Jacobin (magazine)

Based on Wikipedia: Jacobin (magazine)

The Magazine That Made Socialism Cool Again

In 2010, a twenty-one-year-old college student launched a magazine from his dorm room with an audacious goal: to do for the American left what William F. Buckley's National Review had done for the conservative movement decades earlier. That student was Bhaskar Sunkara, and his magazine was Jacobin.

The ambition bordered on delusion. Here was a kid barely old enough to drink, claiming he could build an intellectual infrastructure for democratic socialism in a country where "socialist" was essentially a slur. The Cold War had ended only two decades prior. American politics had drifted so far rightward that even mild social democratic proposals—universal healthcare, stronger unions, higher minimum wages—were routinely dismissed as radical.

And yet.

By 2023, Jacobin had grown to 75,000 paid print subscribers and was drawing over three million monthly visitors to its website. The Columbia Journalism Review called it "the most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade." Noam Chomsky, the legendary linguist and political critic, praised it as "a bright light in dark times."

How did a socialist magazine achieve mainstream relevance in twenty-first century America? The answer involves a senator from Vermont, a franchise model borrowed from fast food restaurants, and an eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary.

A Name That Requires Explanation

Let's start with that unusual name. When most Americans hear "Jacobin," they think—if they think anything at all—of the radical faction during the French Revolution. The original Jacobins, named after the monastery where they met, became synonymous with revolutionary terror. Maximilien Robespierre, their most famous leader, sent thousands to the guillotine before eventually losing his own head to the same device.

But Sunkara didn't name his magazine after those Jacobins.

The name comes from a 1938 book called "The Black Jacobins" by C.L.R. James, a Trinidadian historian and Marxist intellectual. James's book tells the story of the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in history that led to the founding of an independent nation. James argued that the enslaved Haitians, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, embodied the ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—more purely than the French revolutionaries themselves.

Think about that claim for a moment. The people who actually wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, who stormed the Bastille, who executed the king—they were less committed to revolutionary ideals than the enslaved people who had never set foot in Paris.

James's argument was deliberately provocative. The French Revolution proclaimed universal human rights while France maintained one of the most brutal slave economies in the Caribbean. When enslaved Haitians took those revolutionary slogans literally and demanded their own freedom, France sent armies to crush them. The Haitian revolutionaries won anyway, defeating Napoleon's forces and establishing the first free Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

By naming his magazine Jacobin, Sunkara was making a statement about who gets to claim the revolutionary tradition. Not the European theorists who wrote elegant proclamations while profiting from slavery, but the oppressed people who actually lived out those principles.

The National Review Strategy

Sunkara was explicit about his model from the beginning. He wanted to do for socialism what National Review had done for conservatism in the 1950s.

This requires some historical context. When William F. Buckley founded National Review in 1955, American conservatism was a mess. There were libertarians who wanted to shrink government, traditionalists who wanted to preserve social hierarchies, anti-communists focused almost exclusively on foreign policy, and Southern segregationists defending Jim Crow. These groups had little in common and frequently attacked each other.

Buckley's genius was creating a publication that could hold all these factions together. National Review gave conservatives a shared vocabulary, a common intellectual foundation, and a sense of belonging to a coherent movement. It also read them out of the movement—Buckley famously purged the John Birch Society and other groups he considered too extreme or embarrassing.

Over the following decades, this intellectual infrastructure helped transform conservatism from a marginal, fragmented ideology into the dominant force in American politics. Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 was, in many ways, the culmination of what Buckley had started.

Sunkara saw the American left in 2010 as similarly fragmented and intellectually adrift. There were social democrats who wanted to reform capitalism, democratic socialists who wanted to replace it, Marxists of various stripes arguing about hundred-year-old theoretical disputes, and liberals who weren't sure they wanted to be associated with any of these groups. They lacked a shared publication that could "cohere people around a set of ideas, and interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas."

Jacobin would be that publication.

The Bernie Effect

For the first five years, Jacobin grew slowly but steadily. It attracted a small, devoted readership of academics, activists, and politically engaged young people. The writing was smart and accessible—a rare combination in leftist publications, which had a tendency toward either dry academic jargon or simplistic sloganeering.

Then Bernie Sanders ran for president.

Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who had spent decades identifying as a democratic socialist, launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2015. Almost nobody took him seriously at first. He was seventy-four years old, disheveled, prone to shouting, and running against Hillary Clinton, who had essentially been crowned the Democratic nominee years in advance.

But something strange happened. Sanders started drawing enormous crowds. His message—Medicare for All, free college tuition, breaking up big banks, getting money out of politics—resonated with millions of Americans, especially young people. He didn't win the nomination, but he came far closer than anyone predicted and fundamentally shifted the terms of debate within the Democratic Party.

For Jacobin, the Sanders campaign was rocket fuel. Subscriptions tripled from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 by early 2017. The magazine wasn't just covering the resurgence of American socialism—it was helping to shape it. Many of its writers were actively involved in the Sanders campaign and the broader movement it catalyzed.

Donald Trump's election in November 2016 accelerated the trend further. In the two months after Trump won, Jacobin added 16,000 new subscribers. For many liberals, Trump's victory was proof that something had gone fundamentally wrong with American politics—that the centrist approach wasn't working. They were looking for alternatives, and Jacobin was there to offer one.

Going International

By 2018, Jacobin had become successful enough to expand internationally. But how do you export a magazine? Sunkara's solution was characteristically pragmatic.

He described it as "a classic franchise model"—the same approach that allows McDonald's to operate restaurants around the world. The parent publication provides editorial advice and some publishing infrastructure. In exchange, it takes a small percentage of revenue. But the franchisees—in this case, socialist magazines in other countries—operate with significant autonomy.

The first international edition was Jacobin Italia, launched in November 2018. Since then, editions have appeared in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Greece, and the Netherlands. Each adapts the Jacobin formula to local conditions while maintaining the magazine's overall approach: accessible writing, professional design, and a commitment to democratic socialist politics.

This franchise model is unusual for political magazines, which tend to be either purely national or run as centralized international operations. But it reflects Jacobin's broader philosophy. Socialism, in this view, isn't a rigid ideology handed down from above. It's a set of principles and analytical tools that can be applied differently in different contexts.

What Kind of Socialism?

This raises an important question: what exactly does Jacobin believe? The magazine has been variously described as democratic socialist, socialist, and Marxist. These terms overlap but aren't identical.

Socialism, at its broadest, refers to economic systems where the means of production—factories, farmland, major industries—are owned or controlled collectively rather than by private individuals. This can take many forms: government ownership, worker cooperatives, community land trusts, or various hybrids.

Marxism adds a specific theoretical framework. It analyzes society in terms of class conflict between those who own capital and those who work for wages. It predicts that capitalism will eventually give way to socialism, either through gradual evolution or revolutionary rupture. And it emphasizes the importance of understanding economic structures as the foundation of political and cultural life.

Democratic socialism insists that whatever socialism looks like, it must be achieved and maintained through democratic means. This distinguishes it from the authoritarian variants that dominated the twentieth century—the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and their satellites—where nominally socialist economies were controlled by unaccountable party bureaucracies.

Jacobin's own "Essential Guide," published in 2023, states that "one of Jacobin's primary goals from the beginning has been to popularize the idea of democratic socialism." The emphasis on democracy is crucial. Jacobin's socialism is emphatically not about recreating the Soviet model.

But the magazine's actual ideological content is deliberately ecumenical—meaning it welcomes a range of perspectives within the broad socialist tradition. As Dylan Matthews wrote in Vox in 2016, Jacobin is a space where "social democrats, democratic socialists, Trotskyists, council communists, Chavistas, and even the odd liberal can coexist."

The Intellectual Influences

In a 2014 interview, Sunkara named several intellectual influences on the magazine. These provide a useful map of where Jacobin fits in the complicated landscape of socialist thought.

First, Michael Harrington, whom Sunkara called "very underrated as a popularizer of Marxist thought." Harrington was an American socialist who founded the Democratic Socialists of America (the organization that would later grow enormously in the Sanders era). His 1962 book "The Other America" helped inspire Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Harrington believed socialists should work within the Democratic Party to push it leftward—a strategy that remains controversial on the left.

Second, Ralph Miliband and his circle. Miliband was a Belgian-born British Marxist (and father of two future British politicians) who wrote influential analyses of how the state functions under capitalism. He represented a tradition influenced by Trotskyism—the variant of Marxism associated with Leon Trotsky, who lost a power struggle with Stalin and spent his remaining years criticizing the Soviet Union from the left—without fully embracing its organizational forms.

Third, thinkers in the Eurocommunist tradition. Eurocommunism emerged in the 1970s when Western European communist parties began distancing themselves from the Soviet Union and embracing parliamentary democracy. They argued that socialism in advanced capitalist countries would look very different from socialism in Russia or China.

Finally, "Second International radicals" including Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky. The Second International was a federation of socialist parties that existed from 1889 to 1916. Lenin and Kautsky represented opposite poles of this organization—Lenin eventually led the Russian Revolution while Kautsky became a critic of Bolshevik methods—but both worked within its framework.

Some Jacobin writers, including Ben Burgis, follow analytical Marxism, an approach that uses the tools of Anglo-American analytic philosophy to reconstruct and defend Marxist claims. This contrasts with the more continental, Hegelian style of Marxism that remains common in European academia.

The Academic Companion: Catalyst

In 2017, Jacobin launched a companion publication called Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy. Where Jacobin aims for accessibility and popular appeal, Catalyst is unabashedly academic. It publishes peer-reviewed articles—meaning each submission is evaluated by experts in the field before publication—on left-wing politics, capitalism, and Marxist theory.

The journal was a collaboration between Sunkara and two established Marxist academics: Vivek Chibber and Robert Brenner, both professors with extensive publication records. Chibber and Brenner handled editorial decisions while Jacobin provided design, production, and distribution.

The motivation was partly generational. Chibber and Brenner believed there was a gap in left-wing intellectual production. The previous generation of Marxist academics—associated with the New Left of the 1960s—were aging out. Younger scholars had emerged, but there wasn't a dedicated venue for the kind of rigorous theoretical work they wanted to produce. Catalyst would address this gap while connecting academic analysis to the broader readership that Jacobin had cultivated.

As of 2022, Catalyst claims about 7,500 subscribers—much smaller than Jacobin itself, but substantial for a specialized academic journal.

The Criticisms

No successful publication escapes criticism, and Jacobin has attracted plenty from across the political spectrum.

From the right and center, critics have accused the magazine of softpedaling the crimes of communist regimes. Jonathan Chait, a prominent liberal columnist, argued in 2016 that Jacobin writers tend to downplay or excuse repressive actions by Marxist governments under leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. This is a serious charge. The death tolls of twentieth-century communist regimes—through famines, purges, gulags, and political violence—are estimated in the tens of millions.

Jacobin's defenders would note that the magazine's explicit commitment to democratic socialism is precisely a rejection of those authoritarian models. But critics argue that some writers are too willing to rationalize past horrors or engage in "whataboutism"—deflecting criticism of communist abuses by pointing to capitalist ones.

From the left, the criticisms are different and sometimes contradictory.

Jason E. Smith, writing in The Brooklyn Rail, argued that Jacobin promotes "a technocratic and nostalgic version of social democracy" rooted in outdated policies. He criticized the magazine's emphasis on full employment as disconnected from what contemporary social movements actually want: direct democracy, wealth redistribution, and abolishing police and prisons. In Smith's view, Jacobin is too moderate, too focused on policy wonkery, and too willing to work within existing institutions.

Uday Jain, writing for New Socialist, offered a different critique: that Jacobin prioritizes class over other forms of oppression like race and gender. This argument comes from the tradition of intersectionality—the idea that different systems of oppression (capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy) are interconnected and cannot be addressed in isolation. Jain contended that Jacobin's class-first approach marginalizes Black feminists and other scholars who emphasize these interconnections.

Meanwhile, Sohrab Ahmari, writing from a socially conservative position, criticized Jacobin for the opposite reason—focusing too much on cultural liberalism and identity politics at the expense of economic issues. And the Trotskyist publication Left Voice accused the magazine of being too closely aligned with the Democratic Party, prioritizing electoral strategy over genuine socialist transformation.

These contradictory criticisms—too focused on class, too focused on identity; too radical, too moderate; too willing to work with Democrats, not willing enough—might actually validate Jacobin's ecumenical approach. The magazine seems to occupy a space that draws fire from all directions, which may be exactly where Sunkara wanted it.

The Democratic Socialists of America Connection

One criticism deserves special attention because it points to something important about Jacobin's role in American politics.

Jim Creegan, writing in the Weekly Worker in 2018, described Jacobin as "the closest thing to a flagship publication of the DSA left." The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and it grew enormously during and after the Sanders campaigns—from about 5,000 members in 2015 to over 90,000 at its peak.

Many Jacobin editors and writers are DSA members. The magazine's political strategy—pushing the Democratic Party leftward rather than building a separate socialist party—aligns with DSA's approach. When figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member, won high-profile elections, Jacobin celebrated and analyzed these victories.

This close relationship has both strengthened and constrained the magazine. It provides access to a mass movement and keeps Jacobin relevant to real political struggles. But it also ties the publication to the fortunes of a particular organization and strategy. If DSA's approach fails, or if the organization fractures, Jacobin will be affected.

The Bigger Picture

What does Jacobin's success tell us about American politics?

The most obvious lesson is that there's more appetite for left-wing ideas than many observers assumed. For decades, mainstream political commentary treated socialism as a dead letter—an ideology that had been definitively refuted by the fall of the Soviet Union and the triumph of market capitalism. Jacobin's growth suggests this obituary was premature.

But it's worth being precise about what kind of socialism is gaining ground. Jacobin's democratic socialism is quite different from the state socialism of the twentieth century. It emphasizes democracy, pluralism, and individual freedom. It's more concerned with expanding social programs and worker power than with nationalizing every industry. In many ways, it's closer to the social democratic parties that built the welfare states of Western Europe than to anything that existed in the Soviet bloc.

Whether this represents a genuine socialist alternative or just a more ambitious version of liberalism is itself a contested question on the left. Some critics argue that democratic socialism without a path to actually replacing capitalism is just social democracy with better marketing. Others counter that building majority support for ambitious reforms is the necessary first step toward more fundamental transformation.

Jacobin has thrived precisely by avoiding definitive answers to these questions. It provides a forum where different tendencies can argue, a shared vocabulary for discussing alternatives to capitalism, and—perhaps most importantly—a signal that these discussions are happening and that they matter.

In a media landscape dominated by horse-race political coverage and culture war clickbait, that alone is worth something.