Society is One?
“Marx is concerned to defend the concept of society as a single ‘object, reality, sensibility,’ having the character which all objects have–namely, that of self-active practicality.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, is it Science?
Other Fairy Tale
“But 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.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Animal Egoisms
“The crude animal egoisms of men and classes of men thus grab ideas and use them, not as heroic lights to action, but as blinds to hide inaction or actions that are too base.”
~Max Eastman
The End of Socialism in Russia
States of Passion
“The most persistent and most threatening enemy of the scientific attitude is the disposition of men to think what they want to think, and of men and institutions to bend the results even of experimental investigation, and pervert its authority, to the support of their purposes and states of passion.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
Common Sense
“The ability to rest in doubt, to withhold belief where belief is not warranted by methodological investigation–yet more, to suspend judgement while such investigation is in progress–is indispensable to expert common sense and it is the part most difficult for amateurs to learn.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
Science and Magic
“He (the scientist) is an implacable enemy of the occult. He really wants to know; the magician wants not to know.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
Mix the Facts
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 Changeless
“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”
The Crime of Socrates
“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 »
Dialectic Metaphysics IS Ideological
“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 »