Online Publication

ONLINE PUBLICATIONS. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, online media on the Left significantly displaced the readership of the older printed journals or augmented it by adding new readers. The old journals gamely held on, while the newer online publications advanced rapidly.

The larger media landscape had meanwhile changed drastically, of course. The internet, initially developed as part of the larger Cold War digitized military-industrial complex infrastructure, had been created to coordinate defense and NASA program systems. By the mid-1990s, it had unexpectedly proliferated through a public-private partnership among the Clinton administration, state governments, the telecom industry, and newborn internet service provider (ISP) corporations like America Online.

Over the next quarter century, the Left would develop its own new methods of promoting ideas and movements using the web to subvert the longstanding censorship blackout maintained by mainstream print media. This development emerged through the use of four major publication platforms: blogging, streaming video, podcasting, and social networking media.

Blogging, a truncated form of “weblog,” utilized an extremely simple webpage architectural system to collate individual entries into a larger collection. This development offered a tremendous amount of flexibility and ingenuity to publishers. A generous handful of pre-existing Left print publications made a transition into the web domain, maintaining print versions mainly for older readers, while many others began fresh as web-only projects, including options like subscription premium content behind paywalls. The loss of paid advertising, the pitfall of lower revenue streams, affected leftwing publications less because of their greater dependence upon subscriptions and donations.

Podcasting, utilizing low-tech production methods and the MP3 audio file format, enabled anyone with a computer microphone and rudimentary audio editing programs to create a radio show with production values rivaling traditional broadcasters. Streaming videos, most predominant on YouTube, served a dual purpose. First, content creators gained a venue to showcase and exhibit their political education and propaganda videos, not to mention materials from earlier moments in worldwide radical history otherwise perceived as lost due to rarity and technological antiquation of recording methods. Second, as a result of the proliferation of cellular phone cameras, mass mobilizations and entire movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and #BlackLivesMatter/Movement, were catalyzed by such broadcasts. Social networking platforms served as a unifying thread that knit together these various forms of media into a digital ecosphere enabling tremendous political opportunities.

The singularly influential newer entry would surely be Jacobin, with a viewership estimated variously from the tens to low hundreds of thousands. Jacobin was launched in 2010 as a website and, soon after, also a print edition. Its creator was Bhaksar Sunkara, then the twenty-something son of two Trinidadian immigrants. Timed perfectly, Jacobin jumped into a relative vacuum for young socialistic on-line readers and oriented itself not to Left party members or known sympathizers but to a general public. Responding to the realities of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, the new publication found funding and support to expand staff and operations toward pamphlets, podcasts, and sister magazines in Italy, Germany, Brazil and the UK, where it took over a historic Left publication, Tribune.

Jacobin anticipated its destiny in another key sense. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2015-2016 precipitated the return of interest in “socialism” as a viable subject for the first time in several generations. Sunkara had been a reader of Michael Harrington and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) since his early twenties. He thus proved a perfect partner, in crucial ways, for a burgeoning DSA.

By way of contrast, the more politically moderate Dissent magazine had a relationship with DSA going back to the group’s pre-origin in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. Dissent continued in print form and with its own website also reached many among DSA, but especially the older generational cohort. The same age cohort, with markedly differing views, read In These Times, Monthly Review, Against the Current and New Politics, among others, each of these magazines developing their own websites. Jacobin rapidly acquired a cachet that others lacked, and even more, the numbers of readers and contributions far beyond any other entity on the Left. Within the specific vicinity of DSA, the Online University of the Left, a creation of former SDS leader Carl Davidson and others in the vicinity of the post-Communist Party Committees of Correspondence for Democratic Socialism, offered YouTube videos and other materials, in the spirit of Gramsci, to a largely DSA audience.

CounterPunch was the other new entry of considerable leftwing significance. Launched in 1994 by investigative reporter Ken Silverstein, a former intern for Alexander Coburn at the Nation, it was joined by Coburn and later by Jeffrey St. Clair, who became the editor in 1996 at the departure of Silverstein. CounterPunch editors aspired to join the heroic muckrakers of the past like the Appeal to Reason and fearless individuals like anarchist Edward Abbey, like Coburn and St. Clair, a fellow lover of wilderness. Cockburn, himself the son of a famed British Communist journalist and sometimes columnist for the Village Voice, died in 2012. Joshua Frank, an environmental muckraker, joined as managing editor while St. Clair became editor-in-chief.

Open to a very wide range of contributors, activists to academics, CounterPunch became especially strong on global issues, resisting all efforts at US global hegemony but also keen on the failings of liberalism, Democratic politicians in particular. By contrast to other web critics of US foreign policy, CounterPunch aimed from the Left rather than from a libertarian position. Unlike other leftwing publications, it was published in a distant region of California and reflected the sentiment of its surroundings. Silverstein, for his part, launched in 1999 a smaller and more culturally-oriented counterpart, Washington Babylon, a pun on Kenneth Anger’s famed expose volume, Hollywood Babylon.

Current Affairs, a website with a printed bi-monthly publication influenced by Marxist and anarchist traditions, also ranked high for its readership and impressive size of its paid staff. Influenced Jacobin, its contributors also revealed a keen interest in cultural subjects and administrative politics, especially matters of government policy. Current Affairs is known, especially in its print counterpart, for color illustrations, cartoons and comics. Most unusually, its home office is in New Orleans. Its editor-in-chief, Nathan J. Robinson, born in 1989, represented the youngest generation of editors on the Left.

Yes! Magazine and website, the most clearly “spiritual” or “new age” publication, published since 1996 from Bainbridge Island, Washington, treated social issues of various kinds, but especially environmental, racial and regional. It urged “positive” actions and frequently offers excerpts from new books of leftwing thinkers and artists.

Marxmail, the most unusual among all these, was actually a listserv, launched in 1998. After losing its home at the University of Utah due to a ransomware attack in 2020, it migrated to https://groups.io/g/marxmail. Created by former Trotskyist Lou Proyect, long active in support movements but also a noted film critic, marxmail links several thousand activists around the world through a continuing resource of articles, book reviews and general commentary. By contrast to Jacobin or Current Affairs, and notwithstanding the participation of young people, it belongs in a sense to the New Left generation, especially to veterans of Marxist parties. Proyect is also a successor to the Appeal to Reason’s editor, J.A. Wayland, as the “one hoss editor” going his own way, creating a genre altogether unique.

Several further smallish, on-line journals distinguished themselves by their generational connections but also by their attention to visual details. Their appearance was irregular and their political/editorial staff shifting as young people arrived and left the rough-hewn collectives. But they generated a sensibility.

Viewpoint Magazine, created by a circle of activists in the wake of Occupy, defined itself as a “research collective that publishes on the history and theory of class struggle….to reinvent Marxism for our time.” Which is to say: Viewpoint has a firm perspective on “class” as the central issue.

Commune, “a popular magazine for a new era of revolution,” emerged a few years later, notably in Oakland, insisting “we take our inspiration from the movements of our time….The answers are in the streets.” Its use of color in layout design was notable.

Others clearly on the left but outside of the institutional world of existing left magazines, include the podcast Ragblog, the descendant of Austin’s famed underground newspaper, The Rag; and the website Toward Freedom, originating in the Third World support movement of the 1950s. For decades, Toward Freedom headquartered in Burlington, Vermont.

Black Agenda Report, whose origins go back at least to 2006 when Glen Ford, son of an Irish American Communist mother and a leading figure in Black Commentator, formally launched the Report, has deeper roots and more significance within the world of podcasts. A former broadcaster syndicated as the lead in the “Black World Report” of the 1970s, later renamed “America’s Black Forum,” a nationally syndicated Black news show on commercial television, Ford made his name through controversy as well as reportage. The Black Agenda Report continued, more podcast than print or website in its significance. Glen Ford died in 2021. Justice Initiative, led by Heather Gray, was a series of web postings with heavy historical weight, drawing upon the best studies of the impacts of race and racism.

Leftwing or left leaning Latinx media include Alianza Americas, Futuro Media Group, Latino Justice (formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund) and Radio Biliingue.

Numerous complaints, not to mention slanderous accusations, have been made by liberals as well as conservatives against purportedly leftwing podcasts and podcasters. The leftwing label amply applies to Jacobin podcasts, but it would be problematic to characterize even the penetrating investigative podcasts, such as The Intercept or Deconstructed, in that fashion. Many chapters of DSA have occasional or regular podcasts as well. Podcasts by leftwing, approximately Marxist activists in the United States, include ROAR, the Majority Report, Cosmopad, Better Off Red, Revolutionary Left Radio, Eyes Left Podcast, Season of the Bitch, Dead Pundits Society, Super Politics, Fight the Podcast!, Left Anchor, Better Off Red, Zero Squared, Western Marxism and the controversial Chappo Traphouse. The individual podcasts of Richard Wolff, Doug Henwood and David Harvey were widely syndicated.