Everything about Michael Parenti totally explained
Michael Parenti (born
1933) is an
American political scientist,
historian, and media critic.
Background
Parenti received his
Ph.D. in
political science from
Yale University and has taught at several universities, colleges, and other institutions. He is the author of twenty books and many more articles.
His works have been translated into at least eighteen languages. Parenti lectures frequently throughout the United States and abroad. His book,
The Assassination of Julius Caesar, A People's History of Ancient Rome, was selected as a Book of the Year for 2004 by
Online Review of Books and Current Affairs. He is the father of author and
The Nation magazine contributor
Christian Parenti.
Parenti’s writings cover a wide range of subjects: U.S. politics, culture, ideology,
political economy,
imperialism,
fascism,
communism,
democratic socialism,
free-market orthodoxies, conservative judicial activism,
religion,
ancient history,
modern history,
historiography, repression in academia, news and entertainment media, technology,
environmentalism,
sexism,
racism,
homophobia,
Venezuela, the wars in
Iraq and
Yugoslavia, ethnicity, and his own early life. Perhaps his most influential book is
Democracy for the Few, now in its eighth edition, a critical analysis of U.S. society,
economy, and political institutions and a college-level political science textbook published by Wadsworth Publishing.
Parenti lectures across the United States, Canada and abroad. In recent years he's addressed such subjects as "Empires: Past and Present," "US Interventionism: the Case of Iraq," "Race, Gender, and Class Power," "Ideology and History," "The Collapse of Communism," and "Terrorism and Globalization." For many years Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning. Eventually he devoted himself full-time to writing, public speaking, and political activism.
In Washington, D.C., in 2003, the
Caucus for a New Political Science
gave him a Career Achievement Award. In 2007 he received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from U.S. Representative
Barbara Lee and an award from
New Jersey Peace Action. For several years in the 1980s, he was a Visiting Fellow at the
Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington, D.C.
He now serves on the board of judges for
Project Censored, and on the advisory boards of
Independent Progressive Politics Network, and
Education Without Borders; as well as the advisory editorial boards of
New Political Science and
Nature, Society and Thought.
Social and political analyses
Parenti has covered many subjects in 45 years of teaching, writing, and speaking. The broad outlines of some of these are summarized below.
Racism
Parenti argues that western racism is systemic and historical in nature and should be regarded as more than just an attitudinal problem. He claims western racism has its origins in imperialism and
slavery: To justify the
colonial plunder of another nation or entire continent (as in the case of
Africa) as well as the enslavement of conquered populations, imperialists and/or slave traffickers dehumanize their victims and define them as moral inferiors and subhuman.
Parenti maintains that racism serves several functions for ruling interests in the United States:
- It divides the working class against each other.
- It creates a "super-exploited" group of people who are forced to work at below scale wages thereby depressing wage levels for the entire workforce.
- It distracts the (United States) white population from its own legitimate grievances by providing an irrelevant scapegoat in the form of minority populations
Culture and social structure
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming increasingly critical of the existing socio-economic system, Parenti argued that images of the United States as a pluralistic, democratic society were more ideological than accurate. He didn't deny the existence of a vast plurality of social, ethnic, and regional groups in America, but he felt that this group pluralism didn't translate into a democratic pluralism in political life. Only limited portions of the political process are accessed by the general populace. Power in America isn't broadly distributed, according to Parenti, but is highly concentrated in a social structure dominated by corporate moneyed interests, whose influence predominates in most mainstream institutions and major policy areas.
Role of US media
With respect to the US media Parenti has maintained that, while news coverage can be marred by problems of deadlines, space, and ordinary human error, much of the misleading coverage is the result of carefully honed ideological production. Reporters, he says, often exercise much skill to avoid the more important points of a story or news analysis so as not to offend anyone who wields substantial political and economic power, including their own bosses and corporate advertisers. Parenti concludes that their goal is to avoid fishing too deeply into troubled waters thereby maintaining an appearance of objectivity and moderation. Their careers, he suggests, depend in part upon their ability to equate centrist views with “objectivity,” and to stay within the prevailing ideological orthodoxy.
Parenti’s treatment of entertainment media (movies and television) continues the argument that the media are not neutral and favor elitist interests. Exploring a wide range of films and programs, he's attempted to demonstrate that the entertainment media do more than entertain; they indoctrinate by propagating values in keeping with their corporate ownership and corporate advertisers.
Parenti often attacks specific examples of the misleading coverage provided by the US media.
In
Blackshirts and Reds he cites historian
J. Arch Getty's figures to demonstrate the exaggeration elsewhere in the US media of the executions effected by
Joseph Stalin in the
Great Purge.
Parenti critically reviews
Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
in "The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic" and
To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia
, finding similar exaggeration of war crimes in the breakup of
the second Yugoslavia.
In "Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth" he observes, "western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La" then goes on to detail what he feels were its negative aspects.
Culture across the globe
Parenti maintains that, far from being neutral, culture is often ideologically driven in a highly skewed system of social power, benefiting some groups at the expense of others. “Growing portions of our culture are increasingly commodified and mass marketed.” “So we buy more and more of our culture and create less and less of it.” Rather than being accepted at face value, Parenti says that all cultures should be subjected to critical investigation to be judged by “universal human rights standards” and by the criticisms voiced by those who are victimized within the various cultures of the world. Parenti gives extensive attention to those who are regularly victimized by their own cultures, providing examples in chapters entitled “Custom Against Women,” “The Global Rape Culture,” and “Racist Myths.”
Role of voting fraud in US elections
Parenti is among those who have cited a variety of studies claiming that the 2004 presidential election was fraudulent. In an essay entitled "The Stolen Election of 2004" he argued that modern voting technology allowed powerful corporations to manipulate the electoral results. He concluded the article by observing, about the forthcoming US election, "Given this situation, it isn't likely that the GOP will lose control of Congress come November 2006. The two-party monopoly threatens to become an even worse one-party tyranny." In an updated analysis of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, he adds a postscript explaining why---despite the massive crossover reported in the polls away from the GOP—the Democrats won only a slim victory in the Congressional 2006 elections.”
Class and class power
Parenti stresses the role of class in all societies, particularly the purportedly
classless US one. He extends the definition of class as a demographic trait relating to status, education, lifestyle, and income level to include the effects of social interrelationships. He observes that there can be no rich slaveholders without poor slaves, no powerful feudal lords without serfs, no corporate bosses without workers. The interrelationship is highly asymmetrical. It centers on the organized wealth of the society.
US downplay of class
Parenti has repeatedly criticized the tendency among many who profess to be progressive to downplay the importance of class and class power as a formative force as compared to race, gender, and culture. He allows that each of these other categories of social experience have imperatives that are distinctly their own, sometimes of a life-and-death urgency. Still they shouldn't be seen as being mutually exclusive of, or in competition with, considerations of class power in society, he argues, and shouldn't be used as a means of evading class analysis.
Democracy and capitalism
From the late 60s well into the 80s, Parenti was one of many radicals and socialists who questioned the validity and value of what they called “bourgeois democracy,” seeing it more as a charade to mislead the people into thinking that they were free and self-governing. By the late 80s, however, he noticeably modified his position, arguing that democracy shouldn't be thought of as merely a subterfuge or cloak created by ruling elites, although it certainly can serve that purpose. More often, Parenti claimed, whatever modicum of democracy the people attain in any society is usually the outcome of genuine struggle for a more equitable politico-economic order. Why credit the corporate class with giving people a “bourgeois democracy,” he asks, when in fact the ruling plutocrats furiously opposed most democratic advances in U.S. history, be it the extension of the franchise or the struggle for ethnic and gender equality, more direct forms of representation, more room for dissent and free speech, greater accountability of elected officials, and more equitable socio-economic domestic programs.
For Parenti, democracy has two basic dimensions, the procedural and the substantive, both of which are equally important. Procedural democracy consists of the basic political forms: free speech and assembly, the right to dissent, accountability of officeholders, the right to vote in regular and honest elections, etc. Substantive democracy consists of egalitarian socio-economic outputs that advance the well-being of the populace, protect the environment, and curb the abuses and often untrammeled powers of great wealth. Parenti quotes the German sociologist Max Weber who remarked almost a century earlier that it remains to be seen whether democracy and freedom can exist under the dominion of a highly developed capitalism.
Few phenomena in the social order can operate with neutral effect even
if supposedly pursued with neutral intent, according to Parenti. The national debt is a good example. Considered merely as a “problem” of excessive government spending, the national debt in fact works well for certain interests, specifically the moneyed class, Parenti claims. By 1977 he noted how the national debt brought a transfer of income from the taxpayers to the wealthy creditors, the holders of government bonds. The greater the debt, the greater the upward transfer, as the government continues to borrow money from those they should be taxing (the big money interests). Parenti concludes it's no accident that the biggest deficit spenders have been conservative presidents like
Ronald Reagan and both
George H. W. Bush and
George W. Bush. The national debt is in effect a way of privatizing public spending and defunding the federal budget, Parenti argues. The bigger the debt, the less money available for domestic programs, and the more money that goes from the pockets of ordinary taxpayers to rich creditors.
Empire
U.S. foreign policy is neither confused nor bungling, according to Parenti. It is quite consistently directed toward certain goals, and is largely successful. For the most part, U.S. leaders have maintained friendly relations with those governments that have opened up their countries to Western corporate investors, and have shown hostility toward those countries that have tried to use their land, labor, natural resources, and markets for their own self-development, Parenti believes. Iraq was targeted for “having committed economic nationalism,” with a state-run economy that pretty much shut out Western investors. The same holds true for Yugoslavia, he claims. Both countries were bombed and invaded, and their public economies were shattered. Parenti believes that Yugoslavia was transformed from a viable social democracy to a cluster of little right-wing mini-republics.
Parenti's beliefs led him to become head of the United States chapter of the
International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević, in which capacity he added to the criticisms of bias in the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Parenti also maintains that the U.S. empire feeds off the U.S. republic. The empire’s expansion abroad entails increasing costs for the republic. Ventures that are profitable for military contractors and overseas investors have to be paid in blood and taxes by the American populace. The many third world countries that are the targets of colonial intervention pay the highest price, he writes. They suffer not from underdevelopment, but from “maldevelopment,” a result of generations of overexploitation.
Communism
Many on the left continue to deliver impassioned and blanket condemnations of deceased communist countries, Parenti notes. “Those of us who refused to join in the Soviet bashing were branded by left anti-communists as ‘Soviet apologists’ and ‘Stalinists,’ even if we disliked Stalin and his autocratic system of rule and believed there were things seriously wrong with existing Soviet society.”
More recently he wrote that the state-owned economies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union suffered “fatal distortions in their development” because of the years of “embargo, invasion, devastating wars, and costly arms buildup; excessive bureaucratization and poor incentive systems; lack of administrative initiative and technological innovation; and a repressive political rule that allowed little critical expression and feedback while fostering stagnation and elitism.”
Social democracy
Parenti maintains that the structural problems of free-market transnational capitalism will only worsen the living standards of people in the United States and abroad, while deepening the environmental crises.
He advocates a greater measure of public ownership in the USA. Parenti asks “can socialism work? ... Is it not just a dream in theory and a nightmare in practice? Can the government produce anything of worth?” he takes the old adage that history is written by the victors and fleshes it out with examples drawn from ancient and modern times. In regard to early Christianity, for instance, he maintains that, contrary to popular notions, the “Jesus worshipers” didn't gather most of their followers from the poor and downtrodden but from the more affluent strata. Some Christian leaders discouraged slaves from converting to Christianity. Slaves were prohibited from becoming church deacons or priests, he maintains. Contrary to conventional US notions, he argues that the Christians were not the keepers of learning and scholarship during the Dark Ages but played a relentless role in destroying all the advanced learning and all the libraries of antiquity that were in their reach.
In
The Assassination of Julius Caesar,
he states that many historians, both ancient and modern, have treated popular insurgencies and the common people with fear and loathing, depicting them as mindless rootless mobs of ne’er-do-wells. He also argues that Caesar and other popular reformers of the Roman Republic before him were assassinated not because they were violating the Roman constitution but because they were advocating reforms that benefited the commoners at a cost to the aristocracy.
References in popular culture
New York City based ska punk band Choking Victim use a number of samples from Michael Parenti's lectures in their album, No Gods, No Managers.
Los Angeles based crust punk band Against Empire took their name from Michael Parenti's 1995 book of the same name.
Bibliography
The Anti-Communist Impulse, Random House, 1970.
Trends and Tragedies in American Foreign Policy, Little, Brown, 1971.
Ethnic and Political Attitudes, Arno, 1975. ISBN 0405064136
Democracy for the Few, First Edition circa 1974, Eighth Edition 2007.
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