“Science regards all valid knowledge as derived ultimately from experience, derived by the methods of observation, experiment, and rational calculation, and subject to the practical test of action.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“If Marx had understood the art of practical thinking, Das Kapital might have been as great a book as the Hegelian Marxists think it is.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, Religion in “Das Kapital”
Practical Thinking Read More »
Marx “learned, as all good classical philosophers do, to mix the facts and the animistic presuppositions so intricately that it takes a lifetime to divide them.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, Religion in “Das Kapital”
“The dialectic philosophy, as we have seen, was a bold maneuver in the defense of animism against science. Science has always occupied itself with changes, and animism has survived for the most part as an assertion of the Changeless which lies behind and beyond them.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The “Dialectic Method”
“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
