Erin's Reviews > Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

I’m a huge fan of Michael Parenti’s famous “yellow tape” speech. I especially love to listen to it when cooking an elaborate meal in the kitchen, or when I want to bore any non-leftists to tears. Blackshirts & Reds is highly recommended in leftist corners of the internet, so I wanted to see if Parenti’s books were as good as his speeches.

Although I am a dirty communist who agrees with most of Parenti’s ideas, I found this book surprisingly slow to get through. This is especially noteworthy because the book is not even 200 pages.

The first chapter, on rational fascism, is great and opens the book with some nice fire. This chapter does a great job explaining how fascism is closely linked with capitalism, not socialism (as is sometimes claimed). Fascism is a great tool for capitalists who need to keep people in line.

But I found the constant apologies for Soviet Russia pretty tiresome. Parenti attempts to answer a question I’ve often wondered about: why do all communist countries wind up with bureaucracy-clogged central planning and heavy-handed, authoritarian dictators? This is about as far from a Marxist dream as you can get.

Parenti argues that baby communist states are constantly under siege by capitalist military forces, so they have to spend precious resources improving their own military power and fending off capitalist attacks. This means less money for things like food, housing, medicine, and generally getting communism up and running—and more money just trying to keep the enemies from storming the gates. Because they are under perpetual siege, these countries default to strongman leaders (ex: Stalin, Castro) rather than being democratically run by the workers in a classless, moneyless society.

I found this argument interesting, but it’s also pretty difficult to disprove. The “well, they had to do it that way because of the historical conditions” defense can be used to justify pretty much any shitty thing that a government (communist or otherwise) might do. In my opinion, Parenti spent too much time trying to rehabilitate the USSR, rather than just admitting they did a lot of crappy stuff. Admittedly, I know very little about Soviet history, so perhaps Parenti is right about everything, but he doesn’t cite sources for many of his claims, so I’m a bit skeptical.

That said, there is still a lot to like in this book, and Parenti writes with a clarity and wit that I quite enjoyed. I especially liked his description of Marxism as a “holistic science” that connects the dots between economics, politics, media, culture, entertainment, housing, religion, etc. In my own experience of becoming class conscious, once I realized how capitalism worked, I saw its influence everywhere. Capitalism is not just an economic system; it permeates every part of our world and our lives. And Marxism’s primary goal is to critique capitalism, not to design a communist utopia. As a capitalist critique, Parenti notes, the explanatory power of Marxism is huge—from mundane interactions at your job to the racism and sexism interwoven into large-scale systems of power. Once you know how to recognize the fingerprints of the ruling class, you discover they are all over everything.