The most successful economy in the world is communist. The most successful political party in the world—the Communist Party of China (CPC)—has 100 million members and aims to be running the strongest state on earth by 2049. By then it may not matter whether you believe China is genuinely communist, or whether its ruling ideology is a gross distortion of the Marxist original. If its plans succeed, the CPC will get to write both the definitions and the history books. For that reason alone, we should stop treating the history of communism as a finished episode, without relevance to the choices facing us today.
A second reason to study the history of communism is obvious if you glance at the headlines: capitalism is in trouble and 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.
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.
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” for the sake of economic development or “decolonization.”
Yet the fact remains: capitalism is broken, chaotic, and spiraling toward authoritarianism, penury, and war, no matter how fast our semiconductors become.
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.
Karl Marx declared the problem of communism “solved” on the day he saw an electric railway engine displayed in London’s Regent Street. If reincarnated and shown an iPhone, he might ask: what’s stopping you from using this immense combination of knowledge and machine power to achieve a society without property or hierarchy? The answer I would give—in addition to the political power of billionaires and the atomization of organized labor—is the fear of repeating an era during which his portrait was hung on the walls of torture chambers.
The idea of communism is much older than Marx. The great religious thinkers of Antiquity—from Gautama to Pythagoras to Jesus—taught that property should be renounced or held in common. Some, like the Essene sect within Judaism, actually created communal living arrangements within the slave-based economy surrounding them. Equally important, both Judaism and Christianity embedded into their theologies the idea of an “end of history”—a moment of redemption through destruction which, as we will see, became the guiding principle of communist movements in modernity. Then, from the sixteenth century onward, Christian philos-ophers and social reformers repeatedly engaged in thought experiments about classless Utopias.
As they did so, they summoned the creation myths of the great religions to advance the idea that human society had, at its origins, been egalitarian. But while modern anthropology shows that many surviving hunter-gatherer societies forbid private property and practice altruism, they also use coercion and peer pressure to maintain adherence to their norms.
The idea that the absence of private property and systematic inequality automatically removes coercion—which forms the core of the Marxist theory of history—is not proven. Yet the fact remains: capitalism is broken, chaotic, and spiraling toward authoritarianism, penury, and war, no matter how fast our semiconductors become.
In these circumstances it is logical for a new generation to ask whether we can achieve a classless society, with abundance and human flourishing as its goal. The answer is yes, but not like this.
Marx believed that “history does nothing.” It fights no battles, creates no wealth, and stages no revolutions: it is only the activity of individual human beings pursuing their aims. What he underestimated is the extent to which history is therefore susceptible to being shaped by extraordinary people.
I’ve become convinced that, to understand cause and effect in the history of communism, chronology is your friend. The thematic approach, justifiably dominant in academic writing, obscures the fact that by the 1920s communism was a global organism, its nervous system operating across borders in real time: an event in China could trigger a response in Moscow and an order to Berlin in the time it took to encode a radio message. The analytical payload is therefore delivered on the fly, as the camera jump cuts between countries and continents, following events in the order that they happened.
When it comes to sources, there are vast asymmetries between those available to cover the USSR and the Comintern and those available from China. In the 1990s, researchers were finally able to read the confessions beaten out of Stalin’s victims and to see the bloodstains on the paper. With China, by contrast, though official documents exist going back to 1921, they are a mask rather than a window onto reality. As a result, while the Soviet experience can be shown in high resolution, that of the Mao era remains frustratingly pixelated.
Far from being yesterday’s problem, the struggle for the truth about the history of communism may have only just begun.
I have been inspired by the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s instruction to historians: stop writing about the past as if we don’t know its outcome. On the eve of the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Benjamin urged us to write as if “taking control of a memory, as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” That is my intention here, because our moment of danger is tangible.
I do not want to “take control” of the memory of Marx, any more than the memory of the Russian Revolution or the Spanish Civil War. But I do want to prevent the Communist Party of China taking control of them.
Because, as Benjamin reminds us: “not even the dead are safe from the enemy.” Just as postwar fascism fought to expunge the facts about the Holocaust, we are now seeing—in Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and political movements aligned to them in the global south—systematic distortions of the events described here. And it will get worse.
In occupied Ukraine, new statues of Lenin are being erected. In Russia plaques commemorating victims of the Great Purge are being torn down and the last museum of the Gulag has been closed. In China, all critical writing about Mao is dismissed as “historical nihilism.”
As the PRC assembles a new, global alliance of authoritarian states I have no doubt that, should this particular enemy triumph, the thinkers who have influenced me—the Western Marxists, post-Soviet historians, and Benjamin himself—will be buried out of sight (together with myself).
I want you to imagine how this history might be written in a future dominated by the brain-frozen clichés of Chinese communism. The Beijing propaganda machine has been busy eradicating the truth about the Tiananmen Square Massacre for nearly forty years. What might it achieve if given the unchallenged right to curate the facts about 1848, 1917, or indeed 1789?
Far from being yesterday’s problem, the struggle for the truth about the history of communism may have only just begun. If so, Benjamin’s words on the eve of its darkest and finest hours bear repeating:
Every line we succeed in publishing today—no matter how uncertain the future to which we entrust it—is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness.
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From Reds: A Global History of Communism. Used with the permission of the publisher, Scribner. Copyright © 2026 by Paul Mason