America has over a thousand billionaires who control its wealth, its political system, and its economy. But it had only one Michael Parenti. Last week we lost America’s leading political scientist and conscience. We lost our most outstanding writer and critic of American oligarchy and imperialism on January 24, 2026. He was 92.
It is not surprising that Michael wrote the first and best book on NATO’s war against Yugoslavia – To Kill A Nation, in 2000. Opposing the US-led NATO aggression against Yugoslavia and standing up for a multinational, socialist and independent Yugoslavia was the main political litmus test of the 1990s. Michael passed that test. Intellectually bankrupt American academics and fake leftists failed it. Not only that, rather than acknowledging the imperialist aggression for what it was, they adopted whole-hog the false narrative of the US-NATO aggressors that the civil wars and NATO interventions of the 1990s in the Balkans were all the fault of Serbian nationalism and “ancient ethnic hatreds.” Michael’s class analysis proved otherwise. He showed the modus operandi of NATO was incite ethnic conflict, support secessionist movements, finance them and militarily supply them, misrepresent the suppression of gangster violence as human rights atrocities, plant bogus human rights organizations to destabilize the government, and then in the media clamor threaten war to defend “human rights.” It was all too complicated for simple minds to see that this was a war desired by not just the US, but by all of its junior partners in NATO as well. Michael explained it all. Now we have a similar situation in Ukraine. There has been some progress on the learning curve, but mostly we see the false narratives of the imperialist countries again taking up more space than they should.
I cold-called Michael one winter night in the 1990s. It did not take long in the conversation to discover that Michael had grasped the situation in the Balkans fully. That began our long collaboration and friendship. Michael had just finished his book Blackshirts and Reds. In retrospect, this book could have used updating. It was not a completely finished sketch of how the US, UK, and their NATO partners had used fascism and former Nazis and other fascists to undermine socialist governments and impose their power globally. But it was an important step forward in highlighting the use of former fascists to overthrow socialism and reestablish far right nationalist movements, particularly in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine. How clear our hindsight is now that this is precisely what happened? But it’s a measure also of Michael’s genius to have focused attention on it when it had become at that time absolutely necessary globally to understand it. US-UK-NATO support for and employment of ex-Nazis, ex-Ustashe, ex-Ukrainian fascists, and so on, made it possible to preserve and resurrect in the 1990s the fascist movements of the 1940s previously established and utilized by Hitler to impose his condominiums of power in Eastern Europe.
During the 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Michael and I organized (with Gregory Elich and others) the North American Solidarity with Yugoslavia fact finding mission that from August 1st to 15th travelled across Yugoslavia and collected information on NATO war crimes against the peoples of Yugoslavia. As a result of this visit Michael wrote his book To Kill A Nation. He became a member of the board of the Jasenovac Research Institute which had sponsored the delegation in 1999. Subsequently, he became a Co-Chair of the International Committee to Defend Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from the ad-hoc war crimes tribunal in the Hague. The kidnapping and sham trial of President Milosevic was the blueprint for later actions against foreign leaders such as the recent kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela. President Milosevic wrote a preface to the Serbian edition of Michael’s To Kill A Nation in 2002.
A decade before I met him I used his invaluable little book The Sword and the Dollar , which first appeared in 1988, as a required reading in a number of courses I taught in the City University of New York. It provided students with an excellent introductory understanding of the nature and brutal power of US imperialism exercised globally through its military and economic architecture.
But Michael’s major work which established his reputation was his book Democracy For the Few which first appeared in 1974, and which he updated numerous times as late as 2010. If you want to see a beautiful and brilliant example of Marxist scholarship in practice, read this book. It is the best political science textbook on the US political system available. In Chapter 4 where he explains the nature of the US Constitution while referencing Madison and Charles Beard’s classic 1913 work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States he writes:
Those who argue that the founders were motivated primarily by high-minded objectives consistently overlook the fact that the delegates repeatedly stated their intention to erect a government strong enough to protect the haves from the have-nots … and never found it necessary to disguise the fact – as have later-day apologists – that their concern was to diminish popular control and resist all tendencies toward class equalization (or ‘leveling, as it was called). Their opposition to democracy and their dedication to their class interests were unabashedly avowed….
And later in the chapter he shows how the class struggle in the colonies expressed itself through opposition to the Constitution leading to, among other things, the creation of the Bill of Rights. As Michael concluded: “The Constitution, then, was a product not only of class privilege but of class struggle….”
The lesson is clear, the US has been an oligarchy, not a democracy, since day one; but the class struggle continues. As with everything Michael wrote, this determination to keep class analysis in the forefront reflected his love for the American working class and for the global working class as well as his origins.
Michael Parenti was born in New York Hospital in Manhattan September 30, 1933 and grew up in the Italian working-class enclave in East Harlem around 118th Street. His hilarious memoir of growing up there in the 1930s and 1940s, Waiting For Yesterday, so beautifully and movingly written, is a must read. Not only does it evoke the struggles of poor Italian immigrants in America, it also captures working class life in Harlem and New York City of that time and later too. Michael attended City College while working for his father and then received his Masters and Doctorate at Brown and Yale respectively. He would go on to write twenty-five books translated into more than twenty languages and hundreds of articles. His legal problems resulting from his arrests for protesting against the Vietnam War cost him jobs in academia. But it also freed him to focus on writing his books. He didn’t just fight US imperialism – he led the fight against it in this country for decades. Everything he did in life he did with great gusto, humor, and great humanity. He was a pleasure to know and to learn from. Thank you for being my friend Michael!