“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 »
“The Russian revolution is perhaps the greatest tragedy in human history, terrible in the breadth of its impact, terrible in the depth of its significance, terrible in its personal details.”
~Max Eastman
Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism
Russian Revolution Read More »
“Chinese Communists were hand-in-glove with Stalin in his plan to seize Manchuria, and then all China, and then all Asia, and then the world, for the totalitarian revolution.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Chinese Communists Read More »
“It is the bureaucratic socializers—if I may devise that label for the champions of a lawyer-manager-politician-intellectual revolution—who constitute a real and subtle threat to America’s democracy.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Bureaucratic Socializers 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
“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
“I gave my heart to Lenin more completely than I have to any other leader, and fought for the Bolsheviks on the battlefield of American opinion with all the influence my voice and magazine possessed. From the October revolution until Baron Wrangel was swept out of the Crimea, I was engaged in a civil war, and my socialist convictions grew hard and firm. It took a long time after that, a steady and merciless bombardment of hostile and unanswerable facts, to unsettle them.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Introduction
Unsettled Convictions Read More »
“The backers of Hitler in Germany made the same mistake about the Nazi party that the workers and soldiers in Petrograd made about the Bolshevik party. Each group believed that this new brutal, rabid, monolithic fighting gang, on achieving power, would promote, as had been promised, its enlightened interests.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Promised Enlightened Interests Read More »
“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 »
“In the mind of the Marxist, dialectic is the ‘leader of all knowledge’ and ‘holds the primacy and rule of all philosophy,’ and of science ,too. It is the supreme ‘organon’, the ultimate and perfect instrument of understanding, an inherently revolutionary superscience to which all genuinely progressive minds must learn to conform.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part III, The Religious Heritage
