Adolph Reed, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the most important political scientists with a focus on race and class issues in our time. He is also among a rather small cohort of black political theorists who steadfastly foreground the structural class dynamics of urban and African-American experience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Perhaps best known for his sharp critique of the political practice of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and of subsequent African American political figures on both the local (mayoral and city council) and national levels, he has also been a trenchant critic of identity politics and the steady retreat by the self-identified “left” in the United States from confronting (rather than accommodating) the ascendancy of neoliberal politics that aims to “marketize” all human interactions and institutions under the guidance of governments firmly controlled by major capitalists and their minions.
– Labor Studies Journal
