Reflections on the Failure of Socialism

Reflections on the Failure of Socialism by Max Eastman

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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.