Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

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Parenti then describes the failures of communist Russia and he does so with transparency. He describes the bureaucratic corruption, food shortages and ruthless one party rule along with the impracticality of a centrally planned economy. At the same time he emphasizes the successes of not only communist Russia but Cuba and Vietnam. He re-frames the failures of communism by asserting that communism for these countries was actually an enormous improvement from their previous social arrangement of feudal states and czarist hegemony. He also argues that the terrors of the Gulag camp are overstated by western propaganda that most people there were actually criminals and not enemies of the state. I think the point he tries to make is the terror of the Reds is exaggerated and used as US state propaganda as a vehicle for global meddling. I don't necessarily agree with this as the accounts of Gulag war crimes is pretty undeniable at this point so I think he over reached here. State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention. Some of us from poor families who carry the hidden injuries of class are much impressed by these achievements and are unwilling to dismiss them as merely 'economistic'." As an anarchist, I certainly have issues with Marxism-Leninism as an ideology. But it's worthwhile to read Parenti and consider his arguments. And to be frank, it's refreshing to engage with the thought of a grownup M-L like Parenti, Hobsbawm, etc., after constantly encountering the kind of Stalin-avi tank-kiddies on social media who say shit like "Stalin was the greatest genius in history," "Khrushchev was a revisionist," squalid authoritarian dictators are heroes of "anti-imperialism," and the like. In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as Moscow inspired. Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million. During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

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I feel like Parenti never dips more than a toe into any sort of discourse on Stalin, but here he surprisingly dedicates an entire section to Stalin and the myths of the USSR under Stalin. It was pleasant, though I still feel that Parenti is more lukewarm on Stalin than supportive.

Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued a politico-economic agenda not unlike Mussolini’s. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups. Not surprisingly, work discipline left much to be desired. There was the clerk who chatted endlessly with a friend on the telephone while a long line of people waited resentfully for service, the two workers who took three days to paint a hotel wall that should have taken a few hours, the many who would walk off their jobs to go shopping." The autonomists would be proud. I feel he really sells the system short here, repeating the old claim that central planning was "too inefficient" - if so, what is the advantage of socialism at all? Outside of the idea of "totalitarianism", it feels like he endorses near every Western view about the "inefficiencies" of the socialist system. Yet it's clear from what he says elsewhere that even with these inefficiencies, the USSR was able to deliver a decent standard of living for everyone. To have a whole chapter (chapter 4) which is a weird bashing of the socialist states and featuring many claims about "disincentives to work" and even "human nature" is kind of frustrating cause it feels so out of place. Here another big problem of his style of writing shines through - his reluctance to actually cite anything. Big claims don't get cited even when they're controversial. For me it's most noticeable here because so much is basically anecdotal evidence treated as wider fact but it re-occurs throughout the book and weakens his persuasiveness - if you disagree with the left in general you're just going to be asking for more evidence regularly and in this chapter you're going to be asking for more evidence if you're a communist. I found myself overwhelmingly agreeing with Parenti's various analyses about fascism, its interrelation with the capitalist ruling class, the horrors of post-soviet privatization, our societies unwillingness to think in class terms, the dangers of climate change, etc.Truth is an uncomfortable venue for those who pretend to serve our society while in fact serving only themselves—at our expense. I hope this effort will chip away at the Big Lie. The truth may not set us free, as the Bible claims, but it is an important first step in that direction. Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital. Basically I want to know if anything in the book is true. I guess I am a product of the capitalist, anti-communist brainwashing the author talks about, because there are a LOT of things where I just go "that doesn't seem right..." There are things that I have spent so much time thinking about, that I can speak or write of them in an impassioned and organized way whenever prompted. This book read like that to me - that Parenti has spent so much time thinking of this topic that this work just flowed straight out of his pen. All over the world, community in the broader sense-the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship- is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism's implacable drive to settle "over the whole surface of the globe;' creating "a world after its own image." No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.”