“The belief that such a millennium could be brought into being by ‘some combination of lawyers, business and labor managers, politicians and intellectuals,’ is hard to take seriously.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“The Russian revolution is perhaps the greatest tragedy in human history, terrible in the breadth of its impact, terrible in the depth of its significance, terrible in its personal details.”
~Max Eastman
Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism
Russian Revolution Read More »
“Chinese Communists were hand-in-glove with Stalin in his plan to seize Manchuria, and then all China, and then all Asia, and then the world, for the totalitarian revolution.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Chinese Communists Read More »
“It is the bureaucratic socializers—if I may devise that label for the champions of a lawyer-manager-politician-intellectual revolution—who constitute a real and subtle threat to America’s democracy.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Bureaucratic Socializers Read More »
“We are still beguiled by this other fairy tale: that a large group of liberal-minded reformers, not pretending to be a class, not seizing the power but creeping into it, not smashing the state but bending it to their will, can take charge of the economy and approximate a free and equal society. This second notion is really more utopian than the first.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Detached idealists of freedom should regard themselves as a mobile force in defense of the social equilibrium. Their aim at all times should be to prevent the domination of society by any one organized idea or power.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Social Equilibrium Read More »
“I still regarded Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship as an enemy, rather than a result, of the policies of Lenin. It took me another two years to arrive at the knowledge that Lenin’s methods—or in other words bolshevik Marxism—were to blame.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my old political friends refused to speak to me on the street. I was a traitor, a renegade, a pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Any state religion, as all the great liberals have pointed out, is death to human freedom.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Instead of liberating the mind of man, the Bolshevik Revolution locked it into a state’s prison tighter than ever before. No flight of thought was conceivable, no poetic promenade even, no sneak through the doors or peep out of a window in this pre-Darwinian dungeon called Dialectic Materialism.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
