Max Eastman, a dedicated socialist activist as a young man, wrote a book about what he saw as the failures of socialism in 1955 at the age of 72. In it he does a critical expose socialism and what it actually is. I'm going to post one short chapter that is titled the same as this thread is. In Eastman has a lot to say about the morality of socialism, Marxism in particular, and the leaders of the Marxist/socialist movement.
I'm posting this because of all the misinformation that is published about this subject. It's everywhere and the raw truth about it is not often told.
This book is given away freely on the internet. I have have researched the copyright info on it, and as far as I can tell the copyright expired when the copyright holder, the owner of the company that first published it, died. The chapter I'm quoting is 8 pages long so I will be posting 2 pages per post.
I'm posting this because of all the misinformation that is published about this subject. It's everywhere and the raw truth about it is not often told.
This book is given away freely on the internet. I have have researched the copyright info on it, and as far as I can tell the copyright expired when the copyright holder, the owner of the company that first published it, died. The chapter I'm quoting is 8 pages long so I will be posting 2 pages per post.
SINCE Stalin's death it has become necessary
to find a new focus for our hostility to the unscrupulous and
inhuman behavior of the Communists. I wish it might be
focused on the real cause of the trouble: Marxism. Much
force of argument is wasted among Western intellectuals
through a wish to exempt Marx from responsibility for this re--
tum to barbarism. Realpolitik in the evil sense was certainly
not born with Marx. But the peculiar thing we are up against,
the casting aside of moral standards by people specializ-
ing in the quest of ideal human relations, was born with
Marx. He is the fountain source of the mores as well as the
economics of the Russian Bolsheviks, and is the godfather of
the delinquent liberals in all lands.
The notion of Marx as a benign and noble brooder over
man's hopes and sorrows, who would be "horrified" at the'
tricks and duplicities of present-day Communists, is as false
as it is widespread. Marx had a bad character. His best
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eulogists can hardly think up a virtue to ascribe to him-ex-
cept, indeed, tenacity and moral courage. If he ever per-
formed a generous act, it is not to be found in the record. He
was a totally undisciplined, vain, slovenly, and egotistical
spoiled child. He was ready at the drop of a hat with spite-
ful hate. He could be devious, disloyal, snobbish, anti-
democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro. He was by habit a
sponge, an intriguer, a tyrannical bigot who would rather
wreck his party than see it succeed under another leader.
All these traits are clear in the records of his life, and above
all in his private correspondence with his alter ego and in-
exhaustible sugar-daddy, Friedrich Engels. There are bit~ in
this correspondence so revolting to a person of democratic
sensibility that they had to be suppressed to keep the myth
of the great-hearted Karl Marx, champion of the downtrod-
den and of human brotherhood, alive at all. To give one
example: Ferdinand Lassalle, who was eclipsing Marx as
leader of a genuine working class movement in Germany,
they discovered to be not only a Jew whom they called
"Baron Izzy," "oi-oi, the great Lassalle," "the little Jew,"
'''the little kike," "Jew Braun," "Izzy the bounder," etc., but
also "a Jewish ******." "It is perfectly obvious," Marx wrote,
"from the shape of his head and the way his hair grows that
he is descended from the Negroes who joined Moses on the
journey out of Egypt, unless perhaps his mother or his grand-
mother had relations with a ******." Only the Russian Bol-
sheviks, who went in for the religion of immoralism with a
barbaric candor impossible to an urbane European, had the
hardihood to publish these letters unexpurgated.
I use the word religion in a precise sense. Although he
dismissed God as a hoax and the heavenly paradise as a de-
coy, Marx was not by nature skeptical or experimental. His
habits of thought demanded a belief both in paradise and
in a power that would surely lead us to it. He located his
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