“There is no dialectic logic. There are no higher thought forms. There is merely reflection which is wise enough to take account of the fluidity of its subject matter, reflection which understands that terms are not things, nor copies of things, and keeps coming back to things and making new judgements in proportion as the change requires it.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism: Is it Science? Trotsky Defends the Faith
No Dialectic Logic Read More »
“A demonstration that Marxism has all the defining attributes of a religion would be incomplete without a warning against its own peculiar brand of scholasticism.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism: Is it Science? Trotsky Defends the Faith
Religious Scholasticism Read More »
“The Marxist method is to accentuate the class struggle between workers and capitalists, organize it both nationally and internationally, and carry it forward…in full consciousness of the ruthlessness of the forces at play, to the goal of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? The Practical Hypothesis in Marxism
Revolutionary Dictatorship Read More »
“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
“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
“Dialectic Materialism, examined at its point of origin, turns out to be the rather naïve, cloudy, unsuccessful and half-minded attempt of a matter-of-fact mind to escape from German metaphysics.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, The Seed of the Marxian Philosophy
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 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 German state patronized modern capitalism, perverting it to the support of feudal political institutions; and the German philosophers patronized modern science, perverting it to the support of animistic superstition.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Theory of History
Institutions and Superstitions Read More »
“Marx and Engels were defending against scientific materialism–against that attitude which constitutes at least the simple common-sense starting point of science–a materialistic religion.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism
Materialistic Religion Read More »
