Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Today, no one in U.S. policy circles worries about the politico-economic oppression suffered in dozens of right-wing client states. Their professed desire to bring Western political democracy to nations that have had revolutions rarely extends to free-market autocracies. And the grudging moves toward political democracy occasionally made in these autocracies come only through popular pressure and rebellion and only with the unspoken understanding that democratic governance will not infringe substantially upon the interests of the moneyed class.

But have we ever bothered to compare the violence of revolution against the violence that preceded it? “I do not know how one measures the price of historical victories,” said Robert Heilbroner, “I only know that the way in which we ordinarily keep the books of history is wrong.” We make no tally of the generations claimed by that combination of economic exploitation and political suppression so characteristic of the ancien regimes:

“because adult workers have been laid off in favor of children, who are infinitely more exploitable and provide bigger profits

the Cuban Revolution brought sanitation, schools, health clinics, jobs, housing, and human services to a level not found throughout most of the Third World and in many parts of the First World.

The [Cuban] revolution has sent teachers, doctors, and workers to dozens of Third World countries without charging a penny. It shed its own blood fighting colonialism, fighting apartheid, and fascism. … At one point we had 25,000 Third World students studying on scholarships. We still have many scholarship students from Africa and other countries. In addition, our country has treated more children [13,000] who were victims of the Chernobyl tragedy than all other countries put together. They don’t talk about that, and that’s why they blockade us—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. That gives you an idea of the effort involved. A country where life expectancy is more than 75 years. Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents. (Monthly Review, 6/95).

Countries with a high level of economic freedom were those that imposed little or no taxes or regulations on business, and did without wage protections, price controls, environmental safeguards, and benefits for the poor. Economic freedom is the real concern of conservatives and plutocrats; the freedom to utilize vast sums of money to accumulate still vaster sums, regardless of the human and environmental costs.

In short, there is a causal link between vast concentrations of wealth and widespread poverty.

Some leftists and others fall back on the old stereotype of power-hungry Reds who pursue power for power’s sake without regard for actual social goals. If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.

Ronald Radosh urged that the peace movement purge itself of communists so that it not be accused of being communist (Guardian, 3/16/83). If I understand Radosh: To save ourselves from anticommunist witchhunts, we should ourselves become witchhunters.

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.

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.

Noam Chomsky, who is an inexhaustible fount of anticommunist caricatures, offers this comment about Leninism: “Western and also Third World intellectuals were attracted to the Bolshevik counterrevolution [sic] because Leninism is, after all, a doctrine that says that the radical intelligentsia have a right to take state power and to run their countries by force, and that is an idea which is rather appealing to intellectuals.”5 Here Chomsky fashions an image of power-hungry intellectuals to go along with his cartoon image of power-hungry Leninists, villains seeking not the revolutionary means to fight injustice but power for power’s sake. When it comes to Red-bashing, some of the best and brightest on the Left sound not much better than the worst on the Right.

Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all antilynching and fair employment bills. 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 produc...

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed.

The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

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.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. 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. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party.

Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution—like every other—that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way.

By the late 1920s, the Soviets faced the choice of (a) moving in a still more centralized direction with a command economy and forced agrarian collectivization and full-speed industrialization under a commandist, autocratic party leadership, the road taken by Stalin, or (b) moving in a liberalized direction, allowing more political diversity, more autonomy for labor unions and other organizations, more open debate and criticism, greater autonomy among the various Soviet republics, a sector of privately owned small businesses, independent agricultural development by the peasantry, greater emphasis on consumer goods, and less effort given to the kind of capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base. The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more comfortable, more humane and serviceable society. Siege socialism would have given way to worker-consumer socialism. The only problem is that the country would have risked being incapable of withstanding the Nazi onslaught.

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.

All this is not to say that everything Stalin did was of historical necessity. The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities.

As with Nicaragua, so with Mozambique, Angola and numerous other countries in which U.S.-financed mercenary forces destroyed farmlands, villages, health centers, and power stations, while killing or starving hundreds of thousands—the revolutionary baby was strangled in its crib or mercilessly bled beyond recognition. This reality ought to earn at least as much recognition as the suppression of dissidents in this or that revolutionary society.

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.

[The] lack of work discipline, unjustified absences from work, deliberate go-slows so as not to surpass the norms—which are already low and poorly applied in practice—so that they won’t be changed. … In contrast to capitalism, when people in the country-side worked an exhausting 12-hour workday and more, there are a good many instances today especially in agriculture, of people … working no more than four or six hours, with the exception of cane-cutters and possibly a few other kinds of work. We know that in many cases heads of brigades and foremen make a deal with workers to meet the norm in half a day and then go off and work for the other half for some nearby small [private] farmer [for extra income]; or to go slow and meet the norm in seven or eight hours; or do two or three norms in a day and report them over other days on which they don’t go to work. … All these “tricks of the trade” in agriculture are also to be found in industry, transportation services, repair shops and many other places where there’s rampant buddyism, cases of “you do me a favor and I’ll do you one” and pilfering on the side. (Cuba Update, 3/80)

The “brutal totalitarian regime” was actually a giant trough from which many took whatever they could.

But what of the numerous social benefits so lacking in much of the world, I asked, aren’t these to be valued? His response was revealing: “Oh, nobody ever talks about that.” 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.

Material wants were mentioned far more often than the lack of democracy. The emigrés who fled Vietnam in 1989 were not persecuted political dissidents. Usually they were relatively prosperous craftsmen, small entrepreneurs, well-educated engineers, architects, and intellectuals seeking greater opportunities. To quote one: “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.” Another testified: “We had two shops and our income was decent but we wanted a better life.” And another: “They left for the same reasons we did. They wanted to be richer, just like us.”

By the second or third generation, relatively few are still alive who can favorably contrast their lives under socialism with the great hardships and injustices of prerevolutionary days. As stated by one Cuban youth who has no memory of life before the revolution: “We’re tired of the slogans. That was all right for our parents but the revolution is history”

For years I heard about the devilishly clever manipulations of communist propaganda. Later on, I was surprised to discover that news media in communist countries were usually lackluster and plodding. Western capitalist nations are immersed in an advertising culture, with billions spent on marketing and manipulating images.

If anything, many intellectuals in communist nations were utterly starry-eyed about the capitalist world and unwilling to look at its seamier side. Ferociously opposed to the socialist system, they were anticommunist to the point of being full-fledged adulators of Western reactionism. The more rabidly “reactionary chic” a position was, the more appeal it had for the intelligentsia.

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. Nor would they believe anything to the contrary. With complete certitude, well-fed, university-educated, Moscow intellectuals sitting in their modest but comfortable apartments would tell U.S. visitors, “The poorest among you live better than we.”

As a system of analysis mainly concerned with existing capitalism, Marxism has relatively little to say about the development of socialist societies. In the communist countries, Marxism was doled out like a catechism. Its critique of capitalism had no vibrancy or meaning for those who lived in a noncapitalist society. Instead, most intellectuals found excitement in the forbidden fruit of Western bourgeois ideology.

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”

In 1990, during the glasnost period, when the Soviet government announced that the price of newsprint would be raised 300 percent to make it commensurate with its actual cost, the new procapitalist publications complained bitterly. They were angry that state socialism would no longer subsidize their denunciations of state socialism. They were being subjected to the same free-market realities they so enthusiastically advocated for everyone else, and they did not like it.

In May 1991, a survey of Russians by a U.S. polling organization found that 54 percent chose some form of socialism and only 20 percent wanted a free-market economy such as in the United States or Germany. Another 27 percent elected for “a modified form of capitalism as found in Sweden”

Still, substantial numbers, especially among intellectuals and youths—the two groups who know everything—opted for the free-market paradise, without the faintest notion of its social costs.

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. 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 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.

Pressed hard throughout its history by global capitalism’s powerful financial, economic, and military forces, state socialism endured a perpetually tenuous existence, only to be swept away when the floodgates were opened to the West.

The relatively peaceful transition does not fit our image of unscrupulous totalitarians who stop at nothing to maintain power over captive populations. Why didn’t the ruthless Reds act more ruthlessly?

To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist countries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered. But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds.

Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records.

The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population.

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.

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. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.

One of the last remaining Soviet labor camps, Perm 35, was visited in 1989 by Republican congressmen and again in 1990 by French journalists (see Washington Post, 11/28/89 and National Geographic, 3/90, respectively). Both parties found only a few dozen prisoners, some of whom were identified as outright spies. Others were “refuseniks” who had been denied the right to emigrate. Prisoners worked eight hours a day, six days a week, for 250 rubles ($40) a month.

Asked about this, Professor Alberto Prieto of the University of Havana pointed out that even a recent State Department report on human rights showed hundreds of people being tortured, killed, or “disappeared” in almost all the Latin American countries, but mentions only six alleged political prisoners in reference to Cuba

If there were mass atrocities right down to the last days of communism, why did not the newly installed anticommunist regimes seize the opportunity to bring erstwhile communist rulers to justice? Why no Nuremberg-style public trials documenting widespread atrocities? Why were not hundreds of party leaders and security officials and thousands of camp guards rounded up and tried for the millions they supposedly exterminated?

What we witness here is the Nuremberg trials in reverse: Reds put on trial for their anti-fascist efforts by West German friendly-to-fascism prosecutors, using a retroactive application of FRG penal law for GDR citizens. As of the beginning of 1997, several thousand more trials were expected.

In 1989, when the millionaire playwright Vaclav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia, he granted amnesty to about two-thirds of the country’s prison population, which numbered not in the millions but in the thousands. Havel assumed that most of those incarcerated under communism were victims of political repression and therefore deserved release. He and his associates were dismayed to discover that a good number were experienced criminals who lost no time in resuming their unsavory pursuits (New York Times, 12/18/91).