Max Eastman Quotes

Private Property

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“It seems obvious to me now–though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion–that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free-and-equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market.”

~Max Eastman

The Reader’s Digest, July 1941, p.39

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Resistance to Tyranny

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“Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world to recover its poise and its once firm resistance to tyranny.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Both Hopes are False

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Socialist Hypothesis

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“If the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared when the Russian capitalists were expropriated and production taken over by the state, no matter how untoward the circumstances. By that time everything in Russia was worse from the standpoint of socialist ideals than it had been under the regime of the Tsar.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Intro

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Front Organization

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“It was Marx, not Lenin, who invented the technique of the “front organization,” the device of pretending to be a democrat in order to destroy democracy, the ruthless purging of dissident party members, the employment of false personal slander in this task.”

~Max Eastman

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. The Religion of Immoralism

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A New Religion

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“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”

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Bubble-Castle of Socialist Theory

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“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

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The Marxist Mind

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“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

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Oversoulful People

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“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

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