A Left Sketch Book

 “Blackshirts and Reds – Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism,” by Michael Parenti, 1997

This book is a constant seller at May Day so I thought I’d read it.  It is what I would call a ‘sketch book’ – briefly explaining various issues from a Marxist point of view.  Parenti seems close to the U.S. Communist Party and Monthly Review, a Khrushchevite or Bukharinite in his overall analysis.  The book suffers a bit from being dated but what he says is ‘mostly’ true, though he ignores certain debates within the socialist movement, especially related to Trotsky and Mao. 

Parenti gives capsule descriptions of how fascism succeeded in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s through alliances with the whole capitalist class.  He considers fascism to be capital’s final solution to class struggle.  He covers the post-WW2 period of national revolutions and social revolutions across the world that upended colonialism and imperialism for a time, with help from the USSR and Communist movements.  He focuses on the anti-communism of certain anarchists and social-democrats like sacred cow Noam Chomsky, who celebrated the counter-revolutions in eastern Europe and the USSR along with the NYT.  He also points out the creeping privatizations and capitalism in China, Vietnam and Cuba – this in 1997. 

Parenti’s best chapters are on the problems within the ‘state socialist’ countries (an oxymoron by the way, as actual socialism does not have a repressive state) during their years of existence.  They were things like disorganization, low labor standards, pilfering and poor consumer goods.  In contradiction to U.S. propaganda, he insists it was the dearth of consumer goods in comparison to the ‘West’ that caused the most dissatisfaction - not repression or lack of democracy.  He cites the issue of ‘capitalist encirclement’ as one of the great harms to the Soviet bloc, pushing it to arm itself instead of providing better housing and goods to the population.  Evidently ‘socialism in one bloc’ is not even possible.

Parenti has a great chapter on the dictatorial introduction of the ‘free market’ in the USSR and eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing untold misery and a crash in living standards across the board for the proletariat and small farmers.  All this was promoted in the U.S. press as the introduction of freedom (to make profits) and democracy (by multiple instances of repressing left dissent by force).  He quotes many proletarians who regret their support for counter-revolution, who regret losing social support systems.  In a way, he sketches the workers’ states as somewhat similar to present-day Nordic social-democracies.  

He notes that the personal priest of Poland’s Lech Walesa was a vicious anti-Semite.  He especially takes aim at Vaclav Havel, the Zappa-loving philosopher king of the Czech Republic, whose untold dictatorial methods Parenti recounts.  Fascist and authoritarian groups and leaders exploded in eastern Europe and Russia after the success of the counter-revolutions.

Havel - Literary Counter-Revolutionist

Parenti ends with a sketch of the Marxist method in contradiction to post-modernist academic leftists who ignore class and pay attention only to culture.  In the process they misrepresent Marxists like Antonio Gramsci.  He adds a chapter on the defense of the concept of class against post-modernist and identitarian concepts and also against the apolitical myth of the ‘universal U.S. middle class’ we are so acquainted with.

A good introduction to a version of Marxist thinking.  It is especially strong on its inclusion of some of the problems of the workers’ states and the methods of the imperialist counter-revolutions that destroyed them in the interest of U.S. and European capital.   However the title is misleading, as fascism is not the focus.  Nor does he define ‘rational fascism’ except to note that conservative and neo-liberal politics flow into fascist methods like water into a streambed.  They are all capitalist ideologies.

(Not to be confused with his son, Christian Parenti, author of “Tropic of Chaos.”)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Secondhand Time - The Last of the Soviets,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” “The Contradictions of Real Socialism,” “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism,” “Fear,” “Is the East Still Red?” “From Solidarity to Sellout,” “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” or words like ‘fascism’ or ‘Marxism’ or ‘class.’     

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

May 7, 2021