When socialists start studying, they stop being socialists

When we study the works of certain thinkers, philosophers and intellectuals, we realize that many of them, in the later stages of their lives, began to defend concepts, ideas and proposals that can be considered vastly different from everything they defended during their youth.

In fact, living is about developing, renewing oneself constantly, having the courage to challenge one’s own worldview, recognizing mistakes and not being afraid to change one’s mind when fully realizing that a certain concept previously defended can be categorically proven to be false or a common sense fallacy. Such is the history of some thinkers, economists and academics, who began their intellectual life on the wrong path, but eventually corrected themselves by walking the right track.

Many of these individuals changed so radically that their later works bear no resemblance to their early publications. It is extremely interesting to analyze the lives and intellectual trajectories of these people to understand what they stood for, at what stage in their lives they began to defend a completely different system of beliefs, and what led them to change their worldview.

The celebrated American writer Max Eastman (1883–1969) is arguably one of the most interesting cases of an intellectual who radically changed his personal beliefs, committing himself to defending everything he had previously condemned, and vehemently condemning everything he had previously defended.

But who was Max Eastman?

Max Eastman was an American poet, intellectual, and political activist who became well-known for his radical defense of socialism, publishing revolutionary articles, pamphlets, and treatises that were sincere and passionate apologies of communism. An inveterate Marxist in his youth, Max Eastman even spent time in the Soviet Union in the early 1920’s.

Extremely committed to spreading the socialist ideals, Max Eastman did everything in his power to help his colleagues and ideological comrades. Always enthusiastic, he was the one who organized the campaign that raised money to send the socialist John Reed (1887–1920) — who would become world famous for his account of the Russian Revolution, a book titled Ten Days That Shook the World — to the Soviet Union, where he himself would go shortly thereafter.

A staunch advocate of revolutionary ideals, Max Eastman edited several socialist periodicals (most of them short-lived and with limited circulation) and was an active member of the generation of left-wing intellectuals who congregated in Greenwich Village. Once in Soviet territory, Max Eastman met Leon Trotsky personally, which made him even more determined to spread Marxist revolutionary ideals in the United States.

After learning about the realities of life in the Soviet Union, however, Max Eastman decided to return to the United States. In 1929, shortly after the outbreak of the Great Depression, Max Eastman found himself in circumstances that would ultimately bring about a profound change in his worldview and his intellectual output.

Always restless, curious and hungry for knowledge, Max Eastman began to study economics in more depth and realized that state interventionism did nothing to improve people’s quality of life. Along the way, it was only a matter of time before he came into contact with the works of Mises and Hayek, which ended up being a turning point in his life as an intellectual and political activist.

Initially contaminated by the socialist prejudice against the free market, Max Eastman did not allow himself to be intimidated by the restricted intellectual horizon of his peers. Determined to embark on the arduous path of knowledge, even if it cost him his pride, Max Eastman decided to do what few socialists are willing to do: he began to study economics with dedication and seriousness. He set out to read more and more books on free market economics. He began to read the classical liberals and the history of liberalism with great interest. He devoured books and articles. And as he delved deeper into his studies of economics, it didn’t take long for Max Eastman to abandon socialism altogether, eventually becoming an ardent apologist of the free market.

And why did he do this? Because a serious study of economics makes any person see what really produces prosperity and wealth in a society. And it is definitely not state interventionism, central banks or artificial credit stimulus. Nor is it a philosophy as irrational and unhealthy as Marxism.

As time went by, Max Eastman also realized that the socialism he had once defended with strong conviction was not producing good results. Unlike many of his fellow leftist believers, however, Max Eastman didn’t try to pretend that the Soviet Union had become a paradise. Quite the opposite: the nation ruled by Stalin had become a source of deep disgust and disappointment. It hadn’t emancipated the working class, nor created adequate living conditions for the population. And he was willing to admit that. His intellectual honesty did not allow him to be false, dissimulated or hypocritical.

A period of deep, dedicated study and much analysis caused Max Eastman to radically change his belief system and convictions. Consequently, the books, treatises and essays that he published later in his life were nothing like anything he had published in his youth. In 1939, he published Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in Socialism and in 1940, he published Marxism: Is It a Science?

In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. These titles, in turn, contrasted greatly with almost everything he had published in his socialist phase, of which it is possible to highlight titles such as Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth, published in 1925, and Since Lenin Died, also published in 1925. In 1927, he published Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution.

But why did Max Eastman eventually changed his thinking and worldview so radically? After all, it is quite unusual for someone who was a socialist activist to become a staunch apologist for the free market.

Unfortunately, this is unusual, but it shouldn’t be. The fact is that the sincere search for truth, combined with the correct application of logic and reason, led Max Eastman to radically change his position, which invariably led him to the most correct path. This is a natural consequence of anyone who has the virtue of intellectual honesty. Unfortunately, as we can see, this is a very rare virtue.

Much study and careful observation of reality made Max Eastman see the truth. After seeing the reality of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s dictatorship — unlike many of his compatriots —, Max Eastman didn’t try to pretend that socialist Russia was some kind of paradise on Earth. He didn’t try to pretend that poverty, misery and hunger didn’t exist in the Soviet Union. He didn’t  try to pretend that the gulags didn’t exist. Serious study, combined with a realistic perception of the facts, made Max Eastman reject all his ideological fantasies in favor of the truth.

Although it is a commendable attitude, this is something that most intellectuals are incapable of achieving, because they do not possess the necessary virtues. Without a shadow of a doubt, it is necessary to possess qualities such as humility, intellectual honesty and courage to recognize reality, admit past mistakes, change one’s personal belief system and take a stand for what is right.

When he truly understood what true economics really is and how it works, Max Eastman not only renounced his socialist past in a resounding manner, but he also began to fight socialism with extreme determination. Although he remained an atheist his entire life, Max Eastman — through a serious and dedicated study of economics — transformed himself from a revolutionary socialist into an enlightened liberal conservative who became a staunch defender of true economics and the free market.

Max Eastman learned that government centralization is a political evil that causes poverty, and that only a truly free and competitive market can produce wealth and prosperity. The poor do not find redemption through socialism. They are simply used when it is convenient and promptly discarded after the revolution.

He also learned that the paternalistic state, contrary to what socialism promises, uses its power to make the individual a hostage of its public policies. And through this power, the state has full capacity to reduce the individual to nothing. Socialism promises to emancipate the individuals, but in practice, transforms them all into slaves of the state. Max Eastman understood that only a truly free market is capable of granting real social and economic power to the individual.

Fortunately, Max Eastman was not the only example of a socialist intellectual who decided to sincerely seek the truth, making full use of logic, reason and his mental faculties, to arrive at a concrete understanding of reality.

The economist and public intellectual Thomas Sowell (currently, 94 years old) had a similar trajectory. When he began his academic career in the 1950’s, he was an inveterate Marxist. He remained so for ten years.

Yet, despite the Marxist phase that characterized his academic years, Thomas Sowell remained an avid and eclectic reader, reading all kinds of books. He eventually read liberal authors and ended up with Milton Friedman as his academic mentor. An in-depth study of the nature of the minimum wage and a brief stint as a government employee led Sowell to question Marxist ideology, and eventually to dismiss it altogether as pseudoscience.

Although relatively few, there are other examples of intellectuals who eventually abandoned Marxism and began to vehemently combat socialist concepts and ideas. However, not all of them did so for the same reason.

While some intellectuals followed the path of economics, others suffered significant spiritual crises, not to mention those who were struck by existential crises of conscience. In the vast ocean of truth, real economic science represents a foundation on which rests logic, the reason that precedes human action, the combination of productive work in voluntary organizations, and true market ethics. But insidious ideologies like Marxism can be attacked and defeated on many fronts.

African-American author Claude McKay (1890–1948), born in Jamaica, was an ardent communist throughout his youth. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he became friends with revolutionaries such as Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin. Late in his life, however, he suffered a profound spiritual crisis that led him to convert to Catholicism and abandon all the worldly and secular philosophies that had guided his life up until that point. After his conversion, Claude McKay was shunned by many of his former intellectual companions.

Between the 1920’s and the 1950’s, the Soviet Union was considered a kind of sacred cow by the world’s intellectual elite. It was practically forbidden to criticize the “socialist paradise” for any reason. For anyone to be accepted in Western intellectual and academic circles, worshiping the Soviet Union and considering it the political consolidation of paradise on Earth was practically an obligation. The same is true today with regard to the progressive woke ideology. Anyone who wants a career in academia, in the visual arts, in the movie industry or in literature — among many other areas — must adopt the fashionable ideologies of the establishment.

However, the unconditional celebration of the Soviet Union was not unanimous. Not all intellectuals were submissive cowards who accepted without hesitation the impositions of the academic status quo of the time. A few brave and combative thinkers were bold enough to speak out and express their opinions, no matter how unpopular they could be. True free thinkers —no matter how few they would be — did not allow themselves to be intimidated.

Although he remained a left-wing activist throughout his life (as a social democrat), the French writer Albert Camus (1913–1960) clashed with the left-wing militancy of his time when he openly declared that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime and that he was in radical and uncompromising opposition to this type of government.

By describing the Soviet Union as a dictatorship, Albert Camus became extremely unpopular among his peers and became embroiled in a bitter controversy with a fellow countryman, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), publicly known as an ardent apologist for the Soviets. Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were widely known as the two greatest icons of existentialism of that generation, but they stood on very different grounds in terms of political ideology.

Like Max Eastman, Albert Camus, quite rightly so, also chose not to pretend that the Soviet Union was a paradise. He certainly lost prestige and opportunities for wide academic acclaim, as an inevitable consequence of his controversial statements. But the truth, for him, was much more important than any worldly and fleeting glory. This says a lot about his character, convictions and personality.

In this world, we will find all kinds of men. Unfortunately, men of high moral stature are the scarcest. In fact, courageous and virtuous men — humble enough to correct themselves when they are wrong, and always ready to fight a colossal battle in the name of truth — will always be the exception, and not the general rule. The comfort provided by lies and the mediocrity