“The separation of church and state is one of the main measures of protection against tyranny. But the Marxian religion makes this separation impossible, for its creed is politics; its church is the state. There is no hope within its dogmas of any evolution toward the free society it promises.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Do not forget that Stalin was a socialist. Mussolini was a socialist. Hundreds of thousands of the followers of Hitler were socialists or communists, converted overnight by the lure of ‘decisive political action’, and by a small redefinition – a small sacrifice of what is ‘Romantic’ – in the principle of human freedom.”
~Max Eastman
New International, Vol.4 No.8, August 1938
Who Was Socialist? Read More »
Science is: “patience in investigation and clarity in calculation; singleness of purpose; the power to suspend judgement, to remain, if need be, for a lifetime in doubt; the gift of abstraction, of thinking about things definitely but without too much intrusion of their sensuous qualities; the skill to hold in suspense one’s own tastes and passions, a skill which demands discipline of the most rigorous kind. Without these traits, science as a thing distinct from common sense, from magic, pseudo-science, charlatanism, poetry, religion, religious philosophy, and tendentious belief in general, could hardly have come into being.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“I have learned from Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy how much infantile and primitive savage yearning for dependence, for external authority, for the sovereign-father, there is in the average human heart.”
~Max Eastman
Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism
Yearning for Dependence Read More »
“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
