Book Blog: Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti

 

Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti

 

 

So let me start by saying that although I am not a communist, I have a passionate love affair with the work of Michael Parenti; as I’ve brought up casually a couple of times in my writing already. Who is Michael Parenti? An American Marxist cultural critic, historian and scholar who would have been the real Noam Chomsky if the United States wasn’t fundamentally devoted to stamping out left wing thought on a global scale. In particular, Parenti’s excellent book “Inventing Reality” is one of my go-to recommendations for American leftists who are just starting to recognize that our entire society is based on lies that benefit the rich, but haven’t quite grasped the particulars of how The Machine works. In my own life, I have learned a metric f*ckton of important things from reading his work or listening to his lectures and I will always and forever consider myself indebted to professor Parenti as a scholar – this guy is America’s CLR James, we’re just collectively too stupid to realize it.

Which then brings us to the work I’m going to share with you today in PDF form, Parenti’s “Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism,” which was originally published in 1997. Now I know what you’re thinking: “goddammit Nina, why are you always trying to get me to read decades old books” but the plain truth here is that Parenti’s analysis of capitalist triumphalism is still extremely relevant today, and many if not the overwhelming majority of the “predictions” he made about the post-Cold War world, have aged extremely well.

Additionally, it should be noted that Parenti’s Marxist analysis of the relationship between fascism and capitalism is also refreshingly on point and represents an excellent elaboration and expansion of the ideas we talked about when we looked at Leon Trotsky’s “Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It” a few posts back. Finally of course, I think virtually any book by Michael Parenti is worth reading because he is quite simply a cracking writer whose mastery of the language allows him to present vast, complicated concepts in left wing theory both simply and eloquently – a naval-gazing “academic” twit playing at being a revolutionary from his desk, the professor is certainly not.

Unfortunately, all of this still leaves us with the elephant in the room; namely Parenti’s (unearned in my opinion) reputation as a Soviet apologist or perhaps even a Stalinist; whatever that happens to mean at a given moment in American society, because it can and has changed over time.

While it’s certainly true that Parenti is an unabashed communist, an advocate for socialist solutions to societal problems and a vigorous opponent of Pig Empire propaganda against the global left, it is in my opinion simply untrue to call him an apologist – for either the Soviet Union, or Joseph Stalin. In fact, if it will help readers overcome the literal decades of propaganda that have gone into smearing Parenti’s good name and valuable work, I’d like to quote a couple of passages written by the author himself that specifically refute these spurious charges.

Our first Parenti citation comes to us from this same book, Blackshirts & Reds in a chapter entitled Left Anticommunism:

“Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anticommunists as “Soviet Apologists” and “Stalinists,” even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society. Our real sin was that unlike many on the Left we refused to uncritically swallow U.S. media propaganda about communist societies. Instead, we maintained that, aside from the well-publicized deficiencies and injustices, there were positive features about existing communist systems that were worth preserving, that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people in meaningful and humanizing ways. This claim had a decidedly unsettling effect on left anticommunists who themselves could not utter a positive word about any communist society (except possibly Cuba) and could not lend a tolerant or even courteous ear to anyone who did.”

Our second Parenti citation originally appeared in Inventing Reality, and then was cited in the footnotes to Blackshirts & Reds – remember kids, always read the footnotes when consuming left wing academic work; unlike most mainstream historians, pinkos actually put important information in them:

“The U.S. media’s encompassing negativity in regard to the Soviet Union might induce some of us to react with and unqualified glowing view of that society. The truth is, in the USSR there exist serious problems of labor productivity, industrialization, urbanization, bureaucracy, corruption, and alcoholism. There are production and distribution bottlenecks, plan failures, consumer scarcities, criminal abuses of power, suppression of dissidents, and expressions of alienation among some persons in the population.”

Readers can and will of course make up their own minds, but neither of those two passages smell like the work of a devoted “Stalinite” rube or “useful idiot” to me. If believing in socialism and debunking imperialist propaganda about communist countries makes you a “Soviet apologist” then more than half the people reading this will qualify for that label – which is in and of itself an absurd and borderline McCarthyist proposition.

In other words, Parenti is and has always been precisely who he says he is: a Marxist critic of capitalism and imperialism who possesses a profound understanding of class struggle in a fully modernized world. Naturally, that doesn’t make him very popular with sellouts and faux-leftists who seek to square the circle between embracing capitalism and engaging in left wing politics – and those are the folks “on the left” who always get the megaphone in a society utterly dominated by corporate, capitalist ideology.

In the immortal words of Al Pacino (as Satan, in the Devil’s Advocate) you might want to “consider the source, son” when reflecting on the veracity of the numerous smear campaigns conducted against Parenti’s invaluable work – dismissing him as a pie in the sky Red, is a good way to spend the rest of your life believing Noam Chomsky is a revolutionary and never actually challenging the source of the problems that plague labor class life; namely capitalism.

Finally I should take a moment to thank “ML-Theory: A Marxist-Leninist Blog” for posting the PDF copy of Blackshirts & Reds I’m going to re-share below. While I myself was more than happy to purchase a copy brand new at my local bookstore, the existence of online PDFs featuring important left wing content opens up access to these materials to a whole segment of the labor class that would otherwise be unable to obtain them; for that, I’m grateful and I hope Mr. Parenti will find no offense in my sharing of his work here.

To read “Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism” by Michael Parenti, simply click on the title header below:

 

Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism by M. Parenti

 

– nina illingworth