Jacobin

JACOBIN. Jacobin (tagline, “Reason in revolt”) is a New York-based magazine in digital and quarterly print forms, aimed at a left audience, which grew in circulation 2010-2020. With a web audience that reached to 2 million viewers per month by the end of the decade, and a print edition of 60,000 subscribers, Jacobin is strongly associated with the younger socialist movement that coalesced around the 2016 and 2020 presidential primary campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and the newly reinvigorated Democratic Socialists of America (DSA.) Its notable characteristics, especially in contrast to more established Left magazines, include a distinctly digital-era branding, striking graphic design, social media savviness, attention-grabbing headlines (sometimes derided as “clickbait”), and ideological biases towards neo-Kautskyist Marxism, post-Trotskyism, and European (especially Nordic) social democracy under a general banner of “democratic socialism.”

Jacobin, its title sometimes explained as a reference to both the Jacobin Club of the French Revolution and CLR James’s Black Jacobins, was launched by its publisher, Bhaskar Sunkara, when he was only 21 years old. Sunkara was raised by Indo-Trinidadian immigrant parents in New York and joined DSA in high school, editing their youth blog. Sunkara developed an interest in Leon Trotsky and spent his college years at George Washington University reading other Marxist theorists like Ralph Milliband.

The Jacobin’s reach expanded with its launch of Catalyst (“A Journal of Theory and Strategy” edited by Vivek Chibber), The Dig (an English-language podcast), and Jacobin Italiana (an Italian-language franchised podcast). In 2018, Jacobin also acquired the historic and financially distressed British publication Tribune, edited by Ronan Burtenshaw, and published a series of books jointly with Verso.

Jacobin managed to effectively gain attention from the mainstream media, with¬ interest pieces ranging from The New York Times to VOX, and Sunkara himself also contributed to the Times and Guardian (UK). Jacobin’s growth especially accelerated during the Sanders presidential campaigns, as Jacobin reading clubs in some situations kick-started DSA chapters. By mid-2020, sixteen reading clubs operated throughout the United States, plus six in Canada and eleven more around the world.

A strength of Jacobin was an understanding of what commercial media had demonstrated, that a publication can develop a “brand” through a generally unified message and graphical appearance and replicate this formula across digital media sharing. This practice included a voluminous digital publishing schedule. For example, by the end of the 2020 Democratic primary, Jacobin had run 497 unique articles on their website featuring Bernie Sanders. Many cheerleaded quite effectively (“What a Bernie Sanders Presidency Would Look Like” by Daniel Denvir); others prematurely announced triumph (“After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now” by Dustin Guastella.) Despite a general ideological position, Jacobin also printed some opposing viewpoints, a sort of unofficial “loyal opposition” of friendly but critical writers, such as Trotskyist Charlie Post, author of “The Best of Karl Kautsky isn’t Good Enough” and “The Popular Front Didn’t Work.”

The Jacobin project also stirred several controversies within the left. Much came from new DSA members whose own politics evolved as they became more active in the emerging socialist movement. One persistent criticism came from those who believed Jacobin consistently ran “class reductionist” opinion pieces that minimized or unfairly lumped together liberal identity politics with socialist liberation politics regarding oppressed peoples. For example, some reacted strongly against “The Identity Mistake” by Melissa Naschek, which argued that Asad Haider’s pointed criticism of opportunistic identity politics in Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump didn’t go far enough. Others objected to Jacobin’s occasional “dirt bag left” proclivities, that is, the use of crude humor, rarely controversial in itself but sometimes inclined toward sexist tropes. Still others criticized what they judged to be low-quality or quickly produced cultural analysis. Articles such as “In Defense of Kenny G” and “Graphic Novels Are Comic Books, But Gentrified”) seemed to these critics to take advantage of a controversial “hot take” merely to gain website “clicks.” A more serious and frequently leveled criticism was directed at Jacobin’s alleged soft line towards imperialism, especially nostalgia for the Western European social democracies that relied economically on colonial empires or neo-colonial trade and mineral extraction. As internal-caucus politics of the new DSA evolved, Jacobin staff writers were accused of having their thumbs on the scale. Despite these controversies, Jacobin maintained a loyal readership and gained new readers.

Mathews, Dylan. “Inside Jacobin: How a socialist magazine is winning the left’s war of ideas” Vox.co. March 21, 2016.

Jacobin Magazine: https://jacobinmag.com/about

Catalyst: https://catalyst-journal.com/about