In the epigraph to his previous book, How to Stop Fascism (2021), Paul Mason recalls the anti-fascist lawyer and political scientist Karl Loewenstein’s observation that “history teaches us the deathlessness of ideas”. The quotation encapsulates a view of history shaped by the enduring power of ideas to transcend the contexts from which they emerge. In his latest work, Reds: A Global History of Communism, the author is animated by a similar conviction. He traces the history of communism as a political idea that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the era of capitalist triumphalism, before finding new expression in the state-directed alternative represented by contemporary China. In this respect, Reds – like the book that preceded it – is an urgent plea for reason and the importance of learning from the past in a time of crisis. But this time Mason’s ambitions are broader, and the breadth of his historical analysis is impressive. As he remarked when announcing the book, he set out to tell “the whole story” – a story that continually balances the opposing poles of hope and despair, heroism and horror. Beginning with the ideals of common property and social revolution in Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, and following the development of communist thought through the philosophies and revolutionary movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mason traces the idea’s long and turbulent trajectory with a strong narrative momentum. Across its 500 pages, he consistently demonstrates how the concepts that gave rise to communism have displayed a capacity for endurance despite the fact that, when translated into political practice, they repeatedly produced regimes marked by despotism, authoritarianism, and extraordinary human suffering.
In his account of how revolutionary ideas converged across different countries and through different thinkers, Mason is particularly adept at creating dramatic tension as history approaches its decisive moments. His chapter on the revolutions of 1848–49 is a case in point, foreshadowed by the cliffhanger ending to the previous section about Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. What follows is a compelling crescendo, animated by vivid accounts of the adventures of the revolution’s protagonists, such as Marx’s arrival in Paris in March 1848 and his rousing address to the Society for the Rights of Man, followed a year later by Bakunin’s arrival in Dresden, where he fought on the barricades before escaping alongside Richard Wagner. The result is consistently engaging.
There is, throughout, a clear sense of the subject’s enduring relevance. This is true both for the author himself and for his readers. For Mason, the memory of studying Marx in the British Museum Reading Room in the 1980s remains vivid, as does his engagement with Marx’s philosophy, notwithstanding its failure to anticipate the totalitarian forms it assumed in practice. At the same time, the book invites us to confront the continuing significance of these ideas in an age marked once again by political and economic upheaval. Mason’s conclusion, which emphasises the positive and decisive role of popular mass movements in the overthrow of communist regimes, offers a measure of hope. So too does his closing call for “a humane, democratic and sustainable path beyond class society”, however remote such a prospect may appear at the present moment.
Daria Santini is an independent scholar and the author of A Woman Named Edith: Emigre, Photographer and Secret Agent – The Extraordinary Life of Edith Tudor Hart.
