Black Shirts and Reds (book notes)

 Black Shirts and Reds, Micheal Parenti.

This book by Micheal Parenti should be on every communists reading list. It covers a wide range of topics from Fascism it's rise and the present day ecological problems. 

Fascism the word is being thrown around wildly now to describe anything and everything, but Parenti explains fascism with what is sorely missed, class politics. Who benefitted of it, what came of the fascist countries, it's perpetuators, and so much more. 

Most importantly it handles left wing anti-communism, the phenomenon of people (in the US for him) supposedly on the left, undermining communist states past and present. This exists amongst us as well, it should have been this, it should have been that from the cozy confines of our liberal chairs and nothing to show for ourselves as well. It is also not to blindly support the excesses of the communist state, but to look at everything critically. 

The names of Stalin and Mao are repeated like parrots by the liberal bigwigs like Ramachandra Guha and Naom Chomsky whilst comparing the present day lunatics of the right wing. What they fail to understand or wantonly supress is the cause that Stalin or Mao stood for. They did not stand behind private monopoly capitalists, they did not undermine workers, they firmly stood by the people and stood for their future. By repeatedly doing this the celebrated liberals continue to propagate the supposed Red terror. Parenti gives countless arguments to go against them, most of which is summarised in this superb paragraph.

"the overthrow of communism gave the green light to the unbridled exploitative impulses of Western corporate interests. No longer needing to convince workers that they live better than their counterparts in Russia, and no longer restrained by a competing system, the corporate class is rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years. Now that the free market, in its meanest form, is emerging triumphant in the East, so will it prevail in the West. "Capitalism with a human face" is being replaced by "capitalism in your face." As Richard Levins put it, "So in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we what see communists and their allies had held at bay"

Ironically he goes in for some Stalin bashing and some China bashing, it should have been this, that as well, but that's for some other day.

He explains in detail the relevance of Marx and Marxism today and gives us the obvious and not so obvious reasons to hold on to our ideology. In a chapter titled 'C' word he stresses for pages the importance of class consciousness and the ruling class's efforts via all means to blunt the word and the consciousness. 

He stresses on the need for various movements to come together with these lines

"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. "

I have seen some "intellectuals" discredit communist parties with the usual Brahmin bashing arguments and also discredit Marxism in the same vein. The same intellectuals also unironically argue for the democracy that exists today as a paradise compared to the "oppressive China or Cuba". And no they won't say a word about the last few councils of China moved out of absolute poverty or the efforts of Cuba in the fight against covid.

This para is for them

"A common method of devaluing Marxism is to misrepresent what it actually says and then attack the misrepresentation. This happens easily enough since most of the anti-Marxist critics and their audiences have only a passing familiarity with Marxist literature and rely instead on their own caricatured notions. Thus, the Roman Catholic Pastoral Letter on Marxist Communism rejects the claim that "structural [read, class] revolution can entirely cure a disease that is man himself" nor can it provide "the solution of all human suffering." But who makes such a claim? There is no denying that revolution does not entirely cure all human suffering. But why is that assertion used as a refutation of Marxism? Most Marxists are neither chiliastic nor utopian. They dream not of a perfect society but of a better, more just life. They make no claim to eliminating all suffering, and recognize that even in the best of societies there are the inevitable assaults of misfortune, mortality, and other vulnerabilities of life. "

Like I have said before if you are a communist, a must read and if you are not, this is a good summary of world politics from the period from WW 2 to the fall of the USSR.