“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
“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 »
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”
“It was Marx, and not History, that was determined to produce a social revolution, and his investigation of history was an attempt to find out the method by which it could be done. When that simple truth–as obvious to a child as it is inaccessible to a Marxist–has once been acknowledged, the whole discussion loses its mystifying character at once.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Theory of History
“If he (Karl Marx) ever performed a generous act, it is not to be found in the record. He was a totally undisciplined, vain, slovenly, and egotistical spoiled child. He was ready at the drop of a hat with spiteful hate. He could be devious, disloyal, snobbish, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro. He was by habit a sponge, an intriguer, a tyrannical bigot who would rather wreck his party than see it succeed under another leader.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“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 »
“Marxism was a step from utopian socialism to a socialist religion–a scheme for convincing the believer that the universe itself is producing a better society, and that he has only to fall in properly with the general movement of this universe.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 4, The Marxian System, The Belief in Dialectic Materialism
Socialist Religion Read More »
“The separation of church and state is one of the main measures of protection against tyranny. But the Marxian religion makes this separation impossible, for its creed is politics; its church is the state. There is no hope within its dogmas of any evolution toward the free society it promises.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“Not only is there no such thing as dialectic thinking, but there is no such superintellectual knowledge of the exact nature of the universe as that to which an alleged dialectic thinking pretends to give access.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?
Dialectic Thinking? Read More »
