… for nearly two decades, every evening in the week, the dean of American newscasters, Walter Cronkite, would end his CBS television news show with the statement: “And that’s the way it is.” On the eve of his retirement in 1980, Cronkite admitted that isn’t the way it is: “My lips have been kind of buttoned up for almost twenty years…. CBS doesn’t really believe in commentary,” he charged.
— Quoted in Inventing Reality, Michael Parenti, p. 7.
Michael Parenti joins a pitifully small number of US intellectuals who, when facing death, could say that they never bent a knee to the official religion of anti-Communism. Like W.E.B. DuBois, Herbert Aptheker, Phillip Foner, Paul Robeson, Victor Perlo, WZ Foster, Claudia Jones, and damn few others, he willingly paid the price of principle: the denial of a well-deserved, comfortable career as a public intellectual. Instead, he faced insurmountable barriers to mainstream influence that were placed before him by an unforgiving ruling class. Nonetheless, he was one of the most important Marxist thinkers of his generation.
Michael Parenti died on January 24, 2026. From a working-class family, Parenti found his way to academia, attaining a PhD from Yale University. From his early academic employment during the sixties, he combined civil rights and anti-war activism with his Marxism to earn an unspoken blacklisting that denied him a platform for dissent.
Nonetheless, Parenti committed himself to publication, lecturing, and seizing every opportunity for public engagement. His writing was prolific, ranging over explaining Marxist theory, revealing unpleasant truths, peeling away hypocrisy, deepening history, and reinvestigating “established” truths. He did this without the support and resources afforded by university tenure.
He published over two dozen books, writing effectively, without patronizing the reader or burdening the reader with look-at-me academic jargon or pretension. Reading Parenti was truly a delicious pleasure.
Perhaps his best-known books were Democracy for the Few, a no-holds-barred account of the hollowness of bourgeois democracy and Inventing Reality, an exposé of the inherent biases and the partisanship of the mass media. The book is a scathing study that predates the far more widely known and cited Manufacturing Consent of Herman and Chomsky, while making many of the same points in Parenti’s transparent style.
His Blackshirts and Reds exposed and condemned the harm of knee-jerk anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism, placing fascism in the anti-Communist current.
But perhaps the best insight into Parenti’s intense, passionate, engaging practice of Marxist analysis are the many video lectures made available by Parenti’s circle of dedicated admirers on YouTube, DVDs, or CDs. They reveal a witty, wry, entertaining personality cruelly denied access to the university classroom.
Parenti was not afraid of Communism. Indeed, he embraced the Communist world view, defending its legacy without hesitation. He saw the world through the lens of class, weighing events by their impact on working people.
I never met Michael Parenti. He wrote to me many years ago, asking if he could nominate one of my articles for Project Censored. I have long-forgotten the article, but still feel honored by the warm gesture.
Michael Parenti lives!
With the death of Michael Parenti, we have lost one of the greatest dissident voices in American history.
Parenti earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1962, and taught at a number of colleges and universities, never attaining a tenured position because he was “red-baited out of my college-teaching profession and left to survive on my writing and public speaking,” as he put it in his wonderful book Contrary Notions – The Michael Parenti Reader.[1] Unfortunately, this is rather common establishment treatment for those who not only write about politics and injustice, but stand up for the victims, which Parenti routinely did, and at considerable personal cost. In addition to being run out of his profession, he was arrested and beaten bloody for participating in an anti-war rally in the Vietnam years, then taken to jail instead of a hospital.
Booted out of academia, Parenti was forced to earn a living by writing and speaking, an extremely arduous path under the best of circumstances, and virtually impossible as a socialist working from the heart of the capitalist empire. But Parenti somehow managed it.
A prolific author, he published over 20 books and hundreds of articles on a wide range of historical and political themes, commentary so insightful and elegantly expressed that it was translated into many languages and spread around the world. To this day, his speeches, interviews, and articles are eagerly sought out on the Internet by a large, appreciative audience seeking a way out of never-ending capitalist horror. In the end, Parenti may well have reached a larger audience working independently and producing his enormous array of anti-capitalist analyses than he ever could have as a tenured professor in a university.
Though reflexively labeled an “extremist” by capitalist apologists, Parenti never aspired to anything worthy of that label. As he himself put it in his book, Dirty Truths: “Those of us designated as ‘extreme leftists’ actually want rather moderate and civil things: a clean environment, a fair tax structure, use of social production for social needs, expansion of public sector production, serious cuts in a bloated military budget, affordable housing, decently paying jobs, equal justice for all, and the like.” Such desires can be construed as ‘extreme,’ he explained, “only in the sense of being extremely at odds with the dominant interests of the status quo. In the face of such gross injustice and class privilege, considerations of social justice and betterment take on the appearance of ‘extreme’ measures.” [2]
His bread-and-butter publication was Democracy For The Few, a much-recommended university textbook that went through nine editions. Offering a wonderfully thorough critique of American capitalism as a unified social system (not merely an economic model), the book brilliantly dissected the contradiction between elitist and democratic values, relentlessly exposing the realities of class power and powerlessness. Declining to merely denounce what he disliked, Parenti carefully considered arguments underpinning capitalist legitimacy and repeatedly demonstrated their utter lack of rational substance.
Taking the novel approach of actually covering capitalist realities instead of covering them up, Parenti delivered a masterful treatment of all the major themes of systemic exploitation: the grotesquely lopsided distribution of wealth; corporate propaganda masquerading as objective journalism; self-serving mythology about the U.S. “Founding Fathers”; the subjugation and pitiless exploitation of labor, the amelioration of capitalist abuses with social democratic advances (the New Deal), and the constant threat to reverse them; the socialization of risk and the privatization of profit; counterrevolution abroad and the maintenance of a global system of power; ecological catastrophe and the attack on social programs; institutionalized injustice pretending to be law; political repression and police state tactics; the international dimension of class struggle; elections as public relations extravaganzas; the buying of Congress; the president as Commander in Chief of world empire; the partisan courts, and suggestions on how to overcome capitalism with real democracy.
A devastating blow to capitalist ideology, the book encouraged a crisis of conscience in Parenti’s readers that must have torpedoed the shallow careerist notions of many a university student. No honest reader of Democracy For The Few could ever hope to take life quite so unseriously again.
Possessed of a biting sense of humor, Parenti mocked as preposterous the notion that private vices yield public benefits, the classic formulation supposedly justifying capitalism. “We have been asked to believe,” he wrote in Profit Pathology, “that in the paradise of laissez-faire capitalism, the most avaricious individuals, in pursuit of the most irresponsible self-serving ends, can ride bronco across a wide open free market, unbridled and unrestrained, while miraculously producing optimal outcomes beneficial for all of society.”[3] Even as a fairy tale, this would seem overly fantastic, yet it is readily believed by many of those at the alleged pinnacle of intellectual achievement, who polish their sterling credentials.
Parenti’s ironic barbs were the frosting on the cake of a comprehensive analysis that exposed establishment thinkers as the charlatans they were. In fact, his relentlessly probing mind sometimes put him ahead of even the best of his fellow dissident thinkers. Two years before Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent, for example, Parenti published his own critique of the mass media, Inventing Reality, a superbly lucid skewering of capitalist dogmas that is still sadly relevant forty years after publication.
Noting the knee-jerk rejection of any criticism of capitalism at all, Parenti called out the mass media’s sheer defensiveness for its complete lack of substantive engagement. “ . . . it can be observed that people who never complain about the one-sidedness of their mainstream political education are the first to complain of the one-sidedness of any challenge to it,” he wrote. “Far from seeking a diversity of views, they defend themselves from the first exposure to such diversity, preferring to leave their conventional political opinions unchallenged.”[4] The reason, of course, is that disciplined not-thinking when thinking is called for paves the way for capitalist career success.
Eagerly zeroing in on the ideological slant to political commentary under American capitalism, Parenti objected to its Alice-In-Wonderland-like insistence on reverse causation. “In the news media, slums are caused by people who live in them and not by real estate speculators, fast-buck developers, tax-evading investors, and rent-gouging landlords.” Somehow, what stands in need of reform is not the system, but the people victimized by it. As Parenti explained the capitalist logic: “Poverty is a problem of the poor, who need to be taught better values and a more middle-class lifestyle.” [5]
A similarly perverse logic was applied in describing Third World nations as “undeveloped” and “poor,” as though the condition were incidental to being embedded in a capitalist economy, rather than a logical consequence of that fact. In reality, argued Parenti, such nations “are overexploited and the source of great wealth, their resources and cheap labor serving to enrich investors. Only their people remain poor.”[6]
Inventing Reality also called out tricks of labeling attempting to manipulate our perceptions of which governments should be considered good and which evil, without offering a rational analysis of their respective achievements. Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government, for example, was referred to in the U.S. media as the “Allende regime,” while Pinochet’s blood-drenched dictatorship was the “Chilean government” in the years following the 1973 U.S.-instigated coup.[7]
In what Parenti called “an inversion of reality equal to any Orwellian doublethink,” the unprovoked U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983 was described as a liberation of the island. “U.S. Marines and the 82nd Airborne Division were portrayed (in the press) as rescuers and helpers, while Cuban teachers, doctors, and construction workers (on the island in solidarity with the Grenadian people) were seen as agents of terrorism,” he wrote.[8]
Parenti was especially effective in criticizing the mass media’s wildly inaccurate references to Marxism. Though not a declared Marxist himself, he felt obligated to at least try to offer a fair appraisal of Marxism’s intentions and performance, rather than parrot absurd capitalist stereotypes and vulgar smears just to get ahead. “The revolutionary and Marxist left,” he said, “is committed to using a country’s resources and labor for the purpose of eliminating poverty and illiteracy and serving the social needs of the populace rather than the profit needs of rich investors,” ideals the Left was not content to leave confined to academic seminars: “These are not only the theoretical goals of socialism but the actual accomplishments of revolutionaries in power.”[9]
Parenti argued that the establishment’s inability to engage with socialist critique was based on the prior assumption that capitalism is the only “natural” and therefore valid economic system, making argument apparently superfluous. “The press views any attempt to alter the capitalist economy as an attempt to dismantle all economic arrangements,” Parenti wrote. What might be harmful to capitalist class interests is treated as harmful to all of society itself. Likewise, any attempt to transform the capitalist social order is portrayed as an attack on all social order and an invitation to chaos.”[10]
The “there is no alternative” axiom conveniently prevents reflection on capitalism’s glaring flaws. “The press’s systemic class function is to purge popular consciousness of any awareness of the disturbingly inequitable, exploitative, repressive, and violent consequences of capitalist rule at home and abroad,” Parenti observed.[11] This is accomplished with generous doses of distortion and fabrication, which dull the mind and stifle curiosity. “Political orthodoxy, like custom itself, is a mental sedative,” Parenti observed, “while political deviancy, is an irritant. Devoid of the supportive background assumptions of the dominant belief system, the deviant view sounds just too improbable and too controversial to be treated as news, while the orthodox view appears as an objective representation of reality itself.”[12]
A key feature of orthodoxy’s upside-down perspective is the belief that capital creates, rather than is created (by workers), a notion that emerged from a prolonged process of capital accumulation. In Land of Idols, Parenti points out that the word “manufacturer” used to refer to the worker, the person who made things by hand. Today, the term refers to the owner, who expropriates both the labor that makes products and the name referring to those who have labored. Thus, industrial corporations are called “producers” and agricultural firms “growers,” though in reality they produce and grow nothing.[13] “The real producers are those who apply their brains, brawn, and talents to the creation of goods and services,” explained Parenti. Corporations produce profits, and should be known as “organizational devices for the expropriation of labor and for the accumulation of capital, a bullseye description of their parasitic actual function.[14]
This expropriation – on a massive scale – is the cause of mass poverty. “When large surpluses are accumulated by the few, then want and deprivation will be endured by the many who have created the surplus,” wrote Parenti in Dirty Truths. Historical evidence of the process abounds: “Slaveholders lived in luxury and opulence because slaves toiled from dawn to dusk creating the slaveholder’s wealth while consuming but a meager portion for subsistence. Lords and ladies lived in great castles amidst splendid finery with tables laden with food because there were servants and serfs laboring endless hours to sustain them in the style to which they were accustomed.”
Since the process is not all that different today, Parenti asked, “Do the big shareholders, who spend their time boating, traveling, partying, attending charity balls, or running for public office create the fortunes that accumulate from their investments? In reality, class systems of accumulation are zero-sum.”
Capitalism’s insatiable drive to accumulate for the few displaces production to satisfy community needs: “The ultimate purpose of the free market is to create not use value but exchange value, not useful things but profitable ones. The goal is not to produce goods and services for human needs per se but to make money for the investor. Money harnesses labor in order to convert itself into goods and services that will bring in still more money. Capital annexes living labor in order to create more capital.”[15]
A large part of that capital is then dedicated to inducing mass conformity to a system very much not in the interest of those whose needs are being displaced. Parenti emphasized that advertising, for example, directs our critical faculties away from the capitalist system and its commodities and towards ourselves: “Many commercials characterize people as loudmouthed imbeciles whose problems are solved when they encounter the right medication, cosmetic, cleanser, or gadget. In this way industry confines the social imagination and cultural experience of millions, teaching people to define their needs and lifestyles according to the dictates of the commodity market.”[16]
Presented with consumption norms depicted in ads, Parenti observed, people discover “that they are not doing right for baby’s needs or hubby or wifey’s desires; that they are failing in their careers because of poor appearance, sloppy dress, or bad breath; that they are not treating their complexion, hair, or nails properly; that they suffer unnecessary cold misery and headache pains; that they don’t know how to make the tastiest coffee, pie, pudding, or chicken dinner; nor, if left to their own devices, would they be able to clean their floors, sinks, and toilets correctly or tend to their lawns, gardens, appliances, and automobiles.”
In short, they learn that they are not citizens of a democracy but defective consumers. What is to be done? “In order to live well and live properly consumers need corporate producers to guide them,” Parenti explained. “Consumers are taught personal incompetence and dependence on mass market producers.”[17]
Hallelujah. What follows from the fact that incompetence and dependence are now social necessities? Parenti drew attention to the advertisers’ end game: an “individual” shorn of all organic ties to others, pathetically trying to compensate for this staggering loss by obeying the dictates of limitless consumption: “Just as the mass market replaced family and community as provider of goods and services, so now corporations replace parents, grandparents, midwives, neighbors, craftspeople, and oneself in knowing what is best. Big business enhances its legitimacy and social hegemony by portraying itself as society’s Grand Provider.”[18]
At the time Parenti wrote Inventing Reality, the U.S. mass media portrayed such degradation as an enviable monopoly of the West, while also insisting that the U.S.’s chief ideological rival at the time (the USSR) was a dungeon state run by “demonic henchmen of a satanic ideology,” to quote the late Alan Watts.
Parenti was always a good antidote to slam-dunking on the highly caricatured Communist state. For example, in response to the widely touted claim that U.S. workers were far better off than their Soviet counterparts, Parenti pointed out that this rested on an initial, quite inaccurate assumption that Soviet workers were slaves, entitled to nothing. “Far from lacking in benefits and rights,” he corrected, “Soviet workers have a guaranteed right to a job; relatively generous disability, maternity, retirement, and vacation benefits; an earlier retirement age than American workers (60 for men, 55 for women); free medical care; free education and job training; and subsidized housing and education.”
Though staunchly anti-capitalist himself, Parenti was open-minded enough to concede that which group was “better off” depended on one’s values: “If measured by the availability of durable-use consumer goods such as cars, telephones, lawnmowers, and dishwashers, the Soviet worker’s standard of living is lower than the American coworker’s. If measured by the benefits and guarantees mentioned above, Soviet workers enjoy more humane and secure working and living conditions than their American counterparts.”[19]
A fair evaluation, and for that very reason, one that was absolutely unavailable to mass audiences in the United States, who were relentlessly propagandized to believe that the Soviet Union was a “shithole” country, to use more recent billionaire vocabulary.
Completely out of the picture, not just in the mass media but across the political spectrum, was even a brief reference to the actual challenges and achievements of the USSR, a clarifying context that Parenti, but few others, provided:
“Sorely lacking within the U.S. Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish – while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.” [20]
After the collapse of the USSR, Parenti strongly dissented from the chorus proclaiming Marxism dead. While he conceded that Marx’s predictions about the historical role of the proletariat and revolution were wrong, and offered his own thorough critique of Soviet society, he proclaimed Marx’s analysis of capitalism more relevant than ever. “Marx predicted that an expanding capitalism would bring greater wealth for the few and growing misery and economic purgatory for the many. That is exactly what is happening – on a global scale,” he wrote. Or as he noted in The Terrorism Trap shortly after 911, “The number of people living in utter destitution without hope of relief is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. So poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.”[21]
Decades of anti-labor policy later we can see that Parenti was right to view the capitalist-orchestrated demise of the USSR with foreboding: “The goal of U.S. global policy is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, well-organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or medical plans or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profits.”[22]
Though he went to great lengths to criticize all that was wrong with capitalism, Parenti was not guilty of failing to state clearly what he wanted to replace it. In Profit Pathology, he said: “Our goal should be an egalitarian, communitarian, environmentally conscious socialism, with a variety of productive forms, offering economic security, political democracy, and vital protection for the ecological system that sustains us.”
And he identified the kind of popular response that would be necessary to bring it about: “What is needed . . . . is widespread organizing not only around particular issues but for a movement that can project the great necessity for democratic change, a movement ready to embrace new alternatives, including public ownership of major corporations and worker control of production. With time and struggle, we might hope that people will become increasingly intolerant of the growing injustices of the reactionary and inequitable free market system and will move toward a profoundly democratic solution. Perhaps then the day will come, as it came in social orders of the past, when those who seem invincible will be shaken from their pinnacles.”[23]
Few have pointed the way forward with more clarity than Michael Parenti. We will miss him.
Many Yazidis fled their homes after attacks by the Islamic State group targeting the minority community in Iraq. PHOTO/AHMAD AL-RUBAYE
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Women dance during a demonstration marking International Women's Day in Madrid on March 8, 2026. © Thomas Coex, AFP
