Imagine growing up with Parenti as your dad — who should’ve been the GOAT of academia — forced out of the academy and cut off from research libraries for being a Marxist and against the Vietnam war.
Yes, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. But you’ve got to ask yourself how much you could achieve as a revolutionary theorist in a country like the US. You can have all the theory in the world but get nowhere without the masses. And much of the US either has too many treats or is too interested in having treats to bring them along as ‘the masses’ even if you did give them theory. Michael Parenti had the masses.
What base or movement would Christian Parenti be able to build on? You could be a revolutionary and a theorist, building a movement, I guess. But to do what Parenti did? You already know that AOC will betray you like Bernie did to Parenti. And who’s going to pay you to do speeches? Who’s going to buy your books? Academic Marxists in the west are usually shit Marxists—you can get paid by a university/college but only if you toe the line, throwing Stalin and AES to the wolves or writing about and becoming irrelevantly obscure.
Idk, I’m very disillusioned with what you can achieve as a Western ‘public intellectual’, for want of a better phrase.
I think you’ve got it about right.
Imagine growing up with Parenti as your dad — who should’ve been the GOAT of academia — forced out of the academy and cut off from research libraries for being a Marxist and against the Vietnam war.
Yes, without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. But you’ve got to ask yourself how much you could achieve as a revolutionary theorist in a country like the US. You can have all the theory in the world but get nowhere without the masses. And much of the US either has too many treats or is too interested in having treats to bring them along as ‘the masses’ even if you did give them theory. Michael Parenti had the masses.
What base or movement would Christian Parenti be able to build on? You could be a revolutionary and a theorist, building a movement, I guess. But to do what Parenti did? You already know that AOC will betray you like Bernie did to Parenti. And who’s going to pay you to do speeches? Who’s going to buy your books? Academic Marxists in the west are usually shit Marxists—you can get paid by a university/college but only if you toe the line, throwing Stalin and AES to the wolves or writing about and becoming irrelevantly obscure.
Idk, I’m very disillusioned with what you can achieve as a Western ‘public intellectual’, for want of a better phrase.