Michael Parenti passed away on 24 January at the age of 92. He was a titan of the US Left with many of his books being required reading for young Marxist activists. His voice was invariably raised in defence of the poor, oppressed and exploited, and that never wavered in this task, despite the hostility he faced from the US academy and mass media. 

A staunch anti-imperialist, Parenti shone a spotlight into the dark corners of empire, from the horrors of US-backed death squads in Latin America and NATO’s destruction of Yugoslavia, to the insidious role the news and entertainment media play in whitewashing these crimes and thereby “inventing reality.”

His approach was always profoundly human, eschewing the conventional focus on high-level geopolitics or abstract notions of “democracy”, Parenti instead asked who fed the children? Who fought against illiteracy? And on this basis he was a lonely voice on the American Left, defending those great revolutionary projects of the twentieth century from Russia to China and Cuba, not because they were perfect, or were utopias, but because it was in exactly these countries that the most has been done to alleviate poverty and to raise the standard of living of average people.

Parenti’s greatest contribution has been to remind those of us living in the imperialist states that the power to remake our societies lies not with those who hold the wealth, the big bourgeois and their representatives in the state, but with those who produce that wealth, the masses of everyday people.

“History never ends. The last page is never written. History is always being rewritten, and its best passages are not written by the princes or the presidents or the prime ministers or the popes. The best passages are written by the people. For all their faults the people are all we have. In fact we are they.”