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Mr. Parenti, are you a Marxist?

Parenti: This is my answer. I would wear that label proudly if I knew that you understood what I meant by Marxist. And when someone says: 'You're a Marxist now aren't you?' and their only intention is to give a buzzword which says 'this guy drinks the blood of capitalist children' or something, then I'm going to say no, I'm not your label, I don't particularly want your label.

[...] Look, I wrote the book about the media. I don't know what Karl Marx has to say about 20th-century US media, I think he had very little to say because you know... he left early. But there's been a lot of creative thought and scholarship in Marxist literature and I feel that it's a scholasticist thing [to say]: 'Oh, you took your [Marxist] formula and applied it here....'

See, I don't see these things this way because I'm a Marxist. it's just the opposite. I started seeing these things and I started realizing that there was an analysis that had explanatory power for that. It gets very frustrating you know. For years I'd knock myself out trying to make an analysis, I'd come to the conclusion and I'd say: 'Hey you know, the police are not neutral, they're on the side of property and power.' Then someone would say to me: 'That's Marxism, you know, you're sounding like a Marxist.'

That's Marxism... oh. Then I'd say: 'Wealth is largely unaccountable in many of the things it does in our democracy, I don't understand, that isn't what I learned ... ' / 'Oh that's a Marxist point of view, Marx said that you know.' and it would go on, one thing after another and I said:

'Boy, this Karl Marx was really something, you know, every time I put two and two together and come up with an analysis they give him the credit for it.'