.…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!
Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com
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