I Believed that Communism Would

Liberate the World from Oppression. I

Was Catastrophically Wrong.

Max Forrester Eastman

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People who read these reflections may wonder how I arrived at the understanding that
socialism has failed. I am describing the whole experience in another book, but here a
brief glance at the intellectual road I traveled may be helpful. It has not been so
winding a road as some may think.

I stated the aim of my political activities in two articles in the Masses in 1916: not to
reform men, or even primarily reform the world, but to “make all men as free to live
and realize the world as it is possible for them to be.” In this, the years have brought
no change.

In those same articles I dismissed Marx’s philosophic system, his idea that socialism
is historically necessary, as “a rationalization of his wish,” and declared: “We must
alter and remodel what he wrote, and make of it and of what else our recent science
offers, a doctrine that shall clearly have the nature of hypothesis.”

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.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. That, I thought, would give every man a chance to build a life
in his own chosen way. It would “liberate the proletariat and therewith all society,” to
use a Marxian formula that I liked to quote.
To me, in short, socialism was not a philosophy of history, or of life—much less a
religion—but a large-scale social-scientific experiment. I came to it by a process of
thought rather than feeling. I had no personal envies or resentments; I was happily
circumstanced and wisely brought up; I thought of myself as free. I wanted to extend
that freedom to all men; I wanted to see a society without distinctions of caste, class,
race, money-power—without exploitation, without the “wage system.” I knew this
could not be brought about by preaching; I had observed the effects of preaching. I
was captivated by the idea that it might be brought about by a self-interested struggle
on the part of those most deprived under the present system. Thus the class struggle as
a method was the very center of my socialist belief. The articles quoted above were
titled “Towards Liberty, The Method of Progress,” and they were meant to be the first
chapters of a book.

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.
Science requires a scientist, or at least an engineer, and the engineer, in this case,
would have to have dictatorial power. But that thought, if it entered my mind, I
managed to elude. I worked out a socialism of my own which enabled me to take an
independent position on many concrete questions: feminism, population control,
peace, and war. Both the doctrine of class morals and the propaganda of class hate I
rejected. I could think freely on such questions because my socialism was not a
mystical cure-all, but merely a plan which I considered practical for solving the one
specific problem of making freedom more general and democracy more democratic.

Although I was a member of the Socialist Party, the magazines I edited from 1912 to
1922, the Masses and the Liberator, were arrantly independent, and I was pretty
regularly flayed alive by the party officials for some heresy or other. It was usually a
revolutionary heresy. I was decidedly at the red end of the party spectrum. Still, it
wasn’t always the reformists as against the revolutionists that I attacked. As often it
was the dogmatism of both. Naturally, in my attempt to make Marxism over into an
experimental science, I waged a continual war on the bigotry, the cant, the know-it-
allism, of the party priesthood. This I think distinguished the policy of the
old Masses and the Liberator as much as their militant insistence on the class struggle.
I was always close friends with the I.W.W., and on good terms even with the
anarchists, although I lectured them on their childish innocence of the concept of
method. I was not afraid, either, of the word liberal with a small l, although I had my
own definition of it. “A liberal mind,” I wrote in the Masses for September 1917, “is a
mind that is able to imagine itself believing anything. It is the only mind that is
capable of judging beliefs, or that can hold strongly without bigotry to a belief of its
own.”

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, shocking the whole
world of progressive and even moderate socialist opinion, I backed them to the limit
in the Liberator. I raised the money to send John Reed to Russia and published his
articles that grew into the famous book, Ten Days That Shook the World. I was about
the only “red” still out of jail in those violent days, and my magazine was for a time
the sole source of unbewildered information about what was happening in Russia. Its
circulation reached a peak of sixty thousand.

When Lenin’s pamphlet, called in English “The Soviets at Work,” was published—
the same that won Whittaker Chambers to communism—I was enraptured. The
monumental practicality, the resolute factualness, of Lenin’s mind, combined as
almost never before with a glowing regard for poor and oppressed people, anxiety
over their freedom, devotion to the idea of their entrance into power, swept me off my
feet. I still think it one of the noblest—and now saddest—of political documents. It
convinced me that Lenin’s mind was experimental. In every line he seemed to realize
my ideal of a scientific revolutionist. I greeted him in two articles in the Liberator as
“a Statesman of a New Order,” and dedicated myself with no doctrinal reservations to
the defense of his principles of action and his Soviet regime.
Attacking those who accused him of dogmatism, I exclaimed: “I have never seen a
sign in any speech or writing of Lenin that he regarded the Marxian theory as
anything more than a scientific hypothesis in process of verification.”

There were few translations from Russian in those days. I had to go to Russia and
learn the language before I found out that Lenin was a true believer in the Marxian
mystique. He was, to be sure, more high-handed with its postulates than any other
believer—much more so than Trotsky. He had the trick, as Karl Radek once remarked
to me, of “deciding a question on the basis of the facts and then fixing it up with the
theory afterward.” He also had Hegel’s notion of “dialectic logic” to help him with
this trick. I did not know enough then to distinguish between the limited freedom
dispensed to the faithful by this ingenious notion, and the complete freedom of a mind
dealing only with facts, purposes, and plans of action. 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.

Going to Russia

Instead of liberating the mind of man, the Bolshevik

Revolution locked it into a state’s prison tighter than
ever before. Still, I was far enough from fanatical when I sailed for Russia in
1922 to remark to my friends that I was “going over to find out whether what I have
been saying is true.” I arrived in September, in time to learn a little Russian before I
attended the fourth congress of the Third International. I was not a delegate and had
no official status, but the Liberator was well enough known so that I was hospitably
received as a guest. Later on, Trotsky, who consented to cooperate with me on a
biographical portrait, gave me a portentous document bearing his signature and the
seal of the Red Army, asking everybody in Russia to receive me cordially and attend
to my needs. I traveled wherever I wanted to with that document, and saw whatever I
asked to see.
I traveled at the height of the swift recovery that followed the adoption of the New
Economic Policy, and I experienced Soviet life at its best. Although surprised and
shocked by some features of the experiment, I found ground for great hope also. Only
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, Plekhanov, Lenin—these men’s books contained for the Bolsheviks the
last word of human knowledge. They were not science, they were revelation. Nothing
remained for living thinkers to do but apply them, gloss them, dispute about them,
expatiate on them, find in them the germs of every new thought or thing that came
into the world.

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. No one in the western world has any
idea of the degree to which Soviet minds are closed and sealed tight against any idea
but the premises and conclusions of this antique system of wishful thinking. 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.

I felt this barbarous thing more keenly than any other disappointment in the land of
my dreams. I was sure it contained the seeds of priest rule and police rule. Any state
religion, as all the great liberals have pointed out, is death to human freedom. 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.

For these reasons, instead of writing the travel stories expected of me about “Life
under the Soviets,” I went into the reading room of the Marx-Engels Institute in
Moscow and got down to work on my old unfinished partial torso of a book,
Towards Liberty, the Method of Progress. Although not deceived that anybody would
pay prompt attention to me, I thought it my duty to the revolution to attack this
roadblock, this prodigy of obtuseness parading as ultimate wisdom, in the only way it
could be attacked, by an unanswerable demonstration of the conflict between
Marxism and the scientific method.

I stayed a year and nine months in Russia, and put in a major part of my time learning
Russian and reading, mostly in that language, the essential literature on which the
actions of the Bolsheviks were based. Leaving Russia in June 1924, I spent the next
three years in western Europe, where I finished a book on the subject and named
it Marx and Lenin, the Science of Revolution. It was published in London in 1926. The
Anglo-Saxon world had so little interest then in Marxian theory that I had to advance
the money for its publication. But Albert and Charles Boni bought sheets and
published it a year later in New York. La Nouvelle Revue Française published a
French translation the following year. My money investment was well repaid. But my
success in undermining the roadblock in Russia was not conspicuous.

The copy I sent to the Marx-Engels Institute was returned by the Post Office marked:
“Denied admission by the Department of Publications.” The only murmur to come out
of Russia was from the great scientist, Ivan Pavlov, who surprised me with a letter in
his own hand sent fearlessly through the mail: “I endorse completely your criticism of
the philosophical foundation of Marxism.” And he added this contribution to my
painfully slow recovery from socialism: “There isn’t any science of revolution, and
there won’t be for a long time. There is only a groping of the life force, partly guided
empirically, of those who have a much-embracing and strong common sense. Our
Bolshevik Revolution, with its details so disastrous to our intellectual and moral
development, I consider an anachronism which (of this I am convinced) will repeat
itself in this form never and nowhere in the civilized world. Such is my deepest
understanding of these matters.”

Holding on to Leninism

In that book, I wrote as a believer in the Soviet system, and I still imputed to Lenin a
stride forward, however unconscious, toward the attitude of experimental science,
calling him by contrast with his more orthodox opponents an “engineer of revolution.”
There was a great deal of truth in this, but I still managed to elude its implications. I
thought it was a wonderful and hopeful thing that Lenin had succeeded, by basing
himself on the Marxian analysis of class forces, in throwing a net over the whole of
Russian society, and gathering the power into his hands and that of a party dedicated
to building socialism.

This theoretic conception stood firm in my mind, even though I had seen before
leaving Russia what I now believe to be its direct and normal consequence: the
usurpation of power by a tyrant having no honest instinct for the liberties of men. I
had not only seen but very carefully studied the plot by which Stalin made himself
master after Lenin’s death. Besides studying his maneuvers, I attended the party
congress of May 1924, at which his open attack was launched and Trotsky’s prestige
in the party destroyed. Behind the scenes at that congress, Trotsky told me in whispers
the drift and essential details of the suppressed document called Lenin’s Testament. I
was leaving Russia in a few days, and I spent those days gathering, with his
encouragement, what further documents I needed to expose the plot and explain it. To
do this I laid aside my work on Marxism and wrote the little book called Since Lenin
Died, which remains, I think, an authentic source for the history of the conflict about
leadership which followed Lenin’s death.
In the evolution of my socialist opinions that book marked a rather modest step. My
conclusion was only a caution to revolutionists in other countries against accepting in
the name of Leninism “the international authority of a group against whom Lenin’s
dying words were a warning, and who have preserved that authority by suppressing
the essential texts of Lenin.” Fourteen years would pass before I was able to see in
that group, not only an enemy of Lenin’s plans, but a result of the revolution as
conceived and engineered by him.

I had said enough in my two books, however, to ostracize me completely from the
official communist movement. When I came home from Europe in 1927 most of my
old political friends refused to speak to me on the street. I was a traitor, a renegade, a
pariah, a veritable untouchable, so far as the communists were concerned. And as the
bitterness mounted, this mood spread to the radical, and even in some degree to the
liberal, intelligentsia as a whole. To get rid of my facts, I was of course promptly and
indelibly labeled “Trotskyist,” although I neither agreed with Trotsky’s Marxism nor
ever shared the delusion that he might become the successful leader of a party. That
the policies of Lenin and the original aims of the Bolsheviks were defended by
Trotsky was made unmistakably clear in my little book, and will be unmistakably
clear in history, I believe, if honest history survives. But my loyalty was not to any
leader or group. My loyalty was still to the working class, to the idea of progress
through class struggle. In principle, I was merely supplying the international working
class and its leaders with information essential to the intelligent conduct of the
struggle.

The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still
economic; the arch-enemy is still the soft-headed
idealist who refuses to face facts. With the same purpose I
translated and published in 1928 the suppressed program and documents of the exiled
Left Opposition of the Russian Communist party, calling the book The Real Situation
in Russia. As the text was theirs rather than mine, I gave the royalties to a small
branch of the Trotskyist Opposition which had by that time been formed in America.
This added to a growing impression that I was a personal follower of Trotsky,
although my private thoughts about his failure to outmaneuver Stalin were anything
but those of a follower. It was always Lenin’s policies, and the truth about what was
happening in Russia, that I was defending. My translation of Trotsky’s History of the
Russian Revolution was made with admiration but not endorsement. To me that book
is the supreme and most compelling application of the Marxian metaphysics to
history, far outdoing the similar efforts of Marx himself. But I think it will be the last.
No giant will ever again drive facts into those forms at such an expense of intellectual
power.
A book which marks a longer step in my own development, emotional if not
intellectual, was my Artists in Uniform, written in 1932–33, and published in 1934.
There I described the hideous dictatorship in literature and the fine arts set up under
Stalin’s knout, and the obsequious infantilism of Americans like Mike Gold, Joe
Freeman, Bob Minor, Hugo Geliert, Maurice Becker, William Gropper, my ex-
colleagues on the Liberator, who of their own free will kneeled down to it. No one
who had believed in the socialist revolution as a liberation of spirit, as we all in those
days so loudly did, could with intellectual honor pretend that this was it or any step in
the direction of it. I did not pull any punches in that book, but I still spoke as a
revolutionary socialist, a non-party old Bolshevik. I said in my introduction:

“I am on the side of the Soviets and the proletarian class struggle. But I think that
critical truth-speaking is an element of that struggle essential to its success . . . 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.”
Those were, I think, my last published words as a defender of the Soviet Union.

Losing Faith

It is not easy to set dates in such a matter. “Who can determine when it is that the
scales in the balance of opinion begin to turn, and what was a greater probability in
behalf of a belief becomes a positive doubt against it?” Cardinal Newman asks the
question in his Apologia, and I must say that with all the documents I have in hand, I
can not be exact as to the moment when I abandoned my attitude of “loyal to the
Soviet Union but opposed to the Stalin leadership,” and decided that thanks to that
leadership the hope of socialism in Russia was dead. I only know that during the year
1933 those positive doubts grew so strong that I abandoned my pro-Soviet lectures,
and remained silent for about two years. In the spring of 1936, I wrote an essay, “The
End of Socialism in Russia,” which was published in Harper’s Magazine, January
1937, and afterward by Little, Brown & Company as a book. “To my mind, there is
not a hope left for the classless society in present-day Russia,” I said in that book. But
I still regarded Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship as an enemy, rather than a result, of the
policies of Lenin.

It took me another two years to arrive at the knowledge that Lenin’s methods—or in
other words bolshevik Marxism—were to blame. This further slow step in my
enlightenment was recorded in another book, published in 1940, and called Stalin’s
Russia and the Crisis in Socialism.
“I now think,” I wrote in that book, “that this brilliant device for engineering a seizure
of power, invented by Lenin with a super-democratic purpose, has shown itself to be
in fatal conflict with the purpose. I think that an armed seizure of power by a highly
organized minority party, whether in the name of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
the Glory of Rome, the Supremacy of the Nordics, or any other slogan that may be
invented, and no matter how ingeniously integrated with the masses of the population,
will normally lead to the totalitarian state. ‘Totalitarian state’ is merely the modern
name for tyranny. It is tyranny with up-to-date technique. And the essence of that
technique is a reverse use of the very thing upon whose forward action Lenin
ultimately relied, the machinery of public education.”

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. It was my main contribution to the battle, and I wrote it over
again as maturely and carefully as I know how. With the title Marxism: Is It Science,
it was published in the autumn of that same year, 1940.

Even then, although rejecting Lenin’s system of party control, I had not decided that
“the socialist hypothesis” was disproven. That decision, or the inner force to confront
that fact, arrived in the following year. And in this case, I do remember the precise
moment. At a cocktail party given by Freda Utley—I think for her friend Bertrand
Russell—during a conversation about some last and most significantly dreadful news
that had come out of Russia, she suddenly asked me:

“Aside from these Russian developments, do you still believe in the socialist idea?”

I said, “No.”

No More Socialism

The whole idea of extending freedom, or justice, or

equality, or any other civilized value, to the lower
classes through common ownership of the means of
production was a delusive dream.Although I had never said this to
myself, the answer came from the depths of my heart and mind. It seemed perfectly
clear, once the question was boldly put, that 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. I did not need any additional
experiments such as that in Nazi Germany, or in England, or the obvious drift in other
countries, to convince me. I was sure that the whole idea of extending freedom, or
justice, or equality, or any other civilized value, to the lower classes through common
ownership of the means of production was a delusive dream, a bubble that had taken
over a century to burst.

I have never had any hesitations or regrets about the decision—only about the
unconscionably long time it took me to reach it. When I am denounced as a turncoat
by the true believers it does indeed bring a blush to my cheek, but only because it took
me so long to turn my coat. I sadly regret the precious twenty years I spent muddling
and messing around with this idea, which with enough mental clarity and moral force
I might have seen through when I went to Russia in 1922.

This present book contains my principal conclusions, or the principal things I have
learned politically, since making that decision. I imagine some of its readers will echo
the remark of Upton Sinclair in a recent letter, that I have merely “gone from one
extreme to the other.” I think, on the contrary, that the step is shorter from hard-
headed class-struggle socialism to a firm defense of the free-market economy than to
the old wishful notion of a high-minded slide into utopia. It is a straighter step to take.
The struggle is still for freedom; the main facts are still economic; the arch-enemy is
still the soft-headed idealist who refuses to face facts.

An excerpt from Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955).

Max Forrester Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer
on literature, philosophy and society; a poet, and a prominent political activist. He
supported socialism early in his career, however, Eastman changed his views,
becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a
nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies.
Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while
remaining an atheist and independent thinker.