Paul Mason

Understanding what communism was, why millions of people embraced it, and why it failed…is our best guarantee that it does not return.

Reds, the latest book by the former economics editor of Channel 4 News and BBC Newsnight Paul Mason, is an impressively global history of Communism as ‘an impulse, an idea, a political movement and a regime’, which tracks this ‘idea much older than Marx’ from its earliest roots to the present day.

Strikingly, Paul argues that with capitalism in trouble and liberal democracy imploding, communism remains to many, an increasingly relevant ideology in our era of climate crisis and AI.

We’re delighted to welcome Paul to discuss the spread and evolution of Communism through the eyes of individual activists, and from the first barricade to the last chunk of the Berlin Wall.

Chaired by Iain MacGregor