Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Born into a powerfully hostile capitalist world, communist nations suffered through wars, invasions, and an arms race that exhausted their productive capacities and retarded their development.

The intent was to use a shot of capitalism to bolster socialism; the reality was that socialism was used to subsidize and build an unforgiving capitalism.

If the overthrow of communism was a victory for democracy, as some claimed, it was even more a victory for free-market capitalism and conservative anticommunism.

The relatively peaceful transition does not fit our image of unscrupulous totalitarians who stop at nothing to maintain power over captive populations.

In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records.5

In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.6

Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (“counterrevolutionary offenses”) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year.

Total executions from 1921 to 1953, a thirty-three year span inclusive, were 799,455.

As of 1996, more than three hundred “treason” cases had been brought to trial, including a former GDR intelligence chief, a defense minister, and six generals, all indicted for carrying out what were their legal duties under the constitution and laws of the GDR, in some instances fighting fascism and CIA sabotage.

Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states.

While denounced in the U.S. press for leaving their economies in bad shape, in fact, the Reds left the economy of Eastern Europe in far better condition than they found it.

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights.

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.

State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.

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.

All this is not to deny the very real deficiencies of the communist systems. Here I want to point out that much of the credit for the deformation and overthrow of communism should go to the Western forces that tirelessly dedicated themselves to that task, using every possible means of political, economic, military, and diplomatic aggression to achieve a success that will continue to cost the people of the world dearly.

Apparently, the free market, said by “reformers” to be the very foundation of political democracy, could not be introduced through democratic means.

The real coup, says Kagarlitsky, came in the aftermath when Boris Yeltsin used the incident to exceed his constitutional powers and dismantle the Soviet Union itself, absorbing all its powers into his own Russian Republic. While claiming to be undoing the “old regime,” Yeltsin overthrew the new democratic Soviet government of 1989-1991.

Yeltsin banned labor unions from all political activities, suppressed dozens of publications, exercised monopoly control over all broadcast media, and permanently outlawed fifteen political parties. He unilaterally scrapped the constitution and presented the public with a new one that gave the president nearly absolute power over policy while reducing the democratically elected parliament to virtual impotence.1 For these crimes he was hailed as a defender of democracy by U.S. leaders and media.

Yeltsin’s “elite” Omon troops repeatedly attacked leftist demonstrators and pickets in Moscow and other Russian cities.

Yeltsin’s reelection was hailed in the West as a victory for democracy; in fact, it was a victory for private capital and monopoly media, which is not synonymous with democracy, though often treated as such by U.S. leaders and opinion makers.

Instead of being transformed into capitalist states, some communist nations were entirely obliterated as political entities.

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.

“because of the kind of personal information they had to give, they felt more observed and spied on than they were by the Stasi

The professed goal is no longer to provide a better life for all citizens but to maximize the opportunities for individuals to accumulate personal fortunes.

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).

And there has been a dramatic rise in unemployment, homelessness, air and water pollution, prostitution, spousal abuse, child abuse, and just about every other social ill.1

A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.

The spiritual values that are essential to human happiness are being lost or made to seem trivial. Everything is buy, earn, sell”

Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists. They may occupy office but the wealth of the nation, the basic property relations, organic law, financial system, and debt structure, along with the national media, police power, and state institutions, have all been fundamentally restructured. The resources needed for social programs and full employment have been pilfered or completely obliterated, as have monetary reserves, markets, and natural resources.

What people need for survival is found in nature but rarely in a form suitable for immediate consumption. Labor therefore becomes a primary condition of human existence.

It is one of the means whereby people develop their material and cultural life, acquiring knowledge, and new modes of social organization.

They argue that, of itself, capital cannot produce anything; it is the thing that is produced by labor.

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.

I would argue that in a class society the accumulation of wealth fosters the spread of poverty.

So too under capitalism, there can be no financial moguls and industrial tycoons without millions of underpaid and overworked employees.

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.

Business Cycles and the Tendency toward Recession.

The more capital goods (such as machinery, plants, technologies, fuels) needed for production, the higher the fixed costs and the greater the pressure to increase productivity to maintain profit margins.

Marx foresaw this tendency for profits to fall and for protracted recessions and economic instability.

Capital Concentration.

Yet Marx predicted that large firms would force out or buy up smaller adversaries and increasingly dominate the business world, as capital became more concentrated.

Growth of the Proletariat. Another of Marx’s predictions is that the proletariat (workers who have no tools of their own and must work for wages or salaries, selling their labor to someone else) would become an ever-greater percentage of the work force.

Today, less than 10 percent of the labor force is self-employed.

Proletarian Revolution. As capitalism develops so will the

With the growing misery and polarization, the masses would eventually rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie and put the means of production under public ownership for the benefit of all.

proletariat, heavily concentrated in urban areas, seemed capable of an unparalleled level of political development.

As the working class developed so did the capitalist state, whose function has been to protect the capitalist class, with its mechanisms of police suppression and its informational and cultural hegemony.

Oppressive social conditions may cry out for revolution, but that does not mean revolution is forthcoming.

Marx also underestimated the extent to which the advanced capitalist state could use its wealth and power to create a variety of institutions that retard and distract popular consciousness or blunt discontent through reform programs.