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Michael Parenti Interview: On Culture, Karl Marx, and America’s ‘Founding Fathers’
(redphoenix.news)
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9013909
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/62157
Ed Rampell | Red Phoenix guest contributor | California
Michael Parenti during an interview for the 2014 Canadian-Serbian documentary “The Weight of Chains 2”
Editor’s note: Ed Rampell was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because of his TV exposes of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College and is an L.A.-based film historian/critic who co-organized the 2017 70th anniversary Blacklist remembrance at the Writers Guild theater in Beverly Hills and was a moderator at 2019’s “Blacklist Exiles in Mexico” filmfest and conference at the San Francisco Art Institute.
His 2014 interview with the late Michael Parenti was kindly provided to us by Ed for publication in The Red Phoenix. The unabridged interview along with an introduction by him is included below.
On a beautiful summery Sunday preceding Labor Day veteran activist/author Michael Parenti spoke, appropriately, on the topic of “Labor and the Myth of Prosperity.”
The Aug. 31, 2014 talk was the 71st installment of “The Great Minds Series” presented by publicist Ilene Proctor and took place at the Santa Monica home of Jan Goodman and Jerry Manpearl. Political science Prof. Peter Mathews, author of Dollar Democracy, introduced Parenti, who holds a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, is one of the Left’s leading media and culture critics, analysts, academics, speakers and writers.
His 25 books include 2001’s seminal Democracy for the Few, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, A People’s History of Ancient Rome (www.thenewpress.com), The Terrorism Trap, September 11 and Beyond and Superpatriotism (www.citylights.com). In 2006’s The Culture Struggle (www.sevenstories.com), Parenti argued “culture is often a weapon of political control and exploitation,” warning that while America’s “Empire grows in its militarism, the Republic starves, becomes impoverished.”
During his Aug. 31 talk, the Berkeley-based Parenti recounted amusing anecdotes from his 2013 memoir about growing up in East Harlem, Waiting For Yesterday: Pages From a Street Kid’s Life (Via Folios) (Bordighera Press). Parenti went on to speak about subjects covered in his new book to be released in April 2015, Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies (Paradigm Publishers).
Parenti takes issue with the notion that America is a land of prosperity, citing the U.S.’s endless cycle of economic calamities and downturns, noting: “Marx said recessions occur when workers don’t earn enough to pay for the services and products they produce.” Parenti also quoted Marx’s “beautiful comment on debt, that ‘the one thing the people own is their debt.’”
During the Q&A following his hour-or-so talk, this journalist asked Parenti what he thought was Karl Marx’s relevance in the 21st century and he replied: “Marx is more relevant than ever as the contradictions of capitalism increase.” He went on to rue the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Below is from a prior unpublished interview between Parenti and this reporter. Michael Parenti passed away on Jan. 24, 2026. The interview I did with him here is especially relevant as America commemorates the 250th anniversary of our Revolution, and it includes Parenti’s views on some of the country’s founders:
ED RAMPELL: Has American patriotism become more powerful due to the ability of media and corporations to control Americans?
MICHAEL PARENTI: It seems true that the mobilization of imagery and opinion is much more powerful today. People look at and hear things on the radio or TV, repeating them as their own opinions. They hear somebody say, “We can’t just cut and run,” without any analysis, information or discussion. People turn around and say, “We can’t just cut and run,” like little parrots. It’s amazing how they get behind rulers putting out a line.
Or they say: “Saddam was evil.” Demonizing leaders gives you license to bomb, kill, attack the people. They forget to tell you Saddam Hussein used to be the CIA’s boy. His first gig in the Ba’ath Party was to assassinate the democratically elected prime minister, which he just missed doing. He worked his way up, became Ba’ath Party leader. Saddam murdered, tortured, killed, drove into exile or underground every democrat, progressive, constitutionalist, communist, socialist, radical of any kind. He just murdered that whole coalition who’d set up a democratic government, then exterminated the whole leftwing of his own Ba’ath Party. When he did his worst work, he was Washington’s poster boy, got U.S. aid. Saddam was patted on the head by the U.S. Rumsfeld visited, hugged him, shook hands and told him what a swell guy he was. They sicced him onto Iran; [Iraq] invaded Iran to destabilize that country.
(E.R.) What made the U.S. turn against him?
(M.P.) It’s only when he got out of line on oil prices, started committing economic nationalism, talking about how Iraq should have a bigger chunk of the oil market – then, George Bush, Sr. got very worried about oil prices collapsing if [too much] Iraqi crude, some of the best in the world, got on the market. They turn to the American people, say we’ve got to rescue Kuwaitis and [Saddam’s] a terrible guy.
(E.R.) You’re saying that kind of hype is pumped up even more by the media monopoly?
(M.P.) Yes. The Pentagon itself is one of the biggest media producers. The CIA owns publishers and publications. They put out a story every day, send out press releases, which are then published in newspapers as editorials. They create a climate of ideological opinions that can more readily preempt [intelligent debate].
(E.R.) How accurate is it to call the U.S.A. a democracy?
(M.P.) In many respects, the Empire has preempted our democratic rights. Congress votes away our rights, passing things like the Military Commissions and PATRIOT Acts. The Democrats fall all over themselves trying to look even tougher, more militaristic and therefore more patriotic than even the Republicans. To the extent that the Empire does all the things it does, yeah, the democracy is severely compromised. You can go as far back as James Madison and others who talked about how wars are the graveyard for a Republic. This endangers the rights of people because the state then makes all sorts of claims to powers that, in normal times, it would have a hard time expropriating.
(E.R.) Your 2006 book is The Culture Struggle**. How is this different from the notion of rightwingers, such as Bill O’Reilly, of the “culture wars”?**
(M.P.) The culture war of Bill O’Reilly is simply a shorthand label for a whole process of conservatives distracting people from bread and butter and social justice issues by conjuring up what they called “cultural issues.” They’re about family values, propriety, morality, decency in life, keeping children safe from gay lifestyles and abortion. Conservatives supported abortion years ago. As California’s governor, Ronald Reagan signed one of the more liberal abortion bills in the country. When he was in Congress, George Bush, Sr. voted to legalize abortions. They felt the poor had too many children [who] went on welfare; the poor should get abortions and clean up their act. But when they discovered abortion was an issue that could split Democratic Catholic voters and attract lots of Protestant Fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews, they suddenly picked up abortion.
(E.R.) In The Culture Struggle you describe how psychiatry is used as a form of social control.
(M.P.) For years, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [of Mental Disorders], the bible [of the American Psychiatric Association] listed homosexuality as a disease. Homosexuals rallied, pressured them, saying, “Hey, we’re quite happy the way we are. What makes us unhappy is when you start stigmatizing us and oppressing us. Just lay off.”
After many years of agitation the Association removed homosexuality [from its mental disorders list]. Neither decision was scientific. The first was the product of a homophobic culture; the second responded to political action by gay militants. Psychiatry can be used.
(E.R.) What’s your beef with television commercials urging patients to ask doctors to prescribe drugs advertised on TV?
(M.P.) Treatments, which should be scientifically and medically determined, are being commercially determined. Your television set is telling you what you should get. The commercial says, “Tell your doctor to get you this new , inform your doctor.” Patients are being used as lobbyists, in effect, for certain medications. In the old days, you had drug salesmen. Now drug companies are getting viewers to lobby for it themselves, directly to the doctor. It’s a much stronger selling point. If you’re a doctor worried about litigation and don’t take what the salesman gives you, that’s nothing. But if the patient then says, “I fell into this horrible depression and told the doctor he should prescribe something I saw on TV, but he said, ‘No, that’s not very good’” — that’s negligence…
So, you have a media culture. Many decisions and judgments people often made in their own lives are now being made for us. More and more of our culture we buy and just view passively, or it’s packaged and delivered to us, rather than something that we develop. When you think about it, “folk culture” is a strange term, because all culture should be folk culture. It’s created by us folks. But instead we have folk music, folk dance, and folklore. But most culture is no longer that — we watch it on television, other people singing, dancing for millions of dollars.
Even the 9 million teenage rock groups in every basement or garage in suburbia, hoping to become rock stars — that’s not a folk music. It’s them all imitating the big rock stars, trying to get their first CD out, trying to break into that big commercialized product culture.
Music is now packaged — we plug it into our ears and listen to it. I’m from an Italian family and old enough to remember: we used to sing sometimes at the table. It was no big deal. It would be a source of amusement or enjoyment today if you ask somebody to sing; they’d act all goofy and stupid, as if you’ve asked them to drop their trousers on Main Street or something.
But people should create their own authentic culture… We have people on the Internet, we organize demonstrations. Some publications occasionally give opposing views. Community radio stations sometimes do that, also. We’re fighting back.
SIDEBAR: Parenti On Our Not-So-Democratic Founding Fathers
(M.P.) In 1787 the ex-colonies’ elite – including slaveowners – met in secret sessions at Philadelphia to conspire how to control the emerging United States of America. Michael Parenti’s book Democracy for the Few includes revealing quotes from the Constitutional Convention’s anti-democratic delegates:
Most troublesome to the framers of the Constitution was the people’s insurgent spirit. In 1787, George Washington wrote: “There are combustibles in every State, to which a spark might set fire.” A constitution was needed “to contain the threat of the people rather than to embrace their participation and their competence,” lest “the anarchy of the propertyless would give way to despotism.”
Shays’ Rebellion – a 1786-1787 anti-tax armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers – hovered over delegates at the Constitutional Convention determined that high-born persons should control the nation and check the “leveling impulses” of “the majority faction.” In Federalist No. 10 James Madison wrote, “To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”
Madison added: “the most common and durable source of faction has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society” and “the first object of government” is “the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.”
According to Madison’s future vice president, Elbridge Gerry, democracy was “the worst of all political evils.”
America’s first attorney general, Edmund Randolph, believed America’s problems were caused by “the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
Declaration of Independence signer Roger Sherman agreed: “The people should have as little to do as may be about the Government.”
Alexander Hamilton recommended strong centralized state power to “check the imprudence of democracy… All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the wellborn, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.”
George Washington urged Convention delegates not to produce a document merely to “please the people.”
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