This is the third 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.

Southern Africa Stands Up, Wilfred Burchett
Reviewed by George K.

It was very difficult to choose one book for Red Books Day, but in the end I had to choose Southern Africa Stands Up by legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. In the 1960s and 70s Burchett spent time reporting on the national liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe (at the time Rhodesia). He interviewed a number of their leaders and, using a historical materialist analysis, charts the development of these struggles and the various obstacles they faced.

In Australia, Southern Africa is rarely spoken about unless it is in reference to poverty and corruption. Africa in general is projected as a continent made up of countries that are intrinsically backward and have been since they ended explicit colonial domination through long and brutal wars of liberation. Even worse, the current situation of these countries is juxtaposed to their economies under colonial rule, when they were ostensibly stronger and more orderly. This perception is rife in the liberal sphere, but it is also criminally held and promoted by many strands of the Western left, who uncritically talk about “authoritarian rulers” in a flat and inert manner that sits snugly next to the interests of Western imperialist governments.

Burchett, in going to these countries and interviewing the people as well as their revolutionary leaders, does something which is needed today more than ever, and that is to pull the curtains of Western propaganda aside and reveal the courageous and highly theoretically developed national liberation struggles in Southern Africa. Struggles which, seemingly against all odds, achieved extraordinary victories in the face of Western imperialism, victories that ought to humble even the most successful Western activist. The parallels with the struggles against domination of Palestinians by the genocidal state of Israel are plain as day—just as in Palestine, African liberation fighters were routinely referred to as terrorists by Western governments and media, who devoutly humanised the white colonial governments and dehumanised the African freedom fighters at every turn.

The book reveals the truth about so many struggles of oppressed nationalities—that communists, and communist governments, are the ones to have materially and ideologically supported the oppressed in opposition to Western governments, who have done their very best to prevent Africans from liberating themselves. The Cuban support for Angola in repelling the Apartheid South African invasion, which is discussed extensively, is just one example. This is rarely acknowledged in the West, and when it is, it’s presented as some sort of imperialist intervention that is equal and opposite to Western imperialism. Reading about the reality on the ground, the day to day struggles, and the theoretical depth and breadth not only debunks such arguments but reveals them to be in the service of the oppressor nations. For if any intervention, any assistance, any mutual dealings, are imperialism, then who is to say who is right? The effect is to neutralise and stultify us as “neutral observers”, preventing the solidarity that would prompt us to exclaim that, yes, Cuba did a good thing in sending assistance to Angola and in helping the Marxist-Leninist struggle in that country! To deny this is to shy away from the reality of the struggle for liberation in the Global South, but also even here in the North.

In Burchett’s analysis of Mozambique there is further theoretical understanding to be gained about the transition to a socialist economy after national liberation within the context of the global dominance of capitalism. Far from being a pure and glorious process, socialist transition is messy and full of contradictions. Burchett’s conversation with Samora Machel, the first President of independent Mozambique, highlights the extraordinary difficulties that faced Mozambique following their victory: the Portuguese never developed Mozambique, never educated the populace, and built minimal infrastructure. This meant that the flight of the majority of Europeans, who were not expelled but could not bear to live in a society where they were equal before the law, presented a huge economic problem for the leadership. There were few people with the technical knowledge to run various aspects of the economy—one example being the operation of the hydroelectric dam which provided power nationally (as well as being an important export). The greatest buyer of Mozambican power was apartheid South Africa, and so the new government was compelled to deal with the reactionary counterparts of those they had just overthrown. It highlighted to me that the victory of a revolution does not mean the immediate end of capitalism—in fact it marks the start of the very difficult and dialectical process of attempting to build a socialist economy and society in which capitalism and the relations of domination, empowered by Western controlled international structures of trade and finance, not only remain in place, but immediately act to undo the progress that came at such great cost.

This is the struggle that Southern Africa is still undergoing, and it faces both external and internal contradictions that emerge from this history. Southern Africa is still fighting to get on its feet, and we in the West need to stand in solidarity if we are to not only expound the need for a world revolution but to participate in it.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Reviewed by HM.

When I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-written with Alex Haley, it was the first book I had finished in a while. I think it was the first non-fiction book I had read in a long while, or at least one that wasn’t just a collection of essays. I didn’t know much about Malcolm X, but I definitely wasn’t alone there. A prominent comparison is between him and Martin Luther King Jr, and between their tactics and approaches during the civil rights movement in the United States, one which boils down to Malcolm X being ‘violent’ and MLK being ‘peaceful’. I think I also heard someone say something along the lines of Malcolm X being part of the Black Panthers. Essentially, a lot of people don’t know anything about him, or what they do know is so heavily distorted that it may be even better to be in the ‘know nothing’ camp.

The book chronicles Malcolm’s personal transformation into a true Black Liberation leader: his upbringing and youth, his time in prison, and his time with the Nation of Islam. It speaks to his life as a minister, his eventual split with the religious group, his world travels (including his trip to Mecca), and his return to the US with firm new convictions about the world. Malcolm had revolutionary spirit and understood that the fight for freedom from racial oppression was international and intertwined with the various revolutions and national liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century. Later in the book, he says: “We can see in the United Nations a new world order being shaped, along colour lines – an alliance among the non-white nations.” I think of the alliances today, not necessarily socialist alliances but still, alliances. I think of votes in the United Nations, where the majority of the world’s wealthy nations vote one way while the poor ones vote another, of South Africa and the Global South taking Israel to the Hague.

I really appreciated Malcolm’s focus on the importance of reading, of learning and coming to know things. I think it’s good to be always in the process of becoming more intellectual. As Malcolm narrates his life, he’s learning in prison, learning through religion, and learning through struggle. Particularly during his prison years, when he used that time to really focus and study. I don’t normally take notes on what I’m reading, but I did with this. I don’t normally use sticky tabs either (and I didn’t!), but I did take photos of a few pages that I wanted to return to, which is in effect the same. The majority of my photo-sticky tabs are of pages with names of people he either read or met. There were a lot of names that I had never heard of, and a few times when I knew the name but nothing else. He lists Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche (at the time, I had definitely not read any of them, and now I’ve only read bits of Nietzsche). He goes on to say that he doesn’t respect any of them and notes that they “laid the groundwork” for fascism, but nevertheless he read them. (Maybe my thought process as I flick through The Australian or The Atlantic or any other rag that I don’t like: ‘I don’t respect them’ and ‘they’re laying the groundwork for fascism’).

But he also mentions/encounters a lot of revolutionary figures, like Kwame Nkrumah and W. E. B. Du Bois. Malcolm was a Pan-Africanist and saw the connection between the struggles of Black people in the US and the struggles of Black people and of all oppressed races in the Third World and across the globe. He spoke with Nkrumah about the fight for liberation in the African continent, and they “agreed that Pan-Africanism was the key also to the problems of those of African heritage.”

And so I finished this very motivated, with a renewed reading spirit and a long list of writers and books that I wanted to dive into: Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism by Nkrumah, Black Reconstruction by Du Bois, and so on. I think this is a nice spirit to be sharing for Red Books Day, a celebration of left literature, of writing and reading, of learning more about the world so we can know how best to change it—my very loose paraphrase of Vijay Prashad’s paraphrase of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.

My own quote to conclude would be a very simplistic “keep reading!”, but I’ll conclude with another Malcolm X quote from my notes that I think captures his style and humour and his messaging too: “Yes, I’m an extremist. The black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!”

Socialist Education in Korea: Selected Works of Kim Il-Sung
Reviewed by Adam Watson

In the propaganda apparatus and popular imagination of the American empire, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) fulfils a truly unique and paradoxical role. All at once, it is both a reclusive hermit kingdom and intractable rebel state, communist despotism and feudal tyranny, absurdly dysfunctional bureaucracy and alarmingly competent nuclear power.

Despite the DPRK’s status as one of the only examples of actually-existing socialism in the world today, Kim Il-Sung, the revolutionary founder and first president of the DPRK, remains rarely studied in the Global North countries, even amongst socialists. In fairness, this neglect stems, in part, from the limited availability of translated works by Korean socialists, and certainly the efforts to address this gap have faced understandable (but not excusable) obstacles.

Undoubtedly, another factor is the relentless and hegemonic propaganda campaign waged against the DPRK, which has proven so effective that even self-described socialists often distance themselves from the unoccupied half of Korea. Whether this is due to an inability to effectively counter imperialist propaganda or an internalisation of that propaganda—in both cases, an unacceptable failure has occurred. In both cases the remedy is socialist-based education.

For these reasons, however, we may also turn the labour and propaganda efforts of the ruling class to our own advantage and the DPRK can fulfil yet another role: a serviceable litmus test to determine the depth and sophistication of one’s socialist education.

Few could dispute that a serious engagement with the Korean revolution and the study of its methods and achievements is an act of genuine dissent against the American empire. The DPRK serves to demarcate those who merely sympathise with socialist ideas and those who are committed to understanding and advancing tangible revolutionary objectives, distinguishing sympathisers from the cadre.

Our country’s experience proves that in order to build an independent and sovereign country, national education must be kept ahead of all other work.

In simple terms, Kim Il-Sung’s approach to education is dialectical and nationalist in its orientation, exemplified by his response to some comrades who once urged him to attend a revolutionary school in Moscow: “Our people, not people at Moscow or Shanghai, [are] my teachers.” For Kim Il-Sung, the best possible groundwork for revolutionary education is to live amongst the people and know them intimately, studying the history of the nation and fostering a genuine love for it and a deep understanding of its past and present.

The party and the people thus engage in an ongoing dialectical relationship, each depending on the other to educate them and each in turn elevating the socialist consciousness of the other, such that “every member of society [becomes] revolutionary, working-class and communist.” Kim Il-Sung maintains that only on this basis is it possible to construct, and more importantly maintain, a revolution. The lessons he presents throughout are often surprising for the degree to which they are immediately relevant to socialists in the imperial core and present an invaluable resource for revolutionary struggle both in the imperial centre and periphery.

In studying Kim Il-Sung’s selected works on education, it suddenly became apparent to me the similarities between the Korean revolution and the third world national liberation movements generally, and particularly the Arab struggle. As someone who has long been subject to imperialist propaganda about Korea, and despite my conscious commitment to socialism, it was not immediately obvious to me that the Korean revolution is in fact the pinnacle of national liberation movements, the crowning jewel of third world nationalism buried under a dung heap of imperialist propaganda.

The struggle for socialism in Korea has endured unimaginably vicious attacks and disastrous setbacks, yet the Korean revolution has withstood every assault and still made tremendous strides in creating a high standard of living for its citizens. In these selected works on education, Kim Il-Sung explains how the ongoing vitality and successes of the Korean revolution would have been impossible without the rapid institution of a highly advanced system of socialist education in the country, one that is constantly adapting to new material conditions and needs.

The experience of the Korean revolutionaries therefore merits much greater engagement from socialists everywhere, and the development of Korean socialist education retains great relevance to a great many ongoing revolutionary struggles. As such, the Korean approach should be studied widely and objectively with a mind to critically adapt it to the unique conditions prevailing in different countries.