Books: "REDS: A Global History of Communism" By Paul Mason

 

REDS: A Global History of Communism

By Paul Mason

Scribner; hardcover, 544 pages; $32.00

Paul Mason in an award-winning journalist and labor movement activist living in London. He is a columnist at The New World and an adjunct fellow at the Council on Geostrategy. Previously, he was the economics editor at both BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News. He has authored seven books, including PostCapitalism, Rare Earth, and How to Stop Fascism.

Mason's new book, REDS, delivers the definitive history of communism around the world, from Renaissance England to 21st century China. What started as a political idea, a Utopian critique of early capitalism, transformed into a mass movement, and eventually into totalitarian regimes that covered half the earth.

This book comes along at a pivotal moment in history, as he equips a new generation with the history of communism, where it came from and how it failed. This is especially important as communist ideas are in vogue once again, as people all over the world find its ideas attractive.

Liberal capitalism appears to be faltering, global climate chaos is intensifying, and there are advances by the far right in Western democracies, so Mason writes this as a warning against the resurgence of an authoritarian left, and a plea for a progressive resistance to capitalism based on universal human values.

There were three revolutions in the late 18th century that changed the course of the Western world, starting with 1776, when the United States declared independence from Great Britain and became a republic. Then, the French people staged a revolution in 1789, which led to the execution of their king, war with the crowned heads of Europe, and terrorized the aristocracy. In 1791, in what is now Haiti, the black slaves of Saint-Domingue rebelled against their French colonial masters, which prompted Paris to abolish slavery three years later.

Mason writes of their impact, "Though undertaken in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, and 'self-evident rights, these revolutions posed profound questions about social justice. What use is liberty to the poor? What use is equality before the law when inequalities of wealth are growing? What place would be found in the fraternity for women, colonial subjects, and the urban poor? And if political rights are 'self-evident,' why aren't economic rights?

"Communism as a political ideology emerged as an answer to these questions. It was, at its birth, a critique of the outcome of the French Revolution - both from the standpoint of the masses, and of the Enlightenment ideals that has inspired it."

Mason charts communism's rise and fall, from the first barricades in Paris in the 1840s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and inflicted existential defeats on the autocracies of Russia, China, and their satellites. He shows how the story of capitalism is one of both heroism and horror, how workers and peasant activists fought against a system that failed them, and of the repression and famines inflicted by the regimes that were eventually installed.

There were four men who originated communism as a political movement, starting with what is likely the most famous, Karl Marx, who have it a philosophical foundation. There also was Frederich Engels, who took Marx's ideas and made it into a coherent orthodoxy; Louis-Auguste Blanqui, the French revolutionary who took Babeuf's doctrines into the proletariat era; and Mikhail Bakunin, the inventor of revolutionary anarchism.

Mason sees what we're living through now as on the scale of what enabled these four thinkers their rise, as the Western economic model is producing inequality on a massive scale, climate change is leading to severe social stress, debt is rising massively for countries all over, and nuclear war has returned as a danger.

"Faced with a crisis on this scale in the 1930s, millions of people put their faith in communism for a simple reason: every other alternative to fascism failed," Mason writes.

"There is no guarantee this can't happen again. Join any left-wing protest march in the West - for human rights, climate justice, or higher wages - and you will meet a minority of people who think China's system is better than ours. Worse, while communist parties during the Cold War denied the crimes of the Soviet regime, some of today's neo-Leninists openly defend them. On the far left, a new breed of activist is prepared to admit that Stalin and Mao killed millions of people, but to say 'it was worth it's for the sake of economic development or 'decolonization.'

"If, like me, you seek a different future - a sustainable, egalitarian, technologically rich, and democratic society centered on universal values - then understanding what communism was, why millions of people embraced it, and why it failed is more than an academic exercise. It is our best guarantee that it does not return.

REDS is one of the most thoughtful books you will read on this changing world, as Mason balances giving credence to why some people feel there is a massive need for change, while also dealing with the reality of what that could mean.