Marx, Lenin, and the Science of Revolution

by Max Eastman

The result of 10 years' worth of painstaking research, this volume, originally published in 1926 is a sympathetic critique of certain phases of revolutionary dictatorship in Russia. Among other things it focusses on the philosophy and psychology of Marxism, Marxian economics, Bolshevism, the philosophy of Lenin and his role as an engineer of revolution, the Mensheviks, and the anarchist contribution.

Hardcover

About the author

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. In later life, however, his views turned sharply, and he became an advocate of free market economics and an anti-Communist.

A prolific writer, Eastman published more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as the scientific method, humor, Freudian psychology and Soviet culture. He composed five volumes of poetry, a novel and translated into English some of the work of Alexander Pushkin. For the Modern Library, he edited and abridged Marx' Das Kapital.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little cumbersome, as Eastman makes an important and coherent point, but then sort of...remakes it for a maybe-superfluous 285 pages. The essential point is that popular-front era Marxist and Stalinism is religious in nature, not scientific. This is not an indictment of socialism as such or of radicalism at all, but it is a condemnation of Marxist-Leninism, and of the role of German romanticism in Marx's philosophical work. The essential issue is that Eastman abhors dogma and religiosity wherever he sees it. He arrived first at Marxism both out of a desire for radical reform (potentially a contradictory program), and out of a notion that Marxism was as scientific as Darwinism. Beginning with the expulsion of Trotsky, and culminating in the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, it became painfully obvious that popular front supporters were acting out of commitment to a higher truth, rather than a commitment to reason.