Growing up as a pink diaper baby and later studying Russian in college, I graduated as an anti-Communist leftist. Unlike my fellow antiwar protesters, I did not regard Communists as “liberals in a hurry” or as the left-wing of a common socialist movement but instead viewed them as an enemy whose values differed fundamentally from my own. As I learned from my study of the USSR, Leninists similarly considered themselves distinct and regarded other socialists as “useful idiots.”
Communists triumphed in Russia not because of a popular uprising, but through a coup staged by a small group of disciplined, armed intellectuals ready to deploy maximal violence. They succeeded because liberals, anarchists, populist socialist revolutionaries, and other Marxists resisted them only when it was too late. “Condemn terror?” indignantly asked Kadet leader Ivan Petrunkevich. “That would be the moral death of our party!” The phrase “No enemies to the left!” became an article of faith exploited by Lenin, who was unprincipled on principle.
In the 1960s and ’70s, I was surprised that my liberal friends preferred to align with Communists—whose core beliefs they rejected—over conservatives who differed only on policy details. Better those a mile to one’s left than an inch to one’s right! This identity politics made it psychologically impossible for someone to join the right. Is this why liberal Democrats support Hasan Piker, who praises Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China? More terrifying than Abdul El-Sayed, Graham Platner, and Zohran Mamdani is the willingness of those neither totalitarians nor antisemites to endorse them. This support may enable their eventual triumph.
Are there any leftists willing to condemn totalitarians? Paul Mason’s new book, Reds: A Global History of Communism, shows there is at least one. Offering a selective but not irresponsible history of Communist and revolutionary ideas, it urges fellow socialists not to repeat the mistakes that cost millions of lives. Although he celebrates Marx, Mason calls on his peers to confront Communist crimes to prevent their recurrence. How many failures must occur before the argument that real communism has never been tried ceases to work?
“There is no guarantee this [Communist disaster] can’t happen again,” Mason urges. “Join any left-wing protest march in the West and you’ll see a minority who believe China’s system is better than ours. Worse, while Communist parties during the Cold War denied Soviet crimes, some today openly defend them.” The Communists of my childhood refused to accept Stalin’s and Mao’s murders—Piker admits and supports them.
Understanding why totalitarianism happened, Mason observes, is “our best guarantee that it does not return.” “The Soviet Union in the 1930s was a moral abyss our twenty-first-century brains struggle to comprehend,” he adds. “The point of retelling this story should be obvious: to stop it from happening again.”
Yet few surviving Communists have shown interest in the history of their own system. For those who delve into primary sources, confronting one’s moral failure becomes unavoidable. Even non-Communist leftists often fail to grasp that “there is no guarantee this can’t happen again.”
Mason’s work differs from most histories because it is written by someone reasonably well informed and intellectually honest yet sympathetic to Marx. Like others who seek to end inequality and needless hierarchy, he hopes for a transition beyond the market and private property—perhaps through powerful computers or artificial intelligence—to avoid totalitarianism. Despite his humane intentions, Mason has not recognized that without private property and markets, power concentrates in so few hands that its abuse becomes inevitable.
The early portions of Reds examine pre-Marxist utopian socialists to identify catastrophic mistakes later replicated by Communists. Saint-Simon’s idea that well-educated intellectuals and technocrats should organize society strikes Mason as especially dangerous—a point Bakunin and other anti-Marxist anarchists stressed. But for Mason, the Marx Bakunin faulted and the Soviets canonized was not true Marx. He favors what the Soviets called Marx’s “pre-Marxist” phase—such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844—when Marx could still speak of a human essence beyond economics and assume individual freedom was desirable.
As there is wishful thinking, Mason exhibits it in his reading. Far from a dogmatist, Mason’s Marx “continually challenged his own conclusions and refused to build a finished system.” From 1844 onward, Marxism became a project of individual freedom—not the negation of Enlightenment philosophy but its latest expression,” he writes. Despite Marx’s claim, such qualifications reveal how much Mason’s Marx differs from both Marxist regimes and Marx himself.
Mason applauds Walter Benjamin’s view that Marxism is “the secular continuation of the Judeo-Christian demand for a just conclusion to human history.” But what about specifically Marxist ideas that distinguish it from other inheritors of Judeo-Christian tradition, like liberalism? For Mason, they are unimportant: “Its mental tools—the dialectic and the materialist conception of history—are puny compared to today’s systems theories and computational methods.” Why call oneself a Marxist if these distinctions are so minimal?
Mason’s answer seems to be that a few ideas are valid. He embraces Marx’s labor theory of value (true value is the amount of labor needed to produce something) and his concept of “surplus value” (what is unjustly taken from workers by capitalists), which together define exploitation objectively, as mainstream economics does not. “When we put a price on a commodity,” Mason observes along with Marx, “we are guessing the labor time needed to produce it. But price and value differ: when we buy something, we know the price; but it is only a guess at the amount of value.” Marx calls this the “law of value” and shows how surplus value is extracted through coercion.
Mason therefore struggles to explain the Soviet economy’s failure, where planners set prices based on labor theory. Without changing the labor input, prices remained static—meaning shifts in demand couldn’t adjust supply. This led to warehouses filled with unneeded goods while people lined up for basics. Without a market—which Mason would abolish—no other outcome is possible.
By the same token, Mason claims that “as a description of capitalism, the [Communist] Manifesto’s relevance is undeniable today: we face every human relationship reduced to the ‘naked cash nexus.’” Every human relationship?
If Mason were consistent in his anti-Stalinism, he would not regret that Stalin’s foreign policy hurt the French Communist Party—since it shared Stalin’s ideology and was directly controlled by Moscow. Instead, Mason cites Soviet economic figures as if they were reliable when, in fact, constant self-defensive lies left even Soviet leaders in the dark.
Reds: A Global History of Communism
by Paul Mason
Scribner, 544 pages, $32
Gary Saul Morson is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University and author, most recently, of Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard).