Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

When we speak of early horticultural societies, or of slave or feudal or mercantile or industrial capitalist societies, we are recognizing how the basic economic relations ...

Capitalist theorists present capital as a creative providential force. As they would have it, capital gives shape and opportunity to labor; capital creates production, jobs, new technologies, and a general prosperity. Marxists turn the equation around. They argue that, of itself, capital cannot produce anything; it is the thing that is produced by labor. Only human labor can create the farm and the factory, the machine and the computer. And in a class society, the wealth so produced by many is accumulated in the hands of relatively few who soon...

Exploitation can be measured not only in paltry wages, but in the disparity between the wealth created by the worker and the pay she or he receives. Thus some professional athletes receive dramatically higher salaries than most people, but compared to the enormous wealth they produce for their owners, and taking into account the rigors and relative brevity of their careers, the injuries sustained, and the lack of life-long benefits, it can be said they are exploited at a far higher rate than most workers.

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.”

The Third World has endured deepening impoverishment over the last half century. As foreign investment has increased, so has the misery of the common people who are driven from the land. Those who manage to find employment in the cities are forced to labor for subsistence wages. We might recall how enclosure acts of the late eighteenth century in England fenced off common lands and drove the peasantry into the industrial hell-holes of Manchester and London, transforming them into beggars or half-starved factory workers.

Enclosure continues throughout the Third World, displacing tens of millions of people. In countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru, per capita income was lower in 1990 than it had been twenty years earlier. In Mexico, workers earned 50 percent less in 1995 than in 1980. One-third of Latin America’s population, some 130 million, live in utter destitution, while tens of millions more barely manage. In Brazil, the purchasing power of the lower-income brackets declined by 50 percent between 1940 and 1990 and at least half the population suffered varying degrees of malnutrition.

Marxism retains a compelling contemporary quality, for it is less a body of fixed dicta and more a method of looking beyond immediate appearances to see the inner qualities and moving forces that shape social relations

Sociology

“All science would be superfluous if outward appearances and the essence of things directly coincided.” Indeed, perhaps the reason so much of modern social science seems superfluous is because it settles for the tedious tracing of outward appearances.

To understand capitalism, one first has to strip away the appearances pre...

What is unique about capitalism is the systematic expropriation of labor for the sole purpose of accumulation.

Capital annexes living labor in order to accumulate more capital.

The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for consumers or sustain life and society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespe...

An essential point of Marxist analysis is that the social structure and class order prefigure...

converts nature, labor, science, art, music, and medicine into commodities and commodities into capital. It transforms land into real estate, folk culture into mass culture, and citizens into debt-ridden workers and consumers.

Marxists understand that a class society is not just a divided society but one ruled by class power, with the state playing the crucial role in maintaining the existing class structure. Marxism might be considered a “holistic” science in that it recognizes the links between various components of the social system.

Capitalism is not just an economic system but a political and cultural one as well...

In keeping with their system-sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensibly bear little relation to each other or to a larger set of social relations.

Marxists also point out that racism is used as a means of depressing wages by keeping a segment of the labor force vulnerable to super-exploitation. To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By “rational” I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.

More than just a sociological category, class is a relationship to the means of production and to social and state power.

When we think without Marx’s perspective, that is, without considering class interests and class power, we seldom ask why certain things happen. Many

Little is said about how the social order is organized and whose interests prevail.

Devoid of a framework that explains why things happen, we are left to see the world as do mainstream media pundits: as a flow of events, a scatter of particular developments and personalities unrelated to a larger set of social relations—propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, and individual ambition, never by powerful class interests—and yet producing effects that serve such interests with impressive regularity.

Thus we fail to associate social problems with the socio-economic force...

we learn to truncate our own criti...

Marxism gets us into the habit of asking why, of seeing the linkage between political events and class power.

A common method of devaluing Marxism is to misrepresent what it actually says and then attack the misrepresentation. This

A Marxist approach helps us to see connections to which we were previously blind, to relate effects to causes, and to replace the arbitrary and the mysterious with the regular and the necessary.

Marxism also shows how even unintended consequences can be utilized by those with superior resources to service their interests.

Is Marx still relevant today? Only if you want to know why the media distort the news in a mostly mainstream direction; why more and more people at home and abroad face economic adversity while money continues to accumulate in the hands of relatively few; why there is so much private wealth and public poverty in this country and elsewhere; why U.S. forces find it necessary to intervene in so many regions of the world; why a rich and productive economy offers chronic recessions, underemployment, and neglect of social needs; and why many political officeholders are unwilling or unable to serve the public interest.7 Some Marxist theorists have so ascended into the numbing altitudes of abstract cogitation that they seldom touch political realities here on earth.

Fortunately there are others who not only tell us about Marxist theory but demonstrate its utility by applying it to political actualities. They know how to draw connections between immediate experience and the larger structural forces that shape that experience. They cross the forbidden line and talk about class power.

Marxism offers the kind of subversive truths that cause fear and trembling among the high and mighty, those who live atop a mountain of lies.

When certain words are eliminated from public discourse, so are certain thoughts. Dissident

ideas become all the more difficult to express when there are no words to express them.

The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective “middle.”

By including almost everyone, “middle class” serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.

The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the “underclass.” References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society’s most vulnerable elements.

Anything-But-Class (ABC) theorists who, while not allied with conservatives on most political issues, do their part in stunting class consciousness.

What is more misleading than to treat occupational groups as autonomous classes, giving attention to every social group in capitalist society except the capitalist class itself, to every social conflict except class conflict?

Professionals and managers are not an autonomous class as such. Rather they are mental workers who live much better than most other employees but who still serve the accumulation process on behalf of corporate owners. Everyday Class Struggle To support their view that class (in the Marxist sense) is passé, the ABC theorists repeatedly assert that there is not going to be a workers’ revolution in the United States in the foreseeable future.

Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement.

But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic

exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.

To embrace a class analysis is not to deny the significance of identity issues but to see how these are linked both to each other and to the overall structure of politico-economic power. An awareness of class relations deepens our understanding of culture, race, gender, and other such things.

History offers numerous examples of leaders who in the name of national security have been ready to extinguish what precious few liberties people might have won after generations of struggle. Challenges to the privileged social order are treated as attacks upon all social order, a plunge into chaos and anarchy. Repressive measures are declared necessary to safeguard people from the dangers of terrorists, subversives, Reds, and other supposed enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Again and again we are asked to choose between freedom and security when in truth there is no security without freedom.

the driving force of class greed. Wealth is an addiction.

Wealth is pursued without moral restraint. The very rich try to crush anyone who resists their endless, heartless, unprincipled accumulation. Like any addiction, money is pursued in that obsessive, amoral, singleminded way, revealing a total disregard for what is right or wrong, just or unjust, an indifference to other considerations and other people’s interests—and even one’s own interests should they go beyond feeding the addiction.9

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.

Eco-Apocalypse, a Class Act

The essence of capitalism, its raison d’être, is to convert nature into commodities and commodities into capital, transforming the living earth into inanimate wealth.