Reds: A Global History of Communism Author: Paul MasonISBN-13: 978-1035905904Publisher: ApolloGuideline Price: £30; 592ppPaul Mason’s ambitious history of communism is driven by the author’s frustration with a strand of leftism, more evident now than in decades, which is “prepared to admit that Stalin and Mao killed millions of people” but to assert that “it was worth it” for the sake of economic development. What might be called the “you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs” school of socialism does certainly exist, particularly if not exclusively, online. Its proponents occasionally fall back on Bertholt Brecht’s lament that “we who wished to lay the foundations for gentleness/could not ourselves be gentle”. The problem with this is that it can cover everything from being abrasive to someone at a union meeting to mass murder, though thankfully many of its proponents rarely get beyond being rude online to people they’ve never met. Mason understands why some are still drawn to varieties of Marxism, admitting that “capitalism is broken, chaotic, and spiralling towards authoritarianism, penury and war … liberal democracy is imploding. Climate change is generating severe social stress; the Western economic model is producing extreme inequality; debt hangs like a millstone around the necks of once dynamic countries, and nuclear war - unthinkable for three generations - is a present danger.”Mason also argues that an alternative, “stabilising the climate while raising billions of people out of poverty; deepening democracy while harnessing information technology for human good”, is possible. But he asserts that any movement for social change will not succeed if it is tied to failed dogmas and allied to authoritarian governments, some of whom still claim to be Marxist. Mason is not writing a critique of communism from the right; he lauds what he calls the “beautiful troublemakers the revolutionary left produced - liminal figures like Dimitrieff, Kollontai, Gramsci, Bogdanov, Chen Duxiu and Mariátegui - (who) always saw the people themselves, in their complexity and hope, as the yardstick against which to judge political theory”. But, aside from asserting that historically “it was anarcho-syndicalism and left social democracy, not Bolshevism, that expressed working-class consciousness in its most authentic form”, he is vague about what a transformative project would entail. More problematically, Mason is concerned to prevent control of history being seized by those, notably the Chinese Communist Party, who he fears are successfully rewriting it. The growing influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) looms large over this account, though it is unlikely China’s rulers, who I suspect have bigger fish to fry, are that concerned about what he writes. While this book should provoke discussion, some of Mason’s potential audience may also be inured to his opinions. In the last decade he has burned a lot of left-wing bridges. In 2007 he published Live Working or Die Fighting, a celebratory account of working-class self-organisation through the ages. The Northern Soul enthusiast from Lancashire, a miner’s son, espousing radical politics while business editor of BBC2’s Newsnight, made Mason an appealing poster boy. This was a period in which the British left was invigorated by the widespread questioning of neo-liberalism that the last recession produced. In 2012 Mason’s It’s Kicking Off Everywhere lauded this new generation of global revolt. Initially a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, Mason later clashed bitterly and repeatedly with former allies, particularly over foreign policy. He then backed Keir Starmer as Labour leader and unsuccessfully sought a parliamentary nomination himself. Hence Mason’s critics will already have their minds made up about Reds. That is a pity, because while his frustration with a section of the left forms a backdrop to this study, he does not use the book to settle scores. He writes well, despite occasional anachronisms and lapses into journalese, and his very readable narrative raises important questions. Mason tracks the evolution of communist ideas from Saint-Simon and Babeuf, through Owen and Fourier, Blanqui and Bakunin, on to Marx and Engels. These are conveyed in an understandable fashion with an obvious enthusiasm for popular movements from below, the Paris Commune for example offering a moment when “for women, children, people of colour and sex workers, the chains were broken”. He clearly admires mass parties that actually engaged with everyday working-class life, such as the German SPD. There is a long discussion of the development of Russian Marxism, the debates between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries, the impact of the Great War and the two revolutions of 1917. Mason asserts that “the masses followed the Bolsheviks because they delivered the tangible experience of control. To manage your own factory; command your own regiment; dig your hands into soil that you can for the first time call your own - these were things that millions of working people were prepared to risk everything for”. So Stalinism was not inevitable and while the actions of Lenin and others made it more likely, it represented a “qualitative evolution beyond Leninism”. The global appeal of the Bolshevik revolution is noted but not really given enough attention. To understand it, we need to look at those such as the workers in Knocklong, Co Limerick, who took over their creamery in 1920 and announced that “we intend to shake & shatter the foundations of Boss Control, by demonstrating working class consciousness ability to control to industry”. (Mason briefly mentions Ireland in the context of 1916 but those wishing to know more should look at Conor Kostick’s Revolution in Ireland and Emmet O’Connor’s Reds and the Green). Mason does devote welcome attention to the development of Chinese communism, noting how Mao carved out a different path to the Soviet leadership in face of resistance to Japanese occupation. He recognises that the history of communism includes bravery, idealism and working-class self-sacrifice. Communists everywhere gained huge credibility in leading resistance to fascism, for instance. Mason attempts a measured balance sheet on the role of communists during the second World War, acknowledging that “thousands of communist resistance fighters met heroic deaths, creating a moral debt that we, in the present, must go on paying”. Yet he leaves no doubt about the appalling cost: the show trials, gulags, mass disappearances, famines, persecution of ethnic minorities, cynical duplicity and casual betrayal that were central to the experience of communism for much of the 20th century. He illustrates the human suffering with examples like that of Semen Kanatchikov, factory worker and veteran Bolshevik, who, along with hundreds of thousands of others, was murdered during the purges of the 1930s. Unfortunately, Mason’s concentration on the theoretical roots of Marxism means there is too little space for more detailed looks at communism in the postwar world. The significant events are certainly covered, but as the narrative jumps from country to country it can hardly do justice to the diversity of national experiences or the contending politics of individual communist parties. There is almost nothing on the Middle East, for example, where discussion of international communism’s support for Israel in 1948 might have at least raised a few eyebrows among modern Stalinist anti-Zionist obsessives. But overall Mason’s book repeatedly poses the question of how people can struggle against oppression in one sphere, yet justify it in another. For some, perhaps, it is “easy to sleep on another man’s wound”, but for others it would appear that the illusion of having allies among the big battalions is more important than the actual experience of working-class people in these societies themselves. While Mason does not really try to explain why a new generation might find Stalinism attractive, his narrative suggests at least some of the reasons: “the working class has been atomised; the political consciousness of most people is shaped by individualism and identity … it is the super-rich who have the capability to ‘alter humans on a mass scale’ not the left.” He might have added that the hypocrisy of governments arresting pensioners for protesting against genocide, while facilitating that very genocide, makes some question as to whether any moral difference exists between liberal democracy and its supposed enemies. But for all their genuflections towards Marxism, these 21st-century Stalinists are usually strangely bereft of materialist analysis, splitting the world into good and bad, writing off entire nations and ethnic groups as reactionary or progressive, rather than recognising classes or social forces as central. Their embracing of conspiracy theories and thinly veiled grant applications to despotic regimes actually represent the opposite of class politics. But the danger lies, not, as Mason seems to suggest, in a wholesale whitewashing of the Stalinist past. The PRC is almost certainly less interested in their fan boys in tiny western sects than in the cultivation of university heads and business people. Many of what Mason calls the “feral oligarchy of tech bros and crooks” admire how authoritarian China deals with tricky workplace issues, ignoring the Marxist iconography and recognising instead a hugely successful capitalist society. It is likely that the spirit of Mason’s “beautiful rebels” will increasingly be needed to defend basic democratic rights against authoritarians whose political labels may well be interchangeable. Further Reading Hotel Lux: an Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals by Maurice Casey (Footnote Press, 2024) A new way of looking at interwar communism, this is a fascinating story of friends and lovers, inspired by the belief that a new world was in the making. Seán Murray: Marxist-Leninist and Irish Socialist Republican by Seán Byers (Irish Academic Press, 2015) Murray, an IRA veteran from Co Antrim, helped bring Catholic and Protestant workers together in the Outdoor Relief protests of 1932, worked to build a movement in anti-communist Ireland, while struggling with the changing needs of the Soviet Union.‘Bitter with the Past, but Sweet with the Dream’: Communism in the African American Imaginary by Cathy Bergin (Leiden, 2015)Communism had a striking influence on some African Americans during the interwar period, vigorous opposition to racism attracting some to its banner. Bergin examines this through the work of black writers Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Chester Himes.