Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

As the gap between the corporate rich and the rest of us grows, the opportunities for popular rule diminish.

Again and again we are asked to choose between freedom and security when in truth there is no security without freedom. In both dictatorships and democracies, the agencies of “national security,” acting secretively and unaccountably, have regularly violated both our freedom and our security, practicing every known form of repression, corruption, and deceit.

Still, democratic governance can prove troublesome, inciting all sorts of popular demands and imposing restraints on Big Business’s enjoyment of a freewheeling market. For this reason the captains of capitalism and their conservative publicists support both a strong state armed with every intrusive power and a weak government unable to stop corporate abuse or serve the needs of the ordinary populace.

Capitalism is a rational system, the well-calculated systematic maximization of power and profits, a process of accumulation anchored in material obsession that has the ultimately irrational consequence of devouring the system itself—and everything else with it.

“Let us not … flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. … At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. …”

The “car culture” demonstrates how the ecological crisis is not primarily an individual matter of man soiling his own nest. In most instances, the “choice” of using a car is no choice at all. Ecologically efficient and less costly electric-car mass transportation has been deliberately destroyed since the 1930s in campaigns waged across the country by the automotive, oil, and tire industries. Corporations involved in transportation put “America on wheels,” in order to maximize consumption costs for the public and profits for themselves, and to hell with the environment or anything else.

Those who have brought us poverty wages, exploitation, unemployment, homelessness, urban decay, and other oppressive economic conditions are not too troubled about bringing us ecological crisis.