Paul Mason Archives - Aspects of History

Reds: A Global History of Communism, by Paul Mason

Α compelling account of an idea that has survived its political failures tracing communism from Plato and Thomas More through revolution, authoritarianism and the rise of contemporary China while asking what lessons its past holds for the present.

Daria Santini

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...

Reds: A Global History of Communism – A Conversation with Paul Mason

The historian examines with Daria Santini the deep historical roots of communism, the push and pull between Utopian ideals and authoritarianism, and the continued relevance of past communist movements in an era of Chinese ascendancy and debate over alternatives to capitalism.

Paul Mason

Welcome, Paul, to Aspects of History. Why did you choose to begin Reds: A Global History of Communism in antiquity rather than with Marx, Engels, or the Russian revolution? What do we miss when we treat communism as a purely modern phenomenon? Because before it was a...

Rethinking Communism’s History

Karl Marx was never the original architect of the communist tradition, which traces deeper roots from French revolutionary thought and the utopian ideals of Babeuf and Blanqui.

Paul Mason

There is, in the origin story of communism, something akin to what happens the first lines of the Book of Genesis. Left-wing politics in the 1830s are like the biblical “formless void”, with the early workers’ movement mesmerised by pointless speculative Utopias. Then...