i'm actually largely in agreement with what parenti is saying in his definition of culture, but i'm willing to use the inflammatory language that he's apparently trying to avoid: in the context of any actually really left-wing socialist theory, culture is not inherent to an individual's identity, but rather exists parallel to language and religion as a system created by the elite to control and dominate the working class with. culture is consequently just another system of repression and control, and leftists should be arguing that it needs to be abolished along with all of these other systems of control and repression. what's happened, unfortunately, is that liberals have taken over the discourse, and asserted these ideas of identity that the academy used to explicitly categorize as the ideology of "cultural conservatism" as foundational to this "new left", which is just a term used to neutralize and negate the left with. so, i'm actually in agreement with parenti on this point, and it's because he's leaning away from his authoritarian stalinist tendencies and reaching into the far left; he's really channeling somebody like bakunin. we don't always agree with parenti, but we can kind of "deal with him" out here on the ultra far left - he's reasonable enough on most issues. just don't ask him about stalinist crimes against humanity - that's when he gets maddening and outrageous.

i want to disagree with him a little when it come to small business, though. he's talking about small businesses creating jobs as this great thing in the modern economy, but he's missing the context of that happening, which was the collapse of unionism. so, yeah - jobs are being shifted out of unions and into small businesses, where workers become the virtual property of the small business owner. why is this good, exactly? it isn't - we should be resisting this shift of labour from unionized to non-unionized sources, and resisting the bourgeoisie at every chance.