Michael Parenti: The Rebel With a Cause

 AMERICAN SCHOLAR Michael Parenti (1933-2026), who died recently aged 92, was a rare breed among public intellectuals. Notwithstanding his educa­tion, he found it difficult to get a permanent job in academia because of his strong views on capitalism. Born in New York in 1933, Parenti earned his MA from Brown University and PhD from Yale.

It was Parenti’s Yale education that inspired him to dig deep into the Marxian intellectual tradition, says Yale University alumnus and economist Richard D Wolff. “Parenti was a life-long critic of capitalism as well as a student of Marxism who tried to apply its concepts to the capitalist dimensions of the Cold War period,” Wolff tells Open, emphasising that academia in the US threw many obstacles in his path because it had no room for his theoretical approach. “To his credit, he nonetheless kept up his theoretical and political commit­ments by impressive publications as well as many years of con­tributions as a radical teacher. In the manner of [Paul] Sweezy, [Paul] Baran and [Harry] Magdoff—indeed the whole Monthly Review “school”— individuals like Parenti kept important aspects of the Marxian tradition alive in the otherwise dark last 75 years of US politics and intellectual life,” notes Wolff.

Some of Parenti’s books that generated wide interest include Democracy for the Few, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media and Blackshirts & Reds. Till the end, Parenti wrote and spoke forcefully against imperialism and in defence of socialism.