In Tribute to Michael Parenti 1933-2026

Via the Workers Party of Ireland

The great scholar, writer, and educator Michael Parenti, who has passed away aged 92, had the rare ability to clearly and entertainingly explain complex ideas and his work cast an unflinching gaze on class power at home in his native USA and elsewhere in contexts as varied as the ancient Rome of Julius Caesar, Yugoslavia in its dying days, and the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Throughout his work he exposed ruling class power and the lengths to which this power is either obfuscated or outright celebrated in movies, on television news, in high-schools and universities.

In this, he trod a similar path to that of the ‘libertarian anarchist’ Noam Chomsky, but where Chomsky identified corporate power as emerging “out of the same totalitarian soil” “that led to Fascism and Bolshevism.”, for Parenti the equation of Nazism and Communism was a gross misrepresentation and was indicative of the unthinking anti-communism of large sections of the western left.

In Blackshirts and Reds (1997) Parenti notes how “in [fascist] Italy during the 1930s the economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public debt, and widespread corruption”:

"But industrial profits rose and the armaments factories busily rolled out weapons in preparation for the war to come. In Germany, unemployment was cut in half with the considerable expansion in armaments jobs, but overall poverty increased because of the drastic wage cuts. And from 1935 to 1943 industrial profits increased substantially while the net income of corporate leaders climbed 46 percent."

While not denying that Soviet societies had inherent problems including mismanagement, corruption, and non-compliance by workers, Parenti decried the inability of western leftists such as Chomsky and George Orwell to reach a “rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very worst 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 did and 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.”

The same unflinching class analysis was on display in Parenti’s To Kill a Nation (2000), in which the fantasy purveyed by the media of the US government playing a moral civilising role in what was then Yugoslavia, is contrasted with the truth: “US policy makers wanted to abolish Yugoslavia's public sector services and social programs, using the same ‘shock therapy’ imposed on the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The ultimate goal has been the complete privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, and, for that matter, every other nation. It is to replace the social wage with a neoliberal global free market, a process that would deliver still greater wealth and power into the hands of those at the top.” (An academic article from 2024 concludes that “the non-EU successor states of former Yugoslavia are today among the poorest countries in Europe. The economic costs have been extremely high for most successor states of former Yugoslavia and have been compensated only marginally by the main political goals pursued through political independence".)

For readers who may not have yet read Parenti, I suggest that you begin with the two books quoted above. In addition, Michael Parenti was a compelling speaker and many of his speeches can be found on YouTube - for example, Parenti’s debate with the ex-trotskyite Iraq war hawk C. Hitchens.

For a fuller and more eloquent tribute to Michael Parenti and his life, I recommend the obituary by Indian scholar K.M. Seethi, who writes, “in a time of manufactured outrage, corporate capture, ecological collapse and resurgent authoritarianism, Parenti’s voice feels less like history and more like warning”.