us to the era of pure thought! For Christ sake, the U.S literally has bankrolled more than two dozen fascist dictatorships in the 20th century and the author’s main concerns is “state tyranny”. Such ahistorical rubbish, I can’t believe there are Marxists in this world that don’t understand that the state is a product of class antagonisms. How are you gonna bring up Engels, but not understand him when he says that private property cannot be abolished immediately. Heaven forbid that the state actually has to wither away. 8 hours. 8 long hours of philosophy of the problems of capitalism. May I have 8 hours of the problems of imperialism instead. You know the highest stage of capitalism. You’re better off reading Zak Cope’s “Divided World Divided Class”, “Settlers” by J. Sakai, and Micheal Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds” Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; however, the point is to change it.

Tankies mad

About the author

Jonas Čeika is a writer based in Norway. He studied philosophy at NTNU and is the creator of the Cuck Philosophy YouTube channel, which has over 170,000 subscribers and focuses on politics, philosophy and critical theory.