To the Finland Station, by Edmund Wilson

[p023] To the Finland Station. By Edmund Wilson. Fontana, 7s. 6d. Amid all the boring and respectable paper-back reprints, here is an old acquaintance from the 1930s. Edmund Wilson is a distinguished American literary critic of that generation which was young just after the First World War and which went along with the Socialist move- ment for a short spell. Like so many others, he withdrew to his ivory tower in the black period after the Popular Fronts had led to defeats and opened the road to World War Two. The book is an attempt to put readably between covers the historical development of ideas which led to Marxism and culminated in the arrival of Lenin in Petrograd (at the ‘Finland Station’ terminus) in April 1917 to make his decisive interven- tion in history. There is more to the task than Wilson realized. The book is a mixture of interesting facts with crass but nowadays popular misconceptions about Marxism. The facts come from Wilson’s wide reading. The mis- understandings came from more complex origins, from having no deep personal experience of the Marxist movement and of class sttuggle, and from accepting as good coin much of the base stuff that ‘university hacks trot out against Marxism every successive generation. Wilson is in fact in the position of using the ideas of Marx and Lenin to explain what happened, and then repudiating the foundations of Marxism. If, as he says, dialectical materialism is no more than a religious dogma, not only must the whole business have been an accident, but, even worse for Wilson, his whole book is nonsense! He is an ancestor of our late- lamented ‘New Left’. Like Laski and G. D. H. Cole, he wanted to leave out the ‘dogmatic’ parts of Marxism like dialectical materialism and surplus value, which pronounce the decom of reformism and offer a planned strategy of struggle for power. Sure enough, a post-face dated 1940 draws the conclusion that the disaster of Stalinism was all the fault of the Bolshevik form of organization and the proletarian dictatorship. Could anything be more banal, or less help to workers in struggle? Anyone who goes this road must conclude that the Soviet Union is not worth defending, that the October Revolution was not worth the trouble, and socialism is impossible. Wilson shows’ great human sympathy with the struggles of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, and could pose as a progressive as long as this went no further than drawing-room discussion. And he can write well. But all that is good in this book you can find better in Mehring’s Karl Marx: His Life and Work; in the essay on ‘Marxism and History’ in Marxism and Modern Thought (ed. Bukharin, 1935); and in Deutscher’s The Prophet Armed. The ‘analysis you can make up for yourself by a random combination of the words ‘dogmatism’, ‘dictatorship’ and ‘new thinking’. J.A. Bloodbath