We are KPFA supporters, indeed subscribers, who have been on the frontline defending this station, and we urge its continued support. We recognize the good things that Flashpoints has done, in particular its shedding light on the topics of globalization, Palestine, and genetically engineered food. But when the program presents viewpoints that are not only wrong, but odious, it is our right, indeed obligation, to offer our critique. And this is how we feel about Michael Parenti, who not only defends the records of Serb dictator Milosevic and Joseph Stalin, but also continues to offer a version of "socialism" associated with the likes of them, a perspective that we think will be deadly to the prospects for a genuine socialism.

In Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti smears people such as the "prototypic Red-basher" George Orwell (p. 44), who was wounded fighting the fascists in Spain, and who pointed out the immense problems with the very structure of the Soviet system. Parenti defends that system as "not organized for capital gain and private enrichment", quite in contrast to a picture of corporate-like behavior by Soviet state enterprises offered in Fortune in February '77, and the record of eco-devastation brought about by managers cutting costs. He attacks those who contend socialism means control by the workers themselves through direct participation as promoters of "pure socialism, a view that is ahistorical", in which "none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage."

Instead, Parenti talks about Russia's war-driven siege socialism. And about worker-consumer socialism, Russia's road not taken, where less emphasis would be given to "capital accumulation needed to build a strong military-industrial base" (p.56). But he doesn't talk about socialism in a society where the forces of production have been so developed that a true socialism is possible, a society like ours. His socialism is all about backing revolutions made elsewhere. Not about making revolution here. And in his efforts to open people's eyes to the U.S. propaganda machine, all the distortions we've been fed about Communism and communism over the years, he closes our eyes to the nature of the communism Marx himself proposed, the abolition of the law of value, and the opening of a realm of human freedom, where people, not the market, could collectively decide the important issues of their lives. Parenti needs to go back and read Marx again.

A system in which value, the abstract monetary equivalent of labor time, is produced by workers and then expropriated by someone else, be it a private owner, a corporate manager, or a state bureaucrat, is precisely what Marx identified as capitalism. He insisted that in socialism, as it emerges from capitalist society, the product of human labor does not appear as value. He distinguished between capitalism's expropriation of surplus value and the associated producers' deduction of necessary social provisions from the total material product before distribution to the individual producers occurs. (Critique of the Gotha Program, International Publishers, p. 8) He criticized vulgar socialists who presented socialism as "turning principally on distribution" (ibid., p. 11) as opposed to freely associated labor (Capital, v.1., ch.1). One hundred twenty-five years later, this critique is still valid.

Parenti traces the problems of the Soviet Union to the intervention of external powers after the Russian Revolution. In fact, by the November 1917 revolution, factory committees, which had come to take over much of the productive apparatus, were beginning to coordinate their activities. Within days of assuming power, the Bolshevik party issued orders removing control over production from the committes and vesting that control in the party and its various organs. This was at least 6 months before any foreign intervention. The party had from the beginning held a notion of socialism that had much more to do with Henry Ford and the German Army than with Karl Marx. It was criticized for that by Rosa Luxemburg in The Russian Revolution, written in 1918, before intervention began. And marxists through the years have taken the lead in exposing the non-socialist, indeed state capitalist nature of the Soviet system. State capitalism is what Lenin called it.

When he does criticize the Soviet system, Parenti talks of limited incentives for managers to pursue technological development and risk, and low productivity due to a worker discipline that "left much to be desired" on the part of workers who were supposedly offered decent security and prosperity but did not do their fair share. Apparently, Parenti would have solved the problems of the Soviet system via more incentives to managers (i.e. make them more like capitalist owners) and increased measures to squeeze more surplus value from workers. Sounds like a more intensified, more exploitative capitalism.

Parenti contends "Marxism has relatively little to say about the development of socialist societies" and focuses instead on analyzing capitalism. But Marx's analysis of capitalism identified the essential features of that system, especially production for capital accumulation rather than human needs via the employment of wage labor, features which existed in the Soviet Union, which Parenti defends as realistic socialism. And Marx was quite clear that socialism even as it emerges from capitalism has no room for value production and the capitalist state; marxists since then have amplified on this theme. The control of production by workers via direct participation is far from an ahistorical dream, but a reality that has appeared over and over, be it in the early stages of the Russian Revolution as mentioned above, or in Spain in 1936-7, a process Orwell observed and reported on approvingly.

Like many people on the left, what Parenti presents as "socialism" is really state-managed capitalism. Beyond the problems inherent in any form of capitalism that I have already discussed, the state adds another dimension of domination and exploitation. Its very existence represents a separation between order givers and order takers, social power alienated (ie removed) from the people and vested in an institution which stands outside of and over them. Even a democratic state means choosing those who would order you around. Its survival necessarily means the continuation of imposed work in the realm of production, and hence the continuation of capitalism, even if by other means, even if certain features we associate with capitalism such as the "free" market are eliminated. Control of production by workers must be accompanied by a complete vesting of power in the population as a whole via mechanisms of direct democracy such as workers' councils and mass assemblies, again as in the upsurges mentioned previously.

Divorcing marxism from freedom all too easily leads to lending support to tyrants who claim the label "socialist." In a letter to the San Francisco Bay Guardian(3/21/01), Parenti claims a nostalgia for "the guaranteed income, free education, medical care and affordable housing" of the Milosevic era, and dismisses allegations of ethnic cleansing, rape camps and mass atrocities. He contends that only 70 bodies have been recovered from the supposed massacre of Srebrenica. This last contention openly conflicts with the report by the UN Commission on Human Rights on Srebrenica, issued 11/15/99, which provided pages and pages of evidence on the massacre, including an account by one Croat member of the Bosnian Serb Army, Drazen Erdemovic, whose unit by itself executed over 1000 Muslim men and boys on the Pilica state farm. It is available on the Internet from the Commission's website, www.unhchr.ch/.

Milosevic stated out as a major bank official. As Serbia's leader, he was the architect of savage austerity measures imposed upon working people, a policy which implemented the demands of the IMF and international capital. This led to violent protests by workers, including an attack on the Yugoslav parliament building in July '88, and mass rioting in the streets of Belgrade in March '91, as well as widespread strikes in which people from all ethnic backgrounds cooperated on the basis of class interests. The response of Milosevic, and other bureaucrats such as the leaders of Croatia and Bosnia, was to fan the flames of ethnic strife. The US government initially supported Milosevic, on the basis of his willingness to enforce IMF policies, and only turned on him when his regime was deemed unstable.

Milosevic's rule led to mass protests within Yugoslavia in late '96-early '97, after he tried to overturn by force the results of opposition victories in local elections. He retreated briefly, then resorted to escalating repression in Kosovo. In May 2000, his government suppressed what was left of independent media, including radio station B-92, the first station outside the US to send a message of support to the KPFA staff during the July '99 Pacifica occupation. Meanwhile, Parenti was on Flashpoints, describing the Yugoslav opposition as a creature of the CIA. He likewise ignored the murder of several publishers of opposition newspapers.

Parenti consistently downplays the extent of Joseph Stalin's crimes. He recently claimed on KPFA that the number in the Gulags may have been as low as in the thousands. And he dismisses counts of victims in the millions presented by the likes of Russian marxist Roy Medvedev as exaggerations and propaganda.

The politics and program of state capitalism and social democracy espoused by Parenti have already been tried, and proven disastrous, for both working people and the socialist movement. To succeed in getting rid of capitalism, a move necessary for both humanity and the planet, we must disavow this program and the wreckage left behind in its wake. No magic formulas exist; only a populace determined to create a new world and feeling empowered enough to assert its collective will against would-be usurpers via the organs of social power can make such a vision come to fruition.