Amit's Blog

Michael Parenti: The Relentless Demystifier of Empire – An Odyssey Through Power, Propaganda, and Historical Reckoning   Michael Parenti, born in 1933 amid the gritty realities of New York's East Harlem to Italian immigrant roots, stands as a formidable iconoclast in the annals of political scholarship. Armed with a Yale PhD in political science, he transformed from an academic insider to a marginalized truth-teller, his works like Blackshirts and Reds and The Sword and the Dollar piercing the veils of imperial mythology. Parenti's Marxist framework unmasks history not as a tapestry of noble ideals or accidental follies, but as a calculated arena where economic elites wield states, media, and militaries to perpetuate dominance. Dismissed by detractors as a "Marxist ideologue," his ideas have exploded in relevance through "Yellow Parenti" viral lectures on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, captivating a digital generation disillusioned with neoliberal or...

The Machinery of Inequality: How Marx Diagnosed Technology’s Hidden Transfer of Power   Prelude In an age enamored with disruption and innovation, we rarely ask: Who benefits? Karl Marx, writing amid smokestacks and steam engines, saw what many still miss—that technology under capitalism is never neutral. It’s a lever, a weapon, a silent arbitrator of power. While wages may rise and gadgets proliferate, the share of societal surplus flowing to labor has quietly dwindled, especially since the 1980s. Marx didn’t predict dystopian pauperization; he diagnosed a subtler drift—relative disempowerment masked by material comfort. His insight wasn’t about machines replacing hands, but about capital restructuring society to extract more while conceding less. Today, as algorithms manage workers and AI reshapes industries, Marx’s 150-year-old analysis echoes with unsettling clarity. This isn’t a call to abandon progress, but to interrogate its direction. For technology, as Marx knew, is n...