“Far from abandoning ‘all philosophy’ for science, Marx did not even abandon Hegel’s philosophy. He merely replaced Hegel’s World Spirit with a World Robot who performs to a different purpose, and without demanding social attentions, all the work which the World Spirit was employed to perform.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
For Lenin, “an underlying, always unspoken assumption that the new is going to be what he wants it to be, that the real is in harmony with the human ideal, provided it is our ideal, is just as essential to his philosophy as it was to Hegel’s. As a philosopher he is using his mind not merely in order to promote the success of his action, but in order to assure himself that his action will succeed.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
Unspoken Assumption Read More »
“To declare that ‘proletariat and wealth are opposites’ is such loose thinking that to us it seems obvious the purpose must be other than the definition of fact with a view to verified knowledge.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
Declaring Opposites Read More »
“The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Promised Enlightened Interests Read More »
“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
Totalitarian State Read More »
“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”.
Romantic Philosophy Read More »
“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
“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
Such a Religion as This Read More »
“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
Dialectic Metaphysics IS Ideological Read More »
“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
Animistic Thinking Read More »
