Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

All over the world, community in the broader sense—the Gemeinschaft with its organic social relationships and strong reciprocal bonds of commonality and kinship—is forcibly transformed by global capital into commercialized, atomized, mass-market societies. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels referred to capitalism’s implacable drive to settle “over the whole surface of the globe,” creating “a world after its own image.” No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, devouring the resources of whole regions, and standardizing the varieties of human experience. 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. The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people’s labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.”