Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world.

Like conservatives, left anticommunists tolerated nothing less than a blanket condemnation of the Soviet Union as a Stalinist monstrosity and a Leninist moral aberration.

He polemicized against isolated terrorist acts which do nothing but create terror among the populace, invite repression, and isolate the revolutionary movement from the masses.

Lenin urged the building of broad coalitions and mass organizations, encompassing people who were at different levels of political development.

Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.

First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West, as were their personal incomes and life styles.

Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership.

The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.

Third, priority was placed on human services.

Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries.

they did not practice economic imperialism.

When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come.

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency—which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution.

The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.

Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct. When the Nazis invaded in 1941, that same industrial base, safely ensconced thousands of miles from the front, produced the weapons of war that eventually turned the tide.

She bemoaned the fact that war and embargo forced her country to postpone much of its socio-economic agenda.

In fact, the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe seriously weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that had received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand-in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years.

“So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we see what communists and their allies had held at bay”

“We can no longer tolerate the managerial system that rejects scientific and technological progress and new technologies, that is committed to cost-ineffectiveness and generates squandering and waste.”

Managers were little inclined to pursue technological paths that might lead to their own obsolescence.

Managers received no rewards for taking risks.

Supplies needed for technological change were not readily available.

experimentation increased the risks of failing to meet one’s quotas.

There was no incentive to produce better machines for other enterprises since that brought no rewards to one’s own firm.

There was a scarcity of replacement parts both for industrial production and for durable-use consumer goods.

Because producers did not pay real-value prices for raw materials, fuel, and other things, enterprises often used them inefficiently.

Productive capacity was under-utilized. Problems of distribution led to excessive unused inventory.

Improvements in production would lead only to an increase in one’s production quota. In effect, well-run factories were punished with greater work loads.

factory with 11,000 production workers might have an administrative staff of 5,000, a considerable burden on productivity.

one found that they complained less about overbearing control than about the absence of responsible control.

The system itself rewarded evasion and noncompliance.

Such poor performance itself contributed to low productivity and the cycle of scarcity.

Communist economies had a kind of Wonderland quality in that prices seldom bore any relation to actual cost or value.

Citizens were expected to play by the rules and not take advantage of the system, even when the system inadvertently invited transgressions. They were expected to discard a self-interested mode of behavior when in fact there was no reward and some disadvantage in doing so.

People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods dangling in their imaginations.

People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs.

It was this desire for greater affluence rather than the quest for political freedom that motivated most of those who emigrated to the West.

“I don’t think my life here in Vietnam is very bad. In fact, I’m very well off. But that’s human nature to always want something better.”

“We thought building a good society would make good people. That’s not always true.”

Even in the best of societies, much labor has an instrumental value but no inherent gratification.

Media reports sometimes so conflicted with daily experience that the official press was not believed even when it did tell the truth, as when it reported on poverty and repression in the capitalist world.

With almost religious fervor, intellectuals maintained that the capitalist West, especially the United States, was a free-market paradise of superabundance and almost limitless opportunity.

The policymakers of these communist states showed a surprisingly un-Marxist understanding of the problems they faced.

Instead, there was much admiration for what was taken to be Western capitalist know-how and remarkably little understanding of the uglier side of capitalism and how it impacted upon the world.

Communist leaders had even less understanding of the capitalist system than of their own.

It seems communism created a dialectical dynamic that undermined itself. It took semi-feudal, devastated, underdeveloped countries and successfully industrialized them, bringing a better life for most. But this very process of modernization and uplift also created expectations that could not be fulfilled. Many expected to keep all the securities of socialism, overlaid with capitalist consumerism.