Lauren McCain’s Reviews > Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism > Status Update

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 rolled back gains that working people in the West won over the years.

The overthrow of Soviet communist gvmts was cheered by many leftists. Now democracy would have its day.

[Instead], the capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe weakened the numerous Third World liberation struggles that received aid from the Soviet Union and brought a whole new crop of right-wing governments into existence, ones that now worked hand in-glove with U.S. global counterrevolutionaries around the globe.

Decentralization vs. Survival
For a people's revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society's institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone's liking.

[Cuba] has sent teachers, doctors, & workers to Third World countries without charging a penny... They don't talk about that— the country with the most teachers per capita... The country with the most doctors per capita [one for every 214 inhabitants]. The country where life expectancy is more than 75.

Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people(Castro, Monthly Review, 1995)

The Rockefeller family's Chase Bank used its Paris office to help facilitate Nazi international trade during the war.

Corporations like DuPont, Ford, GM, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks & planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. Instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. govmt for damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings.

After WWII, Western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Italy or Germany, except for putting some of the top leaders on trial at Nuremberg.

Within a year, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison. Under the protection of U.S. authorities, the police, courts, military, & bureaucracy remained staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes— as is true to this day.

Along with serving capitalists, fascist leaders served themselves. Their personal greed & their class loyalties were two sides of the same coin.

Hitler is usually portrayed as an ideological fanatic, uninterested in material things. In fact, he accumulated a fortune, much of it in questionable ways.
He invented a "personality right," that enabled him to charge a fee for every postage stamp with his picture on it.

In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old industrial evils, thought to have passed permanently into history, re-emerged as labor conditions deteriorated. In the name of saving society from the Red Menace, unions & strikes were outlawed. Union property & farm cooperatives were confiscated & handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, & factory safety regulations were abolished.

To maintain profits, landowners & industrialists would have to slash wages & raise prices. The state would have to provide them with subsidies & tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more & social services and welfare would have to be cut.

But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers & peasants were unionized.

True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. The Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.'

In January 1933, just weeks after the (1932) election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.