Consider how an early Nietzsche polemicizes in favour of a “new slavery” and the virtues of the ancients, whereas for Marx there is no question that the greatest hero of antiquity is the leader of slave revolts: “Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history.” [51]

A young Marx, musing on his vision of utopia in The German Ideology, waxes poetic about the possibility of a society freed from the division of labor itself:

In communist society, nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. [52]

Nietzsche, meanwhile, in Human, All Too Human, describes a different kind of utopia, a grim society organized around the harsh exigencies of breeding genius in the midst of scarcity:

My Utopia. — In a better arranged society the heavy work and trouble of life will be assigned to those who suffer least through it, to the most obtuse, therefore; and so step by step up to those who are most sensitive to the highest and sublimest kinds of suffering, and who therefore still suffer notwithstanding the greatest alleviations of life. [53]

Nietzsche was no fool. It would be a mistake to dismiss these aphorisms as the antisocial madness of a lone misanthrope; to recall Waite, Nietzsche’s project is “the only position outside communism.” Nietzsche is articulating widespread skepticism about the ability of socialism to deliver mass happiness, and his critique resonates powerfully with anyone who feels their individuality imperiled by a collective. Stalin (and his cohort) claimed Marx, while Hitler (and his cohort) claimed Nietzsche… and the majority of the Western world went on to claim Nietzsche too. Just take a trip to your local bookstore — everything Nietzsche ever wrote is now a classic that never goes out of print, finding its way into teenagers’ backpacks and academic seminars alike.

Accusing Nietzsche of being the ur-fascist, let alone a proto-fascist, has predictable consequences: his countless fans swarm to explain that he never actually endorsed the Nazi party because he was already dead, that any linkages to the Nazi project are the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his German-nationalist sister, that he denounced German ethnonationalists and mocked antisemites, that his philosophy was in fact aesthetic and spiritual and anti-systematic and impossible to pin down, and that he grew out of any misguided ideas he may have held in his youth.

Domenico Losurdo examines each of these defenses in detail, including the conspiracy theory, in his critical biography of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes across as a powerful and complex thinker, who indeed went through multiple phases and espoused contradictory beliefs, but Losurdo shows that one thing remains constant: Nietzsche never stopped experimenting to find the best way to oppose the egalitarian leveling tendencies of modernity that he despised. Funnily enough, after exposing the extent to which Nietzsche corresponded with out-and-out antisemites in his youth, Losurdo cedes some ground to Nietzsche’s apologists:

Cosima’s advice to be careful about what he said may have had a positive effect: far from remaining confined to the verbal level, the self-censorship led to a kind of sublimation and transcendence of immediacy, in the sense that the merciless analysis of modernity became to a certain extent autonomous of the Judeophobic themes that accompanied it. [54]

In other words, when his antisemitic interlocutors advised Nietzsche to mask racism in his writing, they inadvertently spurred him to find justifications for slavery and elitism that weren’t rooted in the all-too-modern and universalist (and thus unstable, empirically refutable) arguments of “race science.” After all, “race science” is, both historically and logically, a liberal concept. If racial differences turn out not to be inherent, there goes the whole (liberal) argument for white supremacy. Liberal racism still feels the need to justify itself in scientific, i.e. universalist terms. As Nietzsche correctly observed, this is already a capitulation to socialism, which wins more the more people scientifically reason together. To truly condemn socialism, Nietzsche painted the issue of class domination as one of will, aesthetics, “freedom,” and spirit.

from https://redsails.org/really-existing-fascism/