The Great Lecture Hall and the Small Seminar Room: Michael Parenti Vs. Western Marxism

The People’s Professor Leaves the Lecture Hall

Michael Parenti is dead. He passed away today, January 24, 2026, at the age of 92, leaving behind a body of work that armed generations with a simple, dangerous habit: to ask who rules, who profits, and who pays. The news has already begun moving through the international anti-imperialist world—reported plainly, mourned loudly, and remembered the only way a communist teacher would respect: not as a saint, but as a weapon.

This tribute is written in that spirit. Not a liberal obituary—those are for men whose ideas were safe enough to be “celebrated” by the very institutions they spent their lives decorating. Parenti’s work was never safe. He was a Marxist political scientist who treated politics as the organized exercise of power, and treated power as the organized theft of labor, land, and life. He insisted that the empire’s favorite words—“democracy,” “freedom,” “humanitarianism,” “objectivity”—are often the velvet glove pulled over a clenched fist. He did not ask the oppressed to be impressed by the vocabulary of their rulers. He asked them to study the machinery.

The official résumé is almost a contradiction on its face: a scholar trained in the citadel, yet refusing the citadel’s manners. Parenti earned his Ph.D. in political science from Yale, taught at a number of colleges and universities, and became an internationally known author and lecturer whose books traveled widely across languages and borders. But the point is not that he “made it.” The point is that he did not let the credential make him housebroken. He carried the tools of scholarship out of the seminar room and into the street, where theory is either useful—or it is decoration for the winning side.

That is why the title of this essay—Michael Parenti vs. Western Marxism—is not a petty argument among academics. It names a real class struggle inside the world of ideas. “Western Marxism,” as it often appears in the imperial core, can become a politics of immaculate critique: fluent about culture, shy about power; relentless about the crimes of enemies, cautious about the crimes of empire; allergic to revolutionary states not because the states are flawless, but because revolution itself is unforgivable. In that atmosphere, socialism is treated like a moral stain: you may analyze it, but you must never defend it. Parenti refused that commandment. He treated anti-communism not as an opinion, but as an imperial discipline—an ideological border wall built inside the mind.

His life’s work is unified by a method: start with material power, follow the money, map the class interests, identify the institutional levers, and then listen closely to the stories empire tells to make its violence feel like common sense. He wrote on capitalist “democracy,” media manufacture, imperial war, the mythology of “humanitarian intervention,” the terror industry, the class character of ancient Rome, and the modern cult of patriotism—not as separate hobbies, but as connected organs of one system.

In the pages that follow, we will treat Parenti the way he treated history: as a battleground. We will sketch the arc of his life, but always to illuminate the function of his work—why it struck nerves, why it was pushed to the margins of respectable discourse, and why it keeps resurfacing wherever ordinary people need a language for what they can already feel in their bones. If there is a “Great Lecture Hall in the Sky,” as Christian Parenti’s line has been quoted today, then Parenti has not gone there to rest. He has gone there to keep teaching. Our job down here is to keep learning the lesson that made him dangerous: empire is not a misunderstanding. It is a system. And systems can be studied—so they can be dismantled.

Why “Western Marxism” Isn’t the World—But It’s the Wall Around One

To understand the political stakes of a tribute to Michael Parenti is also to understand the object against which his life’s work stood in opposition. And one of the clearest intellectual labels we must confront is that of “Western Marxism,” a term that circulates through academic halls and journal pages, often without much thought about what it actually signifies. In its broadest sense, Western Marxism names a cluster of Marxist thought that emerged in Western and Central Europe after the Russian Revolution, deeply shaped by the defeat of proletarian uprisings and the shock of socialist consolidation under Stalin. It is a tradition that pivoted away from the classical Marxist preoccupation with political economy, state power, and mass struggle, and toward the philosophical interpretation of culture, ideology, and subjective experience under capitalism.

The etymology of the phrase might sound innocuous—the “Western” just being geographical, the “Marxism” just a nostalgic nod to the old man Marx—but that surface meaning obscures a deeper logic. From the Comintern’s polemics in the 1920s to Perry Anderson’s 1976 canonical study, the term has been used to mark a specific break: not all Marxism in the West, but that current which retreated from the metabolic, material core of classical Marxism and refigured the doctrine around the lenses of culture, critique, and hermeneutics. In contrast to Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and others whose lives were bound up with mass struggle and revolutionary organization, Western Marxism became a style of Marxism that was comfortable at a distance from the working class as a mass force in history.

The stakes of this divergence are not academic snobbery—they are political. Western Marxism’s rise was born of defeat: when revolutions failed to ignite in the advanced capitalist world as anticipated by Marx’s early materialism, theory turned inward; cultural critique replaced strategy; subjective experience eclipsed collective organization. The bitter irony is that in seeking refuge in philosophy, language, and critique, many strands of Western Marxism ended up echoing the very culture of managerial critique that sustains capitalism’s hegemony. When analysis refuses to confront power at its source—class relations, state apparatuses, imperial projects—it risks becoming another tributary feeding the river that carries empire around the globe.

Michael Parenti understood this well. His Marxism, rooted in the classical lineage of materialist analysis, did not treat culture or ideology as prima donnas on the stage of history detached from political economy. Instead, he insisted that culture and ideology are the machinery by which class power is legitimized and reproduced—by which the empire manufactures consent and obscures conflict. To him, Western Marxism’s tendency to prioritize philosophical nuance over material contradiction was not simply an intellectual choice but a political capitulation to the culture of capital itself. For Parenti, the critical weapon must be sharpened on the anvil of class struggle, not blunted in the seminar rooms of comfortable critique.

This contrast is not offered as a caricature of every thinker labeled “Western Marxist.” Indeed, the tradition contains currents that wrestle earnestly with capitalism’s cultural forms and seek to illuminate the terrain of oppression. Yet there is a recurrent pattern: a reflexive skepticism of state-centered struggle, a privileging of critique over collective power, and a lingering reluctance to embrace the scientific roots of Marxist political economy. In such an approach, empire can be dissected, debated, and even mourned—but rarely confronted as a system of organized power to be dismantled. Parenti’s work, by contrast, never paused at the boundary between understanding and intervention. To grasp capitalism without confronting its instruments of coercion is to admire the cage while ignoring the bars.

The difference, then, is not academic temperament but political gravity. One current circles endlessly around interpretation; the other moves toward intervention. One treats power as a text to be read; the other treats it as a structure to be confronted. Parenti stood firmly in the second camp. His Marxism did not seek a better vocabulary for describing domination — it sought the tools to end it. And that is the line that runs through everything that follows.

Class Power Wears a Flag: Parenti’s Map of Empire and Its Storytellers

At the core of Michael Parenti’s work is a simple but explosive premise: class power does not hide in the shadows—it governs through institutions, narratives, and rituals so normalized that domination begins to feel like common sense. He approached political science not as a debate over opinions, but as a forensic investigation into how power is organized, protected, and disguised. Where others lingered in interpretation, Parenti moved toward exposure. His task was to show that what passes as neutral governance, responsible journalism, or national interest is often the everyday operating system of class rule.

One of his foundational interventions came through his long-running analysis of the U.S. political system as a class structure masquerading as pluralism. In works like Democracy for the Few, Parenti showed that elections, parties, and formal rights operate within a narrow corridor defined by concentrated wealth, corporate ownership, and state institutions aligned with elite interests. The issue was never that democracy was a lie in the simple sense; it was that democracy under capitalism is carefully engineered to be just real enough to legitimize rule, and just limited enough to never threaten the property system at its core.

But Parenti did not stop at the machinery of domestic rule. He traced how this same class power extends outward as empire, and how empire in turn feeds back into the domestic order. In books such as Against Empire and The Face of Imperialism, he analyzed imperialism not as a policy mistake or a moral failing, but as a structural necessity of advanced capitalism seeking markets, resources, cheap labor, and strategic dominance. Empire, in this framework, is not an optional accessory—it is the global form of the same class relations that structure the national state.

What distinguishes Parenti’s contribution is that he never treated force and narrative as separate realms. The bomb and the headline, the coup and the press conference, the sanction and the humanitarian speech—these are different instruments in the same orchestra. In Inventing Reality and Make-Believe Media, he dissected the corporate media not as a collection of biased individuals but as an institutional system whose ownership, advertising structure, and sourcing routines align it with elite power. Media do not simply “misinform”; they manufacture a world in which U.S. interventions appear reluctant, enemies appear irrational, and structural exploitation disappears behind stories of culture, personality, and crisis.

This is where Parenti’s method becomes especially sharp: ideology is not floating above material life—it is the user manual for accepting it. When the public is taught to see corporate rule as “the free market,” military aggression as “security,” and class struggle as “special interests,” the system has already won half the battle. Parenti’s work repeatedly returns to this point: ruling classes do not rely on repression alone; they cultivate perception. The real genius of empire is not only its firepower, but its ability to narrate its own violence as necessity, benevolence, or tragedy without perpetrators.

Seen together, Parenti’s writings form a unified theory: class power organizes the state; the state organizes empire; empire requires narrative management; and narrative management stabilizes class power at home. This circular flow is the bloodstream of modern capitalism. Break any link—expose the myth, disrupt the intervention, challenge the corporate state—and the whole system feels the strain. Parenti’s scholarship was devoted to mapping that circulation so ordinary people could see that what appears as isolated events—an election here, a war there, a media frenzy somewhere else—are coordinated expressions of a single social order.

In this sense, Parenti did not write separate books on media, empire, democracy, or history. He wrote one long book about power, broken into volumes for practical reasons. And unlike much of the theory that circulates safely in the imperial core, his analysis always returned to the same political conclusion: understanding is not an end in itself. To see how the system works is to recognize that it can be opposed—not abstractly, but through organized struggle aimed at the very institutions and interests his work so carefully illuminated. That is the through-line that makes Parenti dangerous even in death: he did not give us metaphors. He gave us a map.

The Heresy of Anti-Anti-Communism

If Parenti’s analysis of class power and empire gave us the map, his stance toward actually existing socialist projects gave us the line he refused to cross. That line is what he famously called anti-anti-communism. In a political culture where “anti-communism” functions as a moral reflex—an instinct so deeply trained that it operates before evidence is even considered—Parenti’s position was treated as heresy. He did not romanticize every policy of every socialist state. What he rejected was the ritual denunciation that begins from the assumption that any society attempting to transcend capitalism must be judged by standards never applied to capitalism itself.

This stance found one of its clearest expressions in Blackshirts and Reds, a book that cut directly against the post–Cold War consensus that history had delivered a final verdict: capitalism, however flawed, was legitimate; communism, however complex, was criminal. Parenti challenged that moral arithmetic. He asked why the violence of capitalist development—colonial conquest, famine amid abundance, world wars, dictatorships backed by Western powers—was treated as unfortunate collateral to “progress,” while the violence and repression within socialist experiments were treated as proof of inherent evil. The double standard, he argued, was not an error. It was ideology in its purest form.

Here is where Parenti’s break with much of Western Marxism becomes unmistakable. In many academic and left-liberal circles, the safest position is a posture of equal-opportunity condemnation: yes, capitalism is bad, but communism was worse; yes, empire commits crimes, but revolutionary states are “authoritarian”; yes, exploitation exists, but attempts to abolish it lead to “totalitarianism.” This posture feels balanced, reasonable, humane. Parenti saw it as the ideological sweet spot of empire. By placing the systemic violence of capitalism and the defensive or developmental coercion of socialist states on the same moral plane—while ignoring the global siege conditions those states faced—it empties anti-capitalism of any practical horizon.

Anti-anti-communism, then, is not a blind defense. It is a methodological correction. It insists that socialist societies be analyzed in their material circumstances: inherited poverty, external sabotage, military encirclement, economic blockade, and the task of rapid development under threat. It asks what these societies achieved—literacy, healthcare, industrialization, land reform—alongside what they repressed or mishandled. Most importantly, it demands that we compare like with like: the record of capitalism not in theory, but in its real historical form—colonial plunder, racial regimes, world wars, and structural inequality on a planetary scale.

Parenti’s refusal to participate in the ritual denunciation of communism did not make him popular in polite circles. It made him necessary. At a time when even self-described leftists internalized the Cold War script, Parenti reopened questions that had been sealed by propaganda: What did socialist revolutions emerge from? What pressures shaped their choices? Who benefited from their destruction? And why does the corporate media remember every shortage in the socialist world but forget every famine engineered by markets and empire?

This is the deeper meaning of his “heresy.” Anti-anti-communism restores the class lens to history and forces the comparison the empire forbids: capitalism as it actually exists, against socialism as it actually struggled. It refuses the courtroom where imperial ideology plays judge and insists on the battlefield where real societies are built under siege. Parenti kept that battlefield open. And that is why the Cold War never really ends for those who still want capitalism to be the horizon of the possible.

When Bombs Learn to Speak Human Rights

If anti-anti-communism was the line Parenti held in theory, Yugoslavia was where he demonstrated what that line meant in practice. The NATO destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was sold to Western audiences as a moral crusade—an emergency intervention to stop ancient hatreds, irrational nationalism, and uniquely evil leaders. It was, we were told, a war for human rights. Parenti treated that narrative the way a mechanic treats a suspicious engine: he took it apart piece by piece and showed how it was built to run on imperial fuel.

In To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, Parenti argued that the dismantling of Yugoslavia was not the tragic collapse of a hopelessly backward society, but a coordinated project of destabilization, economic pressure, political fragmentation, and finally military assault—driven by Western powers seeking to bring a formerly nonaligned socialist federation into the orbit of neoliberal capitalism and NATO expansion. The ethnic conflicts were real, but they were not self-generating storms of “tribal” hatred. They unfolded within a context of IMF restructuring, rising inequality, external meddling, and media narratives that simplified a complex multinational society into a morality play with preassigned villains.

Here Parenti exposed one of empire’s most refined weapons: humanitarian language as strategic cover. The same powers that armed dictatorships across the Global South and tolerated mass suffering when it served economic interests suddenly discovered an urgent conscience when a noncompliant state stood in the way of geopolitical consolidation. Civilian casualties from NATO bombing were described as regrettable errors; the dismemberment of a sovereign country was framed as a step toward peace; the economic shock therapy that followed—privatization, deindustrialization, foreign penetration—was recast as “transition.” Violence, when performed by empire, was rebranded as therapy.

Much of the Western left, including strands shaped by Western Marxism, struggled—or refused—to challenge this narrative. Some repeated media claims uncritically; others fell back on a familiar formula: yes, NATO is bad, but Milosevic was worse; yes, bombing is tragic, but intervention was necessary. Parenti saw in these responses the same pattern he identified elsewhere: an inability to place events within the structural logic of imperial power. By isolating Yugoslavia from the history of Western intervention, economic coercion, and strategic expansion, critics could condemn individual leaders while leaving the imperial system itself morally intact.

Parenti’s intervention was not to canonize any government. It was to reinsert class and empire into the frame. Yugoslavia’s system of social ownership, worker self-management (with all its contradictions), and relative independence from Western control posed an obstacle to the post–Cold War project of integrating Eastern Europe into a neoliberal order. Breaking the federation, deepening internal divisions, and subjecting the region to debt and foreign capital were not unfortunate side effects—they were central outcomes. The bombs cleared not only buildings but economic pathways.

By treating Yugoslavia as a case study in “humanitarian imperialism,” Parenti showed how modern empire prefers not to appear as empire at all. It does not conquer in the old colonial style with flags and governors; it intervenes, stabilizes, transitions, and reconstructs. The language is antiseptic, managerial, even compassionate. But the results—shattered infrastructure, subordinated economies, and diminished sovereignty—tell another story. In exposing that story, Parenti extended his unified theory of power: the state projects force abroad; media narrate it as rescue; and the left that cannot break from imperial moral framing becomes an unwitting chorus in the performance.

Yugoslavia was not an exception in Parenti’s work—it was a lens. Through it, he showed the emerging grammar of post–Cold War empire: intervention without conquest, fragmentation without accountability, and economic penetration narrated as “transition.” The weapons were real, but so were the words that escorted them. And once you learn to hear that grammar, you start recognizing it everywhere—because the script did not die in the Balkans. It matured.

Myth, Memory, and the Manufacture of Common Sense

By the time we reach this stage in Parenti’s body of work, a pattern is unmistakable: empire does not survive on force alone. It survives because people are taught to misrecognize the system that governs them. Guns may seize territory, but myths secure consent. Parenti understood that the struggle over history, culture, and belief is not secondary to class struggle—it is one of the terrains on which class rule is stabilized. If Part III mapped the institutions of power and Part V exposed humanitarian war as a cover for domination, Part VI turns to the cultural atmosphere that makes all of it feel normal.

In books like Land of Idols and Superpatriotism, Parenti dissected the rituals of national mythology that elevate the United States from a historical state into a moral abstraction. Patriotism, in his telling, is not merely affection for one’s people or land; it is often a political technology that fuses identity to empire. Citizens are encouraged to love the flag in the abstract while remaining unaware of the corporate and military interests operating beneath it. Dissent becomes betrayal, criticism becomes ingratitude, and the global projection of power becomes a defense of “our way of life.”

This mythic atmosphere is reinforced by what Parenti described in History as Mystery: the transformation of history into spectacle, trivia, and personality drama. Structural forces—class conflict, economic exploitation, imperial rivalry—are pushed into the background, replaced by tales of great men, national destiny, and cultural uniqueness. When history is stripped of material causation, the present system appears as the natural outcome of timeless virtues rather than the product of struggle, conquest, and policy. A depoliticized past makes a depoliticized present easier to manage.

Parenti’s range was wide, but never random. His study of ancient Rome in The Assassination of Julius Caesar was not a hobby detour—it was a demonstration that class struggle runs through history long before capitalism. He recast the late Roman Republic not as a morality tale about the fall of liberty to tyranny, but as a conflict between populares seeking reforms for the plebeians and oligarchic elites defending concentrated wealth. The point was methodological: what passes as “neutral” history often reflects the viewpoint of the powerful. Strip away that lens, and class conflict reappears as the driving force.

Religion and morality, too, entered Parenti’s field of analysis—not to mock belief, but to reveal how spiritual language can be woven into structures of domination. In works like God and His Demons, he explored how religious narratives are frequently mobilized to sanctify hierarchy, obedience, and suffering while deflecting attention from material injustice. The promise of salvation in another world can become a political sedative in this one. Yet Parenti also recognized that belief systems are contested terrain, capable of nurturing solidarity and resistance when aligned with the oppressed rather than the rulers.

What unifies these investigations is Parenti’s insistence that culture is not a floating realm of symbols detached from material life. It is the atmosphere in which people learn what is thinkable, sayable, and imaginable. When the culture industry presents capitalism as freedom, empire as protection, and inequality as merit, it narrows the horizon of political possibility. Parenti’s project was to widen that horizon—to make visible the hidden scaffolding of power that supports the stories people are taught to live by.

This is why his work on myth and memory is not an add-on to his analysis of class and empire—it is its cultural flank. A system that exploits globally and concentrates wealth at home must constantly narrate itself as just, inevitable, and benevolent. Parenti’s writing intervened in that narrative battlefield. He treated every slogan, every patriotic ritual, every sanitized history as a site of struggle. To unmask a myth is not merely to correct an error; it is to loosen one of the ideological bolts holding the system together. And for Parenti, loosening those bolts was never an academic exercise—it was part of the long work of making another world imaginable.

The People’s University Without Walls

If Parenti’s books gave us the theory of power, his lectures gave us its living circulation. Long before video clips became a form of political education, Parenti was traveling from campuses to union halls to community centers, turning rented rooms into classrooms and audiences into participants in a collective investigation of how the world actually works. He did not speak like a man auditioning for tenure; he spoke like a man trying to make sure working people could recognize the system that governed their lives. The lecture was not performance. It was organization.

Recordings of his talks—now preserved across archives and widely shared online—reveal a style that was deceptively simple: clear language, sharp humor, a steady layering of facts, and an unembarrassed moral clarity rooted in class analysis. He could move from explaining corporate media structures to skewering the absurdities of Cold War propaganda, from analyzing imperial wars to dismantling the mythology of the “free market,” all without losing the thread. The joke would land, the audience would laugh, and then the data would follow—statistics, documents, policy histories—like a second punch.

This mattered politically. In an era when much radical theory became increasingly abstract, Parenti treated accessibility not as a concession but as a principle. Complexity was not an excuse for obscurity. If an argument could not be explained to people outside the academy, then something was wrong with the argument—or with the speaker’s loyalties. His audiences were not imagined as future conference attendees; they were workers, students, organizers, and curious people trying to make sense of wars, layoffs, elections, and media spectacles. He gave them a framework that linked those experiences into a coherent picture of class power.

In this way, Parenti functioned as a kind of people’s university without walls. He offered historical context where the media offered outrage, structural analysis where pundits offered personality, and class explanation where official discourse offered culture or fate. The effect was not only intellectual but psychological. Listeners often left his talks with the sense that confusion had been replaced by clarity—not because the world had become simple, but because its patterns had become visible. Once you see the pattern, you are less easily manipulated by the next crisis headline.

This pedagogical role also sharpened his conflict with Western Marxism’s academic drift. Where theory retreated into specialized language, Parenti moved toward mass comprehension. Where critique became a performance of sophistication, he treated it as a tool for empowerment. His lectures modeled a different relationship between knowledge and struggle: information was not a badge of distinction; it was ammunition to be shared. The speaker’s authority came not from obscurity, but from clarity tied to evidence.

In the long arc of his life, the lecture circuit was not secondary to the books—it was their extension. The ideas traveled by voice, adapted to local contexts, sharpened by questions, and carried forward by listeners into their own organizing spaces. This is part of why Parenti’s influence often exceeds his formal academic citation count. He helped form political consciousness in rooms that never appear in bibliographies. His legacy lives not only in libraries, but in the memories of people who left a talk seeing their own lives in relation to empire, class, and power for the first time.

Don’t Embalm the Weapon

With Michael Parenti’s passing on January 24, 2026, the machinery of liberal memory will do what it always does when a dangerous thinker can no longer answer back: soften him. The sharp edges will be filed down, the anti-imperialism reframed as “critique of U.S. foreign policy,” the class analysis translated into “concern about inequality,” and the anti-anti-communism quietly omitted. He will be praised as “provocative,” “controversial,” “independent,” perhaps even “brilliant”—as long as the political blade of his work is sheathed. That is how the system metabolizes dissent: it cannot silence every voice, so it curates the memory.

Parenti’s legacy resists that treatment. His work was not a collection of interesting perspectives; it was a coherent method for analyzing and opposing a global system of class power. He gave us tools to understand how corporate wealth structures democracy, how empire projects violence abroad, how media manufacture consent, how history is sanitized, how patriotism is weaponized, and how anti-communism functions as an ideological border patrol. These were not separate insights—they were interlocking parts of a single framework aimed at making the invisible architecture of power visible.

The most fitting tribute, then, is not reverence but use. Parenti’s analysis is most alive when it is applied to the present: to new wars justified in the language of human rights, to new media panics that prepare the ground for intervention, to new domestic crises that are blamed on culture rather than class, to new campaigns that declare certain nations beyond the pale of legitimacy. His work teaches us to ask the same questions he always asked: Who benefits? Who decides? Who pays? And what stories are we being told to make these arrangements seem natural?

There is also a deeper charge embedded in his life’s work: do not separate knowledge from struggle. Parenti did not write as a neutral observer of empire; he wrote as someone aligned with those on the receiving end of its policies. His scholarship was partisan in the most honest sense—it took sides with working people, with colonized nations, with those trying to build alternatives to capitalist rule. In an age where “objectivity” is often a polite name for loyalty to the status quo, his example reminds us that clarity about one’s political commitments can be a source of analytical strength, not weakness.

To honor Parenti, then, is to refuse the invitation to turn him into a monument. Monuments are admired from a distance. Weapons are picked up. His books, lectures, and essays remain part of an ongoing political education for anyone trying to understand how empire operates and how it can be resisted. If his voice is now absent from the lecture hall, the task shifts to those who learned from him: to teach, to write, to organize, and to keep exposing the system he spent a lifetime dissecting.

The final measure of his legacy will not be how often he is quoted, but how often his method is practiced. Every time someone cuts through media fog to reveal the interests beneath it, every time an “intervention” is recognized as imperial strategy, every time patriotism is stripped of its mystique and examined as politics, Parenti’s work lives on. He did not ask to be remembered. He asked us to understand. And understanding, in his hands, was always the first step toward changing the world.