Description: A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about, but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how rational 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 as they are.
Brief description: Michael Parenti is the acclaimed author of over 250 published articles and more than twenty books, including, Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, and The Culture Struggle. The New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, the Nation, and Antioch Review, are among the countless publications that have praised Parenti's work.