The Left in Lockdown
We’re living through a bewildering moment for socialists. We talk to radical organizers Adolph Reed, Barbara Smith, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Jodi Dean, and Jane McAlevey about how they’re staying politically engaged under quarantine.
Workers on strike protesting working conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic, outside of Allan Brothers Fruit on May 16, 2020 in Naches, Washington. (David Ryder / Getty Images)
It’s a bewildering, and for some, demobilizing time. The pandemic has upended all our usual ways of organizing, or even participating in public life. The suspension of Bernie Sanders’s campaign is a political defeat, and a steady stream of news — whether from the White House, or for many, our own lives — is unrelentingly horrific.
Normally in such times, the Left turns to our sharpest intellectuals and asks, “What is to be done?” — a fair question, but one that can easily lead to abstractions and bland exhortations, including: “Organize!” Since some of our best socialist thinkers are also organizers and activists, we thought it might be more fruitful instead to ask them: “What are you up to, and why?”
Adolph Reed
Adolph Reed recently retired from a long career as political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s continued his lifelong labor activism, however, as well as his prolific writing output. In his work in the New Republic and Nonsite, he’s been sharply critical of neoliberal identity politics and argued for militant organizing for working-class demands like Medicare for All.
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