From “possibly the most engaged mainstream journalist of our age” (New Statesman) comes a new global history of communism—ranging from Renaissance England to 21st century China and tracing communism’s transformation from a political idea, into a mass movement, and ultimately into totalitarian regimes that covered half the earth.

In Reds, journalist and historian Paul Mason equips a new generation with an understanding of where communism came from and how and why it failed. Charting its ascension and decline, from the first barricades in Paris in the 1840s to the fall of the Berlin Wall, he shows how communism changed from a Utopian critique of early capitalism into a revolutionary movement that inflicted existential defeats on the autocracies of Russia, China, and their satellites. Mason’s story of communism is one of both heroism and horror: of workers and peasant activists fighting against an old regime that exploited them, and of the repression and famines inflicted by the regimes that were eventually installed.

With liberal capitalism appearing to falter, global climate chaos intensifying, and advances by the far right in Western democracies, communist ideas might appear increasingly attractive to people around the world. Timely and erudite, Reds is a warning against the resurgence of an authoritarian left, and a plea for a progressive resistance to capitalism based on universal human values.