“For the Marxists are racing motorists.” Wittgenstein on Max Eastman and on “the sound idea in Marx’s thinking”

Abstract: The present paper tries to give a few hints about how Wittgenstein viewed Marx and Marxism. This is no easy task: even the non-autograph sources are rather sparse. Rush Rhees remembers to have briefly discussed Max Eastman's Marxism: Is it Science? with Wittgenstein in 1943. The main issues of this book – religion, science, engineering – are to be found in Wittgenstein's critical discussion of Marxism. An engineer himself, he is inspired by Eastman's view of up-to-date Marxists as revolutionary engineers, if only to measure their distance from his own philosophy. Moreover, he upsets the diagnosis of Marxism: Is it Science?: Eastman's view of Marxism as a materialistic religion that must be made more scientific is a misunderstanding.