“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. This second notion is really more utopian than the first.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“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 juvenile of me to imagine that humanity as a whole, especially by splitting itself into two halves, could turn a whole period of history into a scientific experiment.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Scientific Experiment? Read More »
“It (socialism) survived long enough to show what was in it: tyranny, namely, and that new perfection of tyranny, the totalitarian state.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
The Totalitarian State Read More »
“Either phony elections or no elections at all—that is what thoroughgoing socialism will mean, no matter who brings it in—hard-headed Bolsheviks, soft-headed Social Democrats, or genteel liberals.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
Thoroughgoing Socialism Read More »
“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
“The crude animal egoisms of men and classes of men thus grab ideas and use them, not as heroic lights to action, but as blinds to hide inaction or actions that are too base.”
~Max Eastman
The End of Socialism in Russia
“The most persistent and most threatening enemy of the scientific attitude is the disposition of men to think what they want to think, and of men and institutions to bend the results even of experimental investigation, and pervert its authority, to the support of their purposes and states of passion.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science?, Part 5, Marx’s Effort to be Scientific, What Science Is
“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 »
“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 »
