Long Island Red Rose

October 2025

Michael Parenti: The Atlas of American Marxism 

American communist stalwart Michael Parenti turned 92 on Sept. 30. From all of us at Long Island DSA, we’d like to wish him a happy birthday.

Parenti is a singular figure in the history of American Marxism. Before his prime, revolutionary organizations like the Black Panthers and Young Lords carried the torch lit by luminaries like W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture. In recent years, the heightened contradictions of capitalism have led to a resurgence in revolutionary socialist fervor throughout the country, as evidenced by the growing membership counts of organizations such as the DSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation. 

But Michael Parenti was at his most influential in the 1980s and 1990s, after COINTELPRO robbed us of a generation of revolutionary momentum, after Reagan and neoliberalism blasted our communities into atomized shells of themselves and dragged our culture by the nose into trite consumerism, and ultimately, after the collapse of the Soviet Union—the greatest blow to the international working class in the last 300 years of struggle. 

In the darkest of dark ages for American Marxism, Michael Parenti, practically alone, held up the sky. Whether in his yellow-tinted lectures or in books like Blackshirts & Reds, he stood before a beleaguered and besieged American left and demanded we re-examine our propagandized notions of the world and where we fit into it. 

In a breezy few hundred pages, he laid bare fascism’s nature as a capitalist ideology and its nigh-inevitable alliance with liberals against worker power. He demonstrated how anti-communist propaganda helped the U.S. empire obscure its role as the world’s most prolific bloodletter post-Hitler, how that CIA ideology infected even our own left wing with an insatiable allergy to Marxism-Leninism, to date the only strand of socialism that has any success to its name. 

In our official history’s codifying of Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and Mao as devilish myths, we lost sight of how their revolutionary projects lifted millions out of poverty and alleviated the sufferings of class society. More importantly, as Parenti points out, those caricatures prevented us from fully grasping the historical realities behind the struggles and collapse of the USSR, debasing our analysis from the scientific grounding it needs to stand above utopian idealism. 

In one book, in barely 150 pages, Parenti flipped American socialism right-side up again. And he wrote far, far more than one book. 

Perhaps the greatest testament to Parenti’s contribution to the political education of this entire generation of American socialists is how basic some of his postulates feel today. Most people who wander into a DSA meeting, even if they’re brand new to socialism, don’t need someone to spell out that American imperialism is the most destructive force in global politics at this point. It’s common knowledge on the left that fascists and liberals make common cause with one another to kneecap the working class. But at the peak of Reagan’s power and Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” malaise of the post-Soviet collapse, neither notion had much purchase in American political discourse. 

There was a point in the 1960s and early 1970s when a good deal of people possessed both that education and the organizational base to build towards a worker-led society. These days, it feels like we’re stumbling slowly towards that point once more. 

But for decades in between, you would have been hard-pressed to find anything resembling effective socialist theory or praxis in the United States… except for Michael Parenti. He towered over the bleakest landscape we’ve ever set eyes upon, and he did it as one of us. Never highfalutin, never forgetting his East Harlem working-class roots. Speaking always with poise and power, his directness reflects someone who lived through the sufferings of class society and empowered his peers to recognize the true nature of the enemy.  

So again, Michael Parenti, from this generation of your theoretical progeny: thank you for giving us the eyes to see the political struggle for what it is. For decades, you held up the sky almost alone; today, thousands of us share that weight. We hope your 92nd year brings you the rest you deserve. The struggle continues, and this time, Atlas is not alone.