It's goal was to outline the history of State Socialism, deconstruct the western propaganda surrounding it, talk about the success and failures of Marxist-Leninism from a honest and positive perspective, and show how the failures of societies like the USSR didn't fail because of Marxism but they failed because of reactionary forces and global capitalism. He points out that true progressives should be more concerned with the living conditions of working people than with some sterile, lofty, and ulimately meaningless debate over cultural issues. 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.

There was a time when I wouldn't have considered this a very high hurdle to clear; but I was younger and more optimistic then. Addeddate 2020-07-12 20:32:11 Identifier michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7zm49217 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.

Nevertheless, Blackshirts and Reds is an excellent overall criticism of fascism because it serves at least as importantly as a principled and unapologetic primer on the continuing practical relevance of Marxism to social change, the author making concisely clear why the honest study of Communist theory and practice -- undistorted by its dedicated enemies -- is no idle exercise in nostalgia, but a necessary prerequisite to really understand and transform present-day society.

Michael Parenti once again [it seems effortless though we know it isn't] lays out a vast, meticulous history of market reforms that dragged eastern Europe down following 1991, all the way up to 1997, and connects this with the rise of fascism in the early to mid 20th century. In Italy during the 1930s the economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public debt, and widespread corruption. More than ever, with the planet itself at stake, it becomes necessary to impose a reality check on those who would plunder our limited ecological resources in the pursuit of limitless profits, those who would squander away our birthright and extinguish our liberties in their uncompromising pursuit of self-gain.

Left-wing figures in the US, even the radicals, will rarely praise Marxist-Leninist states, so Parenti will come as a shock to anyone, even if you're big on left-wing theory. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. A fog of willful amnesia has descended wherein the US can’t see its own atrocities abroad which are numerous and perhaps more so than any single party communist regimes. Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Yes, it's clear from what he says about the collapse of socialism that it was an absolute disaster (chapters 6 and 7 are blistering polemic, really great writing) but that doesn't really convince the uninitiated that communist ideologies are good.

To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more com­fortable, more humane and serviceable society. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing himself. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Our resources are crucial for knowledge lovers everywhere—so if you find all these bits and bytes useful, please pitch in.I would also really recommend this book to anarchist comrades, because denouncing Marxist-Leninists and socialism that actually existed as a "failure" or simply "totalitarian" is just plain false and shooting yourself in the foot as Parenti demonstrates in his book. 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. This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of democratic capitalism to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic efforts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries. Instead it was a broad overview of the many facets of anti-communist and pro-capitalist propaganda and foreign policy in the 20th century. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications.