Communism
No Dialectic Logic
“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…”
~ Max Eastman
Religion
Dialectic
Religious Scholasticism
“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
Communism
Belief in Fantasy
“The belief that such a millennium could be brought into being by ‘some combination of lawyers, business and labor managers, politicians and intellectuals,’ is hard to take seriously.” ~Max Eastman
Religion
Pariah
“When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my old political friends refused to speak to me on the street. I was a traitor, a renegade, a pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned.” ~Max Eastman
Religion
State Religion
“Any state religion, as all the great liberals have pointed out, is death to human freedom.” ~Max Eastman
Marxism
Naive and Cloudy
“Dialectic Materialism, examined at its point of origin, turns out to be the rather naive, cloudy, unsuccessful and half-minded attempt of a matter-of-fact mind to escape from German metaphysics.” ~Max Eastman
Religion
Common Sense
“The ability to rest in doubt, to withhold belief where belief is not warranted by methodological investigation is indispensable to expert common sense and it is the part most difficult for amateurs to learn.” ~Max Eastman
Religion
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
Socialism
Practical Thinking
“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
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