Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Fascism historically has been used to secure the interests of large capitalist interests against the demands of popular democracy. Then and now, fascism has made irrational mass appeals in order to secure the rational ends of class domination.

Revolutions are democratic developments that expand the freedoms of people who enjoyed no freedom under oppressive prerevolutionary regimes. Revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. They bring a dramatic reduction in political and economic oppression.

Like conservatives and reactionaries, most of the U.S. Left greeted communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with fear and loathing, and with idealized expectations that took no account of Western encirclement and the survival necessities of socialism under siege.

In fact, U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

how capitalism propagates and profits from fascism,

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut—measures that might sound familiar to us today.

True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.3 Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.

Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital.

Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism’s raison d’être, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism. It is a subject that deserves far more attention than it has received.

Fascism preaches the authoritarian rule of an all-encompassing state and a supreme leader. It extols the harsher human impulses of conquest and domination, while rejecting egalitarianism, democracy, collectivism, and pacifism as doctrines of weakness and decadence.

fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles.

Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a “New Order” while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.

In comparison, when the Communists took over in East Germany, they removed some 80 percent of the judges, teachers, and officials for their Nazi collaboration; they imprisoned thousands, and they executed six hundred Nazi party leaders for war crimes. They would have shot more of the war criminals had not so many fled to the protective embrace of the West.

By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.

the country with the most teachers per capita of all countries in the world, including developed countries. The country with the most doctors per capita of all countries [one for every 214 inhabitants]. The country with the most art instructors per capita of all countries in the world. The country with the most sports instructors in the world.

For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.

A prototypic Red-basher who pretended to be on the Left was George Orwell.

Orwell announced that a “willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual’s point of view is really dangerous” (Monthly Review, 5/83).

Safely ensconced within a virulently anticommunist society, Orwell (with Orwellian doublethink) characterized the condemnation of communism as a lonely courageous act of defiance.

Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. 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. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.

Stalin’s prophecy that the Soviet Union had only ten years to do what the British had done in a century proved correct.

The human capacity for discontent should not be underestimated. 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. A rise in living standards often incites a still greater rise in expectations. As people are treated better, they want more of the good things and are not necessarily grateful for what they already have. Leading professionals who had attained relatively good living standards wanted to dress better, travel abroad, and enjoy the more abundant life styles available to people of means in the capitalist world.

As a system of analysis mainly concerned with existing capitalism, Marxism has relatively little to say about the development of socialist societies.

Instead, most intellectuals found excitement in the forbidden fruit of Western bourgeois ideology. In looking to the West, they were not interested in broadening the ideological spectrum, a desirable goal, but in replacing the dominant view with a rightist anticommunist orthodoxy. They were not for an end to ideology but for replacing one ideology with another.

With the decline of communist power in Eastern Europe, the worst political scum began to float to the surface, Nazi sympathizers and hate groups of all sorts, though they were not the only purveyors of bigotry.

Most people living under socialism had little understanding of capitalism in practice. Workers interviewed in Poland believed that if their factory were to be closed down in the transition to the free market, “the state will find us some other work” (New Yorker, 11/13/89). They thought they would have it both ways.

“Some people want to be capitalists for themselves, but expect socialism to keep serving them”

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.

One reason siege socialism could not make the transition to consumer socialism is that the state of siege was never lifted. As noted in the previous chapter, the very real internal deficiencies within communist systems were exacerbated by unrelenting external attacks and threats from the Western powers.

The decision by Soviet leaders to achieve military parity with the United States—while working from a much smaller industrial base—placed a serious strain on the entire Soviet economy.

The very siege socialism that allowed the USSR to survive made it difficult for it to thrive. Perestroika (the restructuring of socio-economic practices in order to improve performance) was intended to open and revitalize production. Instead it led to the unraveling of the entire state socialist fabric.

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. Some of the credit should go to the CIA and other cold war agencies, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and various right-wing groups, all of whom funded free-market, anticommunist political organizations and publications throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in what swiftly became the best financed chain of “revolutions” in history.

This says at least as much about the government that was overthrown as about the rebels. Rather than acting as might U.S.-supported rulers in El Salvador, Colombia, Zaire, or Indonesia—with death-squad terrorism and mass repression—the communists relinquished power almost without firing a shot.

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

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 bef...

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. Some of us from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are m...

Throughout its entire seventy-three-year history of counterrevolutionary invasion, civil war, forced industrialization, Stalinist purges and deportations, Nazi conquest, cold war, and nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union did not know one day of peaceful development.

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.

Much production in East Germany was dismantled to prevent competition with West German firms. This was especially evident when collective agriculture was broken up to protect the heavily subsidized and less productive private farms of West Germany.8 Without making compensation, West German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in the GDR, including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system—assets worth about $2 trillion—in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history.

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.

Marxism has an explanatory power that is superior to mainstream bourgeois social science because it deals with the imperatives of class power and political economy, the motor forces of society and history.

Marx’s major work was Capital, a study not of “existing socialism,” which actually did not exist in his day, but of capitalism—a subject that remains terribly relevant to our lives.

Some of Marxism’s basic postulates are as follows:

In order to live, human beings must produce. People cannot live by bread alone but neither can they live without bread. This does not mean all human activity can be reduced to material motives but that all activity is linked to a material base. A work of art may have no direct economic motive attached to it, yet its creation would be impossible if there did not exist the material conditions that allowed the artist to create and show the work to interested audiences who have the time for art.

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. But labor is more than a way of providing for survival. It is one of the means whereby people develop their material and cultural life, acquiring knowledge, and new modes of social organization. The conflicting...