“It was Marx, and not History, that was determined to produce a social revolution, and his investigation of history was an attempt to find out the method by which it could be done. When that simple truth–as obvious to a child as it is inaccessible to a Marxist–has once been acknowledged, the whole discussion loses its mystifying character at once.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Theory of History
“The German state patronized modern capitalism, perverting it to the support of feudal political institutions; and the German philosophers patronized modern science, perverting it to the support of animistic superstition.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Theory of History
Institutions and Superstitions Read More »
“If he (Karl Marx) ever performed a generous act, it is not to be found in the record. He was a totally undisciplined, vain, slovenly, and egotistical spoiled child. He was ready at the drop of a hat with spiteful hate. He could be devious, disloyal, snobbish, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro. He was by habit a sponge, an intriguer, a tyrannical bigot who would rather wreck his party than see it succeed under another leader.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Marx and Engels were defending against scientific materialism–against that attitude which constitutes at least the simple common-sense starting point of science–a materialistic religion.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism
Materialistic Religion Read More »
“Marxism was a step from utopian socialism to a socialist religion–a scheme for convincing the believer that the universe itself is producing a better society, and that he has only to fall in properly with the general movement of this universe.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism
Socialist Religion Read More »
“The chief enemy of the effort to make society more free and equal through any kind of organization is bureaucratism.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 6, Revolution as a Scientific Enterprise, Merits of the Scientific Attitude
“The separation of church and state is one of the main measures of protection against tyranny. But the Marxian religion makes this separation impossible, for its creed is politics; its church is the state. There is no hope within its dogmas of any evolution toward the free society it promises.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Do not forget that Stalin was a socialist. Mussolini was a socialist. Hundreds of thousands of the followers of Hitler were socialists or communists, converted overnight by the lure of ‘decisive political action’, and by a small redefinition – a small sacrifice of what is ‘Romantic’ – in the principle of human freedom.”
~Max Eastman
New International, Vol.4 No.8, August 1938
Who Was Socialist? Read More »
Science is: “patience in investigation and clarity in calculation; singleness of purpose; the power to suspend judgement, to remain, if need be, for a lifetime in doubt; the gift of abstraction, of thinking about things definitely but without too much intrusion of their sensuous qualities; the skill to hold in suspense one’s own tastes and passions, a skill which demands discipline of the most rigorous kind. Without these traits, science as a thing distinct from common sense, from magic, pseudo-science, charlatanism, poetry, religion, religious philosophy, and tendentious belief in general, could hardly have come into being.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“I have learned from Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy how much infantile and primitive savage yearning for dependence, for external authority, for the sovereign-father, there is in the average human heart.”
~Max Eastman
Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism
Yearning for Dependence Read More »
