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

An transparent repudiation and recontextualization.

When I was half way through this book I was a bit disgruntled and thought it was just a communist apologetic piece. After finishing it, I realize that this is not what this book is. I find Parenti to be honest of his critiques of both capitalism and communism and providing a thought provoking and clarifying lens about our current global system of power and how western societies have been indoctrinated into excusing the failures of capitalism while condemning those of communism without understanding the important interplay between the two. This book was written in 1997 but it is likely even more pertinent to today, 2022.

This book starts out with a convincing polemic against fascist corporatism. Parenti summarizes the fascist regimes of Nazism and Mussolini and mentions the complicity of the US in these regimes before WWII by way of American corporate investment. He pushes on the western mind’s cognitive dissonance that we both condemn fascism yet actively participate in a similar system today. Such neo-fascist corporatism include foreign mutli-national corporate control, subversion of foreign sovereign economic autonomy, relics of the Bretton Woods economic system, IMF subprime loans that prohibit nationalization and subsidies of infant industries and not to mention covert and overt destabilization of democratically elected governments under the guise of communism moral panic. The global US economic and military meddling in global affairs since at least WWII really cannot be overstated and the significance of its impact is impossible to measure.

The point Parenti makes is that modern Western culture embraces what can accurately be described as neo-fascist politics while condemning similar regimes of the past. A fog of willful amnesia has descended wherein the US can’t see its own atrocities abroad which are numerous and perhaps more so than any single party communist regimes.

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.

Ultimately this is kind of a book about Marxism and dialectics. Parenti finishes off with a discussion about the yin and yang of wealth and poverty and how they exist together. Poverty appears to be siloed off and relegated to individual choice but it is a direct consequence of opposing wealth concentration. Regressive taxation, labor exploitation, consumption, environmental destruction and recessive bubbles are features, not bugs, of the neoliberal global order. The smoke and mirrors of the corporate ruling class is that they don’t want us to know that everything comes down to class struggle. As fractured as society appears now, and when this book was written, the fracturing is likely a manufactured culture war that is extremely well funded and fanned by political interests. As long as everyone else doesn’t understand that there are only two classes, the labor class and the capital class, we will continue in a merry-go-round of vitriol, scapegoating, nativism, negative partisanship, demagoguery and fascism. The reality, according to Parenti, is that capital doesn’t create labor, labor creates capital. As long as the labor class refuses to recognize this in a unified way, capitalism will continue its inexorable and exhaustive ways.