This is the second part of our series published in the lead up to Red Books Day 2025, in which Red Ant comrades were invited to write a short reflection on a book that radicalised them.

Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed
Reviewed by Davey Heller

The events that took place within Russia in 1917 changed our world. However, occurring well before the age of live streaming, very little footage or even photos emerged to capture the dramatic key moments of the revolution. This is why Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed is such an important book. Reed, a U.S. Communist and journalist, gives at times a visceral eyewitness retelling of the days before and after the insurrection in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) as the working class under the leadership of the Bolsheviks seized power.

Reed captures two of the most important elements of the Russian Revolution: its vast mass character and the vital role played by the Bolsheviks in leading this movement to victory over the immense class forces arrayed against it.

The mass character is clear from the descriptions of halls, filled with the sweat and cigarette smoke of ordinary workers, soldiers and peasants, listening to all-night speeches from the various factions. Factory workers gather together in their thousands to hear political speeches. These meetings, in their raw energy, have more in common with a rock concert than the staid atmosphere of many contemporary political meetings! Reed describes the furrowed brows of ordinary people well aware they were making life and death decisions. When the time comes for defence of the capital from the forces of counter-revolution, the Red Guards merge with thousands of untrained workers and civilians to build barricades and fight hand in hand to repel Kerensky’s Cossack forces. Reed consistently uses metaphors of the natural elements to describe the masses working together.

But Reed shows these elemental class forces being guided by the leadership of the Bolshevik Party every step of the way. Reed had access to the Smolny Institute where the Bolsheviks directed both the timing and planning of the insurrection. He witnessed their leaders making key interventions at the All Russian Congress of Soviets. These include Trotsky greeting the quitting of the Mensheviks from the Congress with the famous line “let them go! They are just so much refuse which will be swept into the garbage-heap of history!” He describes Lenin being greeted by thunderous applause at the Congress as he took to the stage to outline the decree giving land to the peasants. Such bold moments where the new Bolshevik Government announce in quick succession decrees on land and peace give life to Rosa Luxembourg’s declaration that “Lenin and Trotsky and their friends were the first, those who went ahead as an example to the proletariat of the world; they are still the only ones up to now who can cry with Hütten, ‘I have dared!’”

Reed published his book in 1919, only two years after the events he describes. Reading the book from the perspective of the present adds a degree of pathos. One is aware of both the subsequent awesome achievements of the USSR but also of its tragic demise. However, the flame of revolution lit in 1917 burns brightly in both the existing Communist states including China and in the hearts of all those fighting capitalism still. This is why Lenin’s endorsement of the book from 1922 still holds true – “With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly, do I recommend it to the workers of the world.”

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher
Reviewed by Rob A.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”

It was more than a few years ago now when I first picked up a copy of the late Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. I was an “anarchist” in the broadest possible sense, though what that meant beyond negation—against capital, against the state, against hierarchy—I was largely unsure. I was actively seeking an explanation of the structures and forms of power that defined my world, struggling to comprehend them in their complexity. Without any frameworks to make clear sense of it, the emotional toll of living under capitalism is intensified.

Reading Fisher for the first time felt like stepping into daylight after years in a dimly lit room. His ability to weave pop culture, film review, and lengthy asides on musical form into cutting critical theory was something I had never encountered, but which I felt I had been looking for my entire life. I poured over those pages with the immensely confirming and enlivening feeling of being seen, of being recognised. I believe many of us have this feeling when reading the works of our comrades, those who make up the long and beautiful chain of resistance that leads to our own time and place in the world. Fisher’s words called up in me a sudden jolt of clarity, a sense that someone else had seen what I had seen, had articulated what was on the tip of my tongue. Capitalism was not just a mode of production; it conditioned life, thought, even deed; it shaped not only how we worked and what we earned, but how we desired, how we imagined, what we believed was possible.

Fisher’s insight was not just that capitalism was failing—this was obvious, had been obvious—but that even its failures could, and often did reinforce its hold. Economic crises, mass impoverishment, ecological destruction—each collapse, each crisis, each proof of capitalism’s inability to sustain life produced revolt, but alongside it, resignation and naturalisation of the decline. Yes, the system is broken, but what can we do? The only options presented by so-called progressive thinkers were adjustments, modifications, and small reforms to keep the machine running. “There is no alternative” Margaret Thatcher had declared in the heady ascent of neoliberalism, a feeling which was soon to become the near-universal common sense that I and many others in the imperial core were brought up to believe.

“The response is nihilistic hedonism: I try not to think about it.”

Fisher outlined how even resistance had been absorbed, made safe, marketable. Neoliberalism did not only suppress dissent—it preempted it, turned it into a job, a brand, a career path. The explosion of “progressive” NGOs, the endless petitions, the moral appeals to governments that had no morality—all of it became part of the same system, a form of controlled opposition. The Left, once a force that had built movements capable of toppling empires, had become a space of well-meaning gestures and nonprofit initiatives, a loyal opposition to a system that by its nature cannot be reformed.

For a while, I lingered there in the trap of critique without exit. Capitalist Realism had made me feel seen—but it had not yet shown me how to see beyond it.The first crack came, as it always does, with a question. In chapter three, Fisher asks almost off-handedly, “If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from?” This threw me deep into contemplation, and upon finishing the book, I started to build out the beginnings of an answer to that question. This is where I found Marx, and not long after, Lenin; where I found Mao, Fanon and Walter Rodney. Capitalist Realism had mapped the affective experience of the prison; but it was these comrades who showed the way out.

Fisher had said that capitalism forecloses the future. But Marxism confirmed for me that history was not a straight line, but an open field. Capitalism was not eternal: it had been built, piece by piece, through conquest and enclosure, through empire and extraction. And that, like all things built, it could be dismantled.

“What if you held a protest, and everyone came?”

What Fisher did for me was to open a line of inquiry that led to a sincere and ongoing attempt to answer the pressing question of our time: in the light of widespread capitalist crisis, what is to be done? It was not enough to simply negate capitalism. It was not enough to hate the state, to hate bosses, to hate landlords, to wish them away. The world would not change because we rejected it—it would change because we seized it, because we fought for something else. I moved from passive analysis of the world to an active effort to change it. From anarchism, which had given me a moral stance but no strategy, to socialism, which demanded more—study, organization, discipline, and the long work of revolution.

Fisher diagnosed the problem, but in the grey “end of history” that marked his final years he was unable to bring himself to recognise an ostensibly failed socialism as the solution. That said, I owe him a great deal, and have a deep affection for the man and the projects of his life. In honour of his life’s work and his legacy, I think it’s worth naming that, in fact, there is an alternative.

That alternative is political struggle. It is movement-building, it is organizing, it is taking power. It is knowing that there is no alternative within capitalism, and so we must fight to create the world that capitalism tells us is impossible. That alternative is what Marx and Engels name as the real movement which abolishes the present state of things: communism.

We do not win by waiting for the system to collapse under the weight of its contradictions. We do not win by retreating into abstraction. We win by organizing the people capitalism exploits, by building power and by transforming the world in words, and in action.

I want to finish this review by quoting the final passage of the book. I know if Fisher were alive today, he’d see something of this vision in the brightening spark of resistance growing everywhere conscious and caring people live across this great earth.

“The long, dark night at the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

A Theory of Imperialism, Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik
Reviewed by Albert P.

A Theory of Imperialism is a book that grabbed me, as I have always abstractly thought about why the Global South currency is low, but in particular why the wages of the workers of Global south are so deflated compared to countries like Australia. Written by two emeriti professors at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, both Patnaiks are Marxist economists and have written numerous articles and books on imperialism for journals like Monthly Review. The book is a short at just 198 pages. The authors plan to also publish a similar themed, but more comprehensive book.

I have always wondered in the abstract about why currency in the Global South is less valuable than in the Global North, or about why the wages of workers in the Global South are so deflated compared to countries like Australia. A few years ago, the finance company I work for outsourced our work to a team based in India. The exact same work was being done by both teams, one based in India and one in Australia. The technology and processes used are the same and we collaborated with the people in the Indian office on daily basis. I could not find any productivity difference that would justify the wage difference between the two countries.

Then I came across this book which talks about income deflation in the countries of the periphery, and I wanted to dive headfirst in. I first skimmed through the book and did not see too many graphs and numbers and thought It would be a good and easy read, compared to many other books written by economists. Despite having studied economics as an undergraduate, I did find the book a bit of a slog at times, having to re-read some paragraphs a number of times to fully comprehend them.

There are three points that I found very useful from the book: (1) how agricultural patterns are being changed in periphery countries to benefit the Imperial core; (2) a critique of the Ricardian Theory of Comparative Advantage; and (3) how income deflation in the periphery works, i.e. in the countries of the Global South.

Firstly, with neo-liberal economic policies, countries in the Global South are being pushed to open their agricultural markets, and the governments of these countries are decreasing the subsidies or lowering the price guarantees given to the farmers. The farmers are given incentives to plant cash crops like coffee, tea, etc. (instead of diet staples like wheat and rice) for the export of these products to the Global North. The authors argue this is to keep the supply of these products ready for export for the year-round demand from the imperial core. And many of these tropical products cannot be produced in the imperial core of North America and Europe at all. This is one of the very important premises of the book. The economic policies that are recommended or sometimes forced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation (WTO) are being used to change the pattern of agricultural production in the Global South countries.

Secondly, Ricardian Theory of Comparative advantage says that each country should produce what it is best at and to trade the rest with other countries. But many imperial nations during the time the theory was established did not have the weather to produce tropical goods and this makes this theory fallacious from the beginning, according to the authors.

Thirdly, income deflation is when exporter countries domestic purchasing power is reduced so that they themselves are unable to purchase the products that they produce. The authors argue that “income deflation is a key component of imperialism, which is the economic practice of exploiting the periphery”. In the old days it was imposed through the colonial finance mechanism. Nowadays it is achieved through the globalization of finance and austerity policies (like cuts in government expenditure).

In current times when colonisation seems a distant past, this book illustrates how the imperial core countries are still able to exploit and extract resources from the Global South by using tools such as IMF and WTO. The authors also touch on intellectual imperialism, where economic theories are manufactured to keep the exploitation ongoing for the benefit of the imperial core.

This book gave me clarity and a theory that explained the current economic disparities between the Global North and South. We have always led to believe by mainstream academia and media that the reason many countries are poor are due to low productivity or due to lack of “proper” institutions (in fact 2024 Nobel prize on economics was on this same point and the authors have criticised the paper in a different article). This book tackles this myth head-on and instead focuses on the exploitative capitalist and imperialist system that is currently in play, that has far bigger impact on the reason the countries in the Global South are unable to develop in a more sustained fashion and to solve absolute poverty.

I have been following the farmers’ protests and the mass mobilisations that have been happening in India since 2021, and this book has helped me understand this protest movement better, and how the farmers’ movement fits into the larger anti-imperialist struggle. The exploitation of agricultural workers has direct real-life impacts, with nearly half a million farmers suicides in India in last few decades, mostly due to financial debts. The overall agricultural distress has also pushed many landless peasants from rural India to join the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which is a banned organisation in India that wants to overthrow the Indian state by peasant workers’ revolution.

The authors end the book on a sombre note, writing “imperialism is bringing the world to such an impasse at present – an impasse characterised by economic crises, stagnation, and unemployment both in the metropolis and in the periphery; by unprecedented and intolerable levels of oppression of peasants and petty producers in the periphery (of which the mass suicides of peasants in India is one indication); and by acute threat to our ecosystem—that mass resistance to it, as had happened in the context of the world wars that provided the backdrop to the previous round of revolutions, can suddenly erupt anywhere. That could usher in a whole new era of resistance and revolutions through which all existing social conditions, including levels of consciousness, could alter with astonishing rapidity.”

This book should be in everyone’s reading list who wants to understand and contribute to the anti-imperialist struggle of our times.