Vol. 9 No. 3 1942 - page 209

EASTMAN VS. FARRELL
209
race from the terrible dangers that this insidious and false "religion" may
cause it. In particular, he makes a frontal attack on the basic proposal
in the Marxist programme--the demand that the means of production he
socially owned. And he asks me where he has changed his values. Despite
the quotations from past writings which he has cited, he can easily answer
this question by a careful study of the "life-work" of a man named
Eastman.
At the present time, when he frames the -issue of socialism, he answers
his question by asking it.
In Socialism and Human Nature,
he wrote: "To
honest men with courage to face facts it is clear that Lenin's experiment
... failed." Thus, if one disagrees with him, one is fearful of the facts,
dishonest, or both. Part of his "facts" is the conclusion that, because the
Russian Revolution degenerated, the entire socialist programme must he
abandoned. In other words, he assumes that Russia furnished an adequate
historical testing ground for proving or disproving the validity of social–
ism.
He does not prove this assumption: he asserts it.
If
he is correct,
then the same argument can he made to demonstrate that democracy has
failed. Ever since the first World War, the curve of liberty in the world
has been declining. Democracy has lost out in one country after another.
There was a form of political democracy in Italy: fascism triumphed.
The Weimar Constitution used to he described as the most democratic one
in history. Hitler rose to power, and destroyed political democracy in
Germany. Further, his argument can he applied retroactively to demon–
strate that democracy also failed in France in the nineteenth century. Did
not both Napoleons rise on the ashes of democratic republics?
If
one
revolution, carried out in a backward and war-weary country, is a test of
the validity of socialism, why is more than a century of historic expe–
riences not a sufficient test for the theories of political democracy? The
logic of Eastman's position leads him away from both democracy and
socialism.
What reasons does he offer now to explain this failure of Marxism?
According to him, Marxism is a religion, derived from a German meta–
physician .named Hegel. Thanks to Hegel, Marxism became theological,
and this theology blinded
it
to the facts of human nature. Marxists did
not understand psychology. In order to establish this interpretation, he
appeals to what he calls scientific psychology. On examination, this turns
out to he largely the worn-out stuff I read long ago in my college text
hooks, mainly that of MacDougal. Eastman declares that the major Marx–
ists
did not understand the doctrines which were formulated in the instinct
school of psychology. Man is horn with definite instincts, which influence
his future conduct in a fairly definite and precise manner. And because
they do, there is an instinctive basis in human nature which makes it im–
possible ever to establish a socialist society. In particular, man's instincts
make it impossible to eliminate private property. And in our times, we
.must understand that private property is more than mere personal belong–
ings: this is the era of monopoly capitalism. Science, sad to say, has not
decisively proven Max Eastman's scientific psychology. Before Eastman
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