Max Eastman

Totalitarian State

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“An armed seizure of power by a highly organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population, will normally lead to the totalitarian state. ‘Totalitarian state’ is merely the modern name for tyranny.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism

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Romantic Philosophy

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“For my part, I think there is no intellectual question of more importance to the future of American culture than the question whether we are going to conduct our social efforts in the name of science, or are going to swallow down this romantic German philosophy.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, The Word “Dialectic”.

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Hegelism

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“Hegelism is like a mental disease—you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can’t know because you’ve got it.”

~Max Eastman

Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926), p.22

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Such a Religion as This

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“The Marxian policy is to root out all warm and personal religions, and at the same time destroy wonder and a sense of the world’s mystery, by putting a cold and impersonal religion in their place. No human being not specifically and professionally occupied with the revolutionary struggle will accept such a religion as this Dialectic Materialism.”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, is it Science? Part VI, Revolution as a Scientific Enterprise, Merits of the Scientific Attitude

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Dialectic Metaphysics IS Ideological

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“It is impossible, once you have defined ideology as thinking which is unconscious of its motive, to let Marxism continue to hide its motive in an animistic philosophy of the universe. Marxism as a system of dialectic metaphysics IS ideological, just as all transcendental metaphysics is…”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science?, Part IV The Marxian System, Marx and Freud

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Animistic Thinking

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“Animistic thinking consists essentially in trying by some sort of hocus-pocus to transfer your own wishes into the external world, and so get them realized. It is emotional and ceremonial and soon becomes institutionalized…”

~Max Eastman

Marxism, Is it Science?, Part IV, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism

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Private Property

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“It seems obvious to me now–though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion–that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market.”

~Max Eastman

The Reader’s Digest, July 1941, p.39

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Resistance to Tyranny

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“Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world to recover its poise and its once firm resistance to tyranny.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Both Hopes are False

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Socialist Hypothesis

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“If the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared when the Russian capitalists were expropriated and production taken over by the state, no matter how untoward the circumstances. By that time everything in Russia was worse from the standpoint of socialist ideals than it had been under the regime of the Tsar.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Intro

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Front Organization

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“It was Marx, not Lenin, who invented the technique of the “front organization,” the device of pretending to be a democrat in order to destroy democracy, the ruthless purging of dissident party members, the employment of false personal slander in this task.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. The Religion of Immoralism

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