“The crime of Socrates was deeper than disobedience to the laws of the state. It was disobedience to the laws of animistic thinking.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 4, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism
The Crime of Socrates Read More »
“Not only is there no such thing as dialectic thinking, but there is no such superintellectual knowledge of the exact nature of the universe as that to which an alleged dialectic thinking pretends to give access.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?
Dialectic Thinking? Read More »
“We Socialists were, I think, profoundly wrong to ignore the depth and generality of the drive toward property, and therefore exchange of property, in man.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Marx’s dialectic philosophy, with all its wish to be scientific, and to even out-science the scientists, is a survival of the intellectual machinery with which oversoulful people have kept up, in the face of science, wish-fulfillment thoughts about the world.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, Incidental Benefits of Faith
Dialectic Philosophy Read More »
“I gave my heart to Lenin more completely than I have to any other leader, and fought for the Bolsheviks on the battlefield of American opinion with all the influence my voice and magazine possessed. From the October revolution until Baron Wrangel was swept out of the Crimea, I was engaged in a civil war, and my socialist convictions grew hard and firm. It took a long time after that, a steady and merciless bombardment of hostile and unanswerable facts, to unsettle them.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Introduction
Unsettled Convictions Read More »
Marxism “is superscientific, metaphysical–religious in the truest sense of the term. It is a scheme for reading the ideal purpose of the communists and their plan for achieving it into the objective facts, so that their account of changing the world and their plans for changing it become one and the same thing.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
“Far from abandoning ‘all philosophy’ for science, Marx did not even abandon Hegel’s philosophy. He merely replaced Hegel’s World Spirit with a World Robot who performs to a different purpose, and without demanding social attentions, all the work which the World Spirit was employed to perform.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
For Lenin, “an underlying, always unspoken assumption that the new is going to be what he wants it to be, that the real is in harmony with the human ideal, provided it is our ideal, is just as essential to his philosophy as it was to Hegel’s. As a philosopher he is using his mind not merely in order to promote the success of his action, but in order to assure himself that his action will succeed.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
Unspoken Assumption Read More »
“To declare that ‘proletariat and wealth are opposites’ is such loose thinking that to us it seems obvious the purpose must be other than the definition of fact with a view to verified knowledge.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
Declaring Opposites Read More »
“The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Promised Enlightened Interests Read More »
