“In Das Kapital, as in The Holy Family, the force which guarantees the evolution of capitalism to the point of rupture, and the creation of a communist state, is that same logical necessity of ascending from the lower to the higher which Hegel laid on the whole Universe in the name of God.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part IV, The Marxian System, Religion in “Das Capital”
“A false and undeliberated conception of what man is lies at the bottom, I think, of the whole bubble-castle of socialist theory. Although few seem to realize it, Marxism rests on the romantic notion of Rousseau that nature endows men with the qualities necessary to be a free, equal, fraternal, family-like living together, and our sole problem is to fix up the external conditions. All Marx did about this with his dialectical philosophy was to change the tenses in the romance: Nature will endow men with the qualities as soon as the conditions are fixed up.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Bubble-Castle of Socialist Theory Read More »
“In the mind of the Marxist, dialectic is the ‘leader of all knowledge’ and ‘holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy,’ and of science ,too. It is the supreme ‘organon’, the ultimate and perfect instrument of understanding, an inherently revolutionary superscience to which all genuinely progressive minds must learn to conform.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part III, The Religious Heritage
“These oversoulful people have not wanted to deny science or deprive themselves of its benefits, but neither have they wanted to commit themselves to its methods of acquiring knowledge and above all to the limitations of knowledge which those methods imply. They have used the faculty of ideation not only in order to change real things in an ideal direction, but also in order to make themselves comfortable among things-as-they-are by thinking up ideal ways of conceiving them.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part III The Religious Heritage, Chapter 2 Hegel’s Contribution
Oversoulful People Read More »
“The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still economic; the arch-enemy is still the soft-headed idealist who refuses to face facts.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
The Struggle is Still for Freedom Read More »
