Jacobin (magazine)

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Jacobin
Jacobin Logo.svg
Jacobin fall 2013 cover.jpg
Issue 11/12 (fall 2013)
PublisherRemeike Forbes
Categories Politics, culture
FrequencyQuarterly
Paid circulation75,000 [1]
Unpaid circulation>3 million (online monthly) [1]
Founder Bhaskar Sunkara
First issue2010
CountryUnited States
Based inNew York
Language English
Website jacobin.com
ISSN 2158-2602
OCLC 677928766

Jacobin is an American socialist magazine based in New York. Bhaskar Sunkara was its founding editor. As of 2023, the magazine reported a paid print circulation of 75,000 and over 3 million monthly online visitors. [1] Established in 2010, Jacobin's circulation grew in 2016 with the increasing attention on leftist ideas stimulated by Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. The magazine's name is inspired by C. L. R. James's 1938 book The Black Jacobins , about the Haitian Revolution. Ideologically, the magazine is associated with democratic socialism and the Democratic Socialists of America.

Contents

History and overview

The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010, [2] expanding into a print journal later that year. [3] Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara said that he intended for Jacobin to perform a similar role on the contemporary left to that undertaken by National Review on the post-war right, i.e. "to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas". [4] In 2016, the Columbia Journalism Review called it "most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade". [5]

Jacobin's popularity grew with the increasing attention on leftist ideas stimulated by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, with subscriptions tripling from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 as of the first issue of 2017, with 16,000 of the new subscribers being added in the two months after Donald Trump's election. [4]

In spring 2017, Jacobin launched a peer-reviewed journal, Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, which is today edited by New York University professor Vivek Chibber and a small editorial board. As of 2022, Catalyst claims a subscriber base of 7,500. [6]

In November 2018, the magazine's first foreign-language edition, Jacobin Italia, was launched. Sunkara described it as "a classic franchise model", with the parent publication providing publishing and editorial advice and taking a small slice of revenue, but otherwise granting the Italian magazine autonomy. [4] Today, other editions are published out of the Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands. [7]

The name of the magazine derives from the 1938 book The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James in which James ascribes the Haitian revolutionists a greater purity in regards to their attachment to the ideals of the French Revolution than the French Jacobins. [8]

According to creative director Remeike Forbes, the magazine's frequently used "Black Jacobin" logo was inspired by a scene in the movie Burn! referring to Nicaraguan national hero José Dolores Estrada. [9]

Contributors

Sunkara has said he feels that "all of our writers fit within a broad socialist tradition", noting that the magazine does sometimes publish articles by liberals and social democrats, but that such pieces are written from a perspective that is consistent with the magazine's editorial vision. [10]

Notable Jacobin contributors have included:

Ideology and reception

Jacobin has been variously described as democratic socialist, socialist and Marxist. [11] [12] Writing for the New Statesman in November 2013, Max Strasser suggested that Jacobin claims to "take the mantle of Marxist thought of Ralph Miliband and a similar vein of democratic socialism". [13] According to an article published in September 2014 by the Nieman Journalism Lab, Jacobin is a journal of "democratic socialist thought". [14] Jacobin's own "Essential Guide to Jacobin," published in 2023, states that "[o]ne of Jacobin’s primary goals from the beginning has been to popularize the idea of democratic socialism." [15]

In January 2013, The New York Times ran a profile of Bhaskar Sunkara, commenting on the publication's unexpected success and engagement with mainstream liberalism. [16] In an October 2013 article for Tablet , Michelle Goldberg discussed Jacobin as part of a revival of interest in Marxism among young intellectuals. [17] In February 2016, Jake Blumgart, who contributed to the magazine in its early years, stated that it "found an audience by mixing data-driven analysis and Marxist commentary with an irreverent and accessible style". [11]

In a 2014 interview published in New Left Review , Sunkara named a number of ideological influences on the magazine, including Michael Harrington, whom he described as "very underrated as a popularizer of Marxist thought"; Ralph Miliband and others such as Leo Panitch who were influenced by Trotskyism without fully embracing it; theorists working in the Eurocommunist tradition; and "Second International radicals" including Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky. [10]

In April 2016, Noam Chomsky called the magazine "a bright light in dark times". [18]

In a March 2018 article published in the Weekly Worker , Jim Creegan highlighted the association of a number of the magazine's editors and writers with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), describing Jacobin as "the closest thing to a flagship publication of the DSA left" while also stressing the political diversity of contributors, incorporating "everyone from social democratic liberals to avowed revolutionaries". [19]

Catalyst

Associated with Jacobin, Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy is a quarterly interdisciplinary academic journal covering left-wing politics, capitalism, and Marxist theory. [20] Established in the spring of 2017 as a collaboration between editors Vivek Chibber, Robert Brenner, and Jacobin, Catalyst attempts to "promote wide-ranging discussion and to organized debate on the urgent questions facing the working class, the emergent mass movements, and radical and socialist political organizations." [21] Sunkara has described Catalyst as "a more theoretical journal, a more academic journal" compared to Jacobin. [22]

In 2015, Chibber and Brenner approached Bhaskar Sunkara about the possibility of publishing a theoretical journal of socialist politics where Chibber and Brenner would assume editorial control, while Jacobin would design, produce, and circulate the journal. The intention of Catalyst was to address and compensate for a perceived generational gap in left-wing politics after the New Left, taking up political questions commonly explored in the past by the American left and readdressing them to the millennial audience that makes up the Jacobin readership. [23] The first issue of Catalyst was officially released in May of 2017 at a celebration at the In These Times offices in Chicago. [24]

Related Research Articles

Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers' self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownership and from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property. Broadly defined, it includes schools of both anarchism and Marxism, as well as other tendencies that oppose the state and capitalism.

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is considered as the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leo Panitch</span> Canadian Marxist academic (1945–2020)

Leo Victor Panitch was a Canadian research professor of political science and a Canada Research Chair in comparative political economy at York University. From 1985 until the 2021 edition, he served as co-editor of the Socialist Register, which describes itself as "an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left". Panitch himself saw the Register as playing a major role in developing Marxism's conceptual framework for advancing a democratic, co-operative and egalitarian socialist alternative to capitalist competition, exploitation, and insecurity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Miliband</span> Belgian born Polish Marxist theorist (1924–1994)

Ralph Miliband was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.

New Politics is an independent socialist journal founded in 1961 and still published in the United States today. While it is inclusive of articles from a variety of left-of-center positions, the publication is historically associated with a "Neither Washington Nor Moscow!" Third Camp, democratic Marxist perspective, placing it typically to the left of the social democratic views in the journal Dissent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hilary Wainwright</span> British magazine editor (born 1949)

Hilary Wainwright is a British sociologist, political activist and socialist feminist, best known for being a co-editor of Red Pepper magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellen Meiksins Wood</span> American-Canadian Marxist historian (1942–2016)

Ellen Meiksins Wood was an American-Canadian Marxist historian, and one of the primary developers of the Marxist tendency known as political Marxism.

Social democracy is a social, economic, and political philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach toward achieving limited socialism. In modern practice, social democracy has taken the form of predominantly capitalist economies, with the state regulating the economy in the form of welfare capitalism, economic interventionism, partial public ownership, a robust welfare state, policies promoting social equality, and a more equitable distribution of income.

Robert Paul Brenner is an American economic historian. He is a professor emeritus of history and director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, editor of the socialist journal Against the Current, and editorial committee member of New Left Review. His research interests are early modern European history, economic, social and religious history, agrarian history, social theory/Marxism, and Tudor–Stuart England.

Collective ownership is the ownership of private property by all members of a group. The breadth or narrowness of the group can range from a whole society to a set of coworkers in a particular enterprise. In the latter narrower sense, collective ownership is distinguished from common ownership and the commons, which implies open access, the holding of assets in common, and the negation of ownership as such. Collective ownership of the means of production is the defining characteristic of socialism, where collective ownership can refer to society-wide ownership or to cooperative ownership by an organization's members. When contrasted with public ownership, collective ownership commonly refers to group ownership.

Democratic socialism is a left-wing economic and political philosophy that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist, decentralised planned, or democratic centrally planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary or reformist politics to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularised by socialists who opposed the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other countries during the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Democratic Socialists of America</span> American political organization

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a big tent, democratic socialist political organization in the United States. After the Socialist Party of America (SPA) was renamed Social Democrats, USA, Michael Harrington formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC). The DSOC later merged with the New American Movement (NAM) to form the DSA. The organization is headquartered in New York City and has about 80,000 members. It leads organizing and protest campaigns, and has members in the House of Representatives, state legislatures, and other local offices.

Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine, and tradition within socialism that stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary to bring about structural changes in society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for transitioning from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as a seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class and its interests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bhaskar Sunkara</span> American writer

Bhaskar Sunkara is an American political writer. He is the founding editor of Jacobin, the president of The Nation, and publisher of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and London's Tribune. He is a former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality as well as a columnist for The Guardian US.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivek Chibber</span> Indian American sociologist

Vivek Aslam Chibber is an American academic, social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology at New York University, who has published widely on development, social theory, and politics. Chibber is the author of three books, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SEARCH Foundation</span>

The SEARCH Foundation is a left-wing, membership-based Australian not-for-profit organisation, with a number of high-profile members linked to the left of the Australian labour movement. SEARCH is an acronym for "Social Education, Action and Research Concerning Humanity".

Meagan Day is an American writer and editor focusing on class, labor issues, economic inequality, and American politics. She is an editor at Jacobin, where she was previously a staff writer. The author of Maximum Sunlight (2016) and co-author of Bigger than Bernie (2020), her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and The New Republic. Her work has been cited in articles in The New Yorker, The Hill, The New York Times, and Politico. In 2022, she addressed the Oxford Union on the topic of the American Dream in a global context.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "About Us". Jacobin. Archived from the original on June 27, 2021. Retrieved April 10, 2023. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over three million per a month.
  2. "This is what you need to know". Bookforum . September 28, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012. Retrieved April 2, 2011.
  3. Blumgart, Jake (December 18, 2012). "The Next Left: An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara". Boston Review . Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved October 28, 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 Baird, Robert P. (January 2, 2019). "The ABCs of Jacobin". Columbia Journalism Review . Archived from the original on March 6, 2019. Retrieved March 4, 2019.
  5. "The ABCs of Jacobin". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
  6. "About Page". Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. Archived from the original on June 19, 2020. Retrieved June 25, 2020.
  7. Página12 (February 15, 2021). "El alcance regional de la revista Jacobin | Una publicación con debates, reflexiones y análisis de coyuntura". PAGINA12. Retrieved February 6, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  8. Budgen, Sebastian; et al. (October 19, 2015). "Jacobin Magazine: entretien avec Bhaskar Sunkara". Revueperiode (in French). Archived from the original on February 24, 2016. Retrieved February 24, 2016.
  9. Forbes, Remeike (Spring 2012). "The Black Jacobin. Our visual identity". Jacobin. Archived from the original on December 30, 2017. Retrieved December 29, 2017.
  10. 1 2 Sunkara, Bhaskar (2014). "Interview: Project Jacobin". New Left Review (in French). 90: 28–43. Archived from the original on April 19, 2018. Retrieved March 26, 2018. There are of course Socialist Worker and International Socialist Review which are associated with the International Socialist Organization (ISO), an American Trotskyist group with about 1,000 members. Note: International Socialist Review commenced 1956; from the 1990s, continued as a publication of Center for Economic Research and Social Change; last issue produced in 2019.
  11. 1 2 Blumgart, Jake (February 6, 2016). "Jawnts: Giving socialism a good name". Philly.com. Philadelphia Media Network. Archived from the original on August 17, 2016. Retrieved July 10, 2020.
  12. Matthews, Dylan (March 21, 2016). "Inside Jacobin: how a socialist magazine is winning the left's war of ideas". Vox . Archived from the original on May 23, 2020. Retrieved June 13, 2017.
  13. Strasser, Max (November 9, 2013). "Who are the new socialist wunderkinds of America?". New Statesman . Archived from the original on August 7, 2016. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
  14. O'Donovan, Caroline (September 16, 2014). "Jacobin: A Marxist rag run on a lot of petty-bourgeois hustle". Nieman Journalism Lab. Archived from the original on July 10, 2016. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
  15. https://jacobin.com/2023/12/essential-guide-to-jacobin-democratic-socialism-marxism-history
  16. Schuessler, Jennifer (January 1, 2013). "A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream". The New York Times . Archived from the original on February 11, 2020. Retrieved February 27, 2017.
  17. Goldberg, Michelle (October 14, 2013). "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History's Dustbin". Tablet. Archived from the original on July 13, 2020. Retrieved July 10, 2020.
  18. Srinivasan, Meera (April 5, 2016). "The voice of the American Left". The Hindu . Archived from the original on August 9, 2020. Retrieved June 27, 2020.
  19. Creegan, Jim (March 22, 2018). "Walking the Tightrope". Weekly Worker . Archived from the original on April 25, 2020. Retrieved March 26, 2018.
  20. "Announcing Catalyst". Jacobin Magazine . Jacobin Magazine. May 4, 2017. Retrieved June 10, 2017.
  21. Brenner, Robert (2017). "Introducing Catalyst". Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. 1 (1): 5.
  22. ""We were not trying to hide Marxism": Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin Magazine". LeftEast. June 16, 2016. Retrieved June 13, 2017.
  23. Vivek Chibber and René Rojas (June 9, 2017). Launching Catalyst (Facebook Video). Verso Books: Jacobin Magazine. Event occurs at 1:05:00. Retrieved June 9, 2017.
  24. "Chicago Release Party for Catalyst Issue 1/Jacobin Issue 25". Jacobin Magazine Official Facebook. Facebook. May 20, 2017. Retrieved June 10, 2017.

Further reading