“Instead of liberating the mind of man, the Bolshevik Revolution locked it into a state’s prison tighter than ever before. No flight of thought was conceivable, no poetic promenade even, no sneak through the doors or peep out of a window in this pre-Darwinian dungeon called Dialectic Materialism.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“It was juvenile of me to imagine that humanity as a whole, especially by splitting itself into two halves, could turn a whole period of history into a scientific experiment.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Scientific Experiment? Read More »
“The phony elections in totalitarian countries, the ballots with only one party and one list of candidates, are not the mere tricks of a cynical dictator—they are intrinsic to a state-planned economy.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“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 »
“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 »
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
“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
Resistance to Tyranny Read More »
“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
Socialist Hypothesis Read More »
“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
Front Organization Read More »
“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”
