Max Forrester Eastman

(January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969)

Max Forrester Eastman was an influential American socialist in early 20th-century that had a change of heart after witnessing, first hand, the failure of the grand experiment. He edited The Masses and The Liberator magazines, championed women’s rights, and initially cheered on the Bolshevik Revolution, believing socialism would unlock greater freedom for everyone.

He visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s and saw reality up close: brutal power struggles between Trotsky and Stalin, totalitarianism, friends targeted and assassinated, the crushing of the very liberties he cared about most. The failure of socialism to deliver on its promises hit him particularly hard. He returned to America convinced that Marxism is fundamentally flawed and centralized planning could not coexist with human flourishing.

Max changed his tune, shaped by the hardships of the Great Depression and the ideas of economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. He fully embraced free-market capitalism as the only system that supports individual liberty, genuine progress, and human dignity.

He became a vocal anti-communist, writing regularly for Reader’s Digest and The Freeman. Max summed up his journey in his seminal book Reflections on the Failure of Socialism where many of the quotes on this site can be found.

~ Lucio Saverio Eastman