Revolution's Evolution

TO THE FINLAND STATION--Edmund Wilson--Harcourt, Brace ($4).

The Finland Station is a shabby, grey and pink stucco building. Here trains from free Finland arrive in Leningrad. Here, on the night of April 16, 1917, arrived Vladimir Hitch Lenin. He was late: like most Russian trains, even the train bringing Lenin to the Revolution was not on time.

Lenin spoke in his harsh, rasping voice to the crowd. "Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers, I ... greet you as the advance guard of the international proletarian army. . . . Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian revolution . . . has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch. . .. Long live the International Social Revolution!" Then an armored car took him to revolutionary headquarters.

The Finland Station is also a symbol. Here, in the person of Lenin, socialism first issued from the dank sub-cellars of contemporary society, where like an exterminating virus it had developed in the dark. Here socialism first ceased to be merely a theory and became a political reality. Here it prepared to master a great State, rule 170,000,000 people. But Lenin was wrong about the world revolution. It was not until 20 years later that three variants of socialism--Stalinism, Naziism, Fascism--were to combine under German leadership in a world revolution against democratic, capitalist civilization.

Critic Edmund Wilson (Axel's Castle) became interested in the historical evolution of socialism some years ago, has had the present book in mind for six years. To the Finland Station is a study of the slow development of socialist ideas. His purpose is to explore the origins of socialist thought, to trace its tortuous course up to the time it became a political power. He describes this development in terms of the men who transformed it, interlacing a biography of ideas with the biography of the men who held them.

Wilson finds the starting point of socialist historical thinking in a little-known book--Principles of a New Science Dealing with the Nature of Nations, Through Which Are Shown Also New Principles of the Natural Law of Peoples. The author was an obscure, cranky, 18th-Century Neapolitan, Giovanni Battista Vico. Vico had read Francis Bacon. He decided that it was possible to apply to the study of human history the scientific methods Bacon applied to nature. Hitherto history had been written in terms of the lives of great men, as a chronicle of unusual events, as a show directed by God. Vico believed that societies are shaped by their origins and environment, that like men they grow and wane.

Young French Historian Jules Michelet, a poor printer's son born in 1798, after the French Revolution, was inspired by Vico. Wrote Michelet: "... I was seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle." This frenzied intoxication, coupled with an idea that Vico did not live long enough to share--the idea of progress--lasted Michelet through a lifetime of historical writing.

Shortly before the 1848 revolution, Michelet also wrote a hymn of hate, The People. In it he described French society as a series of mutually ferocious classes. The debt-ridden peasant envies the factory worker. The factory worker envies the skilled worker. The skilled worker has "bourgeois aspirations." The bank-ridden bourgeois drives his workers, hates them as the uncertain element in production. The workers hate the foreman. The merchant hates his customers. The leisure class hates everybody, lives in constant fear of communism.

In France of 1848 they had good reason to. The earlier socialists, Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, Fourier, were really trying to create a more Christian life. With their socialist communities, workshops and phalansteries, they hoped to convert the world by good example. Most of the good examples came to life in the U. S., usually died a quick death, sometimes lingered like the Oneida Community or the Fourierist phalanstery near Red Bank, N. J. There the remnants of transcendental Brook Farm migrated. There Author Alexander Woollcott was born.

But more violent theories of socialism were already supplanting these gentle persuaders whom Karl Marx contemptuously dubbed "the Utopians." P.J. Proudhon, self-taught son of a barrelmaker, declared: "Property is theft." Burly, bearded Russian Michael Bakunin was transmuting his biologic impotence into an ardent anarchism-of-the-deed that longed to send the whole world up in smoke. "The desire to destroy," wrote Bakunin, "is also a creative desire." Finding some peasants milling around a German castle one day, he hopped out of his carriage, filled them so quickly with creative desire that when he took his seat again, the castle was burning on four sides.

The men who turned socialist theory into a military crusade of the working class against the middle class were Karl Marx, atheist offspring of several long lines of respected rabbis, and Friedrich Engels, amiable son of a prosperous Rhenish textile tycoon. Marx brought to this crusade a stupendous knowledge of Hegelian philosophy, a brilliant economic mind, trenchant political discernment, a complete inability to earn a living, a perfect willingness to let Friend Engels earn one for him. Marx was also one of the most vituperative geniuses who ever lived. Favorite Marxian epithets for friends and foes alike: Dog! Bedbug! Swine! Pot! Blockhead! Cow! Says Author Wilson: "As the years go on, the word Esel (jackass) seems almost to become synonymous with human being."

In 1848 these two declared class war on society in the Communist Manifesto, a sardonic paean to the achievements of capitalism, a slashing indictment of its motives, methods and results, a rousing shout to the proletariat to throw off its chains. Meanwhile Marx organized the First International, fought everybody else who tried to suggest anything, wrecked it when he could no longer control it. Says Wilson: "Marx was incapable of imagining democracy at all. He had been bred in an authoritarian country. . . ."

During some 30 of his 65 years, Marx relentlessly probed the body of capitalism, looking for the morbid spots. Guided by a rast, somewhat unaccountable irascibility, implicated by attacks of boils, carbuncles,* rheumatism, influenza, ophthalmia, toothache, enlarged liver and creditors, he autopsied (in Das Kapital) the structure and mechanics of capitalism as it had never been autopsied before. He deduced that while it is right and even heroic for the proletariat to expropriate, jail and shoot the bourgeoisie, it is a social crime for the bourgeoisie to make money.

With Marx and Engels, socialism reached test-tube maturity. But the man who perfected the bacterial warfare whereby the body of capitalism was to be infected was Lenin. In 1902 he clearly outlined his method in a book, What Is To Be Done? In 1917 he interrupted his writing of The State and Revolution with the words: "It is pleasanter and more useful to live through the experience of a revolution than to write about it." He went through it.

The same moral debilitation that made the Russian Revolution possible makes conservatives everywhere fatally incurious about their would-be supplanters. They disdain to understand revolutionary theory, aims, organization, tactics, personnel. Because it makes Marxist theory, aims and tactics intelligible to any literate non-Marxist mind, To the Finland Station is an invaluable book. It is an advantage that, like Milton with the character of Satan, Author Wilson is half in love with the human side of the curious specimens he describes.

*Marx once wrote Engels: "I hope that the bourgeoisie as long as they live will have cause to remember my carbuncles."

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