Christmas Books 2014: best politics books to read A spectre is haunting Christmas - the spectre of Communism. In Revolution (Century, £20), Russell Brand argues that impersonal economic forces have cut us off from the loving hive-mind we call humanity. The pain of separation led Brand to seek oblivion in chemical and sexual addictions - he once had quite the problem with crack cocaine, and keeping it in his pants, apparently. Now he is calling for a revolution in the hope of fighting his way back to the warm bath of collective love. The idea that economic forces underpin human societies was commonplace long before Marx, but it was Marx who saw these forces as unnatural and malevolent, steering humanity away from its authentic self. Brand takes up the argument with some verve, a few jokes (mostly at the expense of Americans with funny names like Chomsky or Zimbardo), and a whole heap of self-centredness. There is more detail in Owen Jones's book The Establishment and How They Get Away With It (Allen Lane, £16.99). Jones hopes to show how the rich conspire to grind the masses under their heels. He tries to identify the guilty as a cosy British establishment but finds that all the people he interviews regard themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, whether they are Labour Party ministers, newspaper editors, multimillionaires, or anarchic bloggers. This is awkward, but Jones finesses his argument by claiming they are all blinded by their cynicism, hypocrisy or false consciousness. Once again, subterranean economic forces are at work, guiding a conspiracy that works even when the schemers never speak, or know each other. Smile for the Camera: the Double Life of Cyril Smith (Biteback, £18.99) by Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker makes the case for a more traditional establishment conspiracy. Smith was the governor of my senior school in Rochdale, and even then was rumoured to be a groper and a spanker. It now seems he was also a paedophile and a rapist. We Rochdalians like to think the world revolves around the town, yet it seems far-fetched to believe a high-level national conspiracy protected a minor politician. In the past few weeks the spotlight has turned to an MI6 spymaster and unnamed "senior" Tory politician. However, a lost dossier compiled by another Rochdale MP, Geoffrey Dickens, continues to fuel claims of a high-level cover-up, so perhaps the world really is just a suburb of Rochdale, after all. The term "Establishment," like Turkey's "Deep State" or America's "Georgetown Set," describes a shadowy world of insiders and appeared at the time of the Cambridge spy scandal. It is a general rule of English life that anyone young and ambitious rises until the exact point they are surrounded by Oxbridge graduates. But Please, Mister Postman (Bantam, £16.99) by Alan Johnson puts the lie to the idea that ambition is always fatally compromised, and that a taste of privilege means everyone thinks and acts the same. This is a less dramatic story than Johnson's account of his childhood, This Boy, but in its quiet way makes the case for traditional, everyday political action of the kind Brand and Jones reject in favour of more radical solutions. If a whole generation is cynical about politics, part of the reason clearly lies in the willingness of our leaders to hoodwink us. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald (Hamish Hamilton, £20) is the story of a real conspiracy, telling how GCHQ prostituted itself to the US spy agencies. The Spectre of Communism returns in this year's political blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Belknapp Harvard, £29.95). Classical economists believe that, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts every boat; a view argued with easy confidence by Gerard Lyons, economist to Mayor Boris Johnson, in The Consolations of Economics: How We Will All Benefit from the New World Order (Faber, £16.99). In contrast, Marx believed that free markets produce inequality, social division and violence. Piketty appears to side with Marx, but this is deceptive. When Piketty talks about "capital," he means the kind of investments held by today's leisured rentier class whose money is tied up in property and pensions. Piketty argues that a free market overloaded with this kind of capital may or may not lead to anger and alienation, but it will certainly act like lumpy blockages in the smooth running of the economy. Piketty only wants the economy to work better, as opposed to wanting to join Brand on the barricades. Like Dickens's four Christmas ghosts, it seems the Spectre of Communism is more of a seasonal upset than a radical threat.