“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 »
“The chief enemy of the effort to make society more free and equal through any kind of organization is bureaucratism.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 6, Revolution as a Scientific Enterprise, Merits of the Scientific Attitude
“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
“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 »
“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
Bubble-Castle of Socialist Theory Read More »
“The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still economic; the arch-enemy is still the soft-headed idealist who refuses to face facts.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
The Struggle is Still for Freedom Read More »
