“The chief enemy of the effort to make society more free and equal through any kind of organization is bureaucratism.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 6, Revolution as a Scientific Enterprise, Merits of the Scientific Attitude
“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
“Do not forget that Stalin was a socialist. Mussolini was a socialist. Hundreds of thousands of the followers of Hitler were socialists or communists, converted overnight by the lure of ‘decisive political action’, and by a small redefinition – a small sacrifice of what is ‘Romantic’ – in the principle of human freedom.”
~Max Eastman
New International, Vol.4 No.8, August 1938
Who Was Socialist? Read More »
“I have learned from Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy how much infantile and primitive savage yearning for dependence, for external authority, for the sovereign-father, there is in the average human heart.”
~Max Eastman
Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism
Yearning for Dependence Read More »
“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 »
“We Socialists were, I think, profoundly wrong to ignore the depth and generality of the drive toward property, and therefore exchange of property, in man.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism
“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 »
“For my part, I think there is no intellectual question of more importance to the future of American culture than the question whether we are going to conduct our social efforts in the name of science, or are going to swallow down this romantic German philosophy.”
~Max Eastman
Marxism, Is it Science? Part 3, The Religious Heritage, The Word “Dialectic”.
Romantic Philosophy Read More »
“Almost everyone who cares earnestly about freedom is aroused against the Communists. But it is not only the Communists, it is in a more subtle way the Socialists who are blocking the efforts of the free world to recover its poise and its once firm resistance to tyranny.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Both Hopes are False
Resistance to Tyranny Read More »
“If the socialist hypothesis were valid in general, some tiny shred of the benefits promised by it would have appeared when the Russian capitalists were expropriated and production taken over by the state, no matter how untoward the circumstances. By that time everything in Russia was worse from the standpoint of socialist ideals than it had been under the regime of the Tsar.”
~Max Eastman
Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Intro
Socialist Hypothesis Read More »
