Jacobin (magazine)
 | |
 Issue 11/12 (fall 2013) | |
| Publisher | Remeike Forbes |
|---|---|
| Categories | Politics, culture |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Paid circulation | 75,000[1] |
| Unpaid circulation | >3 million (online monthly)[1] |
| Founder | Bhaskar Sunkara |
| First issue | 2010 |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | New York |
| Language | English |
| Website | jacobin |
| ISSN | 2158-2602 |
| OCLC | 677928766 |
| This article is part of a series on |
| Socialism in the United States |
|---|
 |
Jacobin is an American socialist magazine based in New York. As of 2023,[update] the magazine reported a paid print circulation of 75,000 and over 3 million monthly online visitors.[1]
History and overview
[edit]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]
Title and logo
[edit]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
[edit]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
[edit]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]
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.[15] In an October 2013 article for Tablet, Michelle Goldberg discussed Jacobin as part of a revival of interest in Marxism among young intellectuals.[16] 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".[17]
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". He also noted several features of the publication's editorial stance, namely its rejection of anti-communism; its skepticism regarding the possibility of the Democratic Party being transformed into a social-democratic movement through internal pressure, advocating instead the formation of a mass-based independent labor party; criticism of the parties of the Socialist International, which they argue have been responsible for imposing neoliberal austerity policies; and a conviction that the Nordic model of social democracy is ultimately not viable and that the only alternative to capitalism would be for militant labor and socialist movements to struggle to replace capitalism with socialism.[18]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c "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.
- ^ "This is what you need to know". Bookforum. September 28, 2010. Archived from the original on March 20, 2012. Retrieved April 2, 2011.
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b c 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.
- ^ "The ABCs of Jacobin". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved May 28, 2023.
- ^ "About Page". Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. Archived from the original on June 19, 2020. Retrieved June 25, 2020.
- ^ 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) - ^ 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.
- ^ Forbes, Remeike (Spring 2012). "The Black Jacobin. Our visual identity". Jacobin. Archived from the original on December 30, 2017. Retrieved December 29, 2017.
- ^ a b 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. - ^ a b 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Creegan, Jim (March 22, 2018). "Walking the Tightrope". Weekly Worker. Archived from the original on April 25, 2020. Retrieved March 26, 2018.
Further reading
[edit]- Arrieta-Kenna, Ruairí (December 8, 2019). "How the Cool Kids of the Left Turned on Elizabeth Warren". Politico. Archived from the original on December 10, 2019. Retrieved December 10, 2019.
External links
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