jacobin magazine

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http://jacobinmag.com/

know at least a few ilxors read this young leftist mag, and i'm curious to hear what everyone thinks. i'm a pretty huge fan. print articles are nice and long, thoroughly researched, rigorous, and well-written. it's got an optimistic voice for a radical mag, and positions itself both in opposition to ~neoliberalism~ and to other dominant voices on the left. contributors have included corey robin, nina power, and zizek but my favourite pieces tend to be written by the regular contributing members of the editorial staff, who seem to consist mostly of phd candidates and writers in their twenties. in particular i have liked mike beggs on economic theory, seth ackerman on feasible socialism, and the back & forth between alex gourevitch & max ajl on development & environmentalism (starts here, then here, then here, finally here)

admittedly, some of the content has at times made me cringe (partic some of the earlier stuff), and i could see some ilxors finding it too earnest or self-confident or, idk, naive. but that's actually one of my favourite things about it, that it doesn't adopt a too self-conscious or cynical stance, something they directly address in a recent critique of the baffler re-boot

interview with editor & founder bhaskar sunkara in the boston review

yeah I like this

I mean usually

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/

this guy is usually good

i keep meaning to write them about writing for them but never get around to it

i like some of the stuff they do but im uncertain about the general editorial tone - i guess its nice that its not cynically apocalyptic or knowingly bloggy but they kinda seem self-regarding, maybe?

they are intensely self-regarding

Even with limited resources Jacobin is simply better than all of our competitors — we’ve emerged as a unique and vital voice on the Left and we’d like to stick around to see our project through.

what would you pitch Lamp?

i wrote a really long and hateful response to charles murrays book last year that i wanted to publish somewhere it might be taken seriously - feel like that book in particular represents a lot of whats really poisonous in our culture rn and no one seemed to be savaging it thoroughly or thoughtfully enough but then i got ashamed and didnt and i mean really it only needs a simple graph to discredit the entire thing anyway

i also have an idea for a piece on 'systemic thinking and the left' that kinda folds into the research im working on

also a piece on guaranteed income policies

i remember that post

it was really good. would read any & all of those tho. fsr thought you were in med school or something?

no lol grad school

med school is a kind of grad school

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-soul-of-student-debt/

This is pretty good, and it uses pretty solid theoretical framework two reach conclusions that I completely agree with: (1) student debt must be made dischargeable in bankruptcy and (2) higher education must be made affordable again

eh that one is actually kinda sloppy tho the conclusions are more or less right

there are definitely, uh, blurry parts, but I like the concept that the finance and debt industries have demanded that individuals view themselves through a capitalist lens, where education is an individual "investment" rather than a social good, and where the failure to have a job that pays off your student debt is presumably the result of poor investment risk management or something.

read that last night, thought it was pretty tight what's sloppy about it iyo?

although reading about student debt enrages me to no end hard to gather the peace of mind to form an opinion

it's sloppy in that lines like:

"The social function of student debt is not to make us into serfs or indentured servants. It’s to teach us how to be investors and risk-takers, entrepreneurs who have taken on debt to finance our climb up the ladder of bourgeois success. The soul of student debt is not feudal, but capitalist through and through."

are just kinda nonsense. you can do this subject w/o 'the social function of student debt' etc. I do think its a pretty important subject but way better stuff has been written on it.

I'm not sure I even like jacobin I might just really like peter frase

http://jacobinmag.com/2011/09/the-conservative-leftist-and-the-radical-longshoreman/

hmmm idk, it sounds silly when u put it up there like that but i agree with that quote w/in the context of the article. whether or not it's perfectly true that's definitely the type of rhetoric used to justify student debt & used by lawyers/judges in those stories about people being refused bankruptcy

Maybe it's badly phrased but I think what he means to do is to show that our student debt problem is fundamentally tied up with the way we have come to view, or at least are supposed to now view, student debt -- it's an "investment" that you make, it's building your personal "capital" etc. This logic helps to justify (1) making tuition as high as the "market" can bear, and (2) blaming debtors for their failures (they simply made poor investment decisions or failed to properly manage their personal capital).

Of course, I'd have slightly less of a problem with that kind of thinking if it weren't being asked of 17 year olds who are given no guidance and even contradictory messages about how to go about their degrees.

see I totally agree w/ what you are saying and notice how you can phrase this stuff w/o resorting to gradschoolese

who's speaking gradschoolese?

there was something really good on the left addressing the future of the global workforce / technology but I can't find it. it was called pragmatic Utopianism or something like that. maybe I just dreamed it up or it was in another mag but I'm pretty sure it was jacobin.

the author is flopson, ilxors only speak it on Taylor swift threads

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/robots-and-liberalism/

reads more like eager college student to me than gradschoolese xp

I feel like there is something fundamental that I am missing about the argument that robots will put us all out of work. If we aren't working, and don't have wages with which to buy things, what will create the demand for all of the robot-produced goods?

I have a thread for this subject

ysi?

I am on zing it's called could your job be done by a powerful computer

hurting well, it doesn't have to be so extreme. in economics textbooks you assume that production is something like 2/3 labour 1/3 capital, in recent decades that's become 60 - 40 (by some estimates i read somewhere) which, if workers make their marginal product & owners of capital make rents, means a natural redistribution towards owners of capital

iatee u should read mike beggs piece i linked in the OP if u have not, really sound critique of pre-crisis economic theory

could your job be done by a powerful computer?

ya I read that a long time ago but ill read it again later tonight

anyway one thing is sure jacobin is like a million times better than the new inquiry

But if there's further redistribution toward capital, what do the capitalists do with all the capital? There's no point in redeploying it to produce even more things for which there's no demand, since no one can afford it, and the capitalists themselves can only consume so much. do they all just wind up sitting on giant piles of cash and playing financial games with each other?

already happening

true

i like jacobin, conceptually and also for the most part in fact, but they usually have one huge dud of an article per issue

like this was just absolute garbage. really stunningly bad + stupid

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/the-yacht-rock-counterrevolution/

btw part of the self-regard that ppl complain about is due to the need to be raising funds. they have to sell themselves as cool, new, unique, etc

xps hurting there wouldn't necessarily be any less output to be consumed tho, just less of it being consumed by workers

i thought their baffler critique was really... weird, too

they usually have one huge dud of an article per issue

― max, Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

what didn't you like about it?

i didnt like that article but then i guess i dont like unfunny jokes so its 'not for me'. i liked how much it seemed like a feature on early 00s p4kmedia tho

the bad ones tend to be the cultural ones

i thought this was interesting http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/yours-mine-but-not-ours/

also i didnt agree with this but i love good old school marxist/fanonist cultural criticism http://jacobinmag.com/2013/01/why-django-cant-revolt/

i dunno it just felt so unnecessary. the baffler is not so huge a cultural force, on the left or generally, that it needs a cover-article takedown

But did she need Kendzior's (or anyone's) permission to link to something Kendzior had, all on her own, entered into the public record? Absolutely not.

― Humorist (horse) (誤訳侮辱), Thursday, June 12, 2014 4:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think she needed it from a ~journalistic~ standpoint--but editorially jacobin is a magazine committed to the values of the left, and if uetricht had been doing his ideological diligence in editing that article he should have run such a potentially triggering inclusion by K imo

surely you mean "should not have"?

what value of the left is refraining from re-publishing a person's own public statement due to it being "potentially triggering"? what is "ideological" diligence? the protection of one's allies?

finding good left commentary on the internet is surprisingly hard, so i like jacobin ok even if they do make me roll my eyes sometimes (well, a lot). tried following some of their writers on twitter and had to stop because it was like 80 percent shit like this.

uetricht has said that he hadn't considered that the broadcast of that 1:1 tweet could result in an uptick of threats to K, and that had he considered it, he wouldn't have run it. i think he's right in that regard, and i think that decision, had it been made--to make an editorial choice based on putting the control of the narrative in a survivor's hands--is one that would have been driven by anti-sexist values.

writer unfollowed me bcz i made fun of her review in a tweet

:(

#classwar

nobody said there wouldn't be vanity in our revolution

I read this earlier and shared it without even realizing it'd been written by a guy whose show I produce.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/in-defense-of-the-ferguson-riots/

idk if we have a better generic thread for me to post this to? http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/

So far, so banal - this seems to be nothing more than a luminary of the left’s old guard hurling vile attacks at one of its young bloods. But what if this is a symptom of something bigger and more problematic, both at the journal Harris and Rosenfelt run, and within the left itself?

First though, let us examine what happened in more detail.

rolling let's not thread?

Just as the rapacity of global capitalism has created a surplus population of eastern India’s Adivasis, driving them into the arms of the Maoist Naxalite rebellion, so too did it create a surplus population of New York’s upper-middle and upper class humanities graduates. No longer able to slide into the usual pathways of academia, publishing, or academic publishing, the very real prospect of proletarianisation (or at least having to get a job that paid an hourly wage) left Rosenfelt and many others with the terrifying future of never having opportunities beyond dinner parties and similar to demonstrate that they had, in fact, read The Waste Land at university. Even more terrifying, the possibility that the public intellectual might die out entirely was growing increasingly concrete.

so too

haha yes that's a heckova "so too"

i cant figure out if its just that the left attracts damaged people, or that the internet attracts damaged people, or that the combination of the left and the internet makes regular people damaged

i think that "so too" is snarking tho?

HOOS did you ever meet MH? he was like self-appointed king of UMD activism

i met him once briefly at a thing, then i took twitter shots at him for a TNI piece about teacher's unions, so he blocked & unfriended me. lol.

lol

i had a couple conversations, we ran in similar circles but i never really wanted to be around him. forced himself to the front of literally every activist and/or anarchist thing on campus like it was his destiny. everything. apparently i mentioned him already itt as having an editorial in the paper every day. read creepy sex poetry at the weekly open mic.

also creeped on a friend in a really weird way that sort of paints him in a way in my head

forced himself to the front of literally every activist and/or anarchist thing on campus like it was his destiny

every campus has one or two of these dudes. ugh.

ok lol http://www.cafe.com/why-public-schools-are-the-real-prisons-by-cafes-new-millennial-columnist/

cafe.com is the best site there is

marshall harford iii otm tbh

haven't read the magazine but jacobin headlines have been making me roll my godamn eyes lately :-(

this was a masterpiece though, probably the only piketty criticism from the left written by someone who didn't stop paying attention to economics at cambridge capital controversies. they should suresh a weekly column a la krugman https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/capital-eats-the-world/

https://twitter.com/SaulWilliams/status/694998961623535616

this article is bad imo

also really long

For an open letter from Jacobin to Coates, I thought it was pretty innocous. This part though:

Throughout his writings, Coates rightly rejects the argument that deep inequality is due to the cultural pathology of the black poor. But he embraces another aspect of Cold War liberalism: the focus on institutional racism — a concept that roots racial inequality primarily in covert, systematized practices like redlining in the mortgage industry, property-tax funding structures for public education, the siting of undesirable or toxic land uses adjacent to black communities, and so on, rather than overt forms of anti-black violence and discrimination.

I don't think anyone who has read Between the World and Me could write that, and I'm not sure what to do with an open letter to Coates from someone who hasn't read that.

well, innocuous maybe but it's a whole broadside against his concerns w/ bernie sanders' refusal to take reparations seriously as a political concern

there's also this whole section which amounts to, "because black people also plundered black people, coates is wrong"

Yeah, it's just, I have such low expectations of the Jacobin I guess...

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/bosnian-war-nato-bombing-dayton-accords/

This from last summer is probably the nadir of this bullshit website

Coates' response to Johnson is pretty good: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/why-we-write/459909/

This is pathetic. The magazine publishes a report on the changing class base of the Democratic party, kinda interesting, pretty obvious, a change taking place all over the world. Then it gets to 2016, and this happens:

This attitude has contributed to the success of Bernie Sanders’s bid. Sanders has placed the issue of wealth inequality at the center of the Democratic Party’s agenda for the first time in generations. Still, while Sanders’s populist platform and stump speeches express support for organized labor, it is educated professionals (or aspiring professionals) — not blue- and pink-collar workers — who have mostly turned out at his rallies and donated to his campaign. [Editor’s note: Recent evidence suggests Sanders is attracting low-income voters in greater numbers.]

If you can't let your writers write measured criticism of a candidate, without editorial popping in with comments to the contrary, give it up.

jim, what don't you like about the bosnian war article? (not challenging you; just read it and legitimately curious about yr critique)

jacobin sez: meryl streep's speech "worst thing to happen since trump's election"

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/meryl-streep-speech-trump-golden-globes/

The tilt of her jaw, the lift of her nose like something out of an old portrait representing aristocratic Anglo-German inbreeding, the toss of that shiny blonde mane

mmmmmmmm

can't figure out what i like less about this magazine's name - that they named themselves after the architects of the Reign of Terror, or that in contrast to their revolutionary forbearers they're pretty staid

jim, what don't you like about the bosnian war article? (not challenging you; just read it and legitimately curious about yr critique)

― Mordy, Monday, February 8, 2016 8:45 AM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah, almost a year later i answer this question. classic leftist anti-nato whataboutery and muddying of the waters in the article that kind of boil my blood:

"While Serb soldiers are most to blame for the massacre, the Bosnian government also contributed to the tragedy. According to Swedish diplomat Carl Bildt, who served as the European Union mediator during the Bosnian War, Bosnian officials deliberately allowed Srebrenica to fall to the Serb military. In his memoirs, Bildt notes that Bosnian government forces assigned to protect Srebrenica were “not putting up any resistance. Later it was revealed that they had been ordered by the Sarajevo commanders not to defend Srebrenica.”

Bildt’s account is supported by military correspondent Tim Ripley, who provides copious evidence that the Bosnian government ceded the town to Serb forces, possibly as part of the Izetbegović government’s broader strategy to expose civilians to Serb attacks and garner sympathetic intervention.

Retrospective efforts to whitewash the actions of the Bosnian government, and Izetbegović in particular, have played an important role in establishing the Srebrenica massacre as a morally simple affair, with villains and heroes, thus retroactively justifying US military involvement in Bosnia. Equally important, widespread mischaracterizations of the massacre have served to portray interventions in Bosnia and elsewhere as acts of benevolence."

First off I would suggest that it's somewhat controversial of a take to say that the Bosnian government let Srebrenica fall because they wanted their people to be massacred for propaganda purposes. The mainstream narrative usually has it that the Bosnians were on the back foot in the war and retreated to avoid further military losses and to consolidate the territory they had under firm control rather than protect enclaves. e.g. this from the NYT obit of Izetbegovic:

"Determined to cut losses and establish contiguous territory in a war that was now going against them, Gen. Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb forces overran the eastern Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa in the summer of 1995."

Now even if we accept that Izetbegovic was playing 12 dimensional chess and allowing the Bosnian populace to be terrorized and abused by the Bosnian Serb forces it does not necessarily follow that he could have predicted that the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War was going to happen. Neither is allowing something to happen as bad as carrying out the bad thing (imo). I'm generally sympathetic to looking at the Yugoslav wars through a non-binary prism - shit was definitely murky. But imo to try and cast Srebrenica as a "both sides are as bad as each other" sort of thing is obtuse and/or disingenuous.

Subbed 2 Catalyst, their new journal thing.

is it supposed to be more academic stuff?

recent piece i enjoyed:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/after-piketty-capital-twenty-first-century-naidu

got catalyst no 1. the first two articles (lead editorial and the sociology one) are dire and full of jargon to the point of near unreadability, and also not particularly new or interesting in any sense if yr familiar with the sort of traditions they come out of. there are some decent pieces in the rest of it, at least in the sense they're readable. not really sure what exact territory its trying to stake out when monthly review, new left review, etc. are still kicking around, except maybe they think that more people will read those sorts of articles if they're yoked to the jacobin brand

but not if they're written like those first two articles, nobody will

(also the capsule summaries in front of each article are some condescending cliffs notes nonsense that remind me of the "teachers guides" for reading comprehension exercises in sixth grade)

jacobin writer: the fact that elizabeth warren has such awesome and detailed policies is actually evidence of her weakness as a candidate, and here's why

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-policy-bernie-sanders-presidential-primary

I don't disagree with part of the central thesis, that Warren lacks Sanders' mass appeal and is trying on a different strategy, but the notion that it's a desperate attempt to mask a lack of support or w/ever is needlessly mean (and unfounded)

trying on taking

well, Sanders' mass appeal depends on his 2016 run. I've seen her work a room and a crowd as adeptly as he. After all, it's only April 2019.

Here's an article calling Sanders vs Warren another version of....Debs vs Brandeis.

warren is promoting a positive vision sanders is promoting a reactionary one that's why the radicals prefer him - negation will always sound more dramatic and exciting than reform.

It’s almost as if they complete each other and would be terrific running mates.

to sander's credit (and what is oft pointed out) his rhetoric sounds more revolutionary than it is and it's certainly possible to marry pragmatic structural revamps w/ the glossy veneer of "revolution" but it is funny that jacobin types seem to want to play this dichotomy on both sides - when convenient bernie is offering the more "radical" approach and when he's critiqued for being too radical he's merely a european style social democrat. to me the lacuna between the two positions is cause for concern whereas warren is presenting (politically) a coherent package.

Put bluntly, Warren is turning her campaign into a policy factory because she’s had trouble inspiring people with a broad-strokes political vision the way her closest ideological competitor, Bernie Sanders, has.

iow, she hasn't generated enough popular enthusiasm to rise in the polls, yet. you can figure that part out by looking at the polls.

But we shouldn’t see her policy blitz purely as a sign of strength. It may actually be an SOS message, a panicked response to her campaign’s shortcomings in the field of mass politics.

(my bolding)

To say that these policies are being delineated because she thinks this will help her generate more enthusiasm is just the author drawing that rather simplified conclusion and asserting it as true. Presidential campaigns are complex and multiform and notoriously difficult to win. This article is the usual weak-assed punditry as most campaign reporting. Where it is right, it is stating the obvious. Where it is adventurous, it is empty speculation. Call back in a year.