This is the fourth 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.

The Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah
Reviewed by Motega R

My choice of author, if not specific book, is one which is deeply personal to me. Kwame Nkrumah was not the thinker who introduced me to either Pan-Africanism or Marxism—before reading Nkrumah I was already both a Pan-Africanist and Marxist. I had even encountered, and was influenced by, attempts to combine Pan-Africanism and Marxism in practical struggle. But I had not, until I came across Nkrumah, encountered anyone who was able to practically synthesise them in a way that retained a sincere allegiance to both, and that showed that African Unity, far from being some idealist, utopian goal, was in fact a vital practical political-economic project for the development of the African continent.

In many ways, the story of my engagement with Nkrumah is the story of my engagement with the limitations of our current intellectual horizons as English-speaking Westerners in the imperial core. For while there exists a Marxist intellectual canon, with its authorised heroes and luminaries, there is very little discussion about how this canon can be expanded—about how we can engage with, and learn from, the more than one-hundred years of global Marxist history. Figures from this history, like Nkrumah, should motivate us to apply Marxism to our context in a truly creative and materialist fashion, to use Marxism as a tool in the struggle towards the society of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

This is precisely the view which Nkrumah took in applying Scientific Socialism (the term he preferred to Marxism-Leninism) in his own context. His embrace of Marxism was an embrace of a philosophical perspective that was oriented, not merely to understanding the world, but to changing it. For Nkrumah, therefore, writing and theory represent practical tools in the struggle against imperialism in all of it’s forms. Nkrumah despised, and regarded as a betrayal, the practice of philosophers who engaged in ivory tower theorising, divorced from everyday human life—a reality we observe all too often even among those of us who call ourselves Marxists.

It was reading Nkrumah that convinced me that, as Marxist, one cannot just sit around and criticise from a position of moral self-righteousness, removed from concrete struggle; rather, a genuine Marxist must strive and struggle to understand the world, yes, but also to change it.

I could have chosen virtually any work of Nkrumah’s for this review. However, out of respect to the man himself I have chosen to select precisely the work which he himself selected to be the introduction to his thought, namely, The Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah. As Nkrumah stated in one of his letters, The Axioms is modelled explicitly on Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book—in his letters Nkrumah even calls it his “Little Black Book.” Mao’s book was widely read in Black Power circles at the time—the Black Panther Party purchased their first guns from sales of the Little Red Book, for example. In The Axioms, Nkrumah, inspired by Mao, was seeking to apply practically but creatively what he had learnt from another Marxist from a different society, whose project for socialist construction Nkrumah looked to as a model from which to learn key lessons.

Nkrumah’s Axioms is a good place to start because, unlike, for example, Neo-Colonialism or Consciencism (two of Nkrumah’s more celebrated works), The Axioms is designed to be read by everybody. Moreover, it collects key quotes from different periods of Nkrumah’s career, thus giving the reader access to the entirety of Nkrumah’s thought, from which a reader can expand out further. Nkrumah, in different sections of the work, lays out his views on everything from guerilla warfare to the economics of neo-colonialism, to gender oppression and the vital role women must play in the struggle—to name just a few of the topics covered. Once one has read The Axioms, it can only serve to motivate the reader to engage further with Nkrumah’s vast corpus—Nkrumah being just one of so many figures from whom we have so much to learn.

To conclude, I have chosen the work of the author who has inspired me to realise that being a Marxist is not only a matter of reading Marx and agreeing that “capitalism sux”, but is rather a matter of practical struggle and organisation building. Practical struggle is not a call to an anti-intellectual embrace of pure action, but, on the contrary, is a call to expand our intellectual horizons and to read more widely. Then, having done so, and having taken the key lessons from those authors and figures in the history of Marxism, we can apply ideas to the practical struggle in our own situation. The synthesis of theory and practice in the path to a world of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—this is what Nkrumah taught me, and why The Axioms is my choice for Red Book Day.

“On the Young Marx”
Reviewed by Sal

Louis Althusser’s article “On the Young Marx,” published in his book For Marx, is my choice for Red Books Day 2025. I have two reasons for this choice. One is the deep insight it gave me about theory and its relation to practice. The other is a personal connection I felt, as a migrant, with the subject of the paper, namely Marx.

In this paper, Althusser argues for a break between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He does so partly as a political polemic against a tendency among Eurocommunists to place emphasis on Marx’s earlier works against his mature works, that is, his volumes of Capital; and partly to explain how having a misguided or misinformed motivation for engaging in a practice of theorising leads one to ask the wrong questions. These wrong questions in turn mislead the whole activity of theory building.

The paper starts with a quote from Marx’s The German Ideology: “German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy … Not only in their answers but also in their questions there was a mystification.” After a short discussion on the motivation of the paper (a reflection on a number of contributions to an international Marxist conference), Althusser states that first of all any debate on the topic at hand is a political debate with political motivations and political implications. He then argues for a holistic approach to understanding Marx’s theoretical trajectory, in the sense that one cannot understand the meaning of Marx’s writings based solely on focusing on what he has written. For, as Althusser argues, the text is not a closed entity explainable and understandable on its own, but needs to be considered in tandem with Marx’s practice and surroundings.

He then continues with an elaboration of the concept of a subject’s ‘problematic’: the underlying or ultimate motivation behind the subject’s theoretical activity. According to Althusser, this problematic is what unifies the subject’s theory and practice. Identifying this problematic is the key to understanding the subject’s theoretical activity.

From here, Althusser begins articulating his own version of Marx’s intellectual and theoretical trajectory. He argues that Marx’s persistent problematic—which perhaps could be summarized in Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that philosophers have hitherto only tried to understand the world, whereas the point is to change it—led Marx to break from the tradition he started from. He argues that the metaphor of turning Hegel on his head is a bit misleading, as it does not capture the break Marx had with idealism and does not show the substantial difference between his materialism and Hegelian idealism.

Althusser unfolds the above-mentioned argument in the context of reading Marx’s personal journey from a young journalist with mystical views about France, Germany, and England, to a mature historical materialist who have lived a politically active life in all of those countries, attempting to change the world. It is this persistent attempt to change the world (his problematic) that led Marx to demystify his views about the world through a theoretical journey from idealism to materialism.

This bit resonated a lot with me on a personal level, because as a migrant from ‘The East’, I myself had a mystical view about ‘The West’ as an entity different in essence from ‘The East’. It was only through a struggle to change the world I was living in that I came to the realization that the reality that relates ‘The East’ and ‘The West’ is the class structure that both share in many forms, but mainly in the form of relations of production, reproduction and exchange.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels
Reviewed by Zane Mckeich

Before Marx and Engels’ turn towards materialist analysis, there was a strain of thinking within the socialist movement commonly referred to as “utopian socialism.” The term “utopian” was not intended as an insult. Rather, it was a way of describing early socialist theorists and thinkers that were somehow ahead of their time – at least in Europe. Although Marx and Engels did not subscribe to the views held by these utopian socialists, they did hold a deep respect for these thinkers. Much ink has been spilled on the intellectual history and development of utopian socialists, which I won’t repeat here. Instead, I aim to discuss some of the musings of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, and then dive into an overview of Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

Charles Fourier, born in France in 1772, was one of the utopians to whom Marx and Engels referred. Born in the early stages of capitalism, Fourier was already revealing key insights into the characteristics of capitalism and its developments—most notably pointing out its effects on women—and is even credited for coining the word “feminism.” Although Fourier could not have possibly foreseen the later developments of capitalism, Engels pointed out that “Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel.” Engels also notes that Fourier discovered that scarcity under capitalism was not due to a shortage of the products necessary to sustain life, rather that on the contrary, scarcity was due to an overabundance of products. Capitalism is well known for over-producing goods, but Fourier noticed that although capitalism is good at producing goods, this did not translate to equitable and widespread access to goods. This is a profound critique of the contradictions inherent within the capitalist mode of production, though alone it does not constitute scientific socialism.

What Differentiates Thinkers such as Fourier from Marx and Engels?

In Engels’ foundational text Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, he lays out his critique of the utopian socialists and demonstrates the superiority of a material analysis by highlighting the explanatory power it wields when analysing historical developments and contemporary social relations. Rather than thinking up socialist societies through vague notions of morality or justice like Fourier and the other utopian socialists, Marx and Engels analysed the material conditions of society, constructing a sweeping analysis of the relations of production and drawing methodological and practical political conclusions from this analysis. This was a theoretical rupture from utopian socialism, and came to be known as scientific socialism.

In chapter two of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels lays out the engine of this analysis: dialectics. He traces the history of dialectics, starting with ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Heraclitus, through to the revival and improvement of dialectical thinking by Hegel in the 19^th century. In short, dialectics is a way of understanding reality by emphasising the interconnections, complexities and contradictions within things and how these contradictions—opposing forces—drive development and lead to change. The example that Engels uses in the text can be summarised by a simple thought experiment. When a living thing dies, what is the exact moment they are considered dead? At first glance, this seems simple, but when we take a closer look at death, we find that it is full of complexities. On the cellular level, death is not an instant or singular event—rather it is a process unfolding across time. The precise moment of death is a difficult thing to establish scientifically—the binary between the state of being alive or dead is, like everything, more complicated than we initially thought. As Engels says,

In like manner, every organised being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment, it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment, some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time, the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organised being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.

In the third and final chapter, Engels discusses historical materialism and uses the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism as an example of a historical materialist analysis in action. I believe it is worth quoting Engels at length here as he lays out this method of analysis succinctly in the first sentence.

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.

In the very next sentence, Engels says, “From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”

In contrast to idealist philosophies of utopian socialism that attribute social development to abstract ideas, Engels shows in clear terms that the mode of production and exchange are the driving forces behind social change. By applying the dialectical method to material realities instead of abstract ideas, Engels highlights the power and functionality that this method of analysis provides to revolutionaries. By sketching for us in brief the development of utopian and scientific socialism, and connecting this short history with a concise analysis of the utility of dialectical-historical materialism in the struggle for socialist revolution, Engels leaves us with one of the best introductions to scientific socialism—one that is still being read and discussed 145 years after its initial publication.