Reflections on the Failure of Socialism

by Max Eastman

1955 Devin-Adair Publishing Second Print Hardcover

Genres: Politics, History, Economics, Nonfiction, Philosophy

127 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

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

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism by Max Eastman

Please give a helpful vote to my Amazon review - https://www.evernote.com/l/AGE4HJxQN6...

I read this book immediately after reading Nathan J. Robinson's lightweight "Why You Should be a Socialist." Robinson should have done himself a favor and read Eastman before writing his book and he might have either written a better book or realized that his path had been trodden by a better man and given up Socialism.

Eastman was a Socialist of the reddest color as a young man. He was the editor of the far-left Masses journal. He raised the money to send John Reed to cover the Russian Revolution. Eastman went to Russia in 1922 where he met Lenin and Trotsky. Eastman was responsible for translating and publishing Trotsky's English language version of the history of the Russian Revolution. (Not mentioned in this book, but interesting as a historical footnote - Eastman got into some kind of physical tussle with Ernest Hemingway that probably resulted in bruising Hemingway's pride and forehead.)

Despite this pedigree, Eastman was unusual for seeing through the glamour of socialism and repudiating it as a threat to human decency, freedom and progress. As a result, Eastman was considered an apostate by his former friends who would no longer speak to him, not an unusual occurence. Eastman's path was not unprecedented - just rare. Around the same time, or slightly later, Eugene Lyon ("Assignment in Utopia") was coming to his own terms with the nightmare of lies and repression that was the Soviet Union.

This book seems to be a collection of essays that are sometimes autobiographical in explaining Eastman's journey out of leftism, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes practical. This book was published in 1955 but covers Eastman's observations going back to 1912 as he watched the practical results of the experiment in socialism.

I reviewed Robinson's book earlier this week. Robinson argues that people must be outraged by economic injustice and that they should not tell him he will learn to understand when he gets older. Robinson stumps for utopia and refuses to accept Karl Marx as normative - except when he touts Marx as being someone everyone should engage with - or the Soviet Union as Socialist - except that he thinks that Soviet Union did better economically than is properly allowed (based on a study done one year before the complete collapse of the Soviet Union, ironically.)

A reading of Eastman will dispel these conceits. Eastman shared the faith that Russia was the first true socialist country led by good and decent men concerned with the working class. The fact that these men - starting with Lenin - produced a horror can't be swept under the rug with a "No True Socialist" argument.

Eastman's conclusion was that political liberty comes from economic liberty. This is hardly surprising since Marx said as much:

"(p. 110) Marx himself, as I remarked in another connection, was the first to realize this. It was he who informed us that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him that, if this was so, those other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market."

Outside of cloud-cuckoo-land this is not hard to fathom:

"(p.27) A state apparatus which plans and run runs the business of a country must have the authority of a business executive. And that is the authority to tell all those active in the business where to go and what to do, and if they are insubordinate put them out. It must be an authoritarian state apparatus. It may not want to be, but the economy will go haywire if it is not."

"(p.27) There 'has to be a boss, and his authority within the business has to be recognized, and when not recognized, enforced. Moreover, if the business is vast and complex, his authority has to be continuous. You cannot lift him out of his chair every little while, tear up his plans, and stick in somebody else with a different idea of what should be done or how it should be one. The very concept of a plan implies continuity of control. "

"(p.28) How could you unseat an administration with every enterprise and every wage and salary in the country in its direct control? Not only private self-interest would prevent it, and that would be a force like gravitation, but public prudence also-patriotism! "Don't change horses in midstream," we say. But we'd be in mid-stream all the time with the entire livelihood of the nation dependent upon an unfulfilled plan in the hands of those in office. "Don't rock the boat" would be the eternal slogan, the gist of political morals. That these morals would have to be enforced by the criminal law is as certain as that mankind is man."

These are all live issues today, but we've forgotten the arguments.

In contrast to Socialism, the experiment with so-called capitalism worked:

"(p.47) During the nineteenth century, "capitalism" so-called raised the real wage of the British worker 400 percent; the average real wage of the American worker rose, between 1840 and 1951, from eighteen to eighty-six cents an hour. A good fairy could hardly have worked faster. Of course it was not "capitalism" that did this; an abstract noun can't do anything. It was just the spontaneous way of producing wealth with elaborate machinery and a high division of labor. The word "capitalism" was invented by socialists for the express purpose of discrediting this natural behavior, and apart from the contrast with their dream it has no precise application. We should talk more wisely if we dropped this facile abstraction altogether, and made clear in each case what, specifically, we are talking about. "



Eastman's answer was pluralism - opposing social forces that would allow liberty to exist in the margins:

"(p. 42) The state occupies a special position in society because it has a monopoly of armed force, but that only makes it more vital that it should not be sacrosanct. Not only must the power of the government be limited by law if the citizens are to be free-that too was known to Plato and to Aristotle-but it must be limited by other powers. It must be regarded as one as but one of those social forces upon whose equilibrium a free society depends. When the state overgrows itself, the attitude of the anarchists becomes, within sensible limits, relevant and right; just as when the bankers swell up and presume to run a country, the attitude of the Marxists, barring their claim to universal truth, is right. "

For those of a liberty-loving orientation, the scary thing in 2021 is how virtually all social forces are lining up behind Wokism. In Nazi Germany, that kind of thing was called approvingly "gleichschaltung."

Eastman was a witty prose stylist and a clear-eyed observer of reality. Here are some final observations worth reading to get a flavor of the man:

"(p.52) I remember how when I traveled in Russia in 1922, long before I had waked, or knew I was waking, from the socialist dream, a certain thought kept intruding itself into my mind. These millions of poor peasants whose fate so wrings the heart of Lenin have only two major joy-giving interests outside their bodies and their homes: the market and the church. And Lenin, devoting his life selflessly to their happiness, has no program but to deprive them of these two institutions. That is not quite the way to go about the business of making other people happy."

And:

"(p. 61) It is not only freedom that they betray, however, in apologizing for the Soviet tyranny, or pussyfoot-ing about it, or blackening America so savagely that Russia shines in unspoken contrast. They are betraying civilization itself. They are lending a hand in the destruction of its basic values, promoting a return march in every phase of human progress. Reinstitution of slavery, revival of torture, star chamber proceedings, execution without trial, disruption of families, deportation of nations, massacre of communities, corruption of science, art, philosophy, history; tearing down of the standards of truth, justice, mercy, the dignity and the rights of man- even his right to martyrdom- everything that had been won in the long struggle up from savagery and barbarism. How shall I account for this depraved behavior-for that is how it appears to me-on the part of friends and colleagues who were once dedicated to an effort to make society more just and merciful, more truth-perceiving, more "free and. equal" than it was?
They shield themselves from facts, I suppose, by a biased selection of the books and newspapers to read."

That last is more true today.

[Jeff Daiell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a humane memoir by an author who originally supported Socialism but gradually came to realize that civil liberties will not last long once The State controls the economy.

Jeff Daiell

[Mark Smaling]

There's a reason first-hand information is called eye witness testimony and is admissable in court. This man lived in the Soviet Union for two years, then came back to America a libertarian. Nothing like socialism in practice to debunk all its idealistic theories.

[Michael Mangold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Max Eastman, born in 1883, typifies the Bohemian lifestyle of any era, old or new. A 1905 graduate of Williams College, Eastman subsequently moved to New York to work on his PhD in Philosophy, sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village with his older sister, Crystal, a feminist and political activist. Crystal, along with Max, published the left-wing journals 'the Masses' and 'the Liberator,' both vanguards of radical politics in early-twentieth century America.

In 1911 Max married a woman whose political activism was to have an even more profound influence on him, the actress and poet Ida Rauh, a Provincetown, Massachusetts stage performer. Ida retained her maiden name (a scandalous practice at the time) and was active in the feminist group Heterodoxy, which pushed the boundaries of feminism into the realm of lesbian and bisexual rights. As a member of the Women's Trade Union League, Ida organized strikes of New York's shirtwaist makers, and was arrested in 1916 for assisting Margaret Sanger in distributing birth control information. Ida was also active in the struggle for women's suffrage in both America and in Britain. Perhaps her most lasting contribution to the political left, however, was to introduce socialism to her new groom.

Eastman, the son of two ministers from rural New York's Congregational Church, was instantly swayed by the practical aspirations that socialism brought to Christianity's more passive concerns for the poor:

"The hypothesis, as I conceived it, was that by intensifying the working class struggle, and pursuing it to victory either at the polls or in a revolution, we could 'socialize the means of production,' and thus extend democracy from politics into economics."

Eastman's political aspirations extended beyond economics, encompassing many of the issues still resounding today:

"I wanted to see a society without distinctions of caste, class, race, money-power--without exploitation, without the 'wage system.'"

Eastman joined the Socialist Party and viewed the newly-created Soviet Union as an opportunity to witness an experiment on a grand scale, comparing the socialist state to the capitalist status quo. In 1922 Max Eastman sailed for Russia to observe this experiment close up.

Eastman's work on the Liberator had gained him a certain level of fame among the Soviets, and he was greeted warmly by Leon Trotsky, who gave him official documents granting him access throughout the country. On his travels he soon became troubled by what he saw:

"One thing seemed to me calamitously bad. That was the bigotry and Byzantine scholasticism which had grown up around the sacred scriptures of Marxism. Hegel, Marx, Engels, Piekhanov, Lenin--these men's books contained for the Bolsheviks the last word on human knowledge. They were not science, they were revelation...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."

He went on to write:

"So far as concerns the advance of human understanding, the Soviet Union is a gigantic roadblock, armed, fortified, and defended by indoctrinated automatons made out of flesh, blood, and brains in the robot-factories they call schools."

Eastman was, at this point, not finding fault with Marxist doctrine itself, but with the elevation of its teaching to proselytization:

"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."

Eastman stayed in Russia a year and nine months, departing for Western Europe in June, 1924--five months after Lenin's death. Despite the failures of the Soviet implementation of Marxist ideals, he still credited Lenin for attempting a scientific approach to the improvement of society, calling Lenin the "engineer of revolution."

Eastman returns repeatedly to this idea that the scientific method can be applied to social policy. From 1934's "Artists in Uniform:"

"The efforts toward socialist construction in the Soviet Union must inevitably serve the world movement in some sense as a guide. These efforts should not be followed, however, as a seamstress follows a pattern, but as a scientist repeats an experiment, progressively correcting the errors and perfecting the successful strokes."

Ayn Rand, a refugee from Soviet Russia, similarly attempted (in my estimate, successfully) to apply the scientific method (or more pointedly, logic and reason) to develop her philosophy, Objectivism. As an Objectivist myself I find Eastman's desire to witness such an experiment to be absolutely fascinating. With Stalin's reign of terror following Lenin's death, Eastman lost any aspiration of seeing that experiment come to a successful conclusion. Writing in Harper's Magazine in 1937:

"To my mind there is not a hope left for the classless society in present-day Russia."

Within two years his absolution of Lenin had collapsed, replaced with a realization that Lenin, and Marx himself, had set a trajectory of failure from the start:

"This change of opinion invalidated much that I had said in the second part of my book, 'Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution.' Moreover I had learned a great deal more about Marxism since that book was published in 1926. Its demonstration of the unscientific, and indeed superstitious character of Marx's whole mode of thought seemed more and more important as the battle between the Soviets and western civilization developed."

Eastman's realization that Marxism's faith in dialectical materialism reveals it to be a fundamentally mystical philosophy was compounded by his observation that as state control over the economy expanded, freedom diminished:

"We have to make up our minds, if we are going to defend this free world against an oncreeping totalitarian state control, whether, in fact, our primary interest is in freedom from state control, or in an attempt at economic equality enforced by a controlling state. We have to accept such inequalities as are presumed by, and result from, economic competition...The failure of the Social Democrats, and still more in America of the 'left' liberals, to learn this lesson is now a major threat to freedom in the western world."

Eastman's chronicle of his transformation from champion of economic equality to champion of freedom and liberty is best summed up in that quote. It is a realization either not conceptualized or not believed by advocates of state control over economic activity to this day. For those who seek an honest telling of socialism's greatest experiment, and the transformation of one man who witnessed it, this book is essential.

[Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very helpful, although the chapters were written independently, and so don't cohere as tightly as they could. Eastman's voice is important because he was a former socialist, and even went to Russia during Lenin's rule, learned Russian, knew Trotsky, and translated Russian texts for English readers. So, he was an insider, and had the intellectual honesty to change his mind.

[Emma Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read. The book is especially pertinent since Max Eastman was a die hard revolutionary socialist who initially rooted for, but was then bitterly disappointed by, the Russian Revolution.

[Michael Shoemake · Rating 1 out of 5]

A book stuffed with ad hominem and conflation of arguments. In many chapters Eastman spends his time insulting liberals rather than deconstructing socialist philosophy, and several of his arguments are bad. Here's a couple and why they're bad:

"Acquired traits are not hereditary, and therefore human nature will not change to better suit communism." It's plainly clear that while the genetic makeup of human beings will not change, the way one responds to one's environment growing up is almost infinite in its variations across cultures. One takes one's shape against the cage one grows in.

"Contemporary socialists support the Russian government because they wish to be associated with power." Ad hominem; it addresses no argument.

"Economic and political happenings do not occur on different planets." This is true, but the point that the author he's criticizing is attempting to make is that the phenomena he's discussing are each attributable to two distinct causes, one originating in economics, the other in politics. Whether this is true or not, I can't say, but Eastman certainly does nothing to defeat the argument; he merely says it is wrong.

Et cetera ad nauseam.

[Ben]

Reading this to research a paper on Eastman. Seems to be a logical consistency to his thought, in that he maintained from his early Marxism a devotion to scientific certainty and a disdain for reform as an intelligent solution. Given this, when he became disgusted with the Soviet Experiment, he had no consistent choice other than to attach himself to the libertarian right, and even briefly with McCarthyism. There is an irony in that his criticisms of the socialist project could apply perfectly to what seems to be his own millenarianist devotion to the free market. He even goes so far at one point to suggest that if ever the banks took control of society, it would destroy his position and give credit to socialism.