jacobin magazine

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

the one in the new issue about going to parties and dreading having to talk about working in design might have been awful but i only read half of the first page

like, if frase wants to respond to franks OWS thing he should just do that

you can do this subject w/o 'the social function of student debt' etc.

sure but not if you're attempting to fold it into a 'larger critque' which i think is worth doing

the rhetoric of individualism is a plague

that's true but it's just a subject that needs someone better to do its larger critique. also it's lazy wrt addressing the causes of cost escalation etc. it's just a more complex subject than the author would like to believe.

xp he did though, but i guess you mean there was too much positioning? this was the best part imo

For all its mordant criticism of cultural studies, the Baffler was more in sync with its time than it liked to admit. It was in fact deeply postmodern, not in its explicit allegiances but in the way it partook of a certain cultural weather of the sort theorized by Fredric Jameson. The penchant for interpreting texts — seen in Frank’s privileging of books about Occupy over Occupy participants — mirrors the linguistic turn in academia.

*xps max

right he did but then why spend six paragraphs praising that stupid sex house piece and brag about albini or whatever? THAT was self serving for no real reason

i guess its sort of charming as an old-fashioned meaningless intra-left squabble but i had a very hard time getting through it

and giving props to gawker

i mean yeah the whole thing was basically: they are a bunch of cynical 90's dudes unfit for these times; cancel your baffler subscrip and gives us $$$ maybe it was shameless but i liked it

haha i dont want to be a subscriber to any magazine that will praise me

lol

http://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/our-fiscal-cliff/

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

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

― max, Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:58 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

argh yes! hated this.

in fact I remember getting into a thing in the comments thread with the author I think, but now I don't see the comments

reads more like eager college student to me than gradschoolese xp

― flopson, Tuesday, January 15, 2013 6:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol there was a guy at my school who would show up several times per week in the editorial section of our newspaper, got a job at jacobin very quickly after graduating

'job'

really enjoying my jacobin subscription

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.