To the Finland Station (1940)

Highly recommended, a classic. This should be read by every intelligent reader. This book has special resonance today (in late 2017); economic considerations are the fundament of socialism, an attempt to imagine and institute a political system which could lessen the plight of the poor, of low-wage workers and those in unnecessarily onerous or dangerous jobs, as against economies operating in effect to satisfy the greed of the wealthy who benefit from those people and circumstances and enjoy political systems which evolved to sustain or increase the obvious inequities of wealth.

At issue is always how to institute a true socialist state in place of another. No nation has. Wilson offers thoughtful and closely reasoned criticism of the historical proponents of socialism, identifying not only their insight but also their incorrect assumptions and unsound reasoning, of which there is enough. He outlines a few former attempts at the setting up of Utopian communities, among dozens of which in the U.S. are listed in Wikipedia.

The world-wide concentration of wealth today is an obscenity ultimately warping nearly every human and civil standard, and entraining politics (and arguably media) within a corrupt golden feedback loop which might finally result in even an advanced country having hands-down the most ignorant and dangerous elected leaders in its history, in further increasing the concentration of wealth by tax laws and other means even when unpopular, and in stifling meaningful institutional oversight and balance, abetted perhaps by methodical media misdirection and lack of candor in support of short-sighted policies further enriching the wealthy few at the expense of the many economically insecure.

That is a disheartening prospect even to a lifelong conservative concerned deeply both with this possibility and with unpredictable reactions to it (call it dialectic), from which one hopes revolutionary history is not to be repeated with its usual blood and guts. An alert and informed public would help, where voting is practiced. Reading this book is recommended. It is very well written and enjoyable to read. ( )

a bit of a trudge. there are refreshing moments of evaluation and synthesis. ( )

Looks interesting although I am unsure about the USA angle...

History of the rise of socialism, from the French Revolution to the dawning of the Russian Revolution. All the standard caveats apply, and by the end of his writing the work Wilson knew the reality of the Soviet Union, but this is a worthwhile effort. The earlier chapters especially stand out. A historical work, not a political one. ( )

An interesting but flawed history of the intellectual and historical origins of socialism. Wilson makes the interesting decision to frame the ideas through the lives and biographies of their earliest practitioners.

The most interesting chapters are those in the very beginning, where Wilson recognizes the importance of the historical cycles of Giambattista Vico, and then traces them through the historians of the French Enlightenment, Michelet, who defined the Renaissance.

After him, we have Renan, who was among the foremost rationalist critics of Christianity and nationalism, then Taine, one of the first 'scientific' analysts of history, then the novelist Anatole France, who poked fun at the Church with a story about the baptism of penguins, and the Revolution with The Gods Are Athirst.

The origins of Socialism itself come from the French Revolutionary Babeuf, a sort of anarcho-communist, and Saint-Simon, a founder of a sort of technocratic sect, and his follower, Enfantin, who was among the first to theorize 'free love', some 130 years before the American counterculture. There are also brief sketches of American experiments, including Robert Owen, and the planned Oneida Community.

The bulk of the book, some two hundred pages, is devoted to the dual biographies of Marx and Engels, and some brief sketches of their theory. The biographical portions are superb, the theoretical analysis devoted to one or two lonely chapters. We see, briefly, 1848, the Paris Commune, the fiery Nechayev, and the Anarchists: Bakunin, Proudhon and Kropotkin. Wilson does recognize the chief tenets of Marxist thought as the Labor Theory of Value and Dialectical Materialism, and does fairly question them both.

The last chapters of the book are the most disappointing. The chapter on Lenin seems to be based almost wholly on early Soviet propaganda, and the Trotsky chapter is charming in its naive praise for him, solely arising from the fact that he is not Stalin. Although Wilson at least recognizes these mistakes in judgment in a tacked-on endnote.

What happens after this? What is the fate of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat? Trotsky's early judgment of the Soviet Union as a 'deformed bureaucratic state' seems to endure, and what undercurrents seem to best survive (again based on my very limited experience) are democratic socialism, anti-plutocracy, anti-globaliztion, anti-'scientific management', and the offspring of some Maoist 'Third-Worldism' socialism, which (justly) protests the abusive treatment of the Global South by the richer nations.

Although Wilson's overly high estimation of the fate of the revolution is misplaced, his most correct assertion on socialism may be this:

"Socialism by itself can create neither a political discipline nor a culture [...] Only the organic processes of society can make it possible to arrive at either. And it seems today as if only the man who has already enjoyed a good standard of living and become accustomed to a certain security will really fight for security and comfort. But then, it appears, on the other hand, that from the moment he has acquired these things, he is transformed into something quite other than Karl Marx's idea of a proletarian.

Marx could recognize as worthy of survival only those who had been unjustly degraded and those who rose naturally superior through intellect and moral authority. He had no key for appreciating the realities of a society in which men are really to some degree at liberty to make friends with one another indiscriminately or indiscriminately to bawl one another out - in other words, in which there is any actual approximation to that ideal of a classless society which it was the whole aim of his life to preach. And we must remember - unless we are willing to accept it as a simple act of faith in Scripture, as the people of the year 1000 expected the world to come to an end - that Karl Marx's catastrophic prophecy of the upshot of capitalist development, the big short circuit between the classes, is based primarily on psychological assumptions, which may or may not turn out to have been justified: the assumption that there can be no possible limit to the extent to which the people who live on profits will continue to remain unaware of or indifferent to the privations of the people who provide them. The Armageddon that Karl Marx tended to expect presupposed a situation which the employer and the employee were unable to make any contact whatever. [...]

In other words, Marx was incapable of imagining democracy at all."

But once again, we are seeing economic stratification, even in our democracies - or at least in the American education, health care system, living habits, taxation system. Neo-liberalism and financial conservatism have seen to that. Perhaps the Prophet staggers out of his grave once again. ( )