David North's comments have aged very well. Far more politically grounded and farsighted

yeah i really want to join=this team

What’s far worse terror than this is the way the Israeli war airplanes bomb the armless Palestinians in their stolen homes and lands

The Director for ISCOR clearly is disconnected from the actual course and degree program. What the Director has said I can completely 100% say was not my experience, maybe due to my time @ sdsu was as an Adult non traditional veteran student with disabilities that none were attended to and actually had to stay an extra semester due covid19 infection in 2019 that my instructor didn't care to use his discretion, smh. Why does the director need to lie, if not and this is truly her sentiment 🤔 then all I can assume is she is surrounded by yes men and women that never bring problems and concerns to kinda like the potus. I'm glad I never spent the money that others are paying yearly to attend, smh.

Please note, the video begins with a silent slideshow to avoid copyright issues. The ceremony starts at minute 2:25.

Please note, the video begins with a silent slideshow to avoid copyright issues. The ceremony starts at minute 4:35.

I thoroughly enjoyed this video but felt the need to comment about one observation. The argument that leftists place too much emphasis on the vote and on elections as the premise for concluding that they should then proceed to support Democratic candidates in elections falls entirely to pieces when the inherent assumptions of said premise are applied inversely.

North's opening remarks seem rather prophetic a week after the fascist assault the US capitol...

Comment section is disappointing. They don't understand Reed's position 100%. To say that Reed is trying to funnel you into the democratic party is hilarious. He's saying the exact opposite. The problem is many of you place too much importance on electoralism that you think any advocacy of voting for the Democrat means you're for electoralism. To believe you should vote or should have voted for Biden over Trump in this past election simply means Biden is marginally better than Trump. That's all. How some on the left can't grasp this simple idea is hilarious. Another thing is, many of you don't understand what organizing means. You believe it's mobilization which is what many of the left have been doing the past decade. Knocking on doors when it comes to voting (3rd party, or specific policies) and organizing protests is not what Reed means by organizing. It means getting into unions and convincing workers to fight back against their bosses. Building solidarity with right wingers, liberals, and leftists within the corporate world. This means they (workers) now have a foundation of how the system works, so then you can translate that solidarity into political fights. You also have a naive understanding of how to win. This is why you believe 3rd party is what's needed. It's a gross misunderstanding of how to build your base. You simply believe getting your idea out there like how things are done right now, but with a 3rd party message is going to win things. That's wrong and pointless. What's clearly missing is the numbers, which is your base. There is no leftist base right now. If you have numbers, it doesn't matter whether you're a 3rd party or a Democrat. Because numbers based on a working class coalition would by definition mean you use your numbers to vote for working class policy positions. At that point you would have essentially taken control of a certain portion of the Democrats or if you wanted, started up a 3rd party. Either way, there would be an equivalent amount of ppl voting for working class policies. In other words, the party itself is a pointless discussion.

I think David North articulated his ideas amazingly he was very clear and concise and I think he put forth a vision for the working class that is achievable while Professor Reed seemed to base his analysis in my opinion off of emotions and continue the unsuccessful policy that I see that a lot of progressives have adopted of herding people back into the Democratic Party and then trying to push them left when we have seen time and time again their clear disdain for progressive policies . Great job gentlemen 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

Thanks to the speakers and to the SDSU Poli Sci dept for hosting this event. It was a highlight of political life in 2020.

The idea that Biden will give the left space or buy time to build a mass movement is a deadly mistake. In fact A biden presidency is even more likely than Trump to launch new wars in the middle east and go into direct military clashes with Russia, which could quickly avalanche into another World War. Not much breathing room when Biden drags us back into war shortly after taking office. Never mind "labor rights" which already didn't exist since Obama -- we won't have any rights because war-time martial law will be in effect and the right to free speech and press, as well as striking and activism, will be suspended, with all dissent being labeled as Russian-enemy agents. Biden wil not be breathing room he will be a Bombshell in the most ironic way possible. If you doubt that 2020 can get any more ironic then you'll simply be one of the first to witness it.

Voting is just something you do for at most a day, if you live where votes are suppressed and lines are long, or less than a half hour if you live where it's easy. Voting is instrumental, it doesn't define your politics. For the vast majority of people who are leftists, it really shouldn't be complicated: vote for the one that will do less harm and then spend the rest of your life organizing and actually being political. Once there's a powerful socialist movement we can talk about how to use it in elections, if that's even what we want to do. Until then, punch the ticket and get back to organizing.

Reed takes me back to my university years where I came out more confused than when I went in. To be quite frank , like Chomsky and Hedges, Reed's obscurantism over the building of an independent party of the working class reflects a very definite class character . It is not an accident that the mass of youth flooding out of the Universities for decades have disappeared down the rabbit hole of reformism and a dead end road . The 'so called' ''intellectual '' classes have concerned themselves more with climbing academic ladders with fancy wages attached .Warm and cosy offices and the drip drip of routinism will addle the brain in no time. Idealism of youth swapped for a steady wage and a foot in the door. Little do such people cognise and all too late, if indeed they ever do....that as the world changes, and as ''necessity'' bares down on the working class and not those in their ivory towers....''they are behind events and not in front of them''.

This debate is mentioned in the following article: Pseudo-left apologists for Biden and the bankruptcy of “lesser-evil” politics Joseph Kishore-SEP candidate for US president 31 October 2020 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/31/pers-o31.html

🤣 Mr. Reed trying hard to be edgy by cursing. The fawning of everyone involved over him was sad. Comrade North's scientific analysis of capitalism's current crisis and historical perspective that he applied was, in my opinion, quite accurate and he and the SEP are the only ones offering a true socialist alternative to capitalist slavery.

I voted for Joe Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz, and proudly so.

Thanks for posting, Political Science Department. This was a very illuminating exchange.

wsws.org

Adolph Reed is bound up in identity politics, he's just better at masking it, than say Nikole Hannah-Jones. Both support Biden, so what's the difference, really? The difference is how much education & intelligence they are wasting.

Reed's discourse is so full of generalisations that effectively mean everything and nothing. Quite frankly he is just squirming in the face of a scientifically derived argument posed by David North. This somewhat pitiful out pouring from a propagandist of the pseudo left is really a call for workers to continue to play Russian roulette as if there is all the time in the world ,with a party that is screaming loud and clear at the working class (and has done for decades) , that it defends the interests of US capitalism at ''all costs ''. When Biden nods to the ruling class in the same voice and at precisely the same time he is whispering sweet nothings in the ears of workers, that '' I beat the socialist'' , then the trajectory of the Democratic party under Biden is foretold ''nothing will in essence change''. In this respect Biden begs the ''essential point'' of enquiry on which Reeds argument stands counterposed to that of David North. What is the objective character of capitalism, and by what political logic is it transformed? Are we to assert that the observable historical processes of capitalist decline are in some sense ''when push comes to shove'' arbitrary ? If so, one would have thought with the exponential rise of obscene social inequality to new heights, and the spectre of world war 3 and irreversible climate change , the ruling classes would have shifted into ''time to save the world mode'' long ago . However the observable opposite is the irrefutable truth. Just compare the pie charts of US domestic expenditure over the last decade and the size of the slices tell you unequivocally where the ruling classes are headed and just look at the gargantuan levels of insoluble debt !! However as this process continues its motion through ever escalating intra national crises spurred on by ''competition for profit between competing nation states'', to say nothing of the historical patterns of this crisis that ended ''twice'' in 2 world wars, at this late hour, the bourgeois academic in his ivory tower pronounces the way forward is to continue playing Russian roulette !! wtf!

I voted for Joseph Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz.

Reed tries to shut North up. Reed is contemptible.

Good question, Emmanuele!

Reed's ideas are totally bankrupt. Making excuses for Sanders! The bullshit is on Reed's part, not David's.

I left when Prof. Reed mentioned cleaning the toilet. I was sickened by his attitude. I am coming back to it today in order to hear David North's response to Reed's drivel.

I've always appreciated Professor Reed's principled Marxist opposition to identity politics, and his defence of viewing class as the fundamental defining line in society. But it was unpleasantly clear in this discussion that his pragmatic perspective of building an "institutional left" forces him to at times cast aside Marxism entirely. The claim that the main feature of history is its "specificity", i.e. that any attempt to draw lessons from history is futile, is a complete rejection of historical materialism, and Professor Reed would ridicule this claim had it come out of anyone else's mouth, except that he knows that the historical record can't possibly justify his support for a bourgeois party as providing "breathing room" from fascism. His response to a worker who complained about the Democrats' promotion of identity politics shows that the opportunism behind Professor Reed's call to elect Biden is even incompatible with his usual principled opposition to identity politics. The basic feature of the US's two-party system is that both parties attack the conditions of the working class, but the Democrats couple their right-wing agenda with more progressive social policies -- the worker who has identified that both the Democrats and Republicans are opposed to the interests of his class has taken a major step towards breaking with the two-party system. But the position that Professor Reed implicitly put forward -- that the only thing stopping this worker from voting for the Democrats is a prejudiced opposition to their social policy, and that it would be a step forward to convince this worker to vote for Biden -- requires promoting illusions in a thoroughly anti-working class party, and while still rejecting the theory of identity politics of the material interests of "white supremacy" etc., concedes to its conclusion that a bigoted "white working class" is responsible for Trump. A principled and honest response would be "These 'moral issues' are an important part of the fight for complete human equality. But the Democrats promote them so heavily to disguise the fact that they stand for enormous social inequality, and to divide the only force which can bring about true equality: the working class. Both parties offer social devastation to the working class, and will worsen inequality. Their methods are different: Trump is planning to enforce his attacks by building a fascist base and destroying workers' abilities to fight back, and Biden would prefer to use the politics of race, gender, etc. to divide and demobilise all opposition, and to enforce the requirements of Wall Street through the existing state apparatus." One could find everything in that response in Professor Reed's writings, but why could he not respond in that way to the worker he mentions? If advocating a Biden vote as a lesser evil doesn't require promoting Biden's politics, then why not explain precisely what the Democratic Party is? In this case, honesty about the Democrats leads inevitably to the conclusion that an "irresponsible" rejection of both parties is necessary, and for the working class to defeat fascism itself - and the agreement between Professor Reed and David North on the nature of the Democratic Party breaks down when it comes to a political programme because only one of the two is unafraid to draw the revolutionary conclusion: the urgent task facing socialists is to establish the independence of the working class from all the agents of capitalism.

I hate to be impolite but David North makes this guy, showing off all his books in the background, sound like an idiot. When one cuts through all his BS, his basic position is the same as every other bourgeois socialist. "Everyone wants universal health care and etc but it's just not available so lets get on board with the friendlier right-wing capitalist and organize for the future." I think they said that 40 years ago when workers real wages were about 3 times higher.

Adolph Reed stumbles to reach workers and maintain coherency because he is bungled-up in identity politics. David North makes sense because he is a Marxist & historical materialist

I thought Reed won this debate. Contrary to North's claims, a second Trump term won't lead to the collapse of the Democratic Party, a la the Whigs in 1852-1854, or build the constituency for a socialist revolutionary party. It will only make the left even more marginal, the labor movement even weaker, and the political space for a challenge to the Democrats even narrower than it is after one term of Trump. Biden is less charismatic, has a longer history of corporate collusion, and less credibility with African Americans than Obama. It will be easier for the left to expose him and present an alternative to the corporate Democrats while they are in power and displaying all their contradictions than when they are out of power and the far right dominates the conversation. After all, if the Republicans really are the neo-fascist party that North says they are, then his position is equivalent to Ernst Thälmann in 1931 moralizing about the "social fascist" SPD and claiming, "After Hitler, our turn!" As awful as the SPD was, the German CP should have tactically allied with them as far as necessary to stop the Nazis while expanding its base and presenting a viable alternative for the German working class. And since the US left is in a far weaker position than the CP was in 1931, the same lesson only applies with more force today.

Starts at 4:45

American democracy is dead...Trump and the GOP have killed it.