Discussing Class and Politics with Adolph Reed Jr.

Class Unity recently spoke with political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. about the postwar defeat and transformation of the U.S. left, the political economy of full employment, and the compromises that paved the way for neoliberalism. Using his essay Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair and his forthcoming book When Compromises Come Home to Roost, Reed explains how class conflict was displaced into cultural accounts of poverty, race, technology, and public interest. The conversation moves through the labor movement’s postwar constraints, technological discipline, neoliberal authoritarianism, the Democratic Party, and the limits of electoral shortcuts. It concludes with a discussion of political education, cadre formation, durable organization, and the need to build a constituency for an independent working-class politics. Readers can watch the original Class Unity video, visit the Class Unity event page, read Reed’s essay at Nonsite, and find his biography at Mount Holyoke College.

Class Unity: Welcome to a Class Unity conversation with Adolph Reed Jr. Reed is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is also an organizer with the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute’s Medicare for All-South Carolina initiative. His recent books include The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives and, with Walter Benn Michaels, No Politics but Class Politics. He is completing When Compromises Come Home to Roost: The Decline and Transformation of the U.S. Left and, with Kenneth W. Warren, You Can’t Get There from Here: Black Studies, Cultural Politics, and the Evasion of Inequality. Other works include Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Postsegregation Era and Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. We are delighted to have you with us.

To frame the conversation, we read two recent pieces: “Looking Backward to Counter Mysticism and Despair” and “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss.” In the forthcoming book, you discuss postwar policy debates over the balance between full employment and price stability. Michał Kalecki and Joan Robinson argued that this supposed balance was rooted in class conflict between workers and capitalists. Do you agree with their account, and what about the way those policy debates unfolded validates it?

Adolph Reed Jr.: I do. What impressed me about Robinson and Kalecki is the extent to which they understand political economy in a way that stresses both the adjective and the noun and puts them together. They do not see class struggle as an abstraction charted through consumption functions and the unfolding laws of capitalism. They recognize the open-endedness of history and the fact that, in most moments, class struggle appears through ersatz debates and conflicts. It is only in moments understood as crises, when the mystifications and secondary representations are burned off, that something resembling a direct confrontation between workers and capitalists becomes visible to everyone.

That perspective helped me make sense of how we got from the left’s defeat at the end of the Second World War to the position we occupied by the mid-to-late 1960s. The chapter from which the recent essay was excerpted began in my mind as a coda to the preceding chapter on the War on Poverty and Black Power. Margaret Weir, Judith Stein, and others had written intelligently about the way economic inequality and class conflict were displaced, between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, into cultural discourses of poverty on one side and racial discrimination on the other. But no one had attempted to give a thick account of how that displacement actually transpired within American politics. I thought I would write ten or fifteen pages to fill the gap; it became a hundred-page chapter. I realized that I needed to teach myself the history of postwar economic-policy debates and connect those debates to Cold War imperatives and the development of racial liberalism.

One larger point of the two essays, especially the more recent one, is to show how actual class struggle gets displaced into the cultural domain. That displacement has been one of the tools available to the bourgeoisie against the working class for a very long time.

Class Unity: How does that displacement occur? George W. Taylor’s discussion seems to provide a particularly revealing illustration of the way class conflict is translated into other terms.

Adolph Reed Jr.: Taylor is a useful illustration, although I would not say he was uniquely important. The book begins with Franklin Roosevelt’s articulation of a second Bill of Rights in 1944 and the genuine Full Employment Bill of 1945, which passed the Senate but not the House. The following year brought the full-bore counterattack by capitalists, conservative Democrats, and Republicans against the vestiges of the New Deal and the Congress of Industrial Organizations-grounded left. That marked a major defeat for the left.

For the next two decades, the centerpiece of class struggle was the push for real full employment: an economy that guaranteed every resident the right to a job at a living wage. The 1945 bill would have made full employment the cornerstone of presidential economic policy and required Congress and the executive branch to take affirmative measures, including large-scale public job creation, to meet employment targets. Both Republicans and the new conservative Democrats claimed to favor full employment because public support for it was overwhelming. A Roper poll on the eve of the 1944 election found that 68 percent of respondents would not support any government, party, or economic system, whatever it was called, unless it guaranteed a job to everyone willing to work. That result also tells us how successful the bipartisan right’s ideological campaign has been over the last eighty years.

Through the Eisenhower administration, the supposed tradeoff between full employment and inflation, along with anti-communism, framed discussion of economic policy and social and economic justice. From the end of the Korean War through the beginning of the Vietnam buildup, unemployment remained at levels then considered unacceptably high. Five percent unemployment, or even four percent, was not considered satisfactory by liberals. That is another measure of how thoroughly the bipartisan right has won its culture war against the working class.

By the late 1950s, as chronic unemployment persisted, the idea took hold that a significant portion of unemployment was structural. The claim was that postwar industrial transformation and what was then commonly called automation were causing the national economy to shed more jobs each year than it could replace. This became central to debate over the contemporaneous discovery of a phenomenon called poverty. Poverty was a way of talking about economic inequality while disconnecting it from political economy. Even Michael Harrington, a founder of one of the organizations that later became the Democratic Socialists of America and an advocate of socialism, found the cultural metaphor attractive. That helped legitimate it as a left way of thinking about inequality, although Harrington became much sharper after his side lost the fight over the shape of the War on Poverty.

The structuralist view held that persistent unemployment stemmed from economic transformation and would require large-scale public intervention and labor-market planning, measures wholly unacceptable to the capitalist class. The alternative view was that poverty arose principally from deficiencies among particular groups and individuals. On this account, conservative Keynesian demand stimulus – tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, together with automatic stabilizers – could eliminate most non-pathological unemployment, leaving only residual populations whose poverty could be addressed through tutelage and targeted social intervention. That was the nature of the early-1960s debate, and it shaped how policymakers, intellectuals, and the general public understood the sources of inequality and the federal policies appropriate to them.

The other side of the argument concerned racial economic inequality. A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Walter Reuther, and even Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz argued that disproportionately high Black unemployment had less to do with discrimination than with the same forces of industrial restructuring and deindustrialization. They therefore maintained that overcoming racial economic inequality required the same social-democratic interventions needed to address structural unemployment generally. Our side lost on both fronts. The reasons are complicated but not difficult to understand. By the 1970s, the supposed profitability crisis united both parties against the working class, and the rest is history.

The book’s subtitle is The Decline and Transformation of the U.S. Left. I have joked with friends that an alternative subtitle might be, What the Fuck Did You Think Was Going to Happen?The press probably will not accept it, but it is worth asking.

Class Unity: You said that writing this chapter required a tutorial in postwar political economy, and the result provides an excellent tutorial for readers. The research also seems to show that the relevant positions were more complicated than later secondary accounts suggest. More broadly, poverty discourse divides the poor from the rest of the working class, while arguments about inflation and nonunion workers can pit different groups of workers against one another. Is this segmentation one of the principal ways that class questions are mystified?

Adolph Reed Jr.: Absolutely. A lesson for people doing this kind of intellectual work is that I began with a general sense of the conventional account of the structural-unemployment debates. I read the familiar secondary literature and tried to follow the concrete arguments through the Korean War, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. The more closely I looked, the harder it became to line up the participants cleanly as structuralists on one side and Keynesians on the other. Their positions were much more complex than the secondary literature would have one believe. I eventually concluded that I had to dig into the debates as they occurred, follow them forward, and trace the participants outward into the alliances and tendencies of which they were part. I was rarely more grateful for tenure than when I decided to devote six or eight months to that research while already overdue with the book.

I would almost argue that culture has existed principally, as a politically meaningful phenomenon, as part of the ruling class’s arsenal for dividing workers into categories apparently disconnected from their material lives and pitting them against one another. If this were a different book, I might have begun with the Populist insurgency of the late nineteenth century. Racist ideology played exactly that role in crushing the uprising. It was not simply that white workers were more committed to whiteness than to alliance with Black workers. White-supremacist ideology became a battering ram that the revanchist planter-merchant capitalist class used to beat white workers into submission and disfranchise them.

One sees a similar process after the Second World War in the defeat of the organized working class: the Taft-Hartley Act, the purge of the left from the CIO, and the anti-communist witchhunts. The book is less concerned with narrating those familiar defeats than with the next-best options that became available within capitalism after each defeat. That is where much of the insidious work occurs.

Consider what has been called homeowner populism. During the 1930s and 1940s, there was a brief moment when agitation for social housing seemed politically possible. After the defeat of the left, the alternative was an expansion of the New Deal policy of using individual homeownership to stimulate the real-estate industry. After the war, homeownership became an alternative to social housing and the basis of a politically meaningful identity distinct from class. From the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, the beauty of homeowners as an apparent interest group is that the category can align a low-wage steelworker with a neurosurgeon or a mansion owner. That alignment was visible in California’s battles over fair housing in the 1960s, which helped propel Barry Goldwater to the Republican nomination in 1964, Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, and, eventually, Trumpism.

The cultivation of counter-solidaristic political identities through culture may always have been essential to ruling-class power. No ruling class can govern through coercion alone.

Class Unity: Technological change also played an important role in the postwar compromises you describe. Introducing so-called labor-saving technology can pursue profit while exerting discipline over workers. Is control itself an objective, or should it be understood as a means of preserving profits over the longer term? And does the threat of technological disruption perform that disciplinary function even before a technology – artificial intelligence, for example – actually displaces workers?

Adolph Reed Jr.: That is correct. I am a confirmed Bravermanite. While writing the chapter, I wondered how the structural-unemployment debate might have differed if Harry Braverman had published Labor and Monopoly Capital fifteen years earlier. The realistic answer is that no one would have paid attention. David F. Noble’s America by Design appeared around the same time, and those books, together with other work on the labor process, encouraged a more expansive understanding of discipline and control.

This is what I find compelling in Kalecki’s and Robinson’s arguments about full employment. Even if one could demonstrate formally that industrial employers would earn higher profits under full employment, they still might oppose it because they would lose control. In the early 1980s, one or two large industrial corporations briefly showed interest in a national health or single-payer movement because it could reduce labor costs. They backed away because it would also deprive them of control. Even as every contract shifts more of the cost of health care and other benefits onto workers, employer provision of benefits remains an important anti-strike weapon.

I made the same point in arguments about the North American Free Trade Agreement. Left economists could demonstrate that the number of jobs directly lost from the industrial Midwest was smaller than many assumed. From inside the labor movement, however, the answer was that the jobs did not have to leave. The threat alone could discipline workers. I regard the posturing about driverless cars in the same way. The technology does not need to fulfill its promises. The fantasy of removing human beings from vehicles, airliner cockpits, or other workplaces can exert pressure before it becomes technically credible.

The idea works together with the economic advice that local news programs offer workers during every recession: survive by proving that you can lick your employer’s balls more enthusiastically than your coworkers. That helps explain how unemployment can fall substantially without wage growth. The threat, whether or not it is realized, disciplines workers.

The grotesque logic sometimes becomes explicit. In the 1990s, reports exposed so-called dead peasant insurance: large employers took out life-insurance policies on low-level workers without telling them, named themselves as beneficiaries, and collected when even former employees died. That is primitive accumulation in an unusually literal form. One key to Marx’s critique of capitalism is volume one, part eight of Capital, on so-called primitive accumulation. It reminds us what kind of system we are confronting.

Researching this book also startled me by revealing how central postwar American social science was, across disciplines, to making class and political economy invisible and eventually almost impossible to think. I had studied political science, sociology, and anthropology in the late 1960s; my father was a left political scientist and one of the founders of the Caucus for a New Political Science, so I was never naive about the social sciences. Yet I underestimated their role. Sociologists were especially damaging because they converted class into something cultural. Economists were the capitalist discipline and one expected little from them, but psychologists, political scientists, and sociologists played a nefarious role in constructing the ideological harnesses that have constrained us throughout my lifetime.

Class Unity: Your discussion of unions rejects the caricature that postwar labor leaders were simply in the bag for employers or were straightforward class collaborators. Yet unions also accepted important compromises. Were mistakes made, or were their hands forced? If mistakes were made, how can a future labor movement avoid repeating them?

Adolph Reed Jr.: I was self-conscious about that problem when discussing George W. Taylor’s account of the role unions could play in facilitating technological change and job loss. I could already hear a strain of leftist response saying, “This proves the unions have always been corrupt class collaborators.” I try not to sit in judgment over historical actors as if our seminar were an appeals court deciding who went to heaven and who went to hell. The task is to place ourselves as sympathetically as possible in the complexity of the mid-1940s.

There is a lasting conundrum for leftists in search of a left: the broader a movement’s base and constituency, the more likely it is to succeed, but the less politically coherent it is likely to be. In the postwar moment, important elements of the labor-liberal coalition were content with working people receiving a better deal under capitalism. Some accepted homeowner populism, employer-provided fringe benefits, and the forms of racial justice that took shape as postwar racial liberalism. It makes little sense to say they betrayed a movement to which they had never committed themselves. Their goal, individually and institutionally, was to secure improvements in working people’s lives. That may also explain some of the willingness to travel down the anti-communist road.

Philip Murray, president of both the CIO and the United Steelworkers, was neither a communist nor a radical; he was a Catholic social unionist, perhaps a kind of social democrat. Yet he resisted purging communists from the CIO for several understandable reasons. The liberals in the new Americans for Democratic Action, who helped found Cold War liberalism, pressed him to carry out the purge.

The recurring question is whether history could have gone differently if Communists and communists had been able to build on their base within the CIO. The United Electrical Workers had nearly half a million members at its peak. We do not know what would have happened. We do know that, in the absence of a serious long-term debate over class struggle on our side of the movement, there was little space to consider how to mobilize against the forces defeating the CIO left or how to prepare for the next stages if the immediate defeat proved unavoidable.

The lesson is that a gestural anti-Stalinism often becomes anti-communism and opposition to political discipline. Could the movement have weathered the battles of the late 1940s and early 1950s in a way that left it better prepared for policy struggles in the 1960s and then for neoliberalism? I do not have a counterfactual answer. History is open-ended, but there is no machine that takes us back into it.

Class Unity: Let us turn to fascism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism. You distinguish, provisionally, between the capitalist counterattack associated with Reaganism and Thatcherism and a newer formation aligned with a stronger reactionary, quasi-fascist, and libertarian right – Trumpism, Narendra Modi, Giorgia Meloni, Jair Bolsonaro, and related tendencies. How should we understand the relation between these phases without becoming trapped in disputes over terminology?

Adolph Reed Jr.: Some Canadian comrades and I have been discussing these questions, and Sam Gindin recently offered a useful way to periodize them. One can begin, as Gindin and Leo Panitch did in The Making of Global Capitalism, with the postwar internationalization of capitalist discipline around empire and the United States’ role as the central organizer of that empire. This was ultimately about imposing a new international regime of accumulation.

The so-called profitability crisis of the early 1970s represented the combined fulfillment and exhaustion of that first imperial program. The draconian political-economic responses experienced as Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the Volcker shock answered that exhaustion. The combination of the 2008 crash and the 2020 pandemic may have marked another moment of fulfillment and exhaustion. What if neoliberalism can no longer deliver enough to enough people in the societies it governs to maintain legitimacy even as nominal democracy?

One characteristic of neoliberalism has been continuing de-democratization: removing more and more public decisions from public scrutiny, electorates, and even elected representatives. It has become more draconian along the way. From that perspective, Trumpism and the bipartisan form of neoliberal rule confronting us now are less a qualitative break than a continuation. Which side of the phenomenon one emphasizes depends partly on the political or rhetorical point one is trying to make, because both continuity and change are present.

Trump is the anti-Obama, but not in the way the antiracist commentators imagine. Trump and Barack Obama are bizarro-world versions of each other. Obama asked us to trust him because of who he was and the story he embodied. Americans were encouraged to believe that voting for him, partly because of his race and biography, would say something redemptive about the country and help deliver it to a better future. Trump says the opposite in an equally personalized form.

A labor educator wrote after Trump’s first election about parents from southern Colorado with a union history who had voted for Trump after voting for Obama. One explained that both votes were based on the candidates’ promises. He hoped Trump might bring back industrial jobs that workers could then organize. There are complicated sentiments of that sort in the electorate.

There are continuing academic debates about whether these formations are fascist and precisely how they resemble or differ from fascism. I do not care much about those debates. They belong mostly to academics and people who practice politics in coffeehouses. The formation is what it is. I have been haunted since my early twenties by the specter of missing the last train out of Berlin, but the danger will not look exactly the same this time. American political thought often owes too much to fashion: fascism is imagined as leather, slicked-back hair, chrome, and a familiar visual repertoire.

I felt intense alarm after Republicans took Congress in 1994 and saw Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Bill Archer, Bob Livingston, Tom DeLay, and others boast openly that they wanted to return the country to the 1920s. That produced a flash of recognition. Once one removes the uniforms, much of the Nazi Party consisted of second-rate academics, shopkeepers, car dealers, dentists, osteopaths, and comparable strata. That is close to where the right stands now.

Class Unity: Authoritarianism also appears across the institutions and parties normally classified as liberal or center-left. Across the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union, decision-making has moved farther from the electorate while governments use lawfare, restrictions on speech and protest, and other administrative means to suppress opposition. Trump’s authoritarianism is particularly blatant and vulgar, but is it necessarily more extensive than the subtler forms practiced by liberal parties and institutions?

Adolph Reed Jr.: In 1996, when I lived in Chicago, the Democratic National Convention was held there. For a year beforehand, Bill Clinton and Mayor Richard M. Daley repeatedly voiced concern about a replay of 1968. There was no reason to expect one. It eventually became clear that the invocation of 1968 was preparation for suppressing demonstrations outside the United Center. Quentin Young of Physicians for a National Health Program, who was also my doctor, went to court with the American Civil Liberties Union and won a narrow right to demonstrate. The resulting protest pen was at the edge of a parking lot, held only two people at a time, and could be reached only under police escort from a quarter-mile away.

The connection is straightforward. If the economic model rests on accumulation by dispossession, democracy and participation have to be squeezed. One saw the same logic after the crash of 2008. Millions demonstrated in European capitals, yet governments responded identically whether they were Conservative or Social Democratic. A prime minister, foreign minister, or finance minister appeared on television in a bland monotone to announce, in effect, that the government would do what it had already decided to do. Public expression counted for nothing.

That is the problem with a left that has lost the distinction, emphasized by Jane McAlevey, between mobilizing and organizing. It is hydroponic: it has no roots in the ground. The right understands this, and the nominal left dimly understands that the right understands it. For a large portion of my adult life, we have had a kabuki-theater left without the capacity to respond.

One danger is that Trump could be succeeded by a Rahm Emanuel-Liz Cheney national-salvation center-right government and that we would be instructed to call this a victory. At the same time, something has to slow the rightward movement, and we cannot count on enlightened or even self-interested capitalists. The capitalist class can tolerate extensive authoritarianism and find ways to accommodate it.

Part of the answer is to do what the putative left has consistently refused to do for at least thirty years: connect with ordinary working people and build around a critical sensibility and program. We should not deceive ourselves about beginning with ideas in our heads, but those ideas can win popular support through sustained, face-to-face organizing. Progressive ballot initiatives have won even in states that elect Republicans to every statewide office. Measures raising minimum wages, extending Medicaid, protecting reproductive freedom, and taxing millionaires suggest an arena for organizing that does not require concentrating first on reforming the Democratic Party.

When it is time to vote, I would be surprised if I did not vote for the Democrat, because something must be done to stop the immediate danger. Politics sometimes requires an agreement with an adversary for the sake of preparing for the conflict one knows is coming. But that tactical necessity must not be confused with building an independent politics.

Class Unity: The left has failed to establish an institutional or organizational presence capable of reaching the broader working class. The campaigns of Bernie Sanders briefly suggested movement in that direction, and much of his social-democratic platform now enjoys broad public support. Some working-class voters associated with the MAGA coalition also express pro-labor or antiwar sentiments. Yet treating the Democrats as the unavoidable final destination can make it harder to communicate with workers outside the Democratic base. Should socialists participate in both Democratic and Republican politics, or should organizing begin somewhere else?

Adolph Reed Jr.: I begin from the premise that there is no left in the institutional sense, and that is the central problem. I will also make a shameless plug: Sanders’s platforms in 2016 and 2020 closely resembled the U.S. Labor Party’s platform throughout its existence. I worked for Sanders in both campaigns. After 2016, people with political capacity often returned directly to the state organizations from which they had come, so little independent infrastructure survived. There was more potential traction after 2020, but the pandemic pulled the rug from under organizing efforts, including our work in South Carolina.

I would not trust Republican figures who make gestures toward working-class concerns. I think most of those overtures are bullshit. I would ground a politics non-electorally first, by organizing around issues. Ballot initiatives can be useful because they allow organizers to meet people and begin conversations. Without the ideological noise, enough working people would recognize the sense in the political program people like us have to offer.

We must cultivate the ability to speak with people who do not already agree with us. That requires suspending some of the religious commitments that self-identified leftists have about permissible language and the so-called social and cultural issues. But because there is no left, it is difficult to prescribe what “the left” should do. What is clear is that the movement is in a cadre-building phase.

At the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute, our main focus is creating opportunities for serious political education among working people. We prefer to begin with people in unions, not because they are morally superior, but for the same reason the civil-rights movement went to churches: that is where one can find many people already connected to one another. The aim is to build organization over time.

This is not exactly throwing in the towel, but it does mean accepting that we may not be able to reverse the present tendency immediately. We need to generate lichen in the crevices of the rocks that can support something larger later. I am seventy-eight years old and did not expect this to be the final phase of my life, so I am not happy about it. But I will not search for a magical agency that promises to rescue us from a moment of colossal defeat. My optimism takes a different form.

Class Unity: Previous attempts at cadre building, including the Democratic Socialists of America, were often captured by activists primarily committed to radical-liberal cultural positions. The same outlook has penetrated union staffs and can redirect working-class organization toward culture-first politics. What concrete measures can keep cadre-building efforts centered on class politics?

Adolph Reed Jr.: That is a major problem. When I first heard about the influx into DSA after Sanders’s 2016 campaign, I thought it might be a good development, but it also reminded me of the influx into Students for a Democratic Society in 1968. Within a year, that organization was dead. People entered with very different levels and kinds of political development. Some were working-class-oriented Marxists; many were something else.

The problem is partly one of creating the organizational vessel first. The same issue recurs whenever people ask whether we need a Labor Party immediately. The three people most closely connected with the old Labor Party who are still active, myselfincluded, all answer no. Organizational forms must emerge from activity. There is no other way to prevent the vessel from being captured by people who do not share its purpose.

Unions face a related staff problem. The labor movement attracts some young people whose natural orientation might otherwise have led them to nongovernmental organizations, partly because union staff jobs exist while NGO positions are scarcer and partly because the role of union staffer has acquired a certain mystique. This is not entirely new; the free-floating radical who holds a staff job has existed for decades. Some feel almost guilty about collective bargaining because it represents the supposedly old labor movement, associated in their minds with white men. They imagine that labor’s true mission is to build movements such as Black Lives Matter. Unions themselves will have to resolve this problem.

From the standpoint of broader movement building, one cannot align with everybody. People must come together around a shared vision of what they are trying to do. We did not get into this situation overnight, and we will not get out of it overnight. A real movement consists of people with names and addresses who live within social networks of other people who can be identified, can act, and can expand the base. That is the only politics now worth having.

Potemkin leftism has run its course. Too many people have come of age in a political culture that cannot distinguish mobilizing for a demonstration from organizing and connecting with a durable base. They repeatedly treat the former as though it were the latter. Political education can correct that confusion, but the work will be a long, hard slog and much ugliness lies ahead.

That is also why we must face the need to align with liberals on some matters in order to stop the bleeding. We have to be politically sophisticated enough to know what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how to prevent a tactical alignment from taking control of our project. The position resembles the baseball instruction to throw strikes without giving the batter anything to hit. The imperatives conflict, but serious politics requires operating within that tension.

Class Unity: Recent campaigns have again encouraged electoral hopes. Zohran Mamdani has been praised for emphasizing economic issues, although some of his rhetoric returns to racial framing, while Kshama Sawant uses explicit language about class warfare but also advances policies framed through segmented racial eligibility. Why is it so difficult to escape these patterns, and can an electoral campaign itself become the new movement?

Adolph Reed Jr.: I would not equate Sawant and Mamdani. Sawant is a sectarian who does not think seriously about politics. If I voted in New York City, I would vote for Mamdani and would have supported him in the primary. I know his father slightly and think highly of him and his work.

It would be interesting if Mamdani were elected, and he may be. But some supporters seem to believe that this is what the new movement will look like. We are not going to elect ourselves into a political movement. It was not long ago that Bill de Blasio occupied a similar place in the imagination. Mamdani is different, in many ways more attractive, and probably sharper politically, while de Blasio was more institutionally connected. Yet Wall Street closed ranks against de Blasio. More recently, Brandon Johnson, whom I know well and regard highly, was elected mayor of Chicago with a stronger institutional base in the Chicago Teachers Union. He has also been under enormous pressure.

The American left has long indulged a cargo-cult politics: just over the horizon, barely visible, a ship is supposedly arriving with magical cargo. People occupying the cultural space that a left would fill, if one existed, have repeated that fantasy since Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign. What if, what if, what if?

I would vote for Mamdani and wish him well, but treating his campaign as the movement reverses the proper sequence. We fought about this throughout the Labor Party’s existence. People wanted to run candidates immediately; our position was to build a movement and run candidates from a position of strength. The electoral realm is where one consolidates victory institutionally after victories have been won on the plane of social-movement organizing. The shortcut is a dilettante’s politics. I hope Mamdani wins, but my expectations remain limited.

Class Unity: A recurring theme in both essays is that ideology matters. What might have become a left has lacked the concepts needed to interpret its situation: class, class struggle, and capitalism disappear behind race, homeowner populism, and other substitutes. Political education could re-equip people with the categories and frameworks necessary to think clearly. Since that is much of what Class Unity presently does, is this a useful conclusion to carry into our work?

Adolph Reed Jr.: Absolutely. Political education is enormously important, and organization has to accompany it. Shortly after Obama was elected, I participated in a panel at the American Anthropological Association. When I said that we needed a disciplined political organization, another leftist replied that this sounded like a vanguard party and asked where that had got us the last time around. The answer is to ask where refusing to think in those terms has got us.

I am not calling for immediate party building. I am saying that we have reached a point at which we must create the constituency for the politics we want. Russell Jacoby observed that when the left retreats from a vision of a world qualitatively different from the present one, liberals no longer have anything against which to define themselves. They drift farther right, while people who consider themselves left move into the liberals’ abandoned space, proclaim themselves small-d democrats, and treat any larger political vision as incompatible with building a popular movement.

We need the opposite. It is time to turn the tables. People respond to disciplined political education; the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute conducts trainings with unions and sees that response directly. Keep doing the work. The more, the merrier.

Class Unity: That is an excellent note on which to end. Thank you for taking the time to meet with Class Unity and for a very rich conversation.

Adolph Reed Jr.: Thank you for having me. I appreciate the conversation very much. Take care.