Christian Parenti talks with Class Unity about his article from Compact

 

CLASS UNITY: Class Unity Political Education Committee is thrilled to speak to today’s guest, Christian Parenti. He is an investigative journalist as well as a professor of economics at John Jay University. He’s published numerous books and articles on topics such as mass incarceration in the United States, the War on Terror, climate change, and the surveillance state. His most recent book is Radical Hamilton, Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder. We are happy to have him speak with us today on a range of topics including the deep state, diversity ideology, and the American founding fathers. Christian, thank you for speaking with us today.

CHRISTIAN PARENTI: Well, thank you very much for this invitation, for the chance to speak to you. The first thing we talked about when you invited me was “diversity” as ruling-class ideology. So I’ll just touch on that for a few minutes and then we’ll have a discussion. 

What I did in that article was look at diversity ideology, which is not to be confused with actual diversity, in the context of Federalist 10. Federalist 10 was written by James Madison as part of an effort by John Jay and Hamilton and Madison to argue for the ratification of the Constitution. After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Constitution had to be ratified by nine of the thirteen states. That was the agreement between all thirteen states that if nine of them ratified it, then they would all accept it. And it was not at all clear that it would be ratified because among other things, it created a very strong centralized government, and a lot of people were afraid of that. And there were other concerns, and what Madison was speaking to specifically was not that fear of the big state. That’s what the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the Constitution, are about. The first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, were added, agreed upon, because there was so much concern about the power of the central state. 

But what Madison was speaking to in Federalist 10 was a set of elite concerns about political democracy. They thought if there’s political democracy, then there’ll be class leveling. There’ll be economic democracy, if you’re going to give everybody the vote, even though it wasn’t everybody—but there were no restrictions in the U.S. Constitution against anyone having it. There are no racial or gender restrictions. There are no property restrictions for either office holding or voting. The control of the elections is left to the states, and many of the states had those kinds of restrictions, but the federal Constitution itself didn’t. And so elites were concerned. “Wait a minute, where is this heading? You’re going to give potentially anyone and all these people a vote? Then, then what? Then they want our estates; then they’ll want our wealth.” 

And so Madison was arguing against that and saying, no, look, it’s wrong to think that political democracy necessarily leads to economic democracy. It can, if that majority faction, that majority group or interest group in a society of the propertyless, can get together politically. Then they can use the machinery of political democracy to impose their will. However, society is naturally given to division into all sorts of factions, which just means, interest groups, social divisions. This can result from religious differences, from geographic differences, from attachments to specific political leaders. Any number of reasons come up, he says, and even when there aren’t real reasons, people come up with the most trivial reasons to fall out between each other, right? He said, but of course the most enduring source of faction is property, is the question of wealth and who has it, who does not have it, and he rehearses the relation between debtors and creditors, etc. So the solution to the problem of faction was counterintuitively in Madison’s argument to lean into it, just to have a proliferation of faction so that that potentially majoritarian faction that we would call the working class can’t get together as such, and they will get together instead in little subgroups as followers of this faith, people from that region, etc. And that as long as faction was allowed to proliferate, the political threat of [majoritarian] faction to the propertied elites would be minimized.

And that’s what makes Federalists 10 so amazing. It’s a member of the ruling class saying the quiet part out loud. And it’s also a political lesson that is central to class rule. It is central at any scale. It’s central to class rule within an institution, within a nation-state, and internationally. Divide et impera, divide and rule. So, if you then look at diversity ideology in that context, it starts making more sense. While there are very real and very legitimate grievances motivating various groups that are being recognized, at least symbolically, in diversity ideology, nonetheless, the result, economically, for the majority of people is that this kind of discourse leads to a weaker working class: a distracted, more confused, hyper-variegated working class that is ultimately in large parts unable to recognize itself as such. The working class in the United States is increasingly made up by people who cannot recognize themselves as members of the working class. They have any number of other identifications ranging from psychological diagnoses to racial, gender, sexual orientation, religious subset, right? People can come up with all sorts of quite creative identities, but it’s getting harder and harder for the majority of Americans to identify as workers—workers, renters, consumers, those who produce the wealth, those who do not own the means of production.

So, that’s that article in a nutshell. And along the way, in that article, note just how you take something so basic as the discussion of poverty in this country—just how hard it is to find a discussion of poverty in America that is actually framed in class terms. If you Google poverty, what you’ll find are endless reports on what group suffers poverty at this rate versus that rate. And what will be very hard for you to find, if not impossible, is a description of who are the poor, who is this class as such. You can find out which other groups suffer from the condition of impoverishment, but not a description of this class. 

There are other things we can talk about as well: the deep state, and the threat to democracy that it poses. I have a piece up at Compact that continues on that theme, and I’ve written a couple of other pieces at Compact that deal with that, and I think that that is very, very important. But why don’t we have a discussion?

CLASS UNITY: Thank you. So, just to start, here’s a quote from Madison: “If elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors will be insecure. Our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. It ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulence against the majority. The Senate ought to represent the opulent minority.” So, from this perspective, you can say that the elite likes minorities because it is one. So how do we separate economic minorities from other minorities as treated by diversity ideology? What’s the difference here? 

PARENTI: Well, I think by getting the majority to recognize itself as a majority. Step one is to stop focusing on what minority you are part of and start focusing on what majority you are part of. And the reasons for that are structural, because most people sell their labor to survive, and most people do not own the means of production. Okay, with the proliferation of 401(k)s, you could get technical gains. So, a lot of members of the working class own a little bit of stock through their pensions, but a lot of people don’t even have such pensions. So just get people to focus on the majority group that they’re a part of, which is the working class, and to stop thinking about minorities. That’s step one.

And then the obvious thing is if someone is trying to defend the ruling class as an economic minority, you gotta just step out of that language and speak to the fact that they’re exploiting people and that that’s what matters, not that they’re part of a tiny minority. Ricky Gervais actually had a joke about that in some special of his about how he’s part of this really, really small unrecognized minority of white, straight, male, disgustingly rich multi-millionaires. And who feels sympathy for him? So I guess that’s what I would say. You just have to change the subject out of that kind of thinking. 

Because it’s a mistake to assume that the working class recognizes itself and unites as a result of endless processes of self-variegation, and in every meeting people trying to come up with exact portrayal, an exact accounting of how everyone in the room is slightly different from everyone else or profoundly different from each other. So, as Adolf Reed has said numerous times, no one has yet explained to me how we come out of the room more united after talking about how we’re all different from each other. So, we have to talk about how we are all united and leave some of that aside. That’s not to say that the ways people are different or social oppressions aren’t important—they are—but there also needs to be a practice and a discourse of becoming cognizant of how we’re all in this together. And how do we work with people who are very different from each other. How do people who are different from each other work together on their common interests? That’s the great irony of the whole thing in a way, actually. You know, the workplace for most Americans is the most diverse place, and it’s what we have in common. And struggling at a workplace is really the practice of diversity in most cases. And it’s the practice of diversity, not through focusing on how everyone’s different, but through focusing on how all these people who actually come from these diverse backgrounds are actually pretty similar because they all work for some big meat packer or whatever kind of corporation. And you have some people who are profoundly religious and you have other people who are atheists, but nevertheless, they both make minimum wage and can’t get enough hours to get benefits. That’s the kind of struggle that actually brings people together.

CLASS UNITY: We had a meeting last week to talk about some of your writings that we had gone over. And I don’t have the quote in front of me, but one of the lines from Madison’s Federalist 10 talks about using the Senate as a way to mediate faction or control faction. We’re big fans of the Ehrenreichs’ work on the professional managerial class here. And we were talking about the political class as functioning like the ultra-PMC, effectively, to the entire working class. I wanted to ask, how do you see the existing class strata in the United States today? Do you see it like the old Marxist binary distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, or do you see it as something else?

PARENTI: Well, I see it in the classic Marxist binary, but that doesn’t stop there. The PMC is very important as a constituency. The material conditions of the PMC have been, or are increasingly similar to those of the proletariat. The Ehrenreichs had a follow-up piece that some of you might’ve read. They did it for the Rosa Luxemburg Institute maybe ten years ago, looking at what’s happened to the professional managerial class, and they’re increasingly proletarianized. I remember one stat from that was about how in 1980 the average lawyer worked for a small firm and now the average lawyer works for one of 250 transnational legal behemoths. So the professional managerial class is being absorbed in a structural sense and being turned into a kind of white collar proletariat, but they’re a very important and distinct political constituency. By virtue of their roles managing people, they have a very different worldview and are appealed to with different kinds of messages and are used by the Democrats and the foundations as their base. 

One other important point to consider here is the ultra rich. The billionaire class today is apparently not as wealthy relative to the rest of society as the robber barons were, but it’s getting close. And I think that is something that’s unique to this moment that we need to pay special attention to, that we’ve got the rich, and then we’ve got the ultra-rich. And the ultra-rich are a dangerous—a particularly dangerous element in society, because they don’t even broker with the rest of their own class very much. They don’t have to work through the Chamber of Commerce etc. They can just individually start striking out and buying newspapers, etc., etc. So I think that’s an important class to look at and think about. And I’ve been saying this for years, and for years I was waiting for Doug Henwood to write his book about the ruling class, but I think the ruling class needs to be studied more than it is. So I put that out there for whatever it’s worth.

CLASS UNITY: It’s funny that you just brought up the robber barons, because we had a related question. What are the similarities that you see between a potential populist movement in the situation back then and the extreme wealth and greed and accumulation [of capital] of the billionaire class, on the one hand, and the potential form of a broad class consciousness of the working class, on the other? Everybody who’s got a cell phone today seems like they have something like a little faction going against their own rational self-interests. 

Since you’ve already talked about that, I have another one. In the 1840s and 50s, you had John C. Calhoun and that hyper diversity rhetoric around slavery and states’ rights and so on. And you had a lot of the elites talking about a civil war that eventually happened. And it seems like today all they talk about is the apocalypse and like a kind of dystopian sci-fi future. Could you comment on any parallels you might see today?

PARENTI: Well, one thing about apocalypse discourse. I feel I kind of regret the extent to which I have played into that in writing about climate change. Obviously climate change is very real and the trajectory of global capitalism is pretty apocalyptic. We’ve got the proliferation of failed states beginning with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Somalia, and that has not stopped. There is a lot about the current configuration globally that is just absolutely apocalyptic. The apocalypse is happening every day. It’s happening as we speak in many parts of the world. But that’s endemic—it’s part of neoliberal capitalism. It’s also the legacy of the Cold War and its hot wars in the Global South. 

But there is something very, very debilitating—and it’s a tricky discourse. How does one acknowledge these issues and not at the same time feed into cynicism and despair? And so that’s a caveat. The apocalyptic elements of this moment are very, very real, but I’ve become increasingly aware of just how debilitating that kind of discussion is for young people and how useful it is for elites. And you see it, or I saw it most clearly, in COVID. And COVID was in many ways the deep states’ and the ruling classes’ wet dream. They had this emergency that just allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do, and they got mass consent for doing so. And as a result, there was this massive upward transfer of wealth. And it seems like there are elements in the planning class, the political class, the philanthropic leaders, who have a taste for that rule by emergency. 

And I think that the future is going to be full of much more of that. A piece that I wrote for The Grayzone was very critical of the Left and its embrace of the lockdowns and the vaccine mandates and everything that went with that moment. I thought that it was shocking. We saw the most dramatic infringement of civil liberties in peacetime and really the most dramatic infringement of civil liberties in this country since World War II. It was probably different, but in some ways it was as bad or worse. And the Left, far from resisting, endorsed it and championed it, you know. And everything that the Left had helped establish about that moment was forgotten: the idea of agency capture, a suspicion of these huge corporations, particularly around medicine and Big Pharma. All of this, all these critiques, out the window. And instead you had unions supporting the idea of firing their members who didn’t want to take an experimental vaccine, sometimes arguing because they’ve already had COVID in Europe, and they accept natural immunity. Why can’t I do that here? And yet you had unions often with self-conscious left-wing leadership saying ‘get rid of these people, fire them’. That was deeply shocking to me. 

What I see coming out of COVID is that a taste for rule by emergency has been rekindled among political elites all over the world. And one thing you saw with COVID that was so interesting was just the similarity in the embrace by every power center in society, in a totally uncoordinated way. So you had like literally every university dean using this emergency to grab power, at the same time that you had governments doing that, at the same time you had street gangs. The Marasalva Trutia in San Salvador, which controls whole neighborhoods, used COVID to impose their power even more. They imposed their own lockdowns. To have even more control of its neighborhoods. So, every little note of hierarchy in society pretty much grabbed onto the discourse of emergency and embraced it and did what they wanted. And there were various, sometimes conflicting agendas. And so the taste for rule by emergency is, I fear, quite widespread now. 

Regarding climate change, I think it’s important to remember, climate change is real, but science is not perfect, and we do not know everything. The whole hockey stick thing could happen, but it might not happen. And whatever the case, we have to believe in the future and struggle for the future no matter what. And treating that kind of science, that the world is going to end in ten years, treating it as totally infallible can be dangerous, I think. And I might have cast that science a little less critically in my book, Tropic of Chaos, than I would now. The hockey stick, abrupt climate change, could happen, but it might not. There’s a lot of things that were said ten or fifteen years ago. They were saying there’s going to be more and more intense hurricanes. And it turns out they were wrong there. Hurricanes are forming on water, but they’re landing less often because they didn’t calculate that rising land temperatures would increase the offshore wind that was pushing hurricanes, preventing them from landing. So, these models are not perfect. 

Climate change is real, it’s terrifying, but we cannot live as if the world is gonna end in ten years, because it’s not. It’s going to just be more of the same, but worse. In ten years and twenty years and thirty years, we’ll still be here and we’ll still be dealing with problems that are fundamentally rooted in unchecked, unbridled capitalism, increasingly authoritarian politics, absolutely massively overgrown and totally out-of-control police and intelligence bureaucracies. These are the issues we have to deal with, and militarism…

CLASS UNITY: So on this topic, one thing that we’re interested in is how the Left and progressives in America have, in recent years, in many ways, become the party of the establishment or have supported establishment, whether it’s the squad voting for arms for Ukraine or, as you’re talking about, the COVID lockdown. How do you account for this change in the Left’s own self-perception and activity?

PARENTI: This is very interesting. It goes back to efforts to co-op the Left. To some extent, this project developed against the idea of turning the Left into a vehicle for governance in the project of co-optation. It was baked into the counterinsurgency against the New Left in the ‘60s, the project of co-optation. It says so in the COINTELPRO directive. Its mission is to “misdirect”. And in one of my Compact articles, “Will the Left Stand Up to the Deep State?”, I quoted one of the more important sources on COINTELPRO. He was an informant who felt that he was ripped off by the FBI and then went public, sort of parallel to the document dump that came out of Media, Pennsylvania by which we know of COINTELPRO. And this guy was very clear about how part of the mission was to control, not just to destroy, but to control New Left organizations. And I have a quote in that piece from the guy where he’s saying [the FBI] wanted to determine where these protests would go, what they would chant, when they would move, et cetera.

So, there’s an element of co-optation that begins at that moment. The Ford Foundation starts advancing money to social movements in the early ‘60s, I think it’s ’64 in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. There’s a struggle over land grants. And that’s the first time the Ford Foundation starts funding social movements. But then, through the ’60s, all the philanthropic foundations start funding social movements. At the same time, the Johnson administration is moving to these block grant programs and responding to the pressure of these social movements by giving them block grants and turning social movements and organizers into administrators. San Francisco was one of the first places where this was practiced to great effect. And there was a very aggressive urban renewal movement in San Francisco. And there was a very robust opposition to it, well-organized among the working class, which is internally diverse, in downtown, where it was all these old merchant marines, and then in the Fillmore, which was primarily African-American, and then also over towards North Beach to some extent in Filipino neighborhoods. And these movements were very powerful. Long story short, what happens is a lot of these organizations end up as nonprofit housing developers or administrators. And that kind of process has been going on ever since the ‘60s, all throughout the U.S. Left at every level. 

And so I think those are the deep roots. That’s part of what produces this professional-managerial class Left that is so amenable to being used as a tool of rule. There’s also the open embrace by corporations of all the diversity discourse, anything but class versions of diversity. This becomes an independent industrial sector on its own as diversity trainers. There’s hardly any research done on that. When I wrote that article, I looked into that and the number that’s quoted is now about ten years old. There was one study by Gardner, one of these consulting agencies or something about the diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy industry. And I forget what they came up with, it was eight billion or thirteen billion or something like that. But that was a long time ago. So, there’s a whole industry of this. You’ve got the intellectual class, many of whom feel radical and are radical and want to help build a more equitable and humane society. Yet they’re in these hierarchical institutions like universities and newspapers where there are certain third rails frequently. One of those is class. So they wanna pursue and exercise their politics but they’re also constantly aware that you don’t, do not question the American empire too aggressively, and don’t get too into class, but there’s increasing room culturally and professionally to lean into the question of oppression and diversity rather than economic exploitation. That you may do.

And so, add all this up, and then the cherry on the cake is Trump, and Trump Derangement Syndrome. And I think that people just brought an enormous amount of anxiety, a lot of it rooted in climate concerns. And with cues from the media and the establishment, they cathected upon Trump as the devil, reason went out the window, and that’s how we have ended up here with the movement-oriented Left which is in lockstep with the Democratic Party. 

And there’s an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance on that front, which I’ve been noticing ever since COVID. Perhaps I used to not notice it as much. And I probably used to participate in it more. You know, you have a couple drinks with your friends, you criticize the Democratic Party, and then next election, you go vote for the Democrats. Yeah, I know I used to do that. But now that strikes me as really an insane sort of cognitive dissonance: people sitting around talking about how awful Democrats are and then refusing to stand up to them and forgetting the fact that the Left historically gets more from the Democrats when it’s a problem. But even if your framework is just reformist, organization and disruption and autonomy from the Democrats helps get the goods. I’m not going to be so naive as to say that it doesn’t help to be in the room and all this kind of stuff, but, I’m not proposing just some sort of adolescent anarchist fantasy that if you yell loudly enough at your parents, they give you what you want. But the Left has to have some autonomy from the Democratic Party. It has to be able to say, “okay, so what? So you guys lost the election ’cause we didn’t vote for you because your program is no good and we ran our own candidate. Don’t come crying to me!” And we’re not able to do that because people can’t even recognize the fact that the Biden administration is continuing with the privatization of Medicare and Medicaid. It’s continuing with privatization of the VA. It basically continued much of Trump’s border policies. Its foreign policies are even worse and more aggressive than his. 

Would it really be the worst thing in the world if we didn’t have Joe Biden as president? I’m not convinced it would be much worse. On the environmental front, deregulation, workers’ rights, the Trump administration would be much, much worse. But internationally, we would not be dealing with a war in which the largest atomic power plant in Europe sits on the front lines, and it has lost power six times. And even if you’re a pro-nuke Leftist, you should be concerned about that. You could spin this, you could say, okay, props to the pro-nuke crew, these plants really do hold up well under all sorts of conditions. Fukushima survived by-and-large, the earthquake, to my understanding. But what happened was that the tsunami overtopped the wall, and then came down and then flooded the generators, which were sitting on the ground rather than up off the ground. Had the generators been up off the ground and the tsunami topped that wall and the grounds of the plant had flooded, they probably would not have lost power and there probably would not have been a meltdown. So, even if you’re one of these pro-nuke types, you should be freaked out by the fact that the Zaporizhzhia nuke plant has lost power six times during this war. And if that thing blows, there’s no Soviet Union to send 270,000 liquidators over there with total exposure times, like only two hours each, dumping concrete on the thing. So I do not think we would be facing this problem if Trump had been elected. I’m not advocating for Trump’s election at all, but the Left living in total utter terror of the Republican Party is crucial to why the Left has become basically just a tool of Democratic Party governance.

CLASS UNITY: A question I wanted to ask was about your comment about how the ruling class needs to be studied. I just want a little more information on that. What would be the questions of those studies? What would be the research question? 

PARENTI: Well, who they are, where they are, how they rule, what they do. Maybe you’re familiar with William Domhoff, who wrote Who Rules New Haven?, then Who Rules America?, Who Rules America Now? There was a whole little sub-discipline of this, ruling-class studies, influenced by C. Wright Mills to some extent. And what they looked at was interlocking boards, that was the methodology. So, William Domhoff, who’s still with us, was trying to come up with the methodology to define ruling groups. Can you say there’s a ruling class? And his answer was yes. You can see it through these interlocking boards of directors. 

There’s a very good book by Mark Mizruchi, called The Fracturing of the Corporate Elite. He looks at the disintegration of the American ruling class, and his thesis is that with neoliberalism and the rise of alternative finance, shadow banking, the role of banks on corporate boards has changed. The role of the bankers on corporate boards was the connective tissue. That’s where the class consciousness entered more readily than—well, it entered from all different places, but that was a very consistent place at which a kind of larger class message could be introduced into the decision-making of the board of directors of this or that company. And that with neoliberalism and deregulation and de-industrialization and the increasingly financialized quality of American capitalism, the old-line investment banks play a less and less important role in the corporate culture of the leadership. And so things have become more fragmented. That’s Mizruchi’s argument. 

So, the studies, the discussion of the ruling class would be those kinds of things. Who are they? Where do they get their ideas? What is their relationship to the state? What is their relationship to each other? What is their relationship to the intelligence agencies? How do the different industrial sectors play out in this? What role do domestic energy and extractive industries play? What are the factions in this class? Is there really much of a division, or how big a division is there between the Koch Industries, libertarian, privately held? Looking at the different factions and how they relate to each other, those kinds of questions.

Class Unity: So my question is kind of drawing on the Walter bin Michaels quote, I think you used in one of the pieces we’re discussing, saying that under diversity ideology we would achieve a just society if say only 13% of the people in poverty were African American, for instance, and if basically social ills were evenly distributed among social groups without really decreasing the absolute amount of social ill.  I’ve always thought that quote gives the diversity ideology in the ruling class a little too much credit in that it implies that they’re actively working to decrease disparities in a meaningful sense. And I’m just not really sure where you stand on the question of whether the ruling class, in so far as a class can be beneficent or can be malevolent, is actually working to decrease disparities in a real sense, or if they have an actual interest in, in fact, making disparities worse; given that an anti-racist, like Kindian critique is only more salient if, say, the plight of Black people gets worse. So I was wondering where you stand: what would the actual motivation for that class be?

Parenti: Just to be clear, what Walter Ben Michaels is saying with that quote is just that this is the implication of this discourse. The implication is that victory would constitute a non-racist distribution of poverty across the class hierarchy. And that would certainly be less racist, but it wouldn’t change the class equation. If you had 13% of the 1% were black and only 13% of prisoners were black, right? That would be a much less racist America, but you would still have the class hierarchy. So he’s just saying that seems to be the implication of the disparity discourse in terms of the ruling class. Yeah, I think that there is real commitment to diversity. There’s probably also fake commitment to it, but I think there’s also a real commitment to it. And I think there has been a proper change in the professional managerial class and elites. It’s not approaching the exact proportions. But I think they take it very seriously. And yeah, I think they take it seriously. I don’t think it’s all a big act. Like I don’t think that as soon as they close the doors, they have a totally different conversation. 

Here’s something that should be studied if the ruling class is studied: Ruling class discourse. Part of this has to do with the question: How do elites learn to think and talk? What relationship do talking and thinking have? One thing I think that goes on is that, when you’re in a professional situation, you have to be concerned about legal consequences. So if you’re in an institution and you’re skirting the edge of the law, you’re going to be very careful not to say, “Hey guys, we’re skirting the edge of the law here. I suppose it could be legal if we get rid of this waste in this fashion, but we really should probably do it in that fashion.” 

You don’t say stuff like that. Or if you do say stuff like that, you don’t rise through the hierarchy because it means you’re dumb. So you learn to mask and use language that masks what you know is also going on. And at a certain point, people get very adept at living with this kind of cognitive dissonance and having a sort of defensible public set of utterances. And there isn’t necessarily two deeply different transcripts for a lot of elites. A lot of elites, what you see is what you get, believe in diversity and they believe in capitalism, and they by and large avoid the question of economic exploitation and economic inequality. And they focus on these other questions. And as a result, we’ve got a trans admiral, and the elites are becoming more diverse.

Class Unity: I was thinking before we met today about some of your more recent arguments in your Hamilton book which is a book that I take to be sort of directed to the question of how we achieve the capacity we will need in order to rectify global warming. I’ve always been very interested in your comments about projects in Iceland, about decarbonisation and things like this. Is what we are ultimately talking about an argument for a strong state? I’m just curious if you could share with us today maybe some of your thoughts about how we achieve that balance, because I know a lot of what we’re talking about here today with COVID and everything is, in a sense, repudiating the idea of a strong state.

Parenti: That’s a great question. Well I’ve been thinking, on my list of things to do is writing a piece that would be tentatively called With Apologies to Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson. And certainly, you know, we have a strong state, we have a very, very strong state and in COVID, we saw its abuses spread far and wide. So I have gained a new appreciation for the American civil liberty tradition that provides the people with mechanisms to push back against that state and contain it. And I think that that is very central for any kind of progressive class struggle to occur and we have to embrace the idea of freedom. We have to embrace civil liberties. And I mean, these have real utility for the left.  They are also the products of left wing struggle. I’ve written about that in Jacobin. We need to resurrect that history, recover that history.

The First Amendment, just to take one example, was not national from the beginning. It was for over 100 years seen as only pertaining to federal territory. And in the vast majority of the cases that helped nationalize the First Amendment the plaintiffs are leftists, they’re anarchists, they’re communists, they’re socialists, they’re trade unionists. And that’s how the First Amendment gets nationalized, and states lose the right to control free speech and censor radical literature, etc.  So yeah, I mean, I was always in favor, I mean, I’ve always defended civil liberties, but that stuff has become much more important in my thinking as of late.

And what I was trying to do in Radical Hamilton was also—it was my excuse to dive into American history and like climb the intellectual mountain that is the Constitution, to really deal with it and really understand the American Revolution. And it was also because I found I kind of backed into it by mistake, because I found a hole in the literature. For fun, I was reading about Hamilton. I kept seeing all this stuff about the report on the subject of manufacturers about planning and industrialization. And I have always been interested in the way that capitalism is predicated on planning and dependent on the state. In a way, that book was not very strategically timed.

In terms of my own thinking, it was a book that was to some extent late on a question that was at the heart of neoliberalism. It was written at the death of neoliberalism. That question is, what is the real relationship between the state and the market? The real relationship is that the state proceeds and presides and that the market is a function of the state. And you can go back into the transition debates. Look at the role of the state in nurturing capitalist economic activity so as to tax it so as to use those resources for war making. This is central to the development of capitalism. The development of capitalism is obviously not reducible to that. But that’s a really, really fundamental dynamic in capitalism. And so radical Hamilton was trying to Americanize that story, tell that story in an American context.

So I don’t think I was necessarily arguing that the state needed to be stronger, but what I was trying to say was that there’s always economic planning. You already have that. You already have massive socialization of costs. So the only missing part is, what do you want to do with all this? Also, to try to make elements of the left who have a kind of state aphasia to look at what this beast really does already. There’s already tons of planning, tons of socialization, and we need to be trying to get control of those processes and make demands of those processes rather than pretend they don’t exist and that we’re going to all grow food in empty lots or any of the other kinds of Lilliputian fantasies that the philanthropic foundations regularly forced upon the left.

Class Unity: Changing topics slightly, some changes that I’ve noticed in the culture war within the left itself is that words like “woke” and “identity politics” are becoming broadly recognized as bad things. Now go back in time to about five years ago or so. If you’re criticizing these terms then, you’re going to get pretty much all negative responses. Do you think that the center has shifted somehow and that there is a return to class issues happening within the left? Have we won any gains here or is it all bad still?

Parenti: I don’t know because I’m not engaged in enough left-wing organizations to know, but I don’t think that we’ve turned some corner in that this kind of woke ideology has been vanquished. For a while, I took the suggestion of Walter bin Michaels and Adolph Reed to not use the term woke because it was a right wing coinage. But actually I think it’s worth usingbecause I think it really describes something and it’s an ideology that has at its heart also a kind of therapeutic sensibility and a methodological individualism.

I did a piece for “Nonsite,” Walter B. Michaels’ publication, about the origins of the first privilege walk. It has its roots in the whole therapeutic turn in the ’60s and ’70s. And that is a huge part of what woke is along with diversity ideology. In some ways even more important is this therapeutic sensibility which accompanies it. You see this, when AOC was criticizing Donald Trump’s CNN town hall. She didn’t say, ‘we got to hear more from this billionaire tax cheat who has a record of ripping off workers?!’ She framed it in a therapeutic sense about how he was threatening, he was putting at risk, Eugene Carroll who had accused him of rape, and it was about her psychological well being. I found this profoundly depoliticizing.

Not to make light of Eugene Carroll’s suffering or what Donald Trump did or whatever, if he did do anything, who knows? I’m sure he’s done stuff like it, even if he didn’t do that. But it missed the whole larger politics of it. Let’s talk about class. Let’s talk about this guy’s class position. What’s his agenda? What does he serve?

So, no, I do not actually think it’s on decline. I think more and more people in the left are waking up to the fact that, wait a minute, this is not adding up to anything, but there are a lot of people who are still really deeply into it. It wasn’t long ago that I had a conversation with a friend and someone who’s becoming a lawyer, I think they would identify as a leftist, but they’ve more or less been around the left. And [with] this person, cancel culture came up. And their line was there is no such thing as cancel culture, it’s accountability culture. So, I was totally shocked to hear that. Remember, Al Franken was fired, driven out of the Senate for allegedly touching a woman’s back inappropriately during a photo shoot, and that’s not cancel culture? If stuff still happens like that, that’s an indication, that’s just one example. But, it’s an indication a lot of people are still really deep into this stuff. And it comes from everywhere. Now that it’s become an official ideology, we’re bombarded with this all the time. So, I think it’s not over. But I do think you point out something right, which is that more and more people are kind of stepping back a little bit, taking a more critical view.

Class Unity: Thank you. We have another question that sort of continues on this point. Can you talk a bit about your thoughts on the prospect of the organization of a workers party in America that breaks from the DNC and RNC hegemony? Do you think there’s a prospect for organizing people just around a shared contempt of both parties? Is that a prospect for the future of American politics?

Parenti: I don’t know. I think more important than whatever kind of electoral vehicle there may or may not be is the question of class consciousness. And I think that that’s what really needs to be developed before any such vehicle can be particularly effective. So that’s kind of a dodge, kind of a lame answer. But I think it’s really predicated on that, that if there’s massive class consciousness and people are pushing for their interests as workers, then you’ll start getting all sorts of strange concessions from both parties.

Look at Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was not progressive. Richard Nixon presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, over OSHA, over the Mine Safety Health Administration. Those are major innovations in terms of policy protecting working people and the environment and he did that because he was under pressure. So, I think that the most important thing is building class consciousness to build pressure from below and less important is what form of party [or] how do we relate to the two parties. Or at least that’s not my strong suit, thinking about those things.

Class Unity: Another related question: what’s wrong with the left? Specifically, can you give us your brief diagnoses of organizations like DSA, PSL, CPUSA, organizations that have been around for a long time? What’s wrong with them? Why haven’t they achieved the things that they say they want to achieve while we’re sliding backwards?

Parenti: Well, that’s a great question. I’m not sure I can answer it in the level of detail that you’re requesting. I just don’t know enough about all these organizations to speak to that granular level, but what’s wrong with the left? One problem is that it has been targeted. And so people with good class politics get eliminated and people, you know, leaders who start out without having real clear class politics and develop them get eliminated. You’ve got Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, and the red baiting of intellectuals doesn’t have to end dramatically in assassination. But take that kind of process of red baiting in academia, for example. This is particularly close to my heart because my father was red baited out of academia. And though he’s very well known, he’s 90 years old and still with us, but no longer writing and doing public speaking. But he was driven out of academia at first by conservatives, but then often by liberals and it made life rough.

So there’s repression. And then at the same time that there’s repression, there’s the project of co-optation that’s being funded by the foundations. And they are and also the kind of federal block grant programs, which turns organizers into administrators of housing programs, of social welfare programs organizing and agitation becomes advocacy, quote unquote, and there are jobs for the leadership class. So that co-optation and professionalization process helps confuse people further. And so there’s a stripping away of any kind of class politics.And into the vacuum comes ever more rarefied forms of diversity ideology and this kind of therapeutic sensibility that you have to guard against harm, that you have to include, sacrifice everything on the altar of the most vulnerable among us.

Not that the most vulnerable among us don’t actually need protection, they do, but it becomes a kind of fetish. You saw this in the example of the 2019 DSA convention, the viral clip of someone getting up and saying, ‘please don’t clap’. Well, one of our graduate students at John Jay — where we have a fantastic program in the economics, one of the few places where you can study heterodox economics, not just neoclassical economics, but Marx and Keynes and lots of economic history — was actually on the steering committee of DSA. And I asked him about this recently. I said, what actually happened with that? You know, how does that decision made? He said, his recollection was there was no decision. There was basically somebody from the audience who just said, ‘hey, the clapping is really loud. We have people with conditions here, can you not clap?’ And it was just out of a kind of etiquette, a sense of being nice and taking care of vulnerable people, that someone got up and made this announcement and everyone was like “oh, okay, we have to do this now.” There was actually no reason [or] discussion about that at all.

That’s a perfect kind of encapsulation of what’s wrong. What are you thinking? You want to take state power and then you want to totally transform economic relations and you don’t want people to hoot and holler and clap and yell at the political convention. How does that add up? It’s insane.

So that conversation didn’t happen because of this sort of sensibility which is this therapeutic sensibility and politics has been reduced to etiquette. And I think the foundations are a big part of that. The nonprofitization of the left means the foundations have pretty much direct intellectual control. And this is what they push. They push this kind of diversity training, which is also always this therapeutic training. It’s about speaking your truth, finding yourself, all this kind of stuff. And I think part of the counter-answer to that stuff is that we have to realize that politics has been made throughout history by really messed up people.

I had the opportunity when I was young to go spend time with the FMLN guerrillas at the end of the war. Long story short, I think there were two Americans who hooked up with the FMLN. And one of them happened to be from where I was from in Vermont. So they were there, they were working as a videographer and they were not fighters, but they were embedded with the FMLN. And then there was the offensive and the FMLN took the capital, San Salvador, in 1989. They hold it for like two weeks and then they’re forced back in the mountains. And then in 93 that the war concludes. And the family friend we knew was alive but had disappeared during the offensive and had gone into the mountains with the guerrillas. And I managed to find out where they were by foolishly being like, ‘I know someone in El Salvador’ to a journalist and I hung out with the FMLN in this village. And one of the things that was remarkable was at that time they were being written about by Time magazine as the most impressive guerrilla movement the Americans had ever seen. They did stuff like after the offensive, they invited two American special forces advisors to embed with them, and they overran a Salvadorian military base  and they were like, see, this is how we do it. And this was to get to the Americans and say, “Look, you’re not gonna beat us, but we’re ready to negotiate.” This is the kind of stuff they did. They were really top notch. 

But you hang out there, and it wasn’t like the people were fundamentally different. They were just like regular people. You had good people, honest, humble people, and ego maniacs, dishonest, self-involved, ego, man, it was just the same human material you have everywhere. And somehow they did it! And it wasn’t by making sure that everybody had healed and done the work and was a nice person before they got down to politics. They got down to politics despite the fact hat their movements were full of the same psychological problems that our movements are.

I guess we have to turn away from the self a little bit and to develop a kind of group sensibility and learn the part of etiquette and manners that has been forgotten by this therapeuticization, which is a type of depoliticized politics, which is to not share your feelings all the time, to keep it to yourself and think about the larger group and the greater good and just carry on.

Class Unity: I think your point about therapeutic culture is very well taken. And I think it’s particularly disgusting that any political movement on the therapeutic wellbeing of individuals is fundamentally individualistic, it’s fundamentally antisocial. It’s a means of passive aggressive control that masquerades as mental health. It’s disgusting. 

Getting back to our next question, though, someone was wondering: could you comment on China and your opinion on what they’re doing? The CPC doesn’t seem like it’s into ‘diversity’ ideology yet might be uniting the rest of the world. They seem to have picked up the mantle of the classical political economists, to free production and the market from rents, while capitalists in the west have inverted things so that now the public pays all sorts of rents and they take all the gains.

Parenti: My take on China is that it’s a developmentalist state. It’s following the classic pattern that a lot of states have followed to achieve industrialization which is the Hamiltonian model. It’s kind of a mixed economy. This is the real story of capitalism. The real story of capitalism is that it has always grown up with a kind of socialism of sorts. China comes out of the 70s after a series of profound crises, the great leap forward that leads to agricultural disaster, the cultural revolution, and things are pretty bad in the late 70s and out of purely pragmatic kind of emergency measures, Deng Xiaoping begins opening up and then this growth gets set off. And then with Tiananmen Square, it’s clear they’re not going to experiment with political liberalization.

It seems to me, having been to China twice and spent a bunch of time there and done some story, reported on it, but not being a scholar of China at all, that it’s hard to say what’s going on with China, but I think the most important facts are that the communist party maintains control. And they have facilitated the development of capitalist industrialization and the rise of business services and finance now. But they maintain control in very important ways.

When I was in China, the first time I remember it came out that the beer had formaldehyde in it, that somehow this was being allowed to happen. The end result of that little revelation was that the head of the equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration was executed. I remember this all happened while I was in a province, Anhui, where I think three of the last five governors had been executed, something like that. It just doesn’t make the news much in the West, but the Chinese Communist Party still uses real repression against elites.

The place also has a federalist system. So these provinces have a lot of autonomy and the party in charge of the national government will send down directives and set goals. The provinces may or may not follow them. And there’s a real sort of struggle between the provincial governments and the central government. The central government has also increasingly realized that trade unions can be useful in trying to corral and control these provincial governors.

So I think that what’s going on is that China is trying to eliminate poverty and create development and that there are people who are millionaires and billionaires who are part of the party and have no interest in giving up their wealth. And I think there are probably people in the Chinese Communist Party who have a kind of egalitarian nationalist sensibility that they maybe don’t want to, at the end of the story, once development is achieved, eliminate the capitalist class, but that they’re very clear about social stability, raising the standard of living for people, and continuing this project of developmentalist growth.

That’s how I see China. And I don’t really know enough to know what all the real kind of ideological factions are in the ruling class. But there’s clearly a nationalism at the heart of it, and there’s a commitment to social stability at the heart of it. And that’s what allows the Communist Party to occasionally use violence against the richest, some of the richest people in the society, because you are not free to challenge [the] party and challenge this project because they’re all old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution when they were sent down to the countryside. When they were in these struggle sessions where things were totally out of control. There was a train full of weapons headed to Vietnam that was stopped and looted by rival factions of the Red Guard who then had gun fights in the streets of the city of Gao in southern China and the PLA had to go in and and put the kibosh on that.

Things got totally out of control in China, and China has a long history of instability and foreign meddling, and [for] the current generation of leaders, that’s not an abstraction, that’s something they lived through. So I think that’s important to understand about China. It’s not sufficient, but it’s important.

Class Unity: So I’d like to shift focus just a little bit here and ask you, where do you think there is an opening from an organizing perspective, even just starting at at the rhetorical level, to get the segments of the left, even including those who purport to be socialists, to take seriously these recent revelations about the FBI? I have been distraught and appalled at the extent to which it’s considered a wrong-think to take seriously or even read the revelations in the Twitter Files. You mentioned Doug Henwood. He’s a prime example. There’s also Nathan Robinson. It just seems like they’ve lost their minds. I see this as a real emergency, if there’s not some sort of resistance to this capture, and this is a class issue. The trend since the pandemic is an overarching concern, a real hysteria, to not do anything that’s going to support the right, even if there are real abuses that are going on that really need to be addressed, and to totally ignore the fascism of the Democratic Party. There is so much resistance to populism, instead of trying to do some deep canvassing, to capture these people. Also, I’d like to thank you for your article, “The Lockdown Left”, which was brave at the time that you wrote it, and I’m sure you must have gotten some backlash.

Parenti: Great question. I think the opening is class issues. Now, how do we use that opening? That’s a different question. I totally agree with what you’re saying. I’m not an organizer, so I can’t speak to how exactly to organize. But in terms of what’s going on there, the FBI stuff, this is really, really important and the fact that the left is ignoring it is outrageous. I agree with everything you just said. It’s totally just shocking to me. And a lot of it it flows from COVID and the kind of the way that people allow themselves to be terrified by that and refuse to think critically.

It was also in large part because of Trump derangement syndrome. People have cathected upon Trump and that’s how they just stopped thinking. It’s this total fear of the right wing, which is at the heart of it. And I disagree with Adolf Reed about this; he gets into this very adamantly, that the next election could be the last. And, you know, I have my entire life. As a teenager in the 80s, we thought, “Oh, no, the crazy Christian right!” And they are crazy. But you know, I think that the right currently is actually pretty weak. And part of why they’re so weak is because their base is still so ridiculously right wing. And they’re going to lose on the cultural front. They’re still stuck in the 80s with this book banning and so on, banning Kurt Vonnegut, right? DeSantis has this national profile, because he is one of the most prominent governors to resist the lockdowns and the vaccine mandates and all this kind of stuff. And a lot of people that I know who voted for Bernie and identify as leftists were interested in that. I’d be surprised by people who were saying, ‘is the Republican party becoming kind of left wing?’ Well, you’ve got the answer. No, they banned Kurt Vonnegut books. And I don’t think that’s going to fly with people. That flies with a small group of belligerent Christian fundamentalists, and they are a small group. My in-laws are all evangelical Christians and they’re not into that kind of stuff, banning Kurt Vonnegut.

So, at the heart of the left ignoring the FBI exposees is this terror of the right. And I think the left, to some extent, is fighting the last war. It’s like they’re constantly imagining it’s Nazi Germany. And that the real threat we face right now is the one that you alluded to, which is like the totalitarianism of the center.

During the pandemic I read Augosto Del Noce, who made a relevant comment here. He was a conservative Italian philosopher only translated into English in 2017, but he was very interested in Marxism. He wrote a whole book about Gramsci. He wrote about Paolo Pasolini, and I think he and Pasolini actually corresponded. And he took Marxism seriously, though he was religious. He was a conservative Catholic. And to those who said, “Oh, Marxism is just a religion,” he said, “yeah, but that’s one of its best parts.” And he was critical of Gramsci for the cultural turn. He thought that’s basically the end of Marxism. And he anticipates in the early ’60s, a lot of the kind of stuff that we see now with the cultural motifs of the left coming to be the motifs by which the center can rule in an authoritarian and a totalitarian fashion. Not just authoritarian, it’s not just authoritarian from the top down, but that there’s also this mass consent and hunger for the project of censorship and repression and social control.

Class Unity: One of the topics Class of Unity has been pursuing a lot lately is the idea of fascism and how do we understand what the fascism is? And we’ve done a lot to look at, say, the political economic origins of Nazi Germany, but then also of the American war machine. So just in terms of today’s American politics, what does that word mean?

Parenti: I don’t think that the Republican party are fascist. I think that the totalitarian threat right now is really from the center and that the left has been co-opted into that. And in terms of the FBI stuff let’s just be clear in case anyone hasn’t read these articles. We now have mounting evidence that the FBI has tried to influence the outcome of the last two elections. And even if you support the way that the most recent election went, I think one should be very concerned about that. And that should not be allowed. Intelligence agencies intervening into elections should be a red line that cannot be crossed, this cannot be tolerated and should cause mass outrage. And there are people all across the political spectrum, who if spoken to rationally about this would be totally on board for reforming these agencies. And that’s all being squandered because the Democrats with the support of the left are actively trying to sabotage the House committee looking into the weaponization of the federal government. I have a piece in Compact that kind of carries on with that in response to reading the Durham report.

So, that’s really important. In terms of fascism, there are definitely there fascist elements, there are fascist movements. We saw that in 2017 with these paramilitary groups in Charlottesville and Berkeley and elsewhere. But I think that one of the questions that’s been raised by recent revolutions is what is the relationship of the FBI to these organizations?

The proud boys, the head of the proud boys had been an FBI informant, Enrique Antonio, for 10 years. There are like, perhaps like dozens, there are many handfuls of informants in the January 6th protests and throughout these movements of the right that hit the streets under Donald Trump and create this terrible spectacle because they’re doing terrible things. And that’s also part of what cows the left into the shelter of the Democratic Party. And I understand that fear and I get it, but we also need to be doing good investigative journalism and legal analysis [as to] what the hell is going on here exactly? No one even asks these questions.

It’s like, oh, so what? So the proud boys were headed by an FBI informant. What’s the implication? The implication is that the FBI has some control over this whole organization. That’s the implication.

So there are these fascist elements and there’s connections to the state. But I think that the US is not going to see something like Nazi Germany, it’s going to be different here. We need to be attuned to our own culture, our own history, and the way things are developing right before our eyes. And I do not see a kind of Republican party going fascist in a mass base of fascist Republicans, having a coup and having a fascist America. Rather, I think it’s the warning of Del Noce: that it’s like the center. What Del Noce says is that we know about the totalitarianism of the right, that’s fascism and Nazism and their obsession with race. And we know about the totalitarianism of the left, that’s Stalinism and the obsession with class and the revolution and the kind of repression that can go with that. And what we’re totally blind to is the totalitarian potential of the center that flies under the flag of scientism and even “care” and all of these terms that we’re kind of uncritical of. And that’s where I see the totalitarian threat. And by totalitarian again, it’s repressive social control from on high that is being embraced and met with alacrity from below and bought into and even carried forth by the masses. And you saw that in COVID. So it was not simply directives from on high and everyone kind of sulkily complying. People were throwing themselves into the project of compliance with the COVID mandates.

Class Unity: We have another question: It seems like diversity politics are very successful among the working class. Why is that? What does that say about working class politics? A lot of times this gets hand-waved away to a certain degree by saying we have to build class consciousness. How do [we] do that? And why hasn’t it worked? I have my own suspicions but I want to hear you speak to it.

Parenti: Well, I wonder how much it is done. I am not a political organizer like many of you are. So, on  some of these questions, you have the expertise and I don’t. I wonder how much it is done because I don’t see a lot of it. What I see among my working class students at John Jay is that they’re all very open to a class message because it’s so real for them. They’re all worried about money. And when those kinds of issues come up, they listen. And they have no doubt that the system is rigged. They live in New York City. They can see it in the geography that there are rich neighborhoods and then the neighborhoods that they live in. And they want to understand why this is.

So, I don’t really know, how much it is done by unions and organizations and stuff like that. I suspect not as much as we think it could. I think a lot of probably what happens is that class gets thrown in with all these other oppressions. It’s like ‘we stand with…’ and there’s the long list of marginalized people. And if you’re lucky, maybe it’ll be like ‘and low-wage workers’ or something like that. And so, class shows up as status too often on the left rather than class as a relationship to the means of production, to capital.

My wife, Marcy Smith-Perenti, who wrote a great piece on COVID, even before I did in the Gray Zone, ran an organization, a nonprofit called the Responsible Endowments Coalition. It was funded by the foundations and its job was to organize the student organizers around protests. Its real job was basically to take young activists and muddle their heads with a whole bunch of nonsense and get them to start thinking like fund managers. The whole thing was students at colleges have to work on divestment. Where does that come from? That comes directly from the foundations. That’s where that came up from. And then it came down through Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. That’s what the foundations decided they were going to fund. I think Wallace Global was the one that specifically started that. Now they’re all Rockefeller Brothers. They’re all said, that’s what you do. If you have another plan, you don’t get funding. So if that’s your plan, then you get funding.

And so she came in and the place was in disarray. She reorganized it. And she started taking these youth activists, she hired bunch of radicals, including a bunch of radicals from the Philippines. The funding was essentially to divest or invest. So, you demand that the endowment divest, but then you have to think hard about, well, how should we invest? And that’s not the question you’re supposed to think about. 

So, her staff started taking these delegations of these activists over to the Philippines to villages that had been displaced by the military and were now fighting against logging companies and had really clear radical class politics. And I told her, “the founders are not going to like this”. And indeed, they didn’t. They pulled the plug immediately. That was it. That was the end. It didn’t matter that this was super popular or that these students were getting a great education and understanding the world better. Suddenly, the money ran out.

I think there’s a lot of that out there. If you are appealing to foundation funding, you can say, I’m a socialist, or even I’m a Marxist, like Patricia Cullars of Black Lives Matter, who says she’s a Marxist. But you can’t actually do a class analysis. That’s a no-no. And if you do that, then your funding dries up, which is fine, but it just means it’s gonna be a different kind of organization. You’re not gonna rise through the nonprofits of the left. You’re gonna have to be involved. You’re not gonna be a professional activist. You might if you get a job with organized labor, but there you’re gonna run into all sorts of similar limitations.

Class Unity: We have another question: “do you think that the woke culture of the elites is the same or close to the same as the movement of the new left of the 60s and 70s, or just taking the superficial aspect of this.” It seems like there has been a real shift, and a lot of this politics comes from academia. So within academia, are there real outlets for class conscious research and development or is it just kind of theory, to be crude, crawling up its own ass? Is that what the left academia has become just in the preceding decades?

Parenti: There’s more room in academia for class politics than there has been in the past, but fundamentally, there’s a kind of faux culturalist radicalism that predominates in academia. And that’s even with the kind of more class-oriented stuff, like the new history of capitalism stuff that Sven Beckert and Walter Johnson and Edward Baptista sort of associated with.

Those guys are all notable for basically not engaging with Marxism. So that’s still very much prevalent in academia. Even as there’s more room for [the] kind of work around class and economic issues, the best of that work that’s being done, almost assiduously avoids this big old tradition [of] Marxism that’s full of insights and full of problems, whatever, but needs to be engaged with. So I think that’s part of what’s going on. 

But mostly it’s identitarian politics of class. If class is mentioned at all, it is understood as a status group, not as a relation to the means of production, not capital, but culture is everything. You do not study economic reality. Economics doesn’t study economic reality by and large. It’s about model building and testing theories. And then there are geography and sociology, which could be doing a lot of political economic research. Do a JSTOR search of the academic articles on any given subject, and the vast majority of them are going to be ‘the culture of’ type articles rather than ‘the material practices of’, or ‘the nuts and bolts in political economy of’, [or] fill in the blanks; it could be whatever. The modern timber industry, water management in the 1920s, whatever subject it is, it’s like, it’s amazing how much the culturalist turn predominates.

Class Unity: So with regards to classes and the traditional Marxist account of the bourgeoisie and proletariat, it’s become somewhat more complicated today than the classical dualism of bourgeoisie and proletariat, especially with globalization and the fact that the means of production and the distribution and all of that are literally to the four corners of the globe. So what prospect for the left is there to organize around labor, labor is globalized. 

Parenti: I mean, there’s lots of labor that’s not globalized. There’s the entire service sector you can’t ship that overseas. And I think there’s plenty of options. I don’t think the problem is that anytime we try to organize, they move the factory overseas. That’s obviously a big part of the story of neoliberalism. That’s part of how the working class was politically broken, through de-industrialization. Breaking unions and de-industrialization go hand in hand, but there’s enormous amounts of work that can’t be moved away. So, that’s what I would say to that.

And in terms of this, the classic schema of classes, that’s part of why we need ruling class studies. And a kind of class studies to think about how this stuff works. What are the material relationships between these classes? What are the ideological connections? How does the ruling class maintain ideological control over the professional managerial class who basically, you can say, like the petty bourgeoisie have become proletarianized even as they have this kind of larger social status in the society. 

A lot of these things are empirical questions that need to be understood through research about the moment and can’t just be understood through the great old political texts. I think that could be important. But how do we organize? This comes again and again. How do we organize? I don’t know. I wish I had the answer to that. But I think one part of it is building class consciousness. Another part of it is people have to be disabused of their cynicism, and I spoke to that in the beginning a little bit. I think that kind of hopelessness and cynicism is really demobilizing. And one of the advantages that the right has over the left is that the right has this kind of, to some extent, unfounded and unrealistic optimism in the future. It’s very empowering. And you know, the left used to have that too.

If you read the biographies of the great left leaders, they were moved by this millenarian faith in the future. They knew, “I will die in the struggle, but it’s inevitable”. Basically, it’s a secular religiosity. The revolution will inevitably prevail. And of course, that’s not true. Nothing is inevitable. You don’t know, you don’t know what’s going to happen. But wow, that belief, that optimism was incredibly useful and powerful. And it’s in short supply these days.

I’m not an organizer. I’ve never been good at that. To the extent that I have been an activist, which I’m not really anymore, it’s been as a rank and file person. So I’m sorry, I don’t have better answers on that front. But the culture, trying to build a counterculture from which to organize. I do think that sort of subculture that’s not this weird left exclusive subculture and it’s also not some sort of CP front is necessary. The Communist Party had this as a sensibility: you’ve got to be with the people where they’re at. And yet what developed was this kind of frumpy, stale subculture in the CP. 

My dad was part of the CP and I hung out around the CP in my youth. But there’s got to be a kind of cultivation of left-wing sensibilities through the motifs of the culture, of where people are at. And I think that part of the woke thing, the moralizing, the therapeutic stuff, is that a lot of what people are into is pathologized, and that to become a leftist, for a lot of regular people, feels like you have to go through some sort of like cultural transformation and adopt a kind of a cult-like subculture focused on language and inclusion and this sort of stuff. And you can’t just be into whatever you’re into. You can’t be into sports, cars, makeup, this kind of stuff. I mean, that’s what we gotta be thinking about. If the left is to ever have any traction and be a real threat, sorority girls in Tennessee have to be into it. You know what I mean?

If the left is to ever have any traction and be a real threat, sorority girls in Tennessee have to be into it. If we have sorority girls who love makeup and are like “damn right, I’m for Medicare for all and I do not think that there should be giant private pharmaceutical companies and I do not think that absolutely central decisions about our lives should be left to these mega corporations and banks”, that’s what you need. You need squares. Regular people have to be embracing those kinds of ideas. Those squares, those regular people are not going to turn into the people that you meet in Brooklyn and Berkeley. They’re just not. And if you try and tell them that they should, they’re going to hate you. They’re going to feel attacked. And you’re going to fail.

So I mean, I think that’s a big, a big part of what the left has to do: to try to get in touch with regular people and speak to them in a way that includes them. And I think what that means is probably shedding a lot of stuff, not adding anything. That means accepting that there’s going to be people who are going to have very distinct and weird positions on stuff. There’s going to be a lot of disagreement on details. And you’re going to have to deal with it.

Something else that I should have mentioned: part of the problem in terms of the general question that we’re circling around in here of what’s wrong with the left is also social media. I see the effect of social media as very damaging for people because you no longer have private space to think. You mentioned Doug Henwood and Nathan Robinson, this milieu, people in Brooklyn, I’ve known for 20 years. I couldn’t prove it to you. But my gut tells me that social media has been very, very bad for their critical thinking, because they’re called upon to constantly respond to things in front of thousands of others and then to be accountable for every little thought that flits through their head. And you need some privacy to think critically and you have to take on ideas, experiment with them, kick them around and feel free [to think/say] “yeah, I don’t know about that,” or “what if I really thought this?” So I don’t know what we do about that, But I do think that this Twitter, Facebook, social media subculture has been damaging for the left. And it’s part of what gives it its insular cult-like sensibilities and feelings, and this makes it alienate squares.

Class Unity: Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Christian, for talking to us today.

Parenti: Thank you for inviting me, and keep up the good work. It’s heartening to see people who are concerned about class questions and really committed to working on that front. I think that’s very important. And I’m sure that it probably feels difficult and hard, but I commend you and keep on, keep up the great work.