“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 »
“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
Science is: “patience in investigation and clarity in calculation; singleness of purpose; the power to suspend judgement, to remain, if need be, for a lifetime in doubt; the gift of abstraction, of thinking about things definitely but without too much intrusion of their sensuous qualities; the skill to hold in suspense one’s own tastes and passions, a skill which demands discipline of the most rigorous kind. Without these traits, science as a thing distinct from common sense, from magic, pseudo-science, charlatanism, poetry, religion, religious philosophy, and tendentious belief in general, could hardly have come into being.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“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 »
“Marx’s dialectic philosophy, with all its wish to be scientific, and to even out-science the scientists, is a survival of the intellectual machinery with which oversoulful people have kept up, in the face of science, wish-fulfillment thoughts about the world.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, Incidental Benefits of Faith
Dialectic Philosophy 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
“Far from abandoning ‘all philosophy’ for science, Marx did not even abandon Hegel’s philosophy. He merely replaced Hegel’s World Spirit with a World Robot who performs to a different purpose, and without demanding social attentions, all the work which the World Spirit was employed to perform.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, What Dialectic Meant to Marx and Lenin
“The Marxian policy is to root out all warm and personal religions, and at the same time destroy wonder and a sense of the world’s mystery, by putting a cold and impersonal religion in their place. No human being not specifically and professionally occupied with the revolutionary struggle will accept such a religion as this Dialectic Materialism.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, is it Science? Part VI, Revolution as a Scientific Enterprise, Merits of the Scientific Attitude
Such a Religion as This Read More »
