Michael Parenti Quotes

American socialism cannot be modeled on the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other countries with different historical, economic, and cultural developments.

Conservatives insist that government should be "run more like a business." One might wonder how that could be possible, since government does not market goods and services for the purpose of capital accumulation.

Among the institutions of plutocratic culture, our educational system looms as one of the more influential purveyors of dominant values. From the earliest school year, children are taught to compete individually rather than work cooperatively for mutual benefit. Grade-school students are fed stories of their nation's exploits that might be more valued for their inspirational nationalism than for their historical accuracy. Students are instructed to believe in America's global virtue and moral superiority and to hold a rather uncritical view of American politico economic institutions.

It is somewhat ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of gradual reform when most reforms through history have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class and were won only after prolonged and bitter contest.

Throughout its history, the CIA has resorted to every conceivable crime and machination to make the world safe for the Fortune 500, using false propaganda, economic warfare, bribery, rigged elections, sabotage, demolition, theft, collusion with organized crime, narcotics trafficking, death squads, terror bombings, torture, massacres, and wars of attrition.

Facing a campus that is not nearly as reactionary as they would wish, ultra-conservatives rail about how academia is permeated with doctrinaire, “politically correct” leftists. This is not surprising, since they describe as “leftist” anyone to the left of themselves, including mainstream centrists. Their diatribes usually are little more than attacks upon socio-political views they find intolerable and want eradicated from college curricula. Through all this, one seldom actually hears from the “politically correct” people who supposedly dominate the universe of discourse.

To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Street crime has also increased sharply (, 5/7/96). In the former Soviet Union, women and elderly who once felt free to sit in parks late at night now dare not venture out after dark. Since the overthrow of communism in Hungary, thefts and other felonies have nearly tripled and there has been a 50 percent increase in homicides (, 2/24/92). The police force in Prague today is many times greater than it was under communism, when "relatively few police were needed" (New York Times, 12/18/91). How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.

The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution.

The mass media are class media.

Democracy is something more than a set of political procedures. To be worthy of its name, democracy should produce outcomes that advance the well-being of the people.

The few remaining communist governments, such as North Korea and Cuba, were no longer por­trayed as instruments of Moscow, but as evils in their own right.

“Individualism” in the United States refers to privatized ownership, consumption and recreation. You are individualist in that you are expected to get what you can for yourself and not be too troubled by the problems faced by others. This attitude, considered inhuman in some societies, is labeled approvingly as “ambition” in our own and is treated as a quality of great social value.

Indeed, what really bothers those who endlessly carp about the campus tyranny of “political correctness” is not the orthodoxy of the politically correct “tyrants” but their departure from orthodoxy, their willingness to critically explore gender, ethnic, and class topics in ways that normally are treated as taboo.

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.