Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti [View all]

[Starry Messenger]

I just started reading this book today, and was struck by this first chapter and the parallels to Greece today, re: the announcement of possible martial law to impose austerity. (WillyT's thread on this: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002307774)

http://www.michaelparenti.org/RationalFascism.html

"Rational Fascism
Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Blackshirts and Reds"

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut--measures that might sound familiar to us today.

But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.(2)

<snip>

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

Then he goes on to note that the Nazi brownshirts were first the private mercenaries of businesses, which I'd never read about. The economic roots of fascism have always been hazy to me, the historical and social roots of it seem to get more discussion. Has anyone else read the book already?