Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds

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From Michael Parenti's site:

Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy and ecology—terms often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark.

Parenti shows how fascism renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the “free-market” victory on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism.

Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are the way they are. It is a bold and engaging exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today.

Contents

Preface

1. Rational Fascism
   

Plutocrats Choose Autocrats
Whom Did the Fascists Support?
Kudos for Benito and Adolph
The Rational Use of Irrational Ideology
Patriarchy and Pseudo-Revolution
Friendly to Fascism

2. Let Us Now Praise Revolutions

The Costs of Counterrevolution
Presumptions of Power
Whose Violence?
Free Market for the Few
The Freedom of Revolution
What Measure of Pain?

3. Left Anticommunism

   Genuflecting to Orthodoxy
   Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism
   Decentralization vs. Survival

4. Communism in Wonderland

   Rewarding Inefficiency
   Nobody Minding the Store
   Wanting It All
   Reactionism to the Surface
   Romanticizing Capitalism

5. Stalin’s Fingers

   How Many Victims?
   Where Did the Gulag Go?
   Memories of Maldevelopment

6. The Free-Market Paradise Goes East (I)

   Suppression of the Left
   One-Way Democracy
   Must We Adore Vaclev Havel?
   Colonizing the East

7. The Free-Market Paradise Goes East (II)

   For Vipers and Bloodsuckers
   Shock Therapy for the Many
   Crime and Corruption
   Cultural Decay
   Women and Children Last
   “We Didn’t Realize What We Had”

8. The End Of Marxism?

   Some Durable Basics
   More Right than Wrong
   A Holistic Science
   Compartmentalized Ideology
   Learning to Ask Why

9. Anything But Class: Voiding The C-Word

   The Class Denial of Class
   The ABC Theorists
   Everyday Class Struggle
   A Disappearing Working Class?
   Wealth and Power
   Eco-Apocalypse, a Class Act