Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records.5 Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.”

The three historians who studied the heretofore secret gulag records concluded that the number of victims were far less than usually claimed in the West. This finding is ridiculed by anticommunist liberal Adam Hochschild, who prefers to repeat Churchill’s story about Stalin’s fingers (New York Times, 5/8/96). Like many others, Hochschild has no trouble accepting undocumented speculations about the gulag but much difficulty accepting the documented figures drawn from NKVD archives.

And where are the mass of political prisoners in Cuba? Asked about this, Professor Alberto Prieto of the University of Havana pointed out that even a recent State Department report on human rights showed hundreds of people being tortured, killed, or “disappeared” in almost all the Latin American countries, but mentions only six alleged political prisoners in reference to Cuba (People’s Weekly World, 2/26/94).

In 1989, when the millionaire playwright Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, he granted amnesty to about two-thirds of the country’s prison population, which numbered not in the millions but in the thousands. Havel assumed that most of those incarcerated under communism were victims of political repression and therefore deserved release. He and his associates were dismayed to discover that a good number were experienced criminals who lost no time in resuming their unsavory pursuits (New York Times, 12/18/91).

Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city’s population, an estimated 1.2 million, were drug addicts. Every morning there were special street crews “whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned, and died of disease, cold, and/or starvation” (Z Magazine, October 1995).

To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

But what of the democratic rights that these peoples were denied? In fact, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries had known little political democracy in the days before communism. Russia was a czarist autocracy, Poland a rightist dictatorship with concentration camps of its own, Albania an Italian fascist protectorate as early as 1927, Cuba a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship. Lithuania, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria were outright fascist regimes allied with Nazi Germany in World War II.

An editorial in the Nation (6/17/96) asked: What if a popularly elected communist president in Russia had pursued Yeltsin’s harsh policies of privatization, plunging his country into poverty, turning over most of its richest assets to a small segment of previous communist officials, suppressing dissident elements, using tanks to disband a popularly elected parliament that opposed his policies, re-writing the constitution to give himself almost dictatorial power, and doing all the other things Yeltsin has done? Would U.S. leaders enthusiastically devote themselves to the re-election of this “communist” president and remain all but silent about his transgressions?

The question is posed rhetorically; the Nation editorial presumes that the answer is no. In fact, I would respond: Yes, of course. U.S. leaders would have no trouble supporting this “communist” president, for he would be communist in name only. In actual deed he would be a devoted agent of capitalist restoration.

Openly anti-Semitic groups, cryptofascist parties, and hate campaigns surfaced in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania. Museums that commemorated the heroic antifascist resistance were closed down and monuments to the struggle against Nazism were dismantled. In countries like Lithuania, former Nazi war criminals were exonerated, some even compensated for the years they had spent in jail. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and xenophobic attacks against foreigners of darker hue increased. With the communists no longer around, Jews and foreigners were blamed for low crop prices, inflation, crime, and other social ills.

A systematic enforcement of tribalist political organization might well describe Yugoslavia’s fate, a nation that was fragmented by force of arms into a number of small, conservative republics under the suzerainty of the Western powers. With that dismemberment came a series of wars, repressions, and atrocities committed by all contending sides.

Once the capitalist restorationists in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union took state power, they worked hard to make sure that the new order of corporate plunder, individual greed, low wages, mindless pop culture, and limited electoral democracy would take hold. They set about dismantling public ownership of production and the entire network of social programs that once served the public. They integrated the erstwhile communist countries into the global capitalist system by expropriating their land, labor, natural resources, and markets, swiftly transforming them into impoverished Third World nations. All this was hailed in the U.S. corporate-owned press as a great advance for humanity.

In 1996, the International Monetary Fund extended a $10.2 billion loan to Russia, with terms calling for the privatization of agriculture and other state-owned assets, and the elimination of human service and fuel subsidies. U.S. aid is used to help private investors buy public properties and extract publicly owned raw materials from Eastern European countries under the most favorable investment conditions.

Between 1989 and 1995, in what is now the Czech Republic, nearly 80 percent of all enterprises were privatized—and industrial production shrank by two-thirds.

Since going private, ZiL, the huge Moscow plant, saw its production of trucks slump from 150,000 to 13,000 a year, with almost 40 percent of the workforce laid off. In April 1996, the remaining workers petitioned the Russian government to take back control of ZiL. In the past, ZiL workers and their relatives “had unshakeably safe jobs” at the factory. They lived in apartments and attended schools provided by ZiL. As babies they spent their days at the ZiL day care center, and when ill they were attended to by ZiL doctors. “I was raised in a country that cared about its workers,” said one machinist, who now was sorry he had opposed that system (New York Times, 5/8/94).

In 1992, the Lithuanian government decreed that former owners and their descendants could reclaim property confiscated during the socialist era. As a result, tens of thousands of farming families, about 70 percent of the rural population, were evicted from land they had worked for over a half century, destroying the country’s agricultural base in the process.

Emigrés from Communist states are astonished by the amount of bureaucracy they find in the West. Two Soviet immigrants to Canada complained, independently of each other, that “bureaucracy here was even worse than at home” (Monthly Review, 5/88).

In Russia, the living standard of the average family has fallen almost by half since the market “reforms” took hold (New York Times, 6/16/96).

In countries like Russia and Hungary, as widely reported in the U.S. press, the suicide rate has climbed by 50 percent in a few years. Reductions in fuel service, brought about by rising prices and unpaid bills, have led to a growing number of deaths or serious illnesses among the poor and the elderly during the long winters.

The overthrow of communism brought a rising infant mortality and soaring death rates in Russia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Moldavia, Rumania, Ukraine, Mongolia, and East Germany. One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia’s birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born. The death rate rose nearly 20 percent for East German women in their late thirties, and nearly 30 percent for men of the same age (New York Times, 4/6/94).

The police force in Prague today is many times greater than it was under communism, when “relatively few police were needed” (New York Times, 12/18/91). How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.

During the communist era, three of every five books in the world were produced in the Soviet Union. Today, as the cost of books, periodicals, and newspapers has skyrocketed and education has declined, readership has shrunk almost to Third World levels.

Descending upon the unhappy societies of Eastern Europe and Russia are the Hare Krishnas, Mormans, Moonies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Bahais, rightist Christian evangelicals, self-improvement hucksters, instant-success peddlers, and other materialistic spiritualist scavengers who prey upon the deprived and the desperate, offering solace in the next world or the promise of wealth and success in this one.

The president of one of Russia’s largest construction companies summed it up: “All the material well-being that people had, they lost in one hour. There is practically no more free medical care, accessible higher education, no right to a job or rest. The houses of culture, libraries, stadiums, kindergartens and nurseries, pioneer camps, schools, hospitals and stores are closing. The cost of housing, communal services and transport are no longer affordable for the majority of families” (People’s Weekly World, 4/6/96).

Without the former communist stipulation that women get at least one third of the seats in any legislature, female political representation has dropped to as low as 5 percent in some countries.

Pro-capitalist Angela Stent, of Georgetown University, allows that “most people are worse off than they were under Communism . … The quality of life has deteriorated with the spread of crime and the disappearance of the social safety net” (New York Times, 12/20/93).

In a similar vein, former GDR defense minister Heinz Kessler commented: “Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security” (New York Times, 7/20/96).

State socialism, “the system that did not work,” provided everyone with some measure of security. Free-market capitalism, “the system that works,” brought a free-falling economy, financial plunder, deteriorating social conditions, and mass suffering.

Some people say Marxism is a science and others say it is a dogma, a bundle of reductionist unscientific claims. I would suggest that Marxism is not a science in the positivist sense, formulating hypotheses and testing for predictability, but more accurately a social science, one that shows us how to conceptualize systematically and systemically, moving from surface appearances to deeper, broader features, so better to understand both the specific and the general, and the relationship between the two.

In 1915, Lenin wrote that “[bourgeois] science will not even hear of Marxism, declaring that it has been refuted and annihilated. Marx is attacked with equal zest by young scholars who are making a career by refuting socialism, and by decrepit elders who are preserving the tradition of all kinds of outworn systems.”

Capitalist theorists present capital as a creative providential force. As they would have it, capital gives shape and opportunity to labor; capital creates production, jobs, new technologies, and a general prosperity. Marxists turn the equation around. They argue that, of itself, capital cannot produce anything; it is the thing that is produced by labor. Only human labor can create the farm and the factory, the machine and the computer. And in a class society, the wealth so produced by many is accumulated in the hands of relatively few who soon translate their economic power into political and cultural power in order to better secure the exploitative social order that so favors them.

There can be no rich slaveholders living in idle comfort without a mass of penniless slaves to support their luxurious life style, no lords of the manor who live in opulence without a mass of impoverished landless serfs who till the lords’ lands from dawn to dusk. So too under capitalism, there can be no financial moguls and industrial tycoons without millions of underpaid and overworked employees.

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.

Big Capital has no commitment to anything but capital accumulation, no loyalty to any nation, culture, or people. It moves inexorably according to its inner imperative to accumulate at the highest possible rate without concern for human and environmental costs.

Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment.

In 1820 about 75 percent of Americans worked for themselves on farms or in small businesses and artisan crafts. By 1940 that number had dropped to 21.6 percent. Today, less than 10 percent of the labor force is self-employed.

During the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era, from 1981 to 1996, the share of the national income that went to those who work for a living shrank by over 12 percent. The share that went to those who live off investments increased almost 35 percent. Less than 1 percent of the population owns almost 50 percent of the nation’s wealth. The richest families are hundreds of times wealthier than the average household in the lower 90 percent of the population. The gap between America’s rich and poor is greater than it has been in more than half a century and is getting ever-greater. Thus, between 1977 and 1989, the top 1 percent saw their earnings grow by over 100 percent, while the three lowest quintiles averaged a 3 to 10 percent drop in real income.

The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for consumers or sustain life and society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespective of the human and environmental costs.

Capitalism moves into every area of work and community, harnessing all of social life to its pursuit of profit. It converts nature, labor, science, art, music, and medicine into commodities and commodities into capital. It transforms land into real estate, folk culture into mass culture, and citizens into debt-ridden workers and consumers.

Consider a specific phenomenon like racism. Racism is presented as essentially a set of bad attitudes held by racists. There is little analysis of what makes it so functional for a class society. Instead, race and class are treated as mutually exclusive concepts in competition with each other. But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the fore, racism becomes not less but more important as a factor in class conflict. In short, both race and class are likely to be crucial arenas of struggle at the very same time.

Marxists further maintain that racism involves not just personal attitude but institutional structure and systemic power. They point out that racist organizations and sentiments are often propagated by well-financed reactionary forces seeking to divide the working populace against itself, fracturing it into antagonistic ethnic enclaves.

In the Marxist view there can be no such thing as a class as such, a social entity unto itself. There can be no lords without serfs, no masters without slaves, no capitalists without workers. More than just a sociological category, class is a relationship to the means of production and to social and state power.

When we think without Marx’s perspective, that is, without considering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many things are reported in the news but few are explained. Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail. Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits: as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations—propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests—and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity.

There is no denying that revolution does not entirely cure all human suffering. But why is that assertion used as a refutation of Marxism? Most Marxists are neither chiliastic nor utopian. They dream not of a perfect society but of a better, more just life. They make no claim to eliminating all suffering, and recognize that even in the best of societies there are the inevitable assaults of misfortune, mortality, and other vulnerabilities of life. And certainly in any society there are some people who, for whatever reason, are given to wrongful deeds and self-serving corruptions. The highly imperfect nature of human beings should make us all the more determined not to see power and wealth accumulating in the hands of an unaccountable few, which is the central dedication of capitalism.

Is Marx still relevant today? Only if you want to know why the media distort the news in a mostly mainstream direction; why more and more people at home and abroad face economic adversity while money continues to accumulate in the hands of relatively few; why there is so much private wealth and public poverty in this country and elsewhere; why U.S. forces find it necessary to intervene in so many regions of the world; why a rich and productive economy offers chronic recessions, underemployment, and neglect of social needs; and why many political officeholders are unwilling or unable to serve the public interest.

If the very rich are naturally so much more capable than the rest of us, why must they be provided with so many artificial privileges under the law, so many bailouts, subsidies, and other special considerations—at our expense? Their “naturally superior talents” include unprincipled and illegal subterfuges such as price-fixing, stock manipulation, insider trading, fraud, tax evasion, the legal enforcement of unfair competition, ecological spoliation, harmful products, and unsafe work conditions. One might expect naturally superior people not to act in such rapacious and venal ways. Differences in talent and capacity as might exist between individuals do not excuse the crimes and injustices that are endemic to the corporate business system.

Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.

Capital’s class war is waged with court injunctions, antilabor laws, police repression, union busting, contract violations, sweatshops, dishonest clocking of time, safety violations, harassment and firing of resistant workers, cutbacks in wages and benefits, raids of pension funds, layoffs, and plant closings. Labor fights back with union organizing, strikes, slowdowns, boycotts, public demonstrations, job actions, coordinated absenteeism, and workplace sabotage.

Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

The complaint is not that the very rich have so much more than everyone else but that their superabundance and endless accumulation comes at the expense of everyone and everything else, including our communities and our environment.