Keep reading! It's in good faith. There were real economic problems from perverse incentives that should be reckoned with in future socialist programs. Like, yeah, making bread cheaper than animal feed is going to lead to some farmers feeding their animals bread. Abundance of some products is going to make people less careful with these (I believe he discusses running the heat on maximum with the windows open and throwing out slightly broken stuff to get a new cheap one). Subsidizing low productivity factories and increasing the quotas on productive ones is going to make people upset and resentful.

Over this chapter and subsequent ones, he makes two excellent points: 1. they still largely managed to meet and exceed human needs even with these inefficiencies and problems, and 2. these problems are nothing compared to what came after the collapse of the USSR.

Marxists of all types have spent the past hundred years critiquing the Soviet Union from every angle imaginable, sometimes with good data and on-the-ground information, often with bad data and completely made up cold warrior nonsense. While Parenti was pro-Soviet throughout his life, he was nevertheless a fish swimming in that river, being pulled by those currents. I would suggest bearing Parenti's thoughts in mind as you continue reading about Soviet history and synthesize his views with those of other Marxists who also criticized the same system.

One thing I also want to point out: Stalin himself argues in Economic Problems of the USSR that many aspects of capitalist economics cannot simply be abolished, but must be learned and taught like physical laws so that the socialist economy can use them to its advantage. Mostly he's talking about commodity production and the law of value, but I think it's fair to extrapolate this framework to other things such as perverse incentives, alienation of labor, etc. From the point of view of the worker, what difference does it make if the assembly line is state owned or capitalist owned? You're still a cog in the machine - until the means to completely automate this type of drudgery away have been invented, the best a socialist economy can do is give their workers incentives to do good work, something that every economy objectively struggles with (see both America's "quiet quitting" and China's "lay flat" movements).

I felt a different vibe from his criticisms; it felt more like a way to engage the intended audience. Even now, in the year of our beanis twenty twenty six, when the failings of capitalism are laid bare and fascist brownshirts are executing folks in the street, libs still use "But Stalin Bad!" as a thought-terminating cliché. If the work did not lead in with criticism of AES, it would be dismissed outright as propaganda.

I feel he has a very good grasp of how to meet an audience where they are, and guide them to where they should be.

Black Shirts and Reds was published in 1997. The USSR dissolved in 1991.

He's trying to grapple with the legacy of the Soviet Union and figure out where things went wrong.

Given who Parenti was, I'd assume at least some of it is fair. There's a difference between a lib regurgitating common right-wing talking points and slander against AES vs a Communist who acknowledges that nothing that exists is untainted by reality but nonetheless still understands that scientific socialism remains correct.

Can you share some quotes? I don't remember this.

Still, the early USSR wasn't a paradise, the bolsheviks took over a very backwards and underdeveloped nation with a myriad of problems, mistakes were bound to happen.

Parenti by his own admission used solely western sources. Given that those are largely forming the anticommunist information bubble, it's pretty inevitable he inherited at least some of it even though he was clearly good willed and honest about his attempt to discover the truth.

I thought the exact same thing when I first read Blackshirts & Reds about 8 years ago. I remember wondering if the .pdf of it that I downloaded had been tampered with by anti-communists or something. I kept thinking, "This is the book that everybody has been banging on, telling me it is a must-read to get educated about the USSR and how it is a the book that all the anti-AES libs need to read to set the record straight?" The very thing you mention about how Parenti seems to be repeating the classic lib canard that communism struggled to function because nobody was incentivized to work hard since lazy people had it just as good as the few hard workers, really stuck out for me too. I did stop reading it for a while out of disappointment and felt pretty disillusioned by all the glowing recommendations for it.

Even though I would like to think that I now have a better understanding of where he was coming from and even what some of his own shortcomings were (like his reliance on western sources as others have mentioned), I still kinda stand by that initial disappointment and negative assessment. This is not to say I don't love Parenti because I do. I still get fired up watching or listening to a lot of his live talks like the famous Yellow Parenti vid, and I will always recognize him as one of the vanishingly few great western advocates for actual leftism (in a puddle of bozos like Chomsky).

But speaking of which, it is actually many of his lecture videos that I would tend towards recommending to potentially receptive libs, rather than trying to push Blackshirts & Reds on them for the exact reasons you've been bringing up in this thread. The book is just too rife with sentences that I know anyone who wants to denigrate the USSR, will latch onto and say "See? Stalin was a bad guy, communism does promote laziness in the workers and authoritarianism in the leaders! The USSR was a bad place to live where no one had any of the choices liberal democracies allow them! Even their own commie spokesperson guy says so!" It's not that there isn't some great stuff and plenty of very positive things about the USSR in the book, or even that the criticisms he makes aren't valid, it's that so much of it would work for someone looking to vindicate their anti-communist views. It makes it a little too easy to cherrypick the bad stuff and downplay the good. A lot of the responses you are getting here from comrades that are defending the frequently questionable phrasing Parenti uses, they aren't wrong, but I think they may be missing the issue a bit. As a book for communists who want a critique of the USSR from another communist, BS&R is an excellent choice. But as an introductory piece to USSR/AES validity for the possibly-swayable lib, it is not the pro-communist masterpiece it's sometimes touted as. If you really want someone to get into Parenti specifically, recommend Inventing Reality first.

He's very deliberately speaking to some of the most anti-communist people on the planet, specifically in the context of defending soviet legacy just a few short years after its dissolution. He also has some pretty bad takes on China in retrospect that were far more understandable at the time he wrote the book. For me, it's useful because it utterly demolishes the fantasy of the USSR as a widespread Orwellian torture society, with real problems far more mundane than fantastical, and tons of real working class achievements dashed by the reintroduction of capitalism.

I recommend it not for comrades, but for liberals. For comrades, something like This Soviet World is going to be both more entertaining and capable of capturing the genuine progress on the ground in the early soviet experience.

Because the USSR collapsed. One of the first things you have to explain defending the USSR is, "Well if it was so great, why isn't it around anymore?" Obviously, it had flaws, or it'd still be here.

https://annas-archive.pk/md5/61e9265cf8daa72f7e764cab4805338d