Read Blackshirts and Reds
Watch the 1986 Yellow Lecture
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
The Michael Parenti Library on YouTube has the biggest collection I've seen of Parenti lectures. ChemicalMind, also on YouTube, has some of his most important lectures uploaded with improved audio.
He's not a hard writer to get into at all. Some Marxist writing can come across a bit dry and clinical but Parenti is always a breeze in my experience, there's a reason he's so beloved. The obvious answer is Blackshirts and Reds. It's very short (could be finished in an afternoon or two) and covers such a wide array of topics it's honestly astounding. From there I'd go to Inventing Reality - it's like Manufacturing Consent but actually good. (Gets a bit repetitive in the second half, only in the way history tends to, repeating itself and whatnot) His Julius Caesar book is good but only really worth a read if it's a subject you're already interested in.
His Julius Caesar book is good but only really worth a read if it's a subject you're already interested in.
I'm only a Rome nerd as far as I'm a Catholic (and to that end I don't really care too much about the 1st century BCE, I leave that to St Augustine) but I enjoyed this book.
It's not purely about the history of the Roman Republic, although that's the meat of the book. He also went into how class power and bourgeois historiography has distorted our understanding of the history of the late Roman Republic. He makes a pretty elegant point that bourgeois historians neglect to analyze the class inequality in antiquity because they don't want to engage in 'presentism' but their presentist bourgeois analytical lens is what gives them the tunnel vision to only look at history from Cicero's eyes. There's a lot of valuable historical materialist analysis in the book that can be taken and applied to the present.
Does it cover Julius Caesars contemporary politics and how the material conditions of the time created his rise?
Depends on your interests. Check his series of lectures out and find one that seems good. I'm a film guy so I listen to his 'Rambo and the swarthy hordes' one a lot.
Yellow parenti