Michael Parenti, the political scientist and Marxist activist with great intellectual range, recently died at the age of 92. The YouTube comments on one of his speeches capture how he helped many ordinary people to dispel modern society’s myths.
Parenti wasn’t just for the working class. He was the working class. He grew up in New York, in an ethnic Italian family. He graduated from high school and did what someone in his milieu normally did. He went to work. However, after a few years he changed course. He went to university. He attained a BA at City College and an MA at Brown, followed in 1962 by a PhD at Yale.
Had academia not marginalized him early, he would have been much more widely known as an eloquent, funny and insightful public intellectual. From a Marxist perspective, he analyzed foreign policy, the economy, the media, and much more. His intellectual range was impressive, as illustrated by his writings and talks on antiquity. His writing and speeches are what academics call “accessible,” which means “comprehensible to normal people.”
Throughout the 1960s, he worked at American universities, including as an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. However, at a protest against police brutality in 1970, he was arrested and later convicted. Afterwards, he never held a steady academic post anymore.
We want our public intellectuals to be genuine. If they lack conviction and sincerity, why would we even listen at all? American academia systematically marginalized Parenti because of his political beliefs and activism. So, he gave up and found a regular job because he had bills to pay. No wait. He continued on his own, writing and speaking, for more than half a century.
He also gave us Christian Parenti, the excellent professor of economics. In contrast to his father, Christian did achieve a secure academic position.
Michael Parenti, then, was a rare breed. He forged his own path, speaking out on what he had independently examined, bereft of the comforts of institutional academia because, well, things just aren’t right as they are and I won’t stay silent.
Parenti’s oeuvre, including two dozen books, is a heroic and voluminous attempt to dispel the many myths people hold about the world, which have been conjured up by the powers that be and their paid propagandists to justify the status quo.
Parenti said once that his students often believe that elites don’t care about what they think. His reply gets to the heart of the matter: “Oh no, that’s the only thing they care about you … is what you are thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly. They don’t care how your living conditions are …” Just what you think. Parenti then laid out the massive efforts elites and their employees make to ensure people continue to think the “right” things.
The mainstream summarily dismissed Parenti by calling him a Marxist. As if that broad label suffices to sideline anyone’s arguments and facts. They also said he exaggerated. That’s perhaps the most common “objection” when mainstream liberals discuss “radicals.” Yet, to say someone exaggerates constitutes merely a subjective judgment. Without presenting a logical and empirical case to underpin the accusation, it’s nothing more than a slur.
Another towering intellectual figure on the left, Noam Chomsky, could tell you all about the mainstream’s treatment of dissent. He and Parenti were born five years apart. Having read both, it is obvious to me that their agreements overwhelm their differences.
Here it’s relevant to recall comments by professor Robert W. McChesney, another important intellectual of the left who recently passed away. In a class I took with him around 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (where Parenti taught in the 1960s), McChesney talked about Chomsky and how he keeps his distance from Marxism. Nonetheless, McChesney said, in his analysis of capitalism and the media in particular, Chomsky sounds like a Marxist pretty much all the way.
Another observation by McChesney is relevant here as well. At least on one occasion, though in my memory more than once, he recalled the joke about the left’s circular firing squad. In other words, leftwing activists are prone to factionalism. Perhaps Freud’s idea of the narcissism of small differences applies here? Activists should not elide differences among themselves. But it is more important to keep a sense of proportion as to how significant those differences really are.
In a tweet reminiscing about Parenti, political commentator Nathan J. Robinson captured the relationship between Parenti and Chomsky:
I never understand why some leftists are determined to pit Chomsky and Parenti against each other. They’re both worth reading and their analysis overlaps about 90+ percent of the time. Parenti was a more accessible writer and Chomsky is a more intensive researcher.
In another tweet, Robinson wrote:
The major difference is that Chomsky is an anarchist-influenced libertarian socialist and Parenti a Marxist, and so Chomsky is more skeptical of so-called socialist regimes because he is suspicious of state power. But their analysis of class, media, US foreign policy is similar.
Many people – of the relative few who discovered his work – beg to differ with the elite consensus on Parenti. Take the comments to one of Parenti’s speeches on YouTube. The speech is called “The Myth of Capitalism with Michael Parenti.” It was uploaded twelve years ago and has almost 300 thousand views.
YouTube comments get a bad rap. They are dismissed as badly written, superficial name calling. They sure can be. The comments to Parenti’s speech are overwhelmingly positive and insightful. Sentiments that are expressed repeatedly include:
- Appreciation for his work. A user writes: “It’s this kind of brilliant leftism that can actually bring humanity together.”
- The wish to have learned about him earlier. Another user writes: “Too busy working for the man, to discover Mr. Parenti this late in life. Better late than never.”
- The observation that the speech is as relevant today or even more so. A third user comments: “Crazy how this is so relevant in 2025.”
At the end of the speech, Parenti cites an anonymous internet comment: “What an incomprehensible, insane world it seemed to me. Until I realized it was ruled by rapacious, money-mad sociopaths. Then it all made sense.”
He continues: “And that’s what I tried to do here now, was have it all make sense …”
You did, Michael.
Editors’ Note: Tabe Bergman’s article “Old-New Directions in Political Communication: taking Michael Parenti’s Media Criticism as a Guide” is published in Frontiers in Communication and available here.
