Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

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,

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.

What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura.

Ruling classes throughout the world hate and fear communism not for its lack of political democracy, but because it attempts to establish economic democracy by building an egalitarian, collectivist social system

We hear a great deal about the crimes of communism but almost nothing about its achievements.

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 latest public opinion surveys show that many Russians consider Brezhnev’s era and even Stalin’s era to have been better than the present-day period, at least as far as economic conditions and personal safety are concerned” (New York Times, 10/15/95).

State socialism, “the system that did not work,” provided everyone with some measure of security. Free-market capitalism, “the system that works,” brought a free-falling economy, financial plunder, deteriorating social conditions, and mass suffering.

Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.