In the decades after the Second World War, American academia settled into a language of managerial reason, empirical caution and institutional confidence. It was within this challenging intellectual climate that Michael Parenti emerged as a Marxist scholar who treated politics as a living structure influenced by class, power and historical struggle. His work carried forward a tradition of critical thought that ran from Marx and Gramsci to C. Wright Mills, insisting that scholarship remain accountable to social reality rather than professional comfort.Parenti lived in a society that prided itself on openness, freedom and pluralism – and spent his life demonstrating how carefully curated those ideals were. He taught us that the loudest proclamations of liberty often accompany the silent forms of coercion, that democracy can exist in form while being hollowed out in substance, and that empire rarely announces itself as empire. It calls itself peace. Or order. Or stability. Or humanitarianism.Parenti, who died at 92, was not a man of academic comfort. He was a Marxist in a discipline that trained its students to pretend class did not exist. A critic of empire in a culture that worshipped power. A scholar who insisted that ideas must be judged by whom they serve. And perhaps most dangerously, he spoke plainly. That alone made him suspect.Parenti came of age in a United States that liked to imagine itself as history’s moral endpoint. Born in 1933 to a working-class Italian American family in New York, he learned early that class was not a concept but a condition. He earned his PhD at Yale, but his education did not end there. It advanced into something the academy increasingly found inconvenient.By the late 1960s and early 1970s, political science was busy reinventing itself as a “value-neutral” discipline, more enamoured with models than with power, more comfortable measuring voter behaviour than asking who owned society. Parenti refused that turn. He insisted that the study of politics was itself political, and that claims of neutrality often masked allegiance to the status quo. Parenti, in that sense, was espousing a ‘new political science’.That insistence cost him. He was edged out of elite academic life, denied the career path that rewards compliance. Instead of retreating, he chose something rarer – independence. He lectured in union halls and community centres, wrote for ordinary readers and built an audience outside institutional walls. In doing so, he became something universities seldom tolerate – a public intellectual with a class position.“I created a career of my own,” he once wrote, quoting Virginia Woolf: “It is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition – but even more terrible to be frozen into it.”Democracy, exposedParenti’s work, Democracy for the Few, remains one of the clearest dissections of liberal democracy ever written. Its central claim was disarmingly simple. Democracy under capitalism is structurally constrained. Elections exist, freedoms exist, but power is not evenly distributed – and never has been. He showed how political science textbooks turned dysfunction into virtue. Low voter turnout became “contentment”. Corporate lobbying became “expert input”. Executive power became “efficiency”. Third parties were dismissed as destabilising, while two corporate-friendly parties were celebrated as maturity.At the same time, Parenti refused the easy cynicism of some radicals. He rejected the idea that all reforms were meaningless or that democracy was a complete sham. His argument was louder – democracy exists, but in permanent tension with capitalism. It advances only when pushed from below and retreats whenever elites feel threatened. That tension – between promise and betrayal – became the heartbeat of his work.Empire without illusionsIf Democracy for the Few anatomised power at home, The Sword and the Dollar and Against Empire traced it abroad. Parenti’s writing on imperialism was devastating precisely because it refused abstraction.Empire, he argued, goes beyond ideology or national psychology. It was about profit. The United States did not invade, sanction or destabilise countries because of misunderstandings or bad intelligence. It did so to secure markets, crush alternatives and protect capital. Human rights rhetoric was not the motive. Rather it was the alibi.In To Kill a Nation, his study of Yugoslavia, Parenti exposed how NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign was sold as humanitarian intervention while systematically dismantling a socialist state that refused full submission to Western economic orthodoxy. Factories, bridges, utilities – public infrastructure – were destroyed. Media narratives erased inconvenient facts. Privatisation followed the bombs.What disturbed Parenti most was not Western hypocrisy, but Western amnesia. The ease with which journalists, academics and even leftists accepted official narratives revealed how thoroughly ideology had replaced analysis. It is true that his views on this had drawn a lot of criticism.The media as an ideological machineIn Inventing Reality, Parenti offered what remains one of the most incisive critiques of corporate media ever written. He did not argue that journalists lied constantly. He argued something more dangerous – that truth is produced by selection. What gets reported. What is omitted. Whose voices are quoted. Whose suffering is humanised. Whose violence is normalised.Media bias, Parenti explained, is structural. It flows from ownership, advertising, sourcing and proximity to power. The press does not need to conspire. It simply reflects the interests of those who fund it.This insight has aged disturbingly well. In the era of algorithmic news feeds and manufactured outrage, Parenti’s analysis reads less like theory than prophecy.Fascism, then and nowFew of Parenti’s works feel as urgently contemporary as Blackshirts and Reds. Written in the late 1990s, it rejected the comforting myth that fascism was a historical accident. Fascism, he argued, was capitalism in crisis – what happens when elites abandon democracy to preserve property and power. Mussolini. Hitler. Franco. Pinochet. The line was consistent – economic elites backed authoritarian movements when labour gained strength and democratic politics threatened profit.What made Parenti uncomfortable for liberal audiences was his insistence that fascism – rather than born from mass irrationality alone – is cultivated by ruling classes when democracy becomes inconvenient.Today, as scholars increasingly draw parallels between authoritarian populism and classical fascism, Parenti’s analysis feels prophetic. He warned that nationalism, militarism, demonisation of minorities and contempt for truth were recurring strategies.When Donald Trump rose to power – attacking the press, glorifying violence, undermining elections – many scrambled for explanations. Parenti had already provided one.Ecology and the logic of destructionLong before climate collapse entered mainstream discourse, Parenti understood environmental destruction as a class issue. In essays such as Profit Pathology and the Disposable Planet, he argued that capitalism treats nature as expendable because profit demands it. Corporations, he wrote, do not pollute because they are ignorant. They pollute because it is cheaper. Environmental damage is not a failure of the system. He reminded us that it is a feature.What made Parenti’s ecological critique distinctive was its refusal of moral abstraction. He noted that elites do not experience ecological collapse the same way as the poor. They live elsewhere. Eat differently. Escape first. And so, the destruction continues because it is profitable.A scholar who refused to behaveParenti never founded a school. He never cultivated disciples. He never softened his language to gain institutional favour. He believed that scholarship should disturb comfort. He spoke to workers, students, activists and anyone willing to listen. His lectures – sharp, funny, unsparing – circulated long before social media made such circulation easy. He trusted ordinary people to grasp complex ideas if treated with respect. That trust characterised his legacy.Michael Parenti lived in a society that celebrated freedom while punishing dissent, praised democracy while hollowing it out, and spoke endlessly of peace while waging permanent war. He spent his life naming that contradiction. He leaves behind only tools: class analysis, historical memory, scepticism of power and an insistence that truth matters even when it is inconvenient. In a time of manufactured outrage, corporate capture, ecological collapse and resurgent authoritarianism, Parenti’s voice feels less like history and more like warning.He once wrote: “One does not have to be a Marxist to know there is something very wrong in this society.” He was right. But he also showed us what it means to be one – to look directly at power, to refuse illusions and to keep speaking even when silence would be easier.The author is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.