Very sleek stuff, but reading the analysis gives bad vibes - what is their deal? Trot stuff? Can someone give me a good workup (I’m lazy)?
They let all kinds of leftists write stuff, but the overall vibe is IMO more academic-brained bad rather than Trotskyist, trot vibes are a little bit funnier.
They let some dipshit write an article titled “Why socialists shouldn’t abandon liberalism” or something lmao
Yeah! The vibe is so weird, I’ll be looking at an elegant graph demonstrating income inequality and the next page is an article like that
It’s academia brained “acceptable” socialist rhetoric. They are allowed to point out iniquities but when it comes to discussing What Is To Be Done they limit themselves to liberal electoral politics and cannot offer anything revolutionary because when it comes down to it they are almost entirely wealthy intelligentsia afraid of risking their cushy ivory tower positions.
It’s all Trots right?
Bhaskar Sunkara created Jacobin specifically with the intent of making Marxism more academic and aimed at the intelligentsia.
If you think that sounds like an attempt to sequester Marxism away from the proletariat by concealing it with obscurantist language and focusing on topics that are divorced from the concerns of the working class in order to strip all revolutionary potential from Marxism, well have you ever considered that maybe Kautsky was right all along?
Bhaskar Sunkara created Jacobin specifically with the intent of making Marxism more academic and aimed at the intelligentsia.
Menshevism then
is that true? it’s really not a very highbrow publication, and it’s not like marxists need help being obscurantist
There was a quote from him about Jacobin wanting to be highbrow from a long time ago. I have probably read two Jacobin articles since the early days of the publication so I’m not sure where it’s at today tbh.
Sunkara is a curious figure because he either changes his position a lot, he says what his interviewer wants to hear, or he is intentionally concealing what his goals are. He vacillates from being a loyal opposition Democrat supporter to a revolutionary communist to a person who extols the virtues of social democracy and European welfare capitalism. It could be that he’s just flattering whoever hosts him or that he’s trying to sugarcoat his words so that his message is well-received by the audience of the publication in question idk. I haven’t bothered to look closely enough to try getting a decent read on the guy.
Maybe obscurantist was a poor choice of words on my part but in that old quote he was saying that he wanted to make a socialist publication that was slick and intellectual. So if I gave the impression that he said he wanted to rival French philosophers or the Frankfurt School for their obscuranism then that’s my bad.
Jacobin is like the DSA, all over the place and often quite shit
Even the other trots dunk on them, e.g. WSWS - Jacobin magazine embraces Trump administration’s murderous “herd immunity” policy
As long as they’re not talking about how communist AES is WSWS has fairly good takes.
WSWS published a series of articles defending Roman Polanski and a bunch of stuff against #MeToo. I don’t think they have good takes outside AES either. I believe that they think feminism is “identity politics” and a distraction from revolution, which will somehow unify the whole working class without addressing the special problems within its constituent blocs. Common L.
No, worse, Kautskytes: https://jacobin.com/2019/04/karl-kautsky-democratic-socialism-elections-rupture
