Member Reviews

To be fair, I hate books written about philosophers, but Daniel Tutt overcame my distaste. The first two thirds of "How to Read Like a Parasite" is well written and informative but the rest is simply dreadful. Mr. Tutt footnotes everything about Frederick Nietzsche but he leaves all of his groundless claims regarding capitalism without any citations to authority. And this fatal flaw greatly impairs his book.
For example, he repeatedly insists that capitalism creates inequality, but the fact is that inequality in the US has been converging (and not diverging as Tutt errantly asserts) for at least the last 100 years, and inequality has also been converging in those third world nations that have abandoned socialism and adopted market driven economies for more than 50 years.
Mr. Tutt also mistakenly believes that capitalists "oppress" labor, but wage rates are set by the labor market and not by the owners of capital. Thus, the reason for the recent suppression of wages has been the creation of one billion new workers in Red China after the death of Mao in 1976. And the shift of these peasants from their rural villages to the factories in China's growing cities has lifted these one billion souls out of abject poverty.
Indeed, according to the Bank of England from 1765 (with the onset of capitalism in Northcentral England) until the year 2000 the overall wellbeing of everyone in the West increased by 5,000%! And since the recent turn of the century this positive trend has only accelerated. Capitalism is making thing ever better for everyone.
Finally, Tutt dismisses envy (which is proscribed by the 10th Commandment) for the rise of socialism and/or communism but Helmut Schnoeck book "Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior" easily debunks much (most?) of Mr. Tutt's belief structure. Indeed, skip Tutt's book and read Schnoeck's instead.

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The writings of Nietzsche aren’t for everyone, yet at some time nearly everyone is drawn to some phrase or other by him, the most popular being: What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger. Only the rare reader completes the philosopher’s following qualifier: The philosophy of a warrior. When the critic and translator, Walter Kaufman read Nietzsche, Daniel Tutt describes Kaufmann’s excision of Nietzsche’s political polemics as ‘hermeneutics of innocence’, a phrase taken from Domenico Losurdo’s thousand page Intellectual Biography of Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, rendering Kaufmann’s defense of Nietzsche apolitical through a method of apologetics.

Tutt is not the first critic to burrow deep into the body of Nietzsche’s political philosophy, but unlike the majority of critics who have feasted on Nietzsche, he acknowledges the fascist, racist, parts of which there is much literature and approaches Nietzsche’s political work from a Marxist perspective for the purpose of finding what is useful for readers of Left who contend with Nietzsche’s writings.

Tutt’s historical-materialist reading grounds Nietzsche’s writings within the politics of Germany and France of the times Nietzsche lived. From there he examines critical works of other Nietzsche scholars, activists, and contemporary thinkers, including Jack London, novelist, Huey Newton, co-founder, with Bobby Seale, of the Black Panther Party, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida, who have, in some part, been influenced by the writings of Nietzsche. Tutt writes: ’Nietzsche’s politics do not confirm to any one conventional political conventional political position in our political constellation, his thought rather latches onto existing political and ideological tendencies and shapes them in distinct ways ... .’

The parasitic metaphor first entered Marxist vocabulary in an essay on Nietzsche by Leon Trotsky, entitled On the Philosophy of the Superman, written in 1900: “Nietzsche became the ideologue of a group living like a bird of prey at the expense of society, but under conditions more fortunate than those of the miserable lumpenproletariat: they are a parasitenproletariat of a higher caliber. The composition of this group in contemporary society is quite heterogeneous and fluid even given the extreme complexity and diversity of relationships within the bourgeois regime.”

I suspect only readers familiar with Marxist theory will find this text easy going, whether or not they will find Tutt’s argument convincing, I can’t say. For the curious readers who followed Kaufman, much depends on how deeply one wants to burrow into the writings of Nietzsche, without flinching, fully aware of the distasteful parts. After beginning this book, if you continue, be assured Tutt does burrow his way out to a conclusion worthy of thought, bringing with him several writers worth reading.

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