Blackshirts & Reds

Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, or simply Blackshirts & Reds, is a 1997 book written by the American political scientist Michael Parenti. The book is notable among the political Left for laying the case at a time in which it was not popular to argue – this time being the 1990s i.e. after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that socialism is not only not discredited, but that the works produced in its name validates the continued struggle for its final victory. Parenti argues that the greatest weapon ever rose against communism – was fascism, that it was the continuation of global capitalism in crisis, and that it was used as a bulwark against the advance of communism. Parenti also takes his aim towards anti-communist narratives – including those produced on the Left.

This book has something of a reputation among those on the far-left, especially those who were drawn to communism (that is to say, Marxism-Leninism*) in contemporary times mostly due to its clear prose and rather forceful argumentation against the prevailing (even triumphant) notion that the collapse of communism was good, and for making the case on how it had actually improved the lives to those who lived under it. Indeed, it is often part of the foundational reading lists of socialist and communist groups – some even going as far as to say that Blackshirts & Reds “changed their life”. Such reactions are mostly found in the Anglosphere, or people originating from there, especially among those from the United States, and given the incredibly aggressive anti-communist political culture of the US, it’s not hard to see why people who’ve come to see the various contradictions in American society and reject (aspects of) its national narrative really like this book. However, this reaction also obscures what Parenti actually says about communism in the book in which we will get into. I also intend to make a somewhat controversial statement (well, controversial to Parenti fans) regarding the ‘reading’ of Blackshirts & Reds.

So, what does Parenti say?

The following is a (relatively) brief summary of the contents of Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds compiled in bullet points to help readers of this post curious about the book to get an idea of what it says, and allow them the relative space to decide whether they should read it or not. It is also an illustration of which parts I’m interested in highlighting, so keep that in mind if you’ve not read it.

• Parenti expresses bemusement that in the working-class Italian-American neighbourhood that he grew up in the Bronx, the visage of Benito Mussolini still graces T-shirts in novelty stores. When Parenti questions the clerk about it, the latter shrugs and says that some people like them, and maybe a Mussolini-type leader is what is needed in America. Parenti concludes from this exchanges that fascism still exists in forms more than curiousity. Contemporary anti-fascists would agree all too well.**
• Once the working class, specifically militant organised labour started making gains in Europe – specifically in Italy and Germany, the industrialists and financiers of both started funding the “national socialists”, and especially took a shine to the leadership in Mussolini and Hitler respectively. The class composition of the fascists were from the petty-bourgois and the lumpenproletriat, and they got very good at strike-breaking and smashing unions by the 1920s. In Germany, the Communist Party sought an alliance with the Social Democrats against the threat of Nazis, but they were refused, just as various right-wing parties formed around the Nazis to win enough support to make Adolf Hitler the chancellor of Germany in 1933. Parenti observes that this is a common tale in countries past and present on the short-sightedness and duplicity of social democrats***, in that they would “sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with Reds” (pg. 5). **** Parenti also challenges the notion that fascism was a deformed version of socialism, citing Hitler’s statements about “saving industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism”, and the fact that he assembled a massive personal fortune – even charging a small fee for postage stamps with his face on it (pg. 9).
• The bourgeois press, or as Parenti calls it, “major publications” such as Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and others were very enthusiastic about the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, praising them for saving their countries from collapse and from extremism. The Blackshirts of Italy received particular praise for protecting a “new democracy”. Industrialists like Henry Ford were not only fans but travelled to Rome and Berlin, received medals, and cut deals with their regimes (pg. 10). The critiques offered by various leftists and progressives of fascism did not receive much exposure in the media.
• Parenti insists that to focus on the “irrational” features of fascism is to miss the point of what it functioned as. He sees features such as the cult of personality, retreat into mysticism – particularly nationalist mysticism, and reliance on a monistic slogans e.g. Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer (one people, one rule, one leader), as a deliberate attempt to bind citizens into a nationalist politic eschewing emphasis on class divisions, and in fact reinforcing them, preserving them as a natural order. He contrasts this with the Left which expresses popular demands with an acute awareness of social injustice and class struggle (p. 12). Parenti also sees a parallel in fascist presentations of natural hierachies of class, race and gender; with the then contemporary “race scientists” who argue for the inferiority of black people via arguments against multiculturalism, using their presentation of IQ tests, demographics of academic achievements e.g. The Bell Curve, and crime statistics.
• Parenti chastises those writers who see communism and fascism as totalitarian twins, accusing them of not understanding that fascism had consciously apprpriated the language and even some of the organising from the Left, while doing nothing to resolve class contradictions once their drive to control was fully realised in the conquest of the state. The Nazis used antisemitic and racist propaganda to misdirect grievances rising within German society to convenient scapegoats, and bolstering ideology of the absolutist state which has the Germans interests at heart; this propaganda was carefully disseminated to demographics based on their class position to create the same result: To see ‘the Jew’ as an alien element to society. Parenti also claims that the view of Nazism as parallel to communism was not even the view of European leaders and elites, they in fact saw Nazism as useful as a bulwark against communism.
• Attention is called to the aftermath of World War II, and fascism’s defeat; Parenti charges the Western powers with a lax attitude to eradicating fascism, save for the prosecution of its leadership. Parenti states that under the aegis of the US occupation authorities, many of the Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators were reestablished within the now ‘democratic’ societies acting as police, lawyers and judges, federal agents, and businessmen; while the partisans fighting fascism were persecuted because they were communists and syndicalists. Western complicity in the rehabilitation of Nazis, even if only in reputation, has a continued relevance to this day in light of recent events.
• The American people were subject to relentless propaganda distorting the agenda of communists and that of their own leaders. American people were repeatedly lied to about the reasons for suppressing revolutions across the world, citing the supposedly duplicitous and power-hungry nature of communists, and their responsibility to guide smaller and weaker nations into democracy. Parenti argues that the “global counterrevolutionary war” had led to the mass extermination of various peoples across the world who only sought a different way of living than previously and that the “corporate class”, particularly that of the US, found that unacceptable.
• Parenti defends the concept of ‘revolutionary violence’, though argues that it is falsely cast, as violence is disproportionately deployed by reactionaries seeking to prevent reform, regardless of whether the social movements are peaceful or not. To this end, revolutionary governments in which Parenti cites Cuba, Libya, Vietnam and North Korea as examples should be lauded for not only representing an actualisation of popular struggle, but also surviving the Cold War.*****
• The US during the Cold War, and after were less concerned with resolving inequality and a spirit of altruism than ensuing its continuation, and then cynically claiming that it is spreading/preserving democracy. Parenti cites George Kennan quoting him as saying the US could not afford “the luxury of altruism and world benefaction” in a world where the majority of its people faced abject poverty and exploitation, and that discussions around “vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization…” should cease: “The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better” (p. 32).****** Parenti goes on to deride political scientists such Samuel P. Huntington (he of the “clash of civilizations” fame) and the Reagan-era US Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick for outright defending authoritarian governments in Latin America, Asia, and Africa (which the latter called “benign”), just so long as they weren’t Red. The common equation to all of this is what these governments served: either capital interests, or that of the proletariat. It is in this context that we see Parenti critical of China and its flirtation with global capitalism, along with with the gross attention the country is receiving from these Beltway jerkoffs*******.
• Parenti has a whole chapter devoted to what most would call a “with friends like these…” moment, as he takes aim at a tendency on the Left which propogated anti-communism, and unintentionally or willingly encouraged bourgeois dominance. He diagnoses them as the type to call themselves “anti-totalitarians” with a willingness to fight dogmatism “of both the Right and the Left” – but are in actuality just other kinds of Red-baiters. George Orwell, Murray Bookchin, Noam Chomsky and Ronald Radosh are to Parenti, symptomatic of this problem. Regarding the former, Parenti appears to view Orwell as a proto-Cold War liberal and the blueprint for “left anti-communism” rather than the prophet of creeping absolutism that he’s commonly presented as. The targeting of Bookchin and Chomsky has a personal element to it as well, as Parenti had public and professional disputes with both.
• The centralization of power and authoritarian features typically displayed in socialist states, especially during the Cold War – absolutely has to be contextualized in a scenario where non-stop attempts to subvert, disrupt and destroy the revolutionary governments had taken place throughout the 20th century. These environments are not brought into place by a Lenin, a Stalin, a Mao, or a Castro – but by the conditions the revolution takes place in, which then determines the society.******** Parenti even posits that had any of them not being confronted with struggles for survival for the entirety of their existence, these socialist states would have easily transformed into “worker-consumer societies” (and to an extent, many of them did).
• There were serious issues with socialism as it existed, and that we should not try to sugarcoat that. All of them had rigid command systems – while central planning was useful in ‘siege socialism’ to help them (and ‘them’ usually means either a crumbling semi-feudal empire or a periphery of of an imperialist territory) rapidly industrialise to defend it against enemies like Nazi Germany, they did not have the required flexibility to produce a wide enough********* range of consumer goods and services. Additionally, there was no computerised system large enough to address such a large and highly intricate economy by responding to the aggregate demands of the populace (pg. 59). Innovations in scientific and technological development was stifled by top-down planning – in the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, it was the failure to address this, that led to their infamous ‘stagnation period’. A managerialism persisted which meant that there was a lack of incentive to pursue or allow innovations that could make a manager’s job obsolete; that there was little material incentive to take those risks worsened the problem. They were inefficiencies developing at the point of production, in part because when firms paid for raw materials, fuel, etc., they did not do so at real-value-prices; lack of replacement parts for industrial production and consumer goods; improvement in production only led to the raising of production quotas bringing things back to the trap of incentivised labour (pg. 61). A self-justifying bureaucracy became a fact of life – and not even an efficient or even clever one: in contrast to common reports of ‘totalitarian control overlooking every aspect of life’, incompetence, laxness, and corruption (of the huckster variety) were common features – and this deeply affected work discipline. Go figure: the problems over there – were very similar to the problems here!
• The experience of communism frustrated the common people living it, especially during the period where there was no expectation that the goods and services they wanted would even arrive at all, much less on time. The basic social welfare which was the envy of much of the world, and the guaranteed jobs were all taken for granted – and with the more professionalised strata of people under communism, they became increasingly envious of life in the West, which offered better pay, a wider range of consumer goods – including better clothes, and more exciting lifestyles. This had and has affected interest in Marxism and appreciation of the revolution (in a negative sense) which under their own admission – often provided liveable, even near-“first-world” standard conditions. This created a deeply distorted lens of the West as a cornucopian utopia – with the cognitive dissonance around the existence of deep poverty in these societies brushed aside with the rationalising narratives of “working hard to get rich”. As Parenti put it, “people cannot live on the social wage alone”.
• Many of the dissident intellectuals and activists from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc like Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa are either delusional rubes with a case of “Western envy”, or cynical turncoats afflicted with the same condition. Parenti notes that the “freedom fighter” Sakharov was not only a propagandist for capitalism, but cheered on America during the Vietnam War, and for all his talk about freedom and state tyranny, had fuck all to say about Pinochet’s Chile and other right-wing authoritarian regimes – least of all, South Vietnam.
• Anti-communism, especially in academia has led to unserious, much less an inconsistent presentation of Joseph Stalin’s leadership of the Soviet Union – one that is cultivated to make him a Genghis Khan-like figure, and to lay the case for the “twin totalitarianism” model. Thus, the number of deaths under his regime is inflated over time to a preposterous degree, resembling ‘atrocity porn’. Parenti points out that if Stalin was really as dedicated to killing people as much as is often claimed by Cold War academics, the Soviet population would have decreased significantly, and the gulag would be its single largest enterprise. Parenti also bring up an anecdote when Churchill asked him many died under him, Stalin put up both his hands, thus giving the number of 10 million by Stalin’s own account, according to Churchill, who conveniently didn’t ask Stalin for clarification*********. Parenti however makes clear in this work that he regards the Soviet Union under Stalin as a “dictatorship”, and that Stalin committed many crimes against the Soviet people.
• Decommunization for Eastern Europe brought anything but freedom and democracy; Boris Yeltsin, hailed as a hero in the West was emblematic of the autocratic rule for the sake of market expansion into Russia. Yeltsin was the blueprint for presidents in former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, who now sought to rule by decree, and bypass parliamentary consensus. Parenti muses on the irony that introduction to the free market which was said by reformers “to be the foundation of political democracy, could not be introduced by democratic means”. Support of Yeltsin even during the bombing of the Russian Parliament building in 1993, and the presidential election of 1996 came from the United States, which in the case of the latter – even gave Yeltsin’s campaign team a $10bn aid package to support him, literally buying off democracy. With Yeltsin’s control of media, and iron grip over Russia’s political branches, Yelstin was reelected. Parenti also posits that the repressive and authoritarian features in the process of decommunization and so-called “democratization” began during the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev, citing suppression of workplace organising, control of the flow of information towards pro-capitalist media, and even suppression of debate in the political organs of the Soviet Union.
• With capitalist restoration, not only was their widespread political repression of the Left and trade unions through banning their activities and seizing their property, the nationalism that emerged in many parts of the former Soviet Union led to persecution of ethnic minorities. There was also a “bonfire sale” of state property that the “new capitalists” made a tidy profit out of, stocks in public firms were sold to the global market – from there emerged a class in post-Soviet society which we only call ‘the oligarchy’. The working class, however suffered immensely as the welfare system was ripped to shreds: hospitals were privatised, or were closed down. Cooperative farms were broken up. With the privatisation of agriculture, former ‘breadbaskets’ of Eastern Europe themselves experienced bread stortages. Infant mortality rose dramatically, while the life expectancy reduced sharply during the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The multinationals came in buying up land and property, while pumping out pop culture that mimicked the West – Parenti describes this process as effectively colonisation. Crime and corruption was widespread as “beggars, pimps, dope pushers…” came with “unemployment, homelessness, air and water pollution, prostitution, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill”. Suicide rate increased to nearly 50% in Russia and Hungary. Russia itself turned into a ‘mafia state’ where ‘gangsterism’ rules the country. Eastern Europe is open to all kinds of evangelism. ‘Red nostalgia’ sets in, as capitalism no longer receives its romanticised image after a few years experiencing its sharp edges, leading to a common refrain: “We never knew what we had”.
• Parenti spends the final chapter defending Marxism as a science, and for its continued relevance in explaning social, economic, and political phenomena throughout the world. He insists that it is able to do so because Marxism deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy; treating them as the motor forces of society and history. Parenti points out that people have been declaring ‘the end of Marxism’ even during Lenin’s time, which the latter commented on in just two years before the Russian Revolution. He says that many of Marx’s predictions and theories have proven not only to be right, but still very relevant; pointing out that the ‘tendency for the rate of profit to fall’, while not appreciated in Marx’s time, at the very least in modern times – it is widely accepted that boom-and-bust business cycles are a common and necessary feature of capitalism; that wealth in a society, and indeed around the world, has a tendency to centralise and concentrate through its accumulation – and the capitalist class that own it, rather than encourage or create wealth to spread towards the lower classes via jobs, instead seeks to find means to extract more wealth – not out of a lack of ethics, but necessity; and that labour is the source of all value remains true. He concedes that Marx was wrong about the proletarian revolution starting in Europe, but that was in part because he was a man situated in 19th century Europe when political development of the working masses was unprecedented for its time, and this was what his investigations led him to to make those conclusions. Moreover, “trickle-down” economics is horseshit, and for all the praise capitalism gets from conservatives around the preservation of culture, traditions, family values, and so on – they don’t appear to recognize that it is capitalism that is dissolving these social bonds and their meaning in the first place.
• Defines Marxism as a holistic science which studies the nature and functionality of capitalism; As capitalism is not just an economic system, but an entire social order, this demands investigations into how capitalism shapes politics, law, culture – even communities, families, medicine and science itself. Marxism has to be systemic, and therefore has to advance a universalism. Parenti believes that social phenomena like racism isn’t a mere social ill that requires interpersonal correction, but an expression of systemic power mediated through institutional apparatuses. For Parenti, racism is another form of class warfare – not as blunt as other weapons, but certainly a subtle tool in confounding class consciousness.
• Parenti takes his ire towards “Anything-but-class” (ABC) theorists. By that, he means postmodernists and poststructuralists. He charges that for all their blase and dismissive attitude towards class analysis and Marxism in particular, their radicalism is impotent and is really just a form of liberalism anyway. He mocks Ronald Aronson for his naive politics, and notes his involvement in the Sokal affair…in the notes. He also charges that the ‘separation’ of Marx’s political development to ‘early Marx’ and ‘late Marx’ that was prevalent in cultural studies at this time, is bollocks. He’s also none too happy about what academia has done to Gramsci, identifying him as a Marxist-Leninist, and not the ‘neutered’ radical to mine for explorations on ‘discourse’.
• The most pressing global situation of our time is the ecological crisis – with the substantial damage to the ozone layer, rise in pollution, disappearing freshwater supplies, mass species extinction, destruction of the ocean’s protoplankton and a rise in skin cancer among people, the ecological crisis is an existential one – and the continued existence of capitalism is the culprit, with the driving motor is the transformation of everything, even nature itself, into commodities. The ruling class is well aware of the problem, yet it attacks the environmentalists who seek to combat it – first with the press, and in less developed countries, like Nigeria, with bullets e,g, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Capitalists will be as ruthless to the Greens as they are to Reds. Ergo, the “green movement” would be better served with a commitment to class politics, as the struggle against the eco-apocalypse is another front of the global class struggle (p. 160). And that’s the end of the book.

The Hammer and Sickle at the End of History: Blackshirts & Reds as post-Communist Literature

• See also: ‘actually-existing socialism’

“The only countervailing force that might eventually turn things in a better direction is an informed and mobilized citizenry. Whatever their shortcomings, the people are our best hope. Indeed, we are they. Whether or not the ruling circles still wear blackshirts, and whether or not their opponents are Reds, la lutta continua, the struggle continues, today, tomorrow, and through all history.”

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds – pg. 160, the last paragraph of the book

Despite its reputation as a “tankie book”, Blackshirts & Reds as we’ve seen thus far takes a rather critical stance on the countries under communism, and especially the ones that survived the end of the Cold War. He was none too pleased with China and even Vietnam in their forays into the global world market and the accompanying introduction of privatisation of state assets; Judging by the tone of the book, Parenti likely expected them to go through the same capitalist restoration that the other countries endured. The only ones that seemed to have escaped his sharp pen are probably Cuba, North Korea, and Laos – the latter owing to its relative obscurity.

Nevertheless, the fans who claim to have become communist in part due to the book were exposed to the musings of a man who even at the crumbling of a seven-decade experiment in socialism continued to defend the legacy of that project, all that was built as part of it, unfailingly denounced the United States for its part in smashing it, as well as the naive and deluded leaders who allowed it to get smashed out of some imagined promise of a new alliance – not once cracking so much as a smirk (or even a tear for that matter) over its dissolution, unlike Chomsky who declared its breakdown “a positive for humanity”, or the various academics who outright abandoned socialism for all sorts of various ‘micro-politics’ over ‘grand projects’, came to make up another ‘grand project’ while claiming that that’s not what they’re doing, or become outright turncoats and get involved in some think-tank and advise capitalist-imperialist leaders. Parenti for these people is example is an example of a principled scholar-activist who at a period of a revolutionary ebb, continued to insist on the continued importance of the class struggle, and expressed this in passionate and readable prose without exposing his readers to dense Marxist terminology, even as he describes the processes of capitalism, or rather “corporate power”.

However, the presence of these critiques to communism to large sections of its contemporary advocates who “uphold” states like China, Cuba, Vietnam and other existing Marxist-Leninist nations, these critiques can be slightly disquieting to those who’ve examined fairly closely what was written in it. I’ve seen (anecdote alert!) fans of Parenti and this book in particular, rationalize this by saying that this was an “early” Parenti who had ‘social-democratic’ tendencies, and he became more ‘tankie’ over time – a claim which doesn’t hold much water when you consider that by the time Blackshirts & Reds was published, Parenti had been writing books for nearly three decades, he critiques social democracy in the book (as noted in the bullet points), and Blackshirts & Reds is largely a compilation of essays and lectures synthesized into slim pages.

While Parenti describes himself as a Marxist, and indeed – takes aim at the various competing left-wing modes of thought flourishing in the 1980s and 1990s in academia, as some of its own fans have likely noticed, it is entirely possible that Blackshirts & Reds can be read as ‘post-communist‘. The reason for this doesn’t lie in his critiques of socialist states as they exist, or even with historical leaders in those states, but the context of the period the book is written in, and his stated solution for overcoming it. The year Blackshirts & Reds was published is 1997, which as much as it was a reaction to the mood after the end of the Cold War, it is also a work soaked with the three decades worth of extensive debates on how Marxism is to be approached, conducted and practiced – a “crisis of Marxism”, were beside the ideological and geopolitical tensions between the Soviet model and the Chinese – were arguments over who was the revolutionary subject, whether or not Marxism should be more ‘open’, whether there needs to be a return to Marx (and often with the implication that Engels should be ignored), and did Althusserianism “break” Marxism?

For Parenti, these debates were solipsistic, and did not engage with the very real struggles presented by liberation movements over the course of the Cold War – and the relentless opposition that they were faced with. By that some token, Parenti does not engage with the internal tensions in world communism in his text at all. With several of his works and lectures coming into prominence at what was a clear revolutionary ebb in communism, when existing socialist states had consolidated and appeared to approach the world through national interests, and the climate of disillusionment of the results of various national liberation struggles, Parenti had taken a ‘realist’ approach to their actions. From what point on, he made it a point to discuss colonialism as well as the situation faced by socialist societies at the time.

Parenti’s diagnoses of these societies was pessimistic – especially that of the Soviet Union, however even if Parenti believed that the game was up, he still believed that it along with other countries built or reforged with the red flag flying was more than a failed dream, that it transformed lives for the better, allowed people who would have remained in a state of serfdom had conditions remained what they were in the beginning of the century to not only have more control in their lives**********, but by their own hands recreated their countries into something that they had actual participation in. They were societies built by the masses, and for the masses, and that much deserved to be acknowledged. That the efforts of millions of working-class people to build a society free from poverty, ignorance and conflict collapsing on itself deserved so much more than the mocking eulogies produced in the media, among politicians, and through academia – from a civilisation whose splendor is still effectively maintained by the exploitation of half a billion souls in the planet. And worse, the segments of the Left committed incredible perfidy by joining in the chorus celebrating communism’s demise.

However, Parenti is not – or was not neccessarily saying that communism is not dead, and continued to speak of it as if was a noble, but ultimately flawed project – at the very least in its 20th century manifestations. His final chapter, and especially the last paragraph seems to suggest that what is needed is the ‘spirit of communism’ in order to tackle the pressing global problems of the era. Parenti understandably did not know what was on the horizon in terms of what could emerge out of the social movements that the Left produced at the time, but what he was concerned with was that the collapse of communism, or at least the shock of the fall of the Soviet Union, would not lead to anything good – the possibilities being the resurrection of fascism, even if only in a diminished and fragmented form, or much worse – the unfettered exploitation of the rest of the world. What is not often appreciated is that Parenti himself was born of the New Left – and so is inclined to be supportive, if tentatively, of the new social movements, especially the ‘red-green alliance’ and the anti-globalisation movement. With all that said, if we accept the conclusions made by Parenti in this book, then we also have to consider that while he has a clear and obvious disdain for post-Marxists for their rejection of class as a social relation of continued epistemological significance – Parenti, much like the Western Marxists and the postmodernists had approached a crossroad where solutions lied ahead of the practice of 20th-century communism, which they had all concluded had lost steam.

From this angle, we can see how Blackshirts & Reds can have a post-communist reading. Is what is said by Parenti here really all that different from Jacques Derrida’s declaration that the “spectre of Marx” will continue to haunt the victors of the Cold War so long as exploitation, and violence remains their tools to secure their control of the world? I suppose in some senses, it definitely is – but not by very much. At the very least, Parenti distinguishes himself by embracing that communism was and is a working-class movement, and whatever its mistakes, it shows not just what the working class can build, but if truly unfettered by a constant siege against them by the lieutenants of capital, that they could build something even greater than anything that ever came before in history.

Conclusion

Blackshirts & Reds is much more focused on offering polemics than a work of history, but that does not mean that it is not a very well-researched book; for a work of 160 pages, it is meticulously cited, and almost no line goes without one. As for the contents of the book, can I say that it ‘changed my life’? Well as someone who’s only first read it this year, what I can say is that living in an area where the Communist Party of Britain (glorified Labourites that they are) still has a hub where they meet not that far from where I live, and having started to dive into various Marxist books, I can honestly say no. Then again, Corbynism notwithstanding, I’ve not been bombarded with the continuous background radiation of anti-communism that the United States produces***********, nor am I from a post-communist region whose been fed an unpalatable diet of nationalist tripe to the point that the penetration of foreign capital as public services are ripped away is rarely given another thought. I also can’t help but note that Parenti does describe suppressed radical left groups in America, but only discusses ‘successful revolutions’ in some detail. The book doesn’t appear to be that interested in going over even an American context for radical groups in the struggle against capitalism – and it seems to be because they failed, or aren’t very going anywhere (maybe ended up as a ‘political cult’ in all but name, following the whims of a vain, petty-bourgeois leader). This is kind of a problem since new people coming in to those politics are not only not engaging with their domestic history, they are also not given any tools to challenge the existing social order at home, and instead – turn towards post-revolutionary societies to cheer on, falling under the assumption that they’re the key to the new world, when they’re just as trapped in the era of late capitalist modernity as everywhere else, with positional moves proving very difficult.

So, I’m not really that beholden to Michael Parenti, or this book. Having said that, I do genuinely think that it is remarkable that such a book with the content it has, much less the argumentation within it was written before the 1990s were finished, and that so much of still feels fresh. I think that in light of the climate crisis*************, rise of the far-right globally, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the crises produced by globalisation, this work has an endured relevance to these times. It primarily served as a necessary (over)correction to anti-communist notions prevalent in the post-Cold War era and holds a dire warning that the blackest of reaction is never far away from the retreat of socialism.

Notes:

*- As one might expect especially if they’re students of history, there are competing tendencies of Marxism-Leninism, so what might be okay for one is opposed by the other. Those MLs who happen to be ‘anti-revisionist’ are not likely to take to Parenti due to the ‘positive’ (if critical) description of socialist countries that they deemed ‘revisionist’, or even ‘social-imperialist’. The dry focus on theoretical engagement not displayed by Parenti here, is also the another reason for their hostility, though others have been known to enjoy it for its accessibility, even if they’ve developed beyond it.

**- Hope that clerk was still around to see whether Donald Trump was to his liking. He certainly didn’t have the theoretical ‘insights’ of Mussolini, but he certainly had the pomposity and reactionary fervour down pat.

***- This in part, explains why the revolutionary left is hostile to the reformist left i.e. social democrats.

****- A more contemporary adage is that “liberals would sooner ally with fascists than communists”.

*****- The Libya Parenti refers to here is Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. That Libya hasn’t existed since 2011, and is now effectively replaced by warlordism. In other words, Gaddafi’s Libya may have survived the Cold War, but it certainly didn’t survive the post-Cold War.

******- This sentence should perhaps clarify what the interests of the United States had actually represented in the Cold War, shorn off of the obfuscatory slogans, which even George Kennan himself criticized.

*******- I’ve mentioned this in the notes to this, but since the eve of the end of the Cold War, a number of think tanks and the Cold War intellectuals that were involved in them had taken interest in the kind of modernisation that China had taken. Having drank the Friedman Kool-Aid, they were under the belief that China’s forays with marketisation will lead to not only the overthrow of communism, but the introduction of liberal democracy. The US state Department decided not to wait until this process happens ‘naturally’ and used the National Endownment for Democracy (NED) to support so-called ‘pro-democracy’ activists in China, alongside Chinese dissidents. The fruits of the NED’s activities reached its crescendo in the 1989 Tianamen Square protests, where the popular discontent for various issues that had emerged as a consequence of Chinese marketisation (worker’s rights, living costs, etc.) were highjacked by a student clique demanding ‘democracy’. In any case, the events of Tiananmen Square had shown quite clearly that this fantasy of a Chinese-style colour revolution was not going to happen, or at least succeed. Which is why it is just as well that there were other sections of the think tank-domiciled intelligentsia who were happy enough that China had embraced capitalism, yet felt that its transformation into a Western-style liberal democracy was always farcical, however, these people often resorted to essentialist and racist arguments presuming to know how the Chinese thoughtwhich amounted to saying that democracy was too alien a concept for them (Samuel P. Huntington), and were insted impressed with the ‘neoconservatism’ expressed in the Chinese political system.

********- Historical materialism? In my Michael Parenti book? It’s more likely than you think.

*********- Even if one agrees with the principle of setting up a ‘consumer society’ within the framework of a socialist system, as Parenti appears to, the error of Nikita Khrushchev was to bring that consumer society in competition with that of the United States, especially as early as he did. The United States not only benifitted from its neocolonial relations with its de facto dependencies, it also was virtually untouched (in the mainland) from World War II, and its currency – the dollar was literally the international reserve currency. This allowed it to make a virtually endless supply of consumer goods, in comparison to the Soviet Union. As stated in the following paragraph, this had not only set the seeds for various problems which successive leaders were unable to meet – most notable of which, migration from the Soviet Union to the West, particularly the US in pursuit of the romanticised ‘consumer utopia’ it was presented as, ever searching the “American Dream”.

**********- Churchill’s own legacy has come under scrutiny relatively recently with the Black Lives Matter Movement and works such as Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes, and Churchill’s Secret War. Of particular focus is his role in the Bengal famine of 1943-44, in which 3 million deaths occurred as a result of the requisitioning of the wheat grown in the Indian subcontinent with 70,000 tonnes between April to July of 1943 exported from India to the Allied forces in Europe to assist in the war effort, and purposefully ignoring the Indian viceroy Archibald Wavell’s requests for food aid towards Bengal, contempuously accusing the Indians of “breeding like rabbits”, and even complaining that Gandhi hadn’t died yet. If Churchill was going to accuse Stalin of being a cold-blooded killer with no regard for human life, he should’ve attended to the plank in his own eye. Even today, for all of this talk of Soviet censorship and historical revisionism, the hagiography of Winston Churchill, one of the greatest servants and exponents of British imperialism in history ensures that he is remembered as a war hero, an ‘apostle of freedom and democracy’, and not a bloodthirsty, barely-sane warmonger, white supremacist, and utterly unrepentant colonialist “whose views were not all of that different from Hitler’s”.

***********- Yes, communism gave people more agency than under tsardom, colonialism, and fascism. Deal with it.

*************- Many radical left-wing organisations, including socialist and communist parties had also arose in the United States, although perhaps comparatively late to that of the European parties, and under different conditions. Nevertheless, the histories of groups like the Socialist Party of the United States, the Socialist Workers Party (US), the African Black Brotherhood, the International Workers of the World (Wobblies), and the Communist Party of the United States of America are largely erased from popular narratives of American history or portrayed (certainly and obviously) in the latter as subject to Kremlin influence (this is technically true, but not in the way as is usually presented). If there is a somewhat charitable representation of this radical history, its likely to be of CPUSA’s role in building the New Deal of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration – that is to say, it is subsumed into the historical trajectory of American liberalism, instead of contextualising it in even internationalist progressive movements (through in the CPUSA’s case, it’s partially their own fault, with this “communism is as American as apple pie” stuff). The point is, even those harsh conditions produced contradictions from which emerged a radical politics whose histories prior to the Second World War is largely erased. The explosion of the New Left, which came with Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and so on – is not too easy to ignore, but their presentation in popular media (as expected) seldom deals with the complexity of their political practice.

*************- Wrote this piece during COP28. Make of that what you will.

See also:

• Michael Parenti
  • ‘Yellow Parenti’
  • “Read Parenti!”
• ‘Actually existing socialism’
• history of communism
• The new communism
• end of history (what Parenti is giving the middle finger to)
• Books that I read in 2023