Introduction to Class Notes

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 02:15:15 +0000

The text here is an extract from Adolph Reed Jr’s 2000 work “Class Notes”. This publication is the founding inspiration for the theme and title of this site here – long live Reed.

This book is built on commentary about current issues and events in american politics over most of the 1990s. As such, it expresses an on-going attempt to make sense of contemporary American political life from a critical perspective. most of the essays published here appeared originally in substantially the same form in my regular columns in the progressive and the village voice, or in similar venues. writing in those venues presents a special challenge—to convey complex, perhaps unconventional ideas clearly and concisely to a general audience. I’ve found this challenge very useful partly because i work out my own views on many issues by writing about them; to that extent, these essays are much less a set of didactic pronouncements than a sustained attempt to think things through, and the obligation to communicate those views effectively to others encourages preciseness and clarity. Having to ask constantly, “what would this formulation mean to someone outside my own head or outside a narrowly specialized community of discourse?” imposes a requirement to bring abstractions down to the ground, to imagine how— if at all— they appear in, explain or bear upon the daily world we inhabit and reproduce. the challenge is more important, though, as a corrective to the flight from concreteness that has increasingly beset left theorizing and social criticism, and as a result political practice, in the u.s. in recent decades.

PMC on Class Letters

Introduction to Class Notes