Jacobin (magazine)

History and overview

The publication began as an online magazine released in September 2010, expanding into a print journal later that year. 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". In 2016, the Columbia Journalism Review called it "most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade".

Jacobins 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 new subscribers being added in the two months after Donald Trump's election.

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.

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. Today, other editions are published out of Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands.

Title and logo

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.

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.

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.

Notable Jacobin contributors have included:{{Columns-list|{{Columns-list|colwidth=14em|

• Kristen Ghodsee
• Zohran Mamdani
• Yanis Varoufakis
• Hilary Wainwright
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• Jeremy Corbyn
• Pablo Iglesias Turrión
• Shawn Fain
• Slavoj Žižek

Ideology

Jacobin has been variously described as democratic socialist, socialist and Marxist. 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". According to an article published in September 2014 by the Nieman Journalism Lab, Jacobin is a journal of "democratic socialist thought". *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."

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. In an October 2013 article for Tablet, Michelle Goldberg discussed Jacobin as part of a revival of interest in Marxism among young intellectuals. 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".

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. Dylan Matthews, writing for Vox in 2016, described the ideology of Jacobin as broadly socialist and ideologically ecumenical, noting that the magazine deliberately avoids rigid factionalism and party lines to create a space where "social democrats, democratic socialists, Trotskyists, council communists, Chavistas, and even the odd liberal can coexist".

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) while also stressing the political diversity of contributors, incorporating "everyone from social democratic liberals to avowed revolutionaries".

Praise

In April 2016, Noam Chomsky called the magazine "a bright light in dark times", while also in 2016 Vox characterized Jacobin as "the leading intellectual voice of the American left". In 2023, political scientist George Souvlis characterizes the journal as "an ideal platform for the diffusion of radical ideas and alternative narrations".

Critiques

In 2016, Jonathan Chait, writing for New York, criticized Jacobin for downplaying or excusing the repressive actions of Marxist regimes under leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Also in 2016, Jason E. Smith, writing for The Brooklyn Rail, contended that Jacobin promotes a technocratic and nostalgic version of social democracy rooted in outdated DSA policies from the early 1980s. He criticized Jacobin's central demand for full employment as disconnected from the realities of contemporary mass movements, arguing that the masses are focused instead on direct democracy, redistribution, and police and prison abolition. Smith was critical of Seth Ackerman's model of market socialism, arguing it preserves core capitalist structures such as profit-driven firms and capital markets, merely rebranded as "socialized", while sidelining class struggle and the systemic transformations needed to confront the crisis of work.

In 2017, Uday Jain, writing for the British magazine New Socialist, argued that Jacobin tends to prioritize class over other axes of oppression, such as race and gender, effectively marginalizing the contributions of Black feminists and other scholars who emphasize intersectionality. Jain contended that this approach simplifies complex social dynamics and overlooks the multifaceted nature of oppression.

In 2022, Sohrab Ahmari, writing for Compact, critiqued Jacobin for its focus on cultural liberalism, suggesting it alienates working-class readers by prioritizing identity politics over economic issues. Also in 2022, Left Voice, the online magazine of Trotskyist Fraction – Fourth International, published a critical analysis of Jacobin, accusing it of ignoring class struggle and the oppression faced by marginalized groups. The article argued that ''Jacobin'''s close alignment with the Democratic Party leads it to prioritize electoral strategy over genuine socialist principles, resulting in the marginalization of labor movements and social justice issues in its coverage.

''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. 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." Sunkara has described Catalyst as "a more theoretical journal, a more academic journal" compared to Jacobin.

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. The first issue of Catalyst was officially released in May 2017 at a celebration at the In These Times offices in Chicago.

References

References

1. "About Us".
2. (September 28, 2010). "This is what you need to know". [[Bookforum]].
3. Blumgart, Jake. (December 18, 2012). "The Next Left: An Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara". [[Boston Review]].
4. "The ABCs of Jacobin".
5. "About Page".
6. Baird, Robert P.. (January 2, 2019). "The ABCs of Jacobin".
7. Página12. (2021-02-15). "El alcance regional de la revista Jacobin {{!}} Una publicación con debates, reflexiones y análisis de coyuntura".
8. (October 19, 2015). "Jacobin Magazine: entretien avec Bhaskar Sunkara". Revueperiode.
9. Forbes, Remeike. (Spring 2012). "The Black Jacobin. Our visual identity.". Jacobin.
10. (2014). "Interview: Project Jacobin". [[New Left Review]].
11. (March 21, 2016). "Inside Jacobin: how a socialist magazine is winning the left's war of ideas". [[Vox (website).
12. Chotiner, Isaac. (26 April 2019). "The Editor of Jacobin on the Evolution of American Socialism".
13. Strasser, Max. (November 9, 2013). "Who are the new socialist wunderkinds of America?". [[New Statesman]].
14. O'Donovan, Caroline. (September 16, 2014). "Jacobin: A Marxist rag run on a lot of petty-bourgeois hustle". [[Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
15. "The Essential Guide to Jacobin".
16. Schuessler, Jennifer. (January 1, 2013). "A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream". [[The New York Times]].
17. Goldberg, Michelle. (October 14, 2013). "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History's Dustbin". Tablet.
18. (February 6, 2016). "Jawnts: Giving socialism a good name". [[Philadelphia Media Network]].
19. Burgis, Ben. (10 April 2022). "If You Want to Understand Marxism, Read G. A. Cohen".
20. Burgis, Ben. (16 April 2022). "G. A. Cohen Showed Why We Should All Be Socialists".
21. Creegan, Jim. (March 22, 2018). "Walking the Tightrope". [[Weekly Worker]].
22. (April 5, 2016). "The voice of the American Left". [[The Hindu]].
23. (2023-03-31). "Radical Journalism: Resurgence, Reform, Reaction". Taylor & Francis.
24. [[Jonathan Chait]]. (23 March 2016). "Reminder: Liberalism Is Working, and Marxism Has Always Failed".
25. Schwartz, Joseph M.. (28 March 2016). "Liberalism's Crisis, Socialism's Promise".
26. Smith, Jason E.. (April 2016). "Let Us Be Terrible: Considerations on the Jacobin Club".
27. Jain, Uday. "11 August 2017".
28. [[Sohrab Ahmari]]. (21 April 2022). "The Many Agonies of Jacobin Magazine".
29. (27 February 2022). "Oppression, Class Struggle, and Other Things Jacobin Doesn't Care About".
30. . (May 4, 2017). ["Announcing Catalyst"](https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/announcing-catalyst).
31. (2017). "Introducing Catalyst". Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
32. (16 June 2016). ""We were not trying to hide Marxism": Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin Magazine.".
33. (June 9, 2017). "Launching Catalyst". [[Jacobin Magazine]].
34. . (May 20, 2017). ["Chicago Release Party for Catalyst Issue 1/Jacobin Issue 25"](https://www.facebook.com/events/806641516154919). *Facebook*.