Michael Parenti: Remembering The People’s Historian

When a 92-year-old Marxist scholar dies peacefully in Berkeley, surrounded by family, the obituaries write themselves. Distinguished career. Important books. Influential thinker. All true, all bloodless. But Michael Parenti, who died on January 24, 2026, deserves better than the tepid respectability of academic remembrance.

He spent six decades demonstrating that history’s ruling classes have always murdered their reformers, and that historians have spent centuries covering it up, and it’s our job to make sure they remain uncovered.

Parenti made us ask the questions…Does history belong to those who lived it, or to those who have the leisure to write it? For most of us, the past is a curated gallery of Great Men, where the commoner is merely part of the scenery. Michael Parenti spent his life smashing the glass on those displays.

He understood a fundamental truth that many on the modern British left are only now rediscovering: history is not a series of accidents, but a record of class struggle.

I came across Parenti from an unorthodox angle, through the meticulously researched historical novels of Colleen McCullough. In her Masters of Rome series, she presented a Caesar I had never met in the classroom. This was not the vainglorious tyrant of the textbooks, but a systematic reformer who took aim at the very heart of the Senatorial pocketbook.

McCullough’s narrative highlighted policies that the official record confirms: Caesar did not merely “suggest” reform; he legislated it. He capped interest rates and, in a move that would be unthinkable to modern neoliberalism, ordered that interest already paid be deducted from the principal of a loan, effectively cancelling 25 percent of all public debt.

Most tellingly, he addressed the “latifundia“ crisis, the vast, slave-run estates that had replaced local workers. Caesar decreed that at least one-third of the workforce on these estates must be free-born Roman citizens. This was a direct attempt to repatriate the “dole”, the state grain ration which our own working class still calls by its Roman name, and turn it from a survival subsidy back into a badge of citizenship.

It was a bold intervention in the “free market” of the time. McCullough suggested that Caesar’s assassination was the establishment’s final, desperate veto against a man who was dismantling their monopoly on power. It was Michael Parenti, however, who moved this from the realm of fiction into the harsh light of investigative analysis.

In The Assassination of Julius Caesar, Parenti proved that the daggers on the Senate floor were drawn not to save “Liberty,” but to save the rent-seeking privileges of a billionaire class.

Roughly 99% of the state’s wealth was controlled by 1% of the population in late Republican Rome. Sound familiar? The Senate aristocrats killed Caesar because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their privileged interests. The conspirators wrapped themselves in republican virtue, claimed they defended liberty against tyranny. Cicero, that darling of Latin classes everywhere, was “a self-enriching slaveholder, slumlord, and senator” who deployed his considerable rhetorical gifts to protect oligarchic privilege. Brutus, the noble Brutus of Shakespeare’s tragedy, was simply a murderer defending his class interests with a knife.

What made Parenti dangerous to comfortable academic consensus was his refusal to pretend that historians operate outside of class interest. He employed the notion of “gentlemen historians”, arguing that former and current patricians are concerned with promoting the interests of their class, not in understanding the past. When you read ancient history through this lens, everything changes. The “mob” becomes the working poor demanding their share. The “demagogues” become popular reformers. The “defenders of the Republic” become oligarchs murdering anyone who threatened their wealth.

The Gracchi attempted to introduce various reforms, but were eventually murdered, and the reform movements withered. Julius Caesar took up where they left off, introducing laws to improve the condition of the poor, redistributing land and reducing unemployment. For this, sixty senators stabbed him to death on the Senate floor. History calls it the Ides of March. Parenti called it a class war assassination.

Critics often dismissed Parenti as a polemicist. They claimed his view of history was too focused on the “darker motives” of power. Yet, in an era of corporate capture and vanishing public services, can we afford to be anything other than suspicious? The “orthodox” history taught in our universities often serves to naturalise the present, making the current distribution of wealth seem like an inevitability rather than a theft. But isn’t that the reality… There are no coincidences.

So why isn’t Parenti better known on the British left? Perhaps because his Marxism was uncompromising in an era when compromise became the left’s defining feature. He was edged out of elite academic life, denied the career path that rewards compliance. Instead of retreating, he chose something rarer: independence. He lectured in union halls and community centres, wrote for ordinary readers.

In 1970, while an associate professor at the University of Illinois, he participated in a rally protesting the Kent State shootings and was severely clubbed by state troopers, held for two days, and charged with aggravated battery. Despite witnesses proving his innocence, he was convicted. His academic career ended when the University of Vermont’s board of trustees refused to renew his contract, citing “unprofessional conduct”. He never secured another permanent teaching position.

The academy lost him. The people gained him. His lectures, particularly the famous 1986 “Yellow Lecture” on US imperialism, spread through tape cassettes, VHS copies, and eventually YouTube. A generation of activists learned their class analysis not in seminar rooms but from grainy videos of a working-class kid from East Harlem who read Marx at Yale and never forgot where he came from.

He was a gifted speaker, mixing sharp wit with moral urgency and historical understanding. Watch any of his talks and you encounter a man who believed that explaining capitalism’s contradictions could change minds. He spoke with warmth and humour, but never softened his analysis. Imperialism wasn’t a mistake or an aberration. It was capitalism functioning exactly as designed. The third world wasn’t poor. It had been systematically looted. Democracy wasn’t threatened by creeping authoritarianism. It had always been a façade obscuring class rule.

Parenti wrote over twenty books, from Democracy for the Few to Blackshirts and Reds, each dissecting power’s operations with surgical precision. But The Assassination of Julius Caesar remains special. It demonstrates that the fundamental dynamic of history, the class struggle between exploiters and exploited, hasn’t changed in two thousand years. The oligarchs still murder reformers. The historians still justify it. The people still suffer from it.

If you want to know what pure capitalism really looks like, not the brochure version, not the TED Talk fantasy, but the system stripped naked, listen carefully to Michael Parenti.

This isn’t about markets and choice.

It’s about power, extraction, and who gets crushed when… pic.twitter.com/4q66iLt4fu

— Labour Heartlands (@Labourheartland) January 25, 2026

Some will object that Parenti’s Marxism was too rigid, too deterministic, too unwilling to acknowledge complexity. They’re wrong, but their objection reveals something important. Parenti’s clarity terrified people who built careers on obfuscation. When you state plainly that the ruling class acts consciously to preserve its power, that historians serve class interests, that Caesar died because he redistributed wealth, you strip away the comfortable fiction that history is complex and neutral. It isn’t. It’s a record of who has power and what they did to keep it.

As I write this, Britain’s political class genuflects before corporate power, implements policies that immiserate millions, and claims there’s no alternative. They would have loved Cicero. They would have applauded Caesar’s assassins. They would call Parenti an extremist for stating the obvious: that working people deserve the wealth they create, that reformers who threaten oligarchic power get destroyed, that the establishment always chooses violence over sharing.

Parenti once wrote: “History never ends, and the last page is never written, and the best pages are written not by presidents, prime ministers, popes, or even professors, but by the people. For all their faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. In fact, we are they.”

"History never ends, and the last page is never written, and the best pages are written not by presidents, prime ministers, popes, or even professors, but by the people. For all their faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. In fact, we are they." — #michaelparenti pic.twitter.com/nVPUxljMSw

— Paul Knaggs (@PaulKnaggs) January 26, 2026

Michael Parenti will be immortalised in his work. His lectures will continue to circulate, teaching new generations that power never surrenders willingly. He proved that class analysis illuminates what liberal pieties obscure: that Caesar was slaughtered for redistributing wealth, and that historians spent two millennia sanitising the crime.

The oligarchs who killed Caesar are still killing Caesars. The historians who justified the deed are still justifying its modern equivalents. In this era of manufactured outrage, corporate capture, and ecological collapse, Parenti’s voice feels less like a record of the past and more like an urgent warning. He taught us to interrogate every political murder, every policy shift, and every historical narrative with a single, devastating question: Cui bono? Who benefits?

The answer, inevitably, is the same.

Parenti understood that the struggle for land in 44 BC is the same struggle for social housing in 2026. He saw that the mechanics of rent, debt, and poverty are not accidental; they are the desired outcomes of a system designed by and for the creditors. He reminded us that while the establishment has a very long memory, the working class is often encouraged to live in a perpetual, amnesiac present. It is time we developed a memory of our own.

He often noted that the best pages of history are written not by presidents, prime ministers, or professors, but by the people. For all our faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. In fact, we are they. Michael Parenti didn’t just write history; he gave us the tools to make it.

The establishment never forgets its interests; it is time we remembered ours.