Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

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Book Genre: Anthologies, Collections, Economics, Essays, Historical, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Political Science, Politics, Theory, Writing 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. 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. It as be said that the political right (and to some extent the centre) have it easy. They just have to maintain the power they get and prove to be capable rulers. For revolutionary-leftwing politics to work, you need essentially to cover two bases; 1) offer a valid critique of the existing political model and 2) find something viable to replace it. Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. It is a bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today.

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. It took me a while to read; although flowing, it is dense with fantastic ways of framing or phrasing an issue that I think deserve a moment of contemplation. Conservative ideologues defend capitalism as the system that preserves culture, traditional values, the family, and community. Marxists would respond that capitalism has done more to undermine such things than any other system in history, given its wars, colonizations, and forced migrations, its enclosures, evictions, poverty wages, child labor, homelessness, underemployment, crime, drug infestation, and urban squalor. 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. To be fair, he does discuss some of the inherent problems with communism and a planned economy in one of the chapters, but he seems to sweep that under the rug a little.

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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.

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'." Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism. This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of democratic capitalism to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic efforts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries. Let it be said I have read many defences of the USSR, and Stalinism in general, but this is one of the worst defenses of an 'existing socialist' state Ive read for some time. How Parenti manages to go from logically asset stripping capitalism taking account of its errors to defending a society which was nothing more than an ill planned police state is startling. 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.

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True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. ³ Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor. The strong point of the work, and the fact that it is always suggested to non communists as a first read into socialist and marxist theory is that it manages to describe in a very easy to read way (in more of a speech-rant method of writing), all the externalities of capitalism. He doesn't necessarily analyse and explain the basic Marxist critique of capitalism and its inner machinations, he describes, analyses, and points out the external symptoms that come out of capitalism mainly ecological destruction, gender inequality, racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism etc. 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. 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. These countries, Cuba, the USSR, East Germany etc, are messy, imperfect states, with histories of violence and repression, but, Parenti argues, so are capitalist states, and yet, we don't seem to view our historical failings as evidence of the failure of capitalism. Basically, if you judge socialism by the same criteria you judge capitalism by, you'll find that socialism creates a more fair and prosperous world.