[TEASER] How Fascism Works

Upstream

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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In this episode of our reading series, Robbie reads and provides real-time analysis of the opening chapter of the classic book Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti. The text covers the topics of plutocracy and autocracy, whom the fascists last century supported, a bit of history on Hitler and Mussolini, the rational and irrational aspects of fascism, patriarchy and pseudo-revolution, collaboration, and much more.

The analysis provided in the reading brings this text into our current conditions and looks at where Parenti's analysis holds up and where it might need to be stretched and adapted to help us understand the rise of neofascism in the United States under Trump and his modern day fascist footsoldiers. We explain why it's more important than ever to resist collaboration and to stand in full solidarity with all of the racialized and criminalized "others" in order to combat the fearmongering and scapegoating that fascism relies on in order to grow in strength.

Further resources:

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, by Michael Parenti

Related episodes:

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone and welcome to another episode in our Patreon reading series. Today I'm going to be
0:06.3	reading from a well-known book, Michael Parenti's, Black Shirts and Reds, Rational Fascism and the
0:13.5	Overthrow of Communism. And I first read this book probably about two years ago, and it was just one of those books where
0:23.8	I like underlined every single paragraph practically, you know, one of those books that just
0:29.4	feels like it's a really essential reading. And it's not a particularly long book, and it's quite
0:35.2	accessible. I'm sure many of you have probably read it.
0:38.7	And so I'm going to make sure to pop in here and there and just sort of bring the book into
0:43.1	our present situation and analyze it as we go through it in real time, looking at places where
0:49.1	it's relevant and spot on and maybe seeing where it's not so applicable and looking at places where, you know,
0:57.1	fascism might have evolved in ways that don't necessarily fit into Parenti's analysis anymore as
1:02.6	much. I'm just going to read the first chapter, which is about 17 pages long. And I think it's
1:09.9	going to be a lot of fun, very, very dark, dark fun going
1:14.5	through that chapter and just, you know, talking about this really exciting new political
1:19.2	development that we are all so lucky to be living through right now, which is fascism or
1:26.9	neo-fascism or however you want to characterize it.
1:30.9	So this is going to be a little bit of a break from the China series, of course, which will
1:35.6	resume next time, if all goes as planned, with an episode with the guest Ting's Chalk,
1:42.5	who is with the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research,
1:46.1	that is Vijay's Vijay Prashad's Institute.
1:50.4	And sort of looking at the issue of environmental protection and its intersection with human
1:56.2	development in China, actually from the perspective of a very specific lake cleanup project.
2:02.4	So I think that's going to be a very interesting and fascinating conversation.
	...

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