Monday, May 25, 2020
The many coronavirus conspiracy theories
By Jon Allsop, CJR MAY 15, 2020
ON FEBRUARY 2, more than a month before the World Health Organization deemed the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, it declared that the virus had led to a “massive infodemic.” WHO observed “an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” A few months later, the infodemic has only intensified. Conspiracy theories are sloshing around the internet, alleging, among other wild claims, that China deliberately engineered the virus in a lab, that the US military implanted the virus in China, that Bill Gates wants to use vaccination to microchip the world’s population, and that the virus is spreading via 5G technology. Often, right-wing media outlets have boosted the signal; last week, for example, One America News Network, an outlet beloved of Trump, implicated Gates, George Soros, and the Clintons in a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control.” Sometimes, the White House has been the booster. We all remember bleachgate.
Early this month, a viral YouTube video brought some of these strands together. The video—a clip from a “documentary” called Plandemic—starred Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who claims, among other things, that wearing a face mask can actively make you sick, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suppressed her work on the harms of vaccines. (There is zero evidence for any of this.) The video was promoted aggressively by anti-vaccination activists and by adherents of QAnon, a convoluted deep-state conspiracy theory; the Epoch Times, a right-wing media outlet with ties to Falun Gong, also boosted Mikovits’s message. This week, Davey Alba, of the New York Times, reported that mentions of Mikovits on social media and TV have “spiked to as high as 14,000 a day.” Facebook and YouTube eventually removed the video, but not before it reached millions of users. Erin Gallagher, a social-media researcher who charted the video’s spread, concluded that “both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.” According to Anna Merlan, of VICE, Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube and Google staffer who now has ties to QAnon and anti-vaxxers, helped orchestrate the video’s virality.
ICYMI: The last days of the Cleveland Plain Dealer newsroom
The Mikovits video reached at least eight million people, and it may only be a small taste of conspiracies to come. Kevin Roose, who covers technology for the Times, writes that he was watching the clip from Plandemic when a “terrifying thought” struck him: “What if we get a COVID-19 vaccine and half the country refuses to take it?” Roose sees a number of reasons why a future COVID vaccine could play into the hands of propagandists—it’ll likely have been fast-tracked, adding rocket fuel to existing vaccine-safety fears; it’ll likely be mandatory, at least for certain groups, boosting anger about perceived government overreach; and anti-vaxx boogeymen, including Gates and the WHO, may end up being closely involved in its development. The anti-vax movement, Roose writes, is highly organized and media savvy. By contrast, the messaging of authoritative official health sources can be clunky and poorly suited to online discourse. As Renée DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory, wrote in a recent column for The Atlantic, “All too often, the people responsible for protecting the public do not appear to understand how information moves in the internet era.”
The pandemic is particularly fertile ground for conspiracists. There is not, as yet, an authoritative, established scientific consensus about the virus and its spread, leaving wide informational gaps for nonsense to fill. And the fact that the coronavirus is, as I wrote in March, an “everything story,” affecting every single aspect of our lives, lends itself conveniently to a conspiracist’s habit of thinking in terms of sweeping theories with unifying explanatory power. Yesterday, The Atlantic launched “Shadowland,” a series of pieces, on themes broader than the coronavirus, examining America’s vulnerability to paranoid thinking. In an introductory note, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes that “the conspiracy theorists are winning.” That, he believes, poses an “existential threat.”
Deep, insightful coverage of our poisoned information ecosystem is welcome. Still, conspiracy theories are highly fraught terrain for the reality-based press. By debunking theories, we risk reinforcing their appeal, and furthering their spread. “Throw a fact check at a subversion myth, and it will transform into proof for believers,” Whitney Phillips wrote for this magazine’s recent disinformation-themed issue. “After all, trying to disprove the existence of a Satanic plot is exactly what a Satanist would do.” Journalists must decide, on a case-by-case basis and in real time, which theories are widespread—and harmful—enough to demand rectification, and the best way to go about doing that. It isn’t an easy task. It’s especially hard when lives are on the line.
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Below, more on the coronavirus:
Bright lines: Yesterday, Rick Bright, a whistleblower who says he was ousted from a top federal health job for pushing back on Trump’s advocacy of unproven coronavirus drugs, testified (in person) before a House subcommittee. Bright warned lawmakers that the country faces “the darkest winter in modern history” if it doesn’t improve its handling of the pandemic. Addressing reporters at the White House, Trump and his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, blasted Bright, and boasted about the administration’s preparedness.
Burr caught first?: On Wednesday, the LA Times reported that the FBI seized the cellphone of Senator Richard Burr, a Republican of North Carolina; the bureau is investigating claims that Burr, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, traded stocks based on private briefings he received before the pandemic hammered the US economy. Burr insists that he acted based on publicly available news reports out of Asia; still, yesterday, he stepped back as Senate Intelligence chair while the FBI investigates him. At least three other senators—James Inhofe, Kelly Loeffler, and Dianne Feinstein—have also faced scrutiny related to recent stock trades. (All three deny wrongdoing.) In March, CJR’s Lauren Harris spoke with Robert Faturechi, of ProPublica, and Lachlan Markay, of the Daily Beast, who were first to report on the trades of Burr and Loeffler, respectively.
Layoffs and closures: Yesterday, citing the economic pressure of the pandemic, Quartz laid off around 80 staffers, slashed executive pay, and moved to permanently shutter its physical offices in London, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Washington, DC. (The site is also trying to reduce its rent in New York.) The union representing Quartz staffers said the layoffs had an “outsized impact” on its members. Elsewhere, Matt McKinney reports, for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, that the pandemic has caused a wave of closures among Minnesota newspapers. Owen Van Essen, a media-industry analyst, told McKinney that he expects up to 300 weeklies nationwide to close before the year is out.
A “devastating” impact: For the Washington Post, Ben Strauss reports that in the absence of live sports, sports reporters have been hit particularly hard by layoffs and furloughs of late. Many fear that the pandemic will permanently reshape the sports beat. “There are more important things going on in the world, but I think we’re f—–, honestly,” Paul Sullivan, a sports columnist at the Chicago Tribune, who is about to go on furlough, told Strauss. “Whether sports come back or not.”
Writing on the wall: For CJR, Lauren Markham reports that newsrooms based in California were better prepared than most for the disruption caused by the pandemic, because of the state’s history of earthquakes, wildfires, and power outages. “Most California newsrooms have some form of disaster plan at the ready,” Markham writes. (ICYMI, Markham profiled Lizzie Johnson, a “fire reporter” at the San Francisco Chronicle, for CJR’s recent magazine on coverage of the climate crisis.)
Strike a pose: Yesterday, Amazon announced that it’s collaborating with Vogue and the Council of Fashion Designers of America to launch “Common Threads: Vogue x Amazon Fashion,” a storefront that will aim to help independent high-end designers weather the downturn caused by the pandemic. Vanessa Friedman, of the Times, has more.
In brief: In Russia, Meduza, an independent news site, reports that officials have “fiddled statistics” to keep the country’s COVID-19 death count down. In Brazil, volunteer journalists are working to memorialize victims of the virus via a collaborative project called “Inumeráveis” (“Innumerable”); the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has more. The Atlantic, which has been lauded for its coronavirus coverage, added 70,000 new subscribers across March and April. And yesterday, Reuters reportedly hosted a “virtual singalong” for its employees.
Other notable stories:
For CJR, Howard Polskin, a watcher of right-wing media trends, explores how the Washington Examiner became a “traffic monster.” Hugo Gurdon, the site’s editorial director, has embraced “a model of the newsroom as an editorial factory,” Polskin reports. “Leaving aside its robust opinion section, the rest of the Examiner website is peppered with lots of short, easy-to-digest, fast-to-produce news stories.”
Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo reports that staffers at BuzzFeed increasingly feel animosity toward the Times; one BuzzFeed editor said it feels like the Times is “trying to murder us.” “BuzzFeed feels like the Times has a knack for rereporting certain stories and then publishing similar features of their own with minimal or no credit,” Pompeo writes. The Times has also poached several BuzzFeed stars, including its former editor, Ben Smith.
For the LA Times, Stephen Battaglio profiles Soledad O’Brien, the former CNN anchor who likes to excoriate other journalists on Twitter. O’Brien “believes her tweets are a service in an era when news is often interpreted through a partisan prism,” Battaglio writes. For O’Brien, “journalistic cowardice is a crime and should be pointed out.”
In 2018, authorities in Iran arrested Hassan Fathi, a newspaper columnist, after he gave an interview to the BBC. Last week, he began an 18-month term in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. The Committee to Protect Journalists is calling for Fathi’s release, noting that the spread of COVID-19 makes his imprisonment a “potential death sentence.”
And on Tuesday, at 11am Eastern, Covering Climate Now, the climate-journalism initiative led by CJR and The Nation, will host a webinar focused on climate coverage amid the pandemic. If you’d like to take part, you can register at this link. (The webinar is for journalists only. Following the webinar, CCN will post a recording on its website.)
ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?
Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
The Editor of Jacobin on the Evolution of American Socialism
By Isaac Chotiner April 26, 2019
By Isaac Chotiner April 26, 2019
Bernie Sanders exceeds the rest of the Democratic field in his ability to change the conditions in which policy is written, the editor of Jacobin says.Source Photograph by Mark Wilson / Getty
In 2010, amid the wreckage of an economic crisis, Bhaskar Sunkara, then twenty-one years old, started the magazine Jacobin. Democratic socialist in outlook and aimed at replicating the success that magazines such as National Review had had in spurring on the conservative revolution, Jacobin grew into a sometimes doctrinaire but frequently engaging and thought-provoking journal. And when Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign surpassed almost everyone’s expectations, it became clear that the ideas that Jacobin had been pushing had wider support than was generally understood. Two years later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emerged as a Democratic star; Sanders became a 2020 front-runner, and portraits of young socialists appeared in a cover story in New York.
Now comes Sunkara’s first book, “The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality,” which is both a history of socialism in the twentieth century and a blueprint for how democratic-socialist ideas might succeed in the twenty-first century. Taking in everything from Lenin’s rise to Sweden’s status as “the most livable society in history,” the book does not defend the failures of Marxist-inspired societies. Nevertheless, Sunkara scorns the idea that those failures should limit the ambitions of reformers and revolutionaries intent on creating a fairer society.
I recently spoke by phone with Sunkara, who, in addition to his work on Jacobin, is a columnist for the Guardian US. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different approaches that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken to progressive reform, why Americans vote against their economic interests, and whether liberals are too focussed on the explanatory power of race.
How do you see the difference between democratic socialism and social democracy, and why do you think that difference is so crucial to the future of radical politics?
Great question. We obviously have a common ancestor, Karl Marx.
Not you and me, just to be clear.
Right, not us. Karl Marx and [Friedrich] Engels both called themselves social democrats. It was a united movement in the big workers’ parties in the late nineteenth century. Then the movement kind of switched. Nowadays, what you would call social democracy is the movement that seeks to expand the welfare state, but within the confines of capitalism. It’s a kind of functional socialism. We’re going to cede ownership, but we’re going to tax those productive enterprises and make sure at least there’s a base level of security and rights for people.
A democratic socialist would say, “That’s great. Let’s fight for all those things, let’s have that kind of society.” Then we also want to ask deeper questions about ownership. One is, in a society where things are getting better for workers, but the ability to hold investment is still in the hand of capitalists, capitalists could always rebel against the social-democratic agreement. In Sweden, for example, capital by the late nineteen-seventies is basically saying, “All right, this agreement was working for us before, but now we’re not making enough profit. We need to roll back the welfare state.” If you can finally socialize investment and find a way to transfer production toward coöperatives and toward these other forms of socialized ownership, then maybe we can avoid that.
The second reason is just moral and ethical. I think that wage labor constitutes a form of hierarchy and exploitation that we could do without.
Your book also evinces a certain respect for reformist, rather than radical, politics, and you write that you are aware of “how profound the gains of reform can be.” So why is Sweden insufficient? I think a lot of people would look at Sweden and say, “O.K., it’s not perfect. It can get better. But it’s about as good as any society that humans have been able to construct.”
Part of the reason why my tone is that way is I believe that a mass base of people pushing for things, like Medicare for All and all these other reforms we need in the United States, will be people who will be just like what you described, liberals and progressives. If we, as socialists, adopt this kind of too-snarky, radicaler-than-thou mentality, which obviously we can all slip into at times, we’ll alienate the potential base that could actually make a better country and a better world.
In Sweden, we have to look at what’s happened in the last twenty or thirty years. If you could freeze Sweden in 1974 or 1975, it’s a pretty damned good society. For the last twenty, thirty years, there’s been a rightward lurch in Swedish politics. There’s been ground opened for the populist, racist right. A lot of the welfare state has deteriorated.
I’m not sure that social democracy is sustainable in the long run. Eventually workers will start demanding things that will make inroads into the profitability of capitalist firms, and these capitalists will then turn on the social-democratic compromise. Is there a social-democratic road to socialism? I don’t see them as separate roads. I see one as kind of stopping short, stopping at the five-yard line or ten-yard line.
It seems like you’re trying to make a practical argument, essentially saying that social democracy is always going to fall short and that there are structural reasons why it is likely to. Would that be fair to say?
Yes, exactly.
There aren’t really any antecedents of what you are advocating for. And so, if we want to argue practically about what can work, does that make you anxious or wary?
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s one reason why I like to say, “Let’s go to social democracy. Let’s see what works.” But at some level I just believe that democracy is a good thing, and that we should have a certain set of ideals for our society, which is as much democracy as possible, as little hierarchy as possible. Now, there might be limits to that. Maybe a complex society with a complex division of labor does require some sort of hierarchy. I’m not sure how far we can go, but I do think it’s useful to have the social horizon.
Postwar Sweden was not a multiethnic, multicultural society in the way that modern America is. Are you worried that there’s an inherent contradiction between what we’re talking about and a society that is multicultural and multiethnic—that many people are unwilling to be a part of democratic socialism when people look different from them?
I’m not completely concerned. In Sweden’s case, they were organizing in a deeply unequal country. Now, are there certain organizing barriers in the U.S., a country with a really deep history of racism and racial inequity? Yes. But I think those barriers can be overcome by politics. I think human beings all want the same things. We all want to take care of ourselves, take care of our families. We know when we’re being oppressed. We know when we’re being exploited. We’ll always look for a way out of that situation if it were to arise.
What makes you think that human beings all want the same thing?
We’re animals, right?
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I don’t mean sex and food.
We don’t like being oppressed. We don’t like being treated poorly. I think we want a degree of personal autonomy. I think these things are fairly innate. I’ll give you a concrete example. As women get more economically secure, as they’re in the workplace, they’re able to leave relationships, and divorce rates go up. Is that because these women were automatically indoctrinated with leftist ideals? I think it has more to do with the fact that they’re actually able to seek a better bargain for themselves as they’re given more power. When workers are in conditions of low unemployment, they tend to be more willing to go on strike and fight back. Also, if you look at the polling, people actually have a lot of the same concerns. They have the same concerns about health care, about security.
Right, but do men feel more secure now that women have extra freedom? That seems like a more disturbing question or a more disturbing possible answer. The point is that I think some people perceive their security as coming at the expense of others.
Yeah, that’s one thing we need to battle against politically, because there is a zero-sum-game mentality when it comes to immigration, when it comes to gains by racial minorities, by women. We need to fight against that. The socialist case is that when it comes to, let’s say, white male workers, any privilege that they might have over nonwhite workers or over women is a relative privilege, not an absolute privilege. I don’t mean to downplay the difficulty and the need for anti-racism and feminist organizing, but it is to say that our premise, as socialists, is that we can construct a political coalition in which all oppressed people can make gains, even though some people are going to make less gains than others based on their relative position beforehand.
You write in the book, “Socialists need to argue against the idea that racism and sexism are innate and that people’s consciousness won’t change through struggle. Racism has taken on an almost metaphysical role in liberal politics—it is somehow the cause of, explanation for, and consequence of most social phenomena. The reality is that people can overcome their prejudices in the process of mass struggle over shared interests, but that requires getting people involved in those common struggles to begin with.” When you say “metaphysical role,” are you talking about responses to Trump’s election?
I think after Trump’s election there was this idea that there is this original sin of racism in the United States, and we can’t get rid of it. Obviously, the United States is a society that was built on exclusion, that was built, in particular, on the exploitation of black Americans during slavery, and after slavery, too. It’s also a society in which there’s been a mass civil-rights movement and a feminist movement. There have been other things to make it more humane.
I don’t want to be Panglossian, but I want us to look back at the progress of the last half century and say, “There was great progress, but it wasn’t enough.” I think there was too much pessimism coming from liberal quarters about this. I think people could be won over. Do I think the ordinary Trump voter can be won over? I guess it depends. There’s obviously a core of Trump voters who are racist, who cannot be won over to a progressive program, and many of them aren’t even workers. They’re people who are the traditional base of the right in any country, this middle-class base of authoritarianism. There’s also a bunch of people who were just angry and discontented.
Many people voted for Trump because he’s a Republican and they’re Republicans, and they’re often Republicans for reasons having to do with cultural issues like abortion. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier, about people wanting different things.
Yeah, I take your point that there is a caricature of speaking about economic issues that means essentially not speaking about other issues. But for me, for example, the struggle for reproductive rights is not a cultural or social issue; it is an economic issue. It’s an issue that I want to bring into working-class politics. In other words, who are the people who suffer the most if there’s no abortion clinic within fifty, sixty miles of them? It’s the poorest workers. Who are the people who suffer most from harassment on the job? The women workers. There is a way, I think, to foreground economic issues but not downplay other things.
I agree that, by and large, Democrats do better when they talk about economic issues first. But there probably are a lot of poor people who feel like no abortion clinics mean fewer fetuses getting killed. I do think acknowledging that people have a totally different way of looking at things is important.
Yes, definitely. I think maybe one way to do this is to say, “Listen, we’re not going to backtrack or capitulate on anything we think is important, like fighting for immigrant rights or fighting for abortion rights, but we want to be so convincing on other issues that we can win people over.” For example, if someone’s No. 3 issue is immigration, and they’re on the right on immigration, but their No. 1 issue is jobs and their No. 2 issue is health care, we want to convince them that we’re so good on No. 1 and No. 2 that they’ll vote for the Commie bastards anyway.
It’s interesting that Trump thinks that his appeal is based on cultural and racial issues. His closing message in 2018 was not “Hey, struggling guy in Ohio, I improved your pocketbook.” It was “The Muslims are coming” or “The immigrants are coming.” His message in 2020 will likely be the same. I think it’s at least worth paying attention to the fact that he thinks that’s the way he can win those voters.
This is typical of this kind of right-wing populism. It’s pretty slippery. What he’s primarily pointing to is the idea that something was lost. Obviously, we need a counter to that. Part of it is speaking to a loss but in a different way. You want to talk to people about the fact that jobs have been lost. The unions have been devastated. We just want to point to different villains, which, of course, is a dangerous thing. But at least as far as Sanders or A.O.C. and this crop of left-wing politicians that emerged the last couple of years, I don’t see them as doing it in a way that fuels the right. I see them as doing it in a way that is helping to neutralize those on the right, keep it where it is, which is a minority authoritarian movement that’s going to cause a lot of headaches, that’s going to be around for a long time, but we’ve just got to keep them to their thirty-five or forty per cent, and we need to win over the rest.
What have you made of the Jeremy Corbyn experience in Britain? Labour recently said that it wanted to end the principle of the free movement of people in any Brexit deal, and Corbyn hasn’t generally been strongly against Brexit. I wonder how you think he’s dealt with that, and if it’s given you any pause about how socialist or left-wing policymakers sometimes deal with these issues.
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Even foregrounding the question of freedom of movement seems to be playing on the terrain of the right. Any voter that is going to vote on the issue of immigration and opposition to freedom of movement as a primary thing is not going to be won over. I think it’s counterproductive even at that political level.
So to synthesize what you’re saying about Corbyn, and Sanders, too, who sometimes seems like he’s in favor of more restrictive immigration policies than some on the left—you want them to neutralize the right by talking about economic issues without engaging in any of the cultural demagoguery. Is that fair?
Yes, I want Sanders, instead of just saying, “Oh, I’m against open borders,” in this very negative way, to just say, “Immigrants are coming here because they want to construct America, and they’re working hard. I’d rather have them in the country than people like Donald Trump.” I just can’t imagine the Democratic electorate would be turned off by that. I can’t imagine it would be a poison pill. That’s the one thing that I see a lot of people on the left have been consistently prodding Sanders on, and he has showed a capacity to evolve on certain things. I do believe that if he were in power, you would see something like amnesty for people already here, and you would see a more humane immigration policy.
Is Donald Trump a neoliberal?
This is a complicated question. Neoliberalism to me means the movement to use the power of the state in order to decrease the power of labor and to deregulate and restore the profitability of firms in the seventies and eighties. Since then it’s become the dominant economic consensus in the U.S. You still have a very strong aggressive state, but you don’t expand social welfare. You make sure things stay deregulated, and so on. In that sense, Trump is with the neoliberal consensus, but I think the term has been used as a pure pejorative to the point that it’s losing its analytical value.
In terms of weakening Wall Street regulations or watering down regulations via Cabinet agencies, or not expanding the welfare state, I don’t think those really fit as a description of the Obama Administration, but maybe you do?
I think the Obama Administration represented a centrist consensus within the Democratic Party, which said that the best way to preserve the welfare state was to insure that the economy was humming and growing and that, broadly, the interests of corporations were served because corporations were the ones generating the wealth that Obama wanted to use in order to sustain and expand social programs like Obamacare. But he, in the construction of the social programs, shied away from the creation of big universal programs that would have required more political struggle and actually might have been impossible to enact under his Administration. Would I call that neoliberal? I mean, maybe. I probably have many times in short columns and things like that, but I’m not sure how much analytical value it has.
If you watch what the Trump Administration is doing at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, talking about it as neoliberal seems to miss what’s going on to me because it seems noticeably different than what we—
I don’t think there’s a strong contingent of capital that’s calling for some of the things that Trump is doing. In other words, it seems to me that neoliberal policy would be deregulation that capital demanded, whereas Trump seems to be operating in his own ideological direction—it seems like with a degree of autonomy that I would have to reconcile with Marxist theory. [Laughs]
It seems different than what we’ve seen in the past from either Republican or Democratic Administrations to some extent, no?
There’s definitely been a big departure in certain ways. I think there has been a continuity with Republican Administrations as far as tax cuts and so on. But things have definitely gotten worse, and worse faster than they did under Obama. Obviously, we opposed a lot of Obama’s policies, but there’s no point in saying it’s all the same, because it absolutely isn’t. If push comes to shove and I were in a swing state in 2020, of course, I would vote for anyone in the Democratic field over Trump. I think that’s common sense. It should be hegemonic on the left.
When Sanders was refusing to release his tax returns, you had a series of tweets in which you wrote, “People obsessed with tax returns are narrowly looking for personal corruption as a sign of capture. Politicians serve capitalist interests because they administer a capitalist state dependent on private profits and favorable market conditions to survive and fund programs.” And “Candidates aren’t literally bought by elites, they structurally represent capitalist interests. Bernie is an exception.” Can you explain this?
I was trying to make a broader point about the way in which the interests of businesses exert themselves in government, which is not through direct bribery or coercion or lobbying but more often than not through the dynamics of the economy itself. Things I said, like Bernie is an exception, undermine that point. So I wouldn’t stand by all of that. I would say I agree with my underlying point, but I do want to see Trump’s tax returns. I’m glad that Bernie released his tax returns, too, so I guess I should say that as well.
Corruption occurs in noncapitalist countries, too.
Yeah, of course. But corruption to me isn’t a widespread issue. The conversation often is about Trump only being in power to enrich himself and make his business more profitable. Or back in the Iraq War days, it was, “Dick Cheney only did this war just to make money for Halliburton.” On the one hand, as a populist thing, they’re attacking the right enemies, so maybe it’s O.K., but, to me, it just isn’t the way society actually works. That was the point I was making, but I do think you’re right. There are other levels of corruption that don’t have to do with the things I said that we should obviously be on guard for, and that’s why we need transparency in government. If you’re running for public office, we should know your finances.
Before we go, the Jacobin coverage of Venezuela was more positive during the Chavez regime and earlier in the Maduro regime. Has the way in which that situation has gone downhill made you think any differently about any conception of socialism, or about signs that people should be on the lookout for in leaders that you or other people on the left missed?
There was a lot of debate in the Latin American left about certain things that Venezuela was doing, as opposed to Bolivia and Ecuador. One is, Venezuela seemed to be breaking with some of the “neoliberal consensus” more than Bolivia and Ecuador, but doing it through using oil rents, and I think in the long run that probably created some more macroeconomic instability. In Bolivia and Ecuador there was a more conservative approach on some of the macroeconomic stuff, and that enabled them to create more stability in the long term.
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You undermine a lot of the gains of your programs for workers if you’re also going to expose them to hyperinflation. That doesn’t make me some deficit hawk or austerity type to say that. I think there were macroeconomic mistakes. There was obviously, at times, an extremely right-wing opposition in Venezuela. There was a lot of political instability, some of it coming from the United States. I think as a whole, the mentality of the left has been to say that we in the U.S., a country that has been the perpetrator of so much injustice in Latin America and so many interventions, don’t have a right to critically look at states.
I meant that the way Chavez used rhetoric was more important than some people on the left maybe thought. Do you think that it’s worth paying attention to things like this and that we probably shouldn’t be totally surprised by how it played out?
When we were analyzing Venezuela, we analyzed it mostly through the populist tradition, saying that Venezuela was a manifestation of left populism. Maybe this is kind of an academic cop out, but I think some of the rhetoric Chavez was using, some of the approach from his government, the fact that he did have a segment of capital on his side, the fact that he would have all these military officers and a segment of state bureaucracy on his side, the fact that there wasn’t an active labor-backed party in Venezuela and whatever else, meant that we interpreted it all as, Hey listen, this is definitely redistributive. This is vaguely left. This guy seems good, so it’s good. This is a social movement if he says it is.
I guess the underlying point of your question is, Might creating this kind of polarization of us versus them, and pushing very hard to destabilize the country lead to that outcome? Burke had that one line, I’m paraphrasing very brutally, that the only thing worse than existing tyranny is a failed revolution against that tyranny. I think we always have to be on guard with what happens when our revolutions fail, because often it leads to a counterrevolution on the right or a situation of political paralysis. That can’t stop us from trying to make change, but I think a lot of the lesson of the last hundred years is to pay attention to unexpected outcomes and to construct policies in a way that makes sense.
You talk about Sanders a bit at the end of your book. Is it fair to say that in your mind Sanders is a good democratic socialist, and Warren is a good social democrat?
I’m not sure if I would call Warren a social democrat, but in my mind she’s definitely the second-best in the field. I think the gap between Sanders and Warren and the gap between Warren and the rest of the field is equally significant. I think a lot of the things she’s proposing are great. I think she’s pushing the policy debate in a really good direction.
Does any part of you ever think that someone like her being President, given how the government works, would actually be more effective for the left than someone like Sanders?
I see your argument. Let’s say you have a scenario where the world ends in eight years, and you’re talking about what can get passed within this next eight years. Then you would say that maybe Warren has certain skills that might be useful administrating the state. Maybe those skills exceed those of Sanders.
In my mind, thinking about politics over ten, fifteen, twenty years, someone with the strength and moral clarity of Sanders, with the ability to attract people to him and create a movement around him, can really create the conditions in which we’re not just writing policy but we’re changing the conditions in which policy is written. Does that make sense? I think Sanders is better at changing the conditions in which policy is written and being uncompromising in certain things in a way that is actually useful in the long term.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-editor-of-jacobin-on-the-evolution-of-american-socialism-bhaskar-sunkara
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with major public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.
In 2010, amid the wreckage of an economic crisis, Bhaskar Sunkara, then twenty-one years old, started the magazine Jacobin. Democratic socialist in outlook and aimed at replicating the success that magazines such as National Review had had in spurring on the conservative revolution, Jacobin grew into a sometimes doctrinaire but frequently engaging and thought-provoking journal. And when Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign surpassed almost everyone’s expectations, it became clear that the ideas that Jacobin had been pushing had wider support than was generally understood. Two years later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emerged as a Democratic star; Sanders became a 2020 front-runner, and portraits of young socialists appeared in a cover story in New York.
Now comes Sunkara’s first book, “The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality,” which is both a history of socialism in the twentieth century and a blueprint for how democratic-socialist ideas might succeed in the twenty-first century. Taking in everything from Lenin’s rise to Sweden’s status as “the most livable society in history,” the book does not defend the failures of Marxist-inspired societies. Nevertheless, Sunkara scorns the idea that those failures should limit the ambitions of reformers and revolutionaries intent on creating a fairer society.
I recently spoke by phone with Sunkara, who, in addition to his work on Jacobin, is a columnist for the Guardian US. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different approaches that Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have taken to progressive reform, why Americans vote against their economic interests, and whether liberals are too focussed on the explanatory power of race.
How do you see the difference between democratic socialism and social democracy, and why do you think that difference is so crucial to the future of radical politics?
Great question. We obviously have a common ancestor, Karl Marx.
Not you and me, just to be clear.
Right, not us. Karl Marx and [Friedrich] Engels both called themselves social democrats. It was a united movement in the big workers’ parties in the late nineteenth century. Then the movement kind of switched. Nowadays, what you would call social democracy is the movement that seeks to expand the welfare state, but within the confines of capitalism. It’s a kind of functional socialism. We’re going to cede ownership, but we’re going to tax those productive enterprises and make sure at least there’s a base level of security and rights for people.
A democratic socialist would say, “That’s great. Let’s fight for all those things, let’s have that kind of society.” Then we also want to ask deeper questions about ownership. One is, in a society where things are getting better for workers, but the ability to hold investment is still in the hand of capitalists, capitalists could always rebel against the social-democratic agreement. In Sweden, for example, capital by the late nineteen-seventies is basically saying, “All right, this agreement was working for us before, but now we’re not making enough profit. We need to roll back the welfare state.” If you can finally socialize investment and find a way to transfer production toward coöperatives and toward these other forms of socialized ownership, then maybe we can avoid that.
The second reason is just moral and ethical. I think that wage labor constitutes a form of hierarchy and exploitation that we could do without.
Your book also evinces a certain respect for reformist, rather than radical, politics, and you write that you are aware of “how profound the gains of reform can be.” So why is Sweden insufficient? I think a lot of people would look at Sweden and say, “O.K., it’s not perfect. It can get better. But it’s about as good as any society that humans have been able to construct.”
Part of the reason why my tone is that way is I believe that a mass base of people pushing for things, like Medicare for All and all these other reforms we need in the United States, will be people who will be just like what you described, liberals and progressives. If we, as socialists, adopt this kind of too-snarky, radicaler-than-thou mentality, which obviously we can all slip into at times, we’ll alienate the potential base that could actually make a better country and a better world.
In Sweden, we have to look at what’s happened in the last twenty or thirty years. If you could freeze Sweden in 1974 or 1975, it’s a pretty damned good society. For the last twenty, thirty years, there’s been a rightward lurch in Swedish politics. There’s been ground opened for the populist, racist right. A lot of the welfare state has deteriorated.
I’m not sure that social democracy is sustainable in the long run. Eventually workers will start demanding things that will make inroads into the profitability of capitalist firms, and these capitalists will then turn on the social-democratic compromise. Is there a social-democratic road to socialism? I don’t see them as separate roads. I see one as kind of stopping short, stopping at the five-yard line or ten-yard line.
It seems like you’re trying to make a practical argument, essentially saying that social democracy is always going to fall short and that there are structural reasons why it is likely to. Would that be fair to say?
Yes, exactly.
There aren’t really any antecedents of what you are advocating for. And so, if we want to argue practically about what can work, does that make you anxious or wary?
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s one reason why I like to say, “Let’s go to social democracy. Let’s see what works.” But at some level I just believe that democracy is a good thing, and that we should have a certain set of ideals for our society, which is as much democracy as possible, as little hierarchy as possible. Now, there might be limits to that. Maybe a complex society with a complex division of labor does require some sort of hierarchy. I’m not sure how far we can go, but I do think it’s useful to have the social horizon.
Postwar Sweden was not a multiethnic, multicultural society in the way that modern America is. Are you worried that there’s an inherent contradiction between what we’re talking about and a society that is multicultural and multiethnic—that many people are unwilling to be a part of democratic socialism when people look different from them?
I’m not completely concerned. In Sweden’s case, they were organizing in a deeply unequal country. Now, are there certain organizing barriers in the U.S., a country with a really deep history of racism and racial inequity? Yes. But I think those barriers can be overcome by politics. I think human beings all want the same things. We all want to take care of ourselves, take care of our families. We know when we’re being oppressed. We know when we’re being exploited. We’ll always look for a way out of that situation if it were to arise.
What makes you think that human beings all want the same thing?
We’re animals, right?
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I don’t mean sex and food.
We don’t like being oppressed. We don’t like being treated poorly. I think we want a degree of personal autonomy. I think these things are fairly innate. I’ll give you a concrete example. As women get more economically secure, as they’re in the workplace, they’re able to leave relationships, and divorce rates go up. Is that because these women were automatically indoctrinated with leftist ideals? I think it has more to do with the fact that they’re actually able to seek a better bargain for themselves as they’re given more power. When workers are in conditions of low unemployment, they tend to be more willing to go on strike and fight back. Also, if you look at the polling, people actually have a lot of the same concerns. They have the same concerns about health care, about security.
Right, but do men feel more secure now that women have extra freedom? That seems like a more disturbing question or a more disturbing possible answer. The point is that I think some people perceive their security as coming at the expense of others.
Yeah, that’s one thing we need to battle against politically, because there is a zero-sum-game mentality when it comes to immigration, when it comes to gains by racial minorities, by women. We need to fight against that. The socialist case is that when it comes to, let’s say, white male workers, any privilege that they might have over nonwhite workers or over women is a relative privilege, not an absolute privilege. I don’t mean to downplay the difficulty and the need for anti-racism and feminist organizing, but it is to say that our premise, as socialists, is that we can construct a political coalition in which all oppressed people can make gains, even though some people are going to make less gains than others based on their relative position beforehand.
You write in the book, “Socialists need to argue against the idea that racism and sexism are innate and that people’s consciousness won’t change through struggle. Racism has taken on an almost metaphysical role in liberal politics—it is somehow the cause of, explanation for, and consequence of most social phenomena. The reality is that people can overcome their prejudices in the process of mass struggle over shared interests, but that requires getting people involved in those common struggles to begin with.” When you say “metaphysical role,” are you talking about responses to Trump’s election?
I think after Trump’s election there was this idea that there is this original sin of racism in the United States, and we can’t get rid of it. Obviously, the United States is a society that was built on exclusion, that was built, in particular, on the exploitation of black Americans during slavery, and after slavery, too. It’s also a society in which there’s been a mass civil-rights movement and a feminist movement. There have been other things to make it more humane.
I don’t want to be Panglossian, but I want us to look back at the progress of the last half century and say, “There was great progress, but it wasn’t enough.” I think there was too much pessimism coming from liberal quarters about this. I think people could be won over. Do I think the ordinary Trump voter can be won over? I guess it depends. There’s obviously a core of Trump voters who are racist, who cannot be won over to a progressive program, and many of them aren’t even workers. They’re people who are the traditional base of the right in any country, this middle-class base of authoritarianism. There’s also a bunch of people who were just angry and discontented.
Many people voted for Trump because he’s a Republican and they’re Republicans, and they’re often Republicans for reasons having to do with cultural issues like abortion. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier, about people wanting different things.
Yeah, I take your point that there is a caricature of speaking about economic issues that means essentially not speaking about other issues. But for me, for example, the struggle for reproductive rights is not a cultural or social issue; it is an economic issue. It’s an issue that I want to bring into working-class politics. In other words, who are the people who suffer the most if there’s no abortion clinic within fifty, sixty miles of them? It’s the poorest workers. Who are the people who suffer most from harassment on the job? The women workers. There is a way, I think, to foreground economic issues but not downplay other things.
I agree that, by and large, Democrats do better when they talk about economic issues first. But there probably are a lot of poor people who feel like no abortion clinics mean fewer fetuses getting killed. I do think acknowledging that people have a totally different way of looking at things is important.
Yes, definitely. I think maybe one way to do this is to say, “Listen, we’re not going to backtrack or capitulate on anything we think is important, like fighting for immigrant rights or fighting for abortion rights, but we want to be so convincing on other issues that we can win people over.” For example, if someone’s No. 3 issue is immigration, and they’re on the right on immigration, but their No. 1 issue is jobs and their No. 2 issue is health care, we want to convince them that we’re so good on No. 1 and No. 2 that they’ll vote for the Commie bastards anyway.
It’s interesting that Trump thinks that his appeal is based on cultural and racial issues. His closing message in 2018 was not “Hey, struggling guy in Ohio, I improved your pocketbook.” It was “The Muslims are coming” or “The immigrants are coming.” His message in 2020 will likely be the same. I think it’s at least worth paying attention to the fact that he thinks that’s the way he can win those voters.
This is typical of this kind of right-wing populism. It’s pretty slippery. What he’s primarily pointing to is the idea that something was lost. Obviously, we need a counter to that. Part of it is speaking to a loss but in a different way. You want to talk to people about the fact that jobs have been lost. The unions have been devastated. We just want to point to different villains, which, of course, is a dangerous thing. But at least as far as Sanders or A.O.C. and this crop of left-wing politicians that emerged the last couple of years, I don’t see them as doing it in a way that fuels the right. I see them as doing it in a way that is helping to neutralize those on the right, keep it where it is, which is a minority authoritarian movement that’s going to cause a lot of headaches, that’s going to be around for a long time, but we’ve just got to keep them to their thirty-five or forty per cent, and we need to win over the rest.
What have you made of the Jeremy Corbyn experience in Britain? Labour recently said that it wanted to end the principle of the free movement of people in any Brexit deal, and Corbyn hasn’t generally been strongly against Brexit. I wonder how you think he’s dealt with that, and if it’s given you any pause about how socialist or left-wing policymakers sometimes deal with these issues.
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Even foregrounding the question of freedom of movement seems to be playing on the terrain of the right. Any voter that is going to vote on the issue of immigration and opposition to freedom of movement as a primary thing is not going to be won over. I think it’s counterproductive even at that political level.
So to synthesize what you’re saying about Corbyn, and Sanders, too, who sometimes seems like he’s in favor of more restrictive immigration policies than some on the left—you want them to neutralize the right by talking about economic issues without engaging in any of the cultural demagoguery. Is that fair?
Yes, I want Sanders, instead of just saying, “Oh, I’m against open borders,” in this very negative way, to just say, “Immigrants are coming here because they want to construct America, and they’re working hard. I’d rather have them in the country than people like Donald Trump.” I just can’t imagine the Democratic electorate would be turned off by that. I can’t imagine it would be a poison pill. That’s the one thing that I see a lot of people on the left have been consistently prodding Sanders on, and he has showed a capacity to evolve on certain things. I do believe that if he were in power, you would see something like amnesty for people already here, and you would see a more humane immigration policy.
Is Donald Trump a neoliberal?
This is a complicated question. Neoliberalism to me means the movement to use the power of the state in order to decrease the power of labor and to deregulate and restore the profitability of firms in the seventies and eighties. Since then it’s become the dominant economic consensus in the U.S. You still have a very strong aggressive state, but you don’t expand social welfare. You make sure things stay deregulated, and so on. In that sense, Trump is with the neoliberal consensus, but I think the term has been used as a pure pejorative to the point that it’s losing its analytical value.
In terms of weakening Wall Street regulations or watering down regulations via Cabinet agencies, or not expanding the welfare state, I don’t think those really fit as a description of the Obama Administration, but maybe you do?
I think the Obama Administration represented a centrist consensus within the Democratic Party, which said that the best way to preserve the welfare state was to insure that the economy was humming and growing and that, broadly, the interests of corporations were served because corporations were the ones generating the wealth that Obama wanted to use in order to sustain and expand social programs like Obamacare. But he, in the construction of the social programs, shied away from the creation of big universal programs that would have required more political struggle and actually might have been impossible to enact under his Administration. Would I call that neoliberal? I mean, maybe. I probably have many times in short columns and things like that, but I’m not sure how much analytical value it has.
If you watch what the Trump Administration is doing at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, talking about it as neoliberal seems to miss what’s going on to me because it seems noticeably different than what we—
I don’t think there’s a strong contingent of capital that’s calling for some of the things that Trump is doing. In other words, it seems to me that neoliberal policy would be deregulation that capital demanded, whereas Trump seems to be operating in his own ideological direction—it seems like with a degree of autonomy that I would have to reconcile with Marxist theory. [Laughs]
It seems different than what we’ve seen in the past from either Republican or Democratic Administrations to some extent, no?
There’s definitely been a big departure in certain ways. I think there has been a continuity with Republican Administrations as far as tax cuts and so on. But things have definitely gotten worse, and worse faster than they did under Obama. Obviously, we opposed a lot of Obama’s policies, but there’s no point in saying it’s all the same, because it absolutely isn’t. If push comes to shove and I were in a swing state in 2020, of course, I would vote for anyone in the Democratic field over Trump. I think that’s common sense. It should be hegemonic on the left.
When Sanders was refusing to release his tax returns, you had a series of tweets in which you wrote, “People obsessed with tax returns are narrowly looking for personal corruption as a sign of capture. Politicians serve capitalist interests because they administer a capitalist state dependent on private profits and favorable market conditions to survive and fund programs.” And “Candidates aren’t literally bought by elites, they structurally represent capitalist interests. Bernie is an exception.” Can you explain this?
I was trying to make a broader point about the way in which the interests of businesses exert themselves in government, which is not through direct bribery or coercion or lobbying but more often than not through the dynamics of the economy itself. Things I said, like Bernie is an exception, undermine that point. So I wouldn’t stand by all of that. I would say I agree with my underlying point, but I do want to see Trump’s tax returns. I’m glad that Bernie released his tax returns, too, so I guess I should say that as well.
Corruption occurs in noncapitalist countries, too.
Yeah, of course. But corruption to me isn’t a widespread issue. The conversation often is about Trump only being in power to enrich himself and make his business more profitable. Or back in the Iraq War days, it was, “Dick Cheney only did this war just to make money for Halliburton.” On the one hand, as a populist thing, they’re attacking the right enemies, so maybe it’s O.K., but, to me, it just isn’t the way society actually works. That was the point I was making, but I do think you’re right. There are other levels of corruption that don’t have to do with the things I said that we should obviously be on guard for, and that’s why we need transparency in government. If you’re running for public office, we should know your finances.
Before we go, the Jacobin coverage of Venezuela was more positive during the Chavez regime and earlier in the Maduro regime. Has the way in which that situation has gone downhill made you think any differently about any conception of socialism, or about signs that people should be on the lookout for in leaders that you or other people on the left missed?
There was a lot of debate in the Latin American left about certain things that Venezuela was doing, as opposed to Bolivia and Ecuador. One is, Venezuela seemed to be breaking with some of the “neoliberal consensus” more than Bolivia and Ecuador, but doing it through using oil rents, and I think in the long run that probably created some more macroeconomic instability. In Bolivia and Ecuador there was a more conservative approach on some of the macroeconomic stuff, and that enabled them to create more stability in the long term.
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You undermine a lot of the gains of your programs for workers if you’re also going to expose them to hyperinflation. That doesn’t make me some deficit hawk or austerity type to say that. I think there were macroeconomic mistakes. There was obviously, at times, an extremely right-wing opposition in Venezuela. There was a lot of political instability, some of it coming from the United States. I think as a whole, the mentality of the left has been to say that we in the U.S., a country that has been the perpetrator of so much injustice in Latin America and so many interventions, don’t have a right to critically look at states.
I meant that the way Chavez used rhetoric was more important than some people on the left maybe thought. Do you think that it’s worth paying attention to things like this and that we probably shouldn’t be totally surprised by how it played out?
When we were analyzing Venezuela, we analyzed it mostly through the populist tradition, saying that Venezuela was a manifestation of left populism. Maybe this is kind of an academic cop out, but I think some of the rhetoric Chavez was using, some of the approach from his government, the fact that he did have a segment of capital on his side, the fact that he would have all these military officers and a segment of state bureaucracy on his side, the fact that there wasn’t an active labor-backed party in Venezuela and whatever else, meant that we interpreted it all as, Hey listen, this is definitely redistributive. This is vaguely left. This guy seems good, so it’s good. This is a social movement if he says it is.
I guess the underlying point of your question is, Might creating this kind of polarization of us versus them, and pushing very hard to destabilize the country lead to that outcome? Burke had that one line, I’m paraphrasing very brutally, that the only thing worse than existing tyranny is a failed revolution against that tyranny. I think we always have to be on guard with what happens when our revolutions fail, because often it leads to a counterrevolution on the right or a situation of political paralysis. That can’t stop us from trying to make change, but I think a lot of the lesson of the last hundred years is to pay attention to unexpected outcomes and to construct policies in a way that makes sense.
You talk about Sanders a bit at the end of your book. Is it fair to say that in your mind Sanders is a good democratic socialist, and Warren is a good social democrat?
I’m not sure if I would call Warren a social democrat, but in my mind she’s definitely the second-best in the field. I think the gap between Sanders and Warren and the gap between Warren and the rest of the field is equally significant. I think a lot of the things she’s proposing are great. I think she’s pushing the policy debate in a really good direction.
Does any part of you ever think that someone like her being President, given how the government works, would actually be more effective for the left than someone like Sanders?
I see your argument. Let’s say you have a scenario where the world ends in eight years, and you’re talking about what can get passed within this next eight years. Then you would say that maybe Warren has certain skills that might be useful administrating the state. Maybe those skills exceed those of Sanders.
In my mind, thinking about politics over ten, fifteen, twenty years, someone with the strength and moral clarity of Sanders, with the ability to attract people to him and create a movement around him, can really create the conditions in which we’re not just writing policy but we’re changing the conditions in which policy is written. Does that make sense? I think Sanders is better at changing the conditions in which policy is written and being uncompromising in certain things in a way that is actually useful in the long term.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-editor-of-jacobin-on-the-evolution-of-american-socialism-bhaskar-sunkara
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with major public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.
The ABCs of Jacobin
The unlikely success of a socialist print magazine
JANUARY 2, 2019
Bhaskar Sunkara. Photo: Matthew David Roberts.
Every successful magazine, like every successful revolution, condenses an atmosphere. The atmosphere may be political or it may be cultural. It may be a matter of taste or a question of style. Very often it is generational.
If your youth was anything like mine, you grew up reading what your parents kept around the house, and for a time you unthinkingly shaped yourself to the sensibilities of those publications. And then one day you looked up and saw that the world you knew, the world you were living in, was unrecognizable in the pages you were reading. Maybe you discovered that the jokes weren’t that funny anymore, or never were. Maybe you realized that you couldn’t care less about the people they thought were important, couldn’t imagine why they didn’t spend more pages on the artists, celebrities, and athletes you knew were a hundred times more interesting. Maybe you found yourself no longer convinced by their arguments. Maybe they just seemed old.
New magazines begin here: with the sure knowledge that something is missing, that the existing options aren’t cutting it. And it is for this reason, I suspect, that the founders of successful magazines tend to emerge from a fairly narrow demographic band. Francis Underwood was 32 years old when he persuaded Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a few others to help him start The Atlantic Monthly in 1857. Harold Ross and his wife, the pioneering journalist Jane Grant, were the same age when they founded The New Yorker in 1925. Henry Luce and Briton Hadden were 24 and 25, respectively, when they started Time. Hugh Hefner was 27 when he started Playboy, as was John H. Johnson when he started Ebony. Gloria Steinem was 37 when she and several other women produced the first issue of Ms. as an insert in New York, which had launched as an independent magazine when Milton Glaser was 38 and Clay Felker was a relatively ancient 42. Dave Eggers was 28 when he started McSweeney’s, and he was 33 when McSweeney’s spawned The Believer, whose founding editors—Vendela Vida, Heidi Julavits, and Ed Park—were 31, 34, and 33.
When Bhaskar Sunkara decided to start Jacobin—the socialist quarterly that has proved itself the most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade—he was just 21. To start a magazine that young, even one that survived for more than a handful of issues, was hardly unprecedented. Jann Wenner was the same age when he founded Rolling Stone. But whereas Wenner had a once-in-a-century cultural renaissance to help him on his way, Sunkara started Jacobin under a doubly vexed sign: in 2010, when Jacobin got its start, the only surer bets than the impossibility of a Donald Trump presidency were that print media was in a death spiral and American socialism was a permanent fossil. And yet, since then, Jacobin has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, not least Sunkara’s. The print magazine, with a circulation of 40,000, now stands at the center of an expanding enterprise that includes a book imprint, podcasts, an academic journal called Catalyst, and a website with over a million monthly visitors. Last fall, Jacobin adopted an elder sibling, in the form of Tribune, a leftist British magazine founded in 1937, and in November it launched its first foreign-language edition, in Italy.
In October, Sunkara met me for lunch at a restaurant near the magazine’s office in Brooklyn. Dressed in a blue shirt with a button-down collar, on the short side of average height, he had black hair trimmed neatly around his ears and a few days’ worth of beard. After ordering a Diet Coke and a sandwich, Sunkara explained that his aim in starting Jacobin had been “to plant a flag for a certain kind of democratic-socialist politics.” Concerned that fundamental Marxist ideas like unions and class conflict had fallen out of style, he sought to provide a socialist alternative to anarchism and to Obama-style liberalism. At the same time, he felt a strong aversion to the academic jargon and petty factionalism that had been hallmarks of American socialism in recent years. With an eye toward attracting the readers on the left edge of liberalism—the people who watched Chris Hayes on MSNBC or read the bloggers at Crooked Timber—he set out to create a magazine whose language and tone would not be too proud to court new readers, or too stuffy to entertain them.
There’s little about this plan that sounds strange today. Bernie Sanders, who ran openly as a democratic socialist against Hillary Clinton in 2016, is already considered a front-runner for the Democratic nomination next year. And it was just last fall that two more democratic socialists, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, were elected to Congress. Lately even Francis Fukuyama, the political theorist best known for predicting the permanent triumph of market capitalism thirty years ago, has decided that socialism “ought to come back.
But to understand what Sunkara was up against when he started Jacobin, it helps to remember what “socialism” signified a decade ago. Those were the years, you may recall, when the bank bailouts and the fight over the Affordable Care Act turned the word into the worst sort of slur. The prevailing state of affairs was captured by Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale. “We might as well call it: The American left is dead,” Gage wrote in the Times in 2011. “Today, the dream of socialism exists mostly as a far-right phantom.”
These days, by contrast, the Times has taken to running cheery quizzes asking its readers, “Are You a Democratic Socialist?” As the quiz indicates, there is still what one might generously call a productive confusion about who ought to be counted in the category. (A Jacobin editor, for instance, described Sanders as “a deeply flawed representative of the Left” in late 2015.) But what seems indisputable is that “socialist” has been sapped, at least among Democrats, of its derisive force. And while it’s too much to suggest that Jacobin was responsible for this change, it’s equally too little to suggest that the magazine was swept along helplessly but happily by a rising red tide. More than once Sunkara told me that he has always thought of Jacobin as a political project, not a media project. What the rise of Jacobin suggests, however, is just how inextricable, and maybe even indistinguishable, those categories turn out to be.
Luck looms large in the story Sunkara likes to tell about himself. He found his way to socialism early and, in his account, mostly by accident. He was born in the summer of 1989, a year after his parents and four older siblings immigrated from Trinidad. When they got to the United States, Sunkara’s parents both took 60-hour-a-week jobs, his mother as a telemarketer, his father at a welfare clinic. With five kids, there wasn’t much money to go around, but they earned enough to rent a house in Pleasantville, an upscale community just north of New York City that gave their children access to high-quality public schools.
Sunkara says that the Pleasantville library, where he spent afternoons waiting for his parents to get off their shifts, proved especially important. It was there, in seventh or eighth grade, right around the time the Iraq War was getting underway, that he first read George Orwell. From Homage to Catalonia he became interested in the Spanish Civil War, which led him to Leon Trotsky and other Marxists. “I think it was just completely random,” Sunkara says now. He counts himself fortunate he didn’t stumble on Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman first.
While books helped shape his worldview, by far the deeper pull toward politics came from his experience as the only natural-born citizen in his family. Unlike his immigrant siblings, Sunkara grew up with the full complement of Pleasantville’s property-tax-funded social programs. He says he was attracted to socialism in large part “because I saw how much of life was an accident of birth.”
Sunkara went to his first Democratic Socialists of America meeting just before graduating high school. The DSA then had just 6,000 members nationwide, and the New York chapter, which Sunkara attended, skewed old and Jewish. He recalls sitting patiently through hours of stories about what it was like to grow up in the Bronx in the forties and fifties, when everyone had to choose whether they were an anti-Stalinist socialist or a party-line Communist. “It felt like they were trying to make certain things relevant,” he says, “but it was basically relics.”
In college, at George Washington University in DC, Sunkara supported John Edwards’s presidential run and began editing the blog of the youth wing of the DSA. He developed a taste for British polemicists—Alexander Cockburn, Perry Anderson, Christopher Hitchens, V.S. Naipaul—and read back through the archives of left-wing stalwarts like Dissent, New Politics, New Left Review, and The Nation. He admired many of these publications, but he also identified unclaimed territory between those that seemed almost afraid to be too accessible to their readers, and others that settled for mindless cheerleading. (In a blog post he published around the same time, Sunkara lamented “the deterioration of The Nation into a vapid, politically complacent mouthpiece of the establishment.”)
When he decided to start a new magazine, in the summer of 2010, Sunkara looked to William F. Buckley’s National Review as a model. That magazine had been careful to define itself as conservative, not Republican, and it had taken certain positions—encouraging Barry Goldwater to run for president in 1964, for instance—even when they might spell short-term trouble for the Republican Party. In a similar way, Sunkara says, he hoped to use Jacobin “to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas.”
Sunkara says now he had no real idea how to run a magazine—he didn’t know, for instance, that publisher was a job title a person might aspire to. But what his youth cost him in experience, connections, and, most critically, cash (his initial annual budget was just $240) compensated Sunkara with a certain editorial liberty. For decades, Marxism had been treated as a fringe concern by mainstream media outlets. Free enterprise was the American way, and any suggestion otherwise, it was understood, risked planting a fatal first step on the slippery slope toward Stalinism. But these hangups had little purchase for the millennial cohort Sunkara hoped to address. Having lived their entire adult lives under the shadow of the Great Recession, for them it was capitalism, not Communism, that counted as the god that failed.
What his youth cost him in experience, connections, and, most critically, cash compensated Sunkara with a certain editorial liberty.
The editor’s note introducing the first online issue of Jacobin was echt Sunkara: at once swaggering and modest, funny and sober, earnest and desperately afraid of being caught taking itself too seriously. “Publications with tiny audiences have a knack for mighty pronouncements,” he wrote. “A grandiloquent opening, some platitudes about ‘resurrecting intellectual discourse’ followed by issue after issue of the same old shit.’” The About page described Jacobin in a style (and with a typo) only an undergraduate could love: “A magazine of culture and polemic that Edmund Burke ceaselessly berates on his Twitter page. Each of our issue’s contents are poured over in taverns and other houses of ill-repute and best enjoyed with a well-shaken can of lukewarm beer.” Sunkara solicited writers he knew from the DSA blog and from Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer listserv. His first issue included essays on European social democracy and the Zapatistas, interviews with Azar Nafisi (the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Walter Benn Michaels (The Trouble with Diversity), and a review that found in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad Love Story “a distracting, superficial critique of capitalism.”
By any standard, the launch was a dud. The site registered only 600 visitors in its first month, causing him to reconsider the project. Unconvinced that a website alone could distinguish Jacobin among the glut of other small online outlets, Sunkara decided he needed a print magazine. This idea was, to put it extremely mildly, counterintuitive. After all, 2010 was the year Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT Media Lab, declared that physical books would be dead in half a decade, the same year Apple introduced the iPad, which was widely seen as the last best hope to rescue the magazine industry from otherwise certain extinction.
If you could get an actual copy of your magazine into the hands of your readers, you could force them to pay attention.
Sunkara had no idea that both of these predictions would prove wildly mistaken, but he figured that a physical object couldn’t be ignored as easily as a blog post. If you could get an actual copy of your magazine into the hands of your readers, you could force them to pay attention. With this logic in mind, he prepared a print issue that duplicated much of what had already appeared for free online, and published it early in 2011.
The first print issue sold well enough to convince Sunkara that he ought to start work on a second. Later that year, he told an interviewer that he had stumbled into a niche. “I don’t really see anyone doing what we’re doing and I’m not sure whether I should be proud or disheartened by that,” he said. “I do know that if the response to our haphazard launch is any indication, there is a market for what we’re producing.” His goal, he said, was to produce an eight-issue run.
In September 2011, a day after Gage noted that “the left has mounted no effective mass protests, inspired no significant uprisings” in the Times, Occupy Wall Street set up in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Jacobin covered the movement on its blog and was mostly bemused about its anarchist flavor. But while the protest would have an important long-term influence—it taught a generation of activists to think in terms of class—its most immediate effect on Jacobin was the publicity generated by an Occupy-themed video that went viral thanks to a concentrated blast of right-wing outrage.
Around the same time, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design named Remeike Forbes emailed Sunkara, offering to design a T-shirt as a fundraiser. It didn’t take long for Forbes to be drafted as the magazine’s sole designer. His involvement led to an immediate improvement. The first issues of Jacobin, with hot-pink display copy and four-color art, had offered clear proof that Sunkara wanted nothing to do with the drab design of most left-wing publications, which seemed to draw aesthetic inspiration from the East German Plattenbauten. But the earliest issues of the magazine were erratically laid out, with odd accumulations of negative space that betrayed their amateur origins.
Forbes’s covers established a hip new tone for the magazine, whether it was the Bastille-era guillotine done up as an Ikea assembly diagram or an unflattering allusion to Jacobin’s Gen X antecedent, The Baffler, which implied that it was time to turn the page—literally—on the previous generation. (Sunkara admitted to me that he had no idea The Baffler existed until a year or two after he started Jacobin.) Forbes’s most distinctive contribution was a stylized silhouette of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture that appeared on the cover of the Spring 2012 issue. In an accompanying essay, Forbes wrote that the choice of a black person as Jacobin’s logo “provoked some anxiety on the editorial board,” given the potential for causing offense. But as a black Jamaican immigrant himself, he saw in L’Ouverture’s revolution an encapsulation of “the historic mission of the Left.” (L’Ouverture was also the subject of The Black Jacobins, by the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James, which Sunkara has credited with indirectly inspiring the name of his magazine.)
Jacobin’s design was easily the most distinctive thing about it, and helped propel the magazine from 2,000 subscribers in early 2013 to 7,000 the following year. But the magazine also began to attract notice for its frank and often surprisingly sensible articles on the theory and practice of socialism. Mike Beggs, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, had a hit with “Zombie Marx,” from the Summer 2011 issue, while Peter Frase’s “Four Futures,” from Winter 2012, imagined a taxonomy of possible outcomes that might follow the deployment of full automation, such that the economy no longer required human labor.
And yet as important as these articles were for Jacobin’s reputation, the magazine more closely resembled Wenner’s Rolling Stone, or Harold Hayes’s Esquire, or Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair than it did Dissent or the New Left Review in at least one respect: its whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Reading Jacobin you got the sense that socialism had as much to do with a sensibility as any particular set of arguments. It was, or became, part of who you were.
Henwood, who has an essay in the latest issue of Jacobin, its twenty-seventh, told me recently that the magazine’s success in making socialism seem vibrant should not be underestimated. When he started writing for leftist publications in the 1980s, “it was just such a lonely landscape. You’d go to these left spaces and they are often filled with freaks, like really odd people.” Jacobin, he says, helped American socialism escape its dreary Cold War reputation. “To have this lively, attractive magazine, this young culture—it’s definitely a very important part of what turned this thing around. It created an audience for radical socialist politics among a younger generation.”
“[Jacobin] created an audience for radical socialist politics among a younger generation.”
Keenly aware of how few options there were for people who might be curious about socialist politics but not ready to dive headfirst into the DSA, Sunkara helped facilitate the organization of Jacobin reading groups across the country and around the world. Over lunch, he told me that he still felt this practical urgency. “What most people encounter as Marxism—from going to college, for instance—is Frankfurt School cultural criticism, things that are actually quite complicated and often pretty meaningless. We just say, ‘This is the core idea, and you can understand it.’” A similar spirit informed The ABCs of Socialism, a book Jacobin published in 2016, and Sunkara’s own Socialist Manifesto, which Basic Books is publishing in April. He told me that he wrote the book, a history of socialism, in hopes that a high school student would “be able to pick it up and understand it and be interested in it.” Last year, as part of a themed issue on childhood, Jacobin even published a children’s book about socialist bats.
On a clear Monday night in mid-October, I went to watch Sunkara debate Gene Epstein in Manhattan. Epstein, who is 74, is the former economics editor of Barron’s and the director of the Soho Forum, the organization that sponsored the debate. The event was a reprise of a similar debate that Sunkara had organized in 2017, during which he and Vivek Chibber, the editor of Catalyst, had debated two editors from Reason, the libertarian magazine, in front of a left-leaning audience at Cooper Union. Now the libertarians would have their revenge: it would be Sunkara’s charge to defend the thesis that “socialism is more effective than capitalism in bringing freedom to the masses” at a debate series whose mission is “to enhance social and professional ties within the NYC libertarian community.”
Before the debate began, a comedian in an unzipped hoodie warmed up the crowd with jokes about #MeToo and Bernie Sanders. Shortly after an ill-considered crack about hungry Africans earned him a few boos from the audience—“I’m sorry if I stereotyped Africa,” he told his hecklers, not sorry at all—he ceded the stage to Sunkara, Epstein, and the debate’s moderator, Naomi Brockwell, a red-haired bitcoin enthusiast.
Sunkara took to the lectern dressed like a McKinsey associate, in a pale-blue business shirt and brown leather derbys. He made little effort to dispel the impression that the event had attracted something less than his full enthusiasm, reminding the audience that he’d been paid for his appearance at the debate. A thundering Eugene Debs he was not: When his prepared text summoned a future in which workers might “reach their God-given potential,” Sunkara stopped himself abruptly and looked up from his notes. “I’m an atheist, I’m not sure why I said God.” Later he broke out laughing when he realized that his claim that “to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person no matter who they are, where they came from, or what they did” very nearly plagiarized the chorus of a Backstreet Boys song.
“He’s a capitalist success story! He started a magazine that’s got 38,000 subscribers! He bought a magazine in Britain! He’s the wunderkind of socialism!”
Epstein proved the more natural debater, but about an hour into the program, his emotions got the better of him. “Walk the walk and quit talking the talk!” he sputtered at Sunkara, waving his hands like an aggravated pelican. “Bhaskar, learn some economics!”
After the debate I found Epstein at the center of a circle well-wishers. A few of them were trading news about a blockchain conference in Malta and a cruise off the coast of the Mexican Riviera whose entire purpose, according to Brockwell, was “talking about how much they dislike Paul Krugman.” Epstein was gracious about his erstwhile opponent. “Isn’t he kind of a charming personality?” he said to a man with an Ayn Rand Institute pin in his lapel. When I asked why he wanted to debate Sunkara, Epstein grew rhapsodic: “The guy is the socialist entrepreneur par excellence! He’s a capitalist success story! He started a magazine that’s got 38,000 subscribers! He bought a magazine in Britain! He’s the wunderkind of socialism!”
Bhaskar Sunkara. Photo: Matthew David Roberts.
Every successful magazine, like every successful revolution, condenses an atmosphere. The atmosphere may be political or it may be cultural. It may be a matter of taste or a question of style. Very often it is generational.
If your youth was anything like mine, you grew up reading what your parents kept around the house, and for a time you unthinkingly shaped yourself to the sensibilities of those publications. And then one day you looked up and saw that the world you knew, the world you were living in, was unrecognizable in the pages you were reading. Maybe you discovered that the jokes weren’t that funny anymore, or never were. Maybe you realized that you couldn’t care less about the people they thought were important, couldn’t imagine why they didn’t spend more pages on the artists, celebrities, and athletes you knew were a hundred times more interesting. Maybe you found yourself no longer convinced by their arguments. Maybe they just seemed old.
New magazines begin here: with the sure knowledge that something is missing, that the existing options aren’t cutting it. And it is for this reason, I suspect, that the founders of successful magazines tend to emerge from a fairly narrow demographic band. Francis Underwood was 32 years old when he persuaded Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a few others to help him start The Atlantic Monthly in 1857. Harold Ross and his wife, the pioneering journalist Jane Grant, were the same age when they founded The New Yorker in 1925. Henry Luce and Briton Hadden were 24 and 25, respectively, when they started Time. Hugh Hefner was 27 when he started Playboy, as was John H. Johnson when he started Ebony. Gloria Steinem was 37 when she and several other women produced the first issue of Ms. as an insert in New York, which had launched as an independent magazine when Milton Glaser was 38 and Clay Felker was a relatively ancient 42. Dave Eggers was 28 when he started McSweeney’s, and he was 33 when McSweeney’s spawned The Believer, whose founding editors—Vendela Vida, Heidi Julavits, and Ed Park—were 31, 34, and 33.
When Bhaskar Sunkara decided to start Jacobin—the socialist quarterly that has proved itself the most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade—he was just 21. To start a magazine that young, even one that survived for more than a handful of issues, was hardly unprecedented. Jann Wenner was the same age when he founded Rolling Stone. But whereas Wenner had a once-in-a-century cultural renaissance to help him on his way, Sunkara started Jacobin under a doubly vexed sign: in 2010, when Jacobin got its start, the only surer bets than the impossibility of a Donald Trump presidency were that print media was in a death spiral and American socialism was a permanent fossil. And yet, since then, Jacobin has succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, not least Sunkara’s. The print magazine, with a circulation of 40,000, now stands at the center of an expanding enterprise that includes a book imprint, podcasts, an academic journal called Catalyst, and a website with over a million monthly visitors. Last fall, Jacobin adopted an elder sibling, in the form of Tribune, a leftist British magazine founded in 1937, and in November it launched its first foreign-language edition, in Italy.
In October, Sunkara met me for lunch at a restaurant near the magazine’s office in Brooklyn. Dressed in a blue shirt with a button-down collar, on the short side of average height, he had black hair trimmed neatly around his ears and a few days’ worth of beard. After ordering a Diet Coke and a sandwich, Sunkara explained that his aim in starting Jacobin had been “to plant a flag for a certain kind of democratic-socialist politics.” Concerned that fundamental Marxist ideas like unions and class conflict had fallen out of style, he sought to provide a socialist alternative to anarchism and to Obama-style liberalism. At the same time, he felt a strong aversion to the academic jargon and petty factionalism that had been hallmarks of American socialism in recent years. With an eye toward attracting the readers on the left edge of liberalism—the people who watched Chris Hayes on MSNBC or read the bloggers at Crooked Timber—he set out to create a magazine whose language and tone would not be too proud to court new readers, or too stuffy to entertain them.
There’s little about this plan that sounds strange today. Bernie Sanders, who ran openly as a democratic socialist against Hillary Clinton in 2016, is already considered a front-runner for the Democratic nomination next year. And it was just last fall that two more democratic socialists, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, were elected to Congress. Lately even Francis Fukuyama, the political theorist best known for predicting the permanent triumph of market capitalism thirty years ago, has decided that socialism “ought to come back.
But to understand what Sunkara was up against when he started Jacobin, it helps to remember what “socialism” signified a decade ago. Those were the years, you may recall, when the bank bailouts and the fight over the Affordable Care Act turned the word into the worst sort of slur. The prevailing state of affairs was captured by Beverly Gage, a professor of history at Yale. “We might as well call it: The American left is dead,” Gage wrote in the Times in 2011. “Today, the dream of socialism exists mostly as a far-right phantom.”
These days, by contrast, the Times has taken to running cheery quizzes asking its readers, “Are You a Democratic Socialist?” As the quiz indicates, there is still what one might generously call a productive confusion about who ought to be counted in the category. (A Jacobin editor, for instance, described Sanders as “a deeply flawed representative of the Left” in late 2015.) But what seems indisputable is that “socialist” has been sapped, at least among Democrats, of its derisive force. And while it’s too much to suggest that Jacobin was responsible for this change, it’s equally too little to suggest that the magazine was swept along helplessly but happily by a rising red tide. More than once Sunkara told me that he has always thought of Jacobin as a political project, not a media project. What the rise of Jacobin suggests, however, is just how inextricable, and maybe even indistinguishable, those categories turn out to be.
Luck looms large in the story Sunkara likes to tell about himself. He found his way to socialism early and, in his account, mostly by accident. He was born in the summer of 1989, a year after his parents and four older siblings immigrated from Trinidad. When they got to the United States, Sunkara’s parents both took 60-hour-a-week jobs, his mother as a telemarketer, his father at a welfare clinic. With five kids, there wasn’t much money to go around, but they earned enough to rent a house in Pleasantville, an upscale community just north of New York City that gave their children access to high-quality public schools.
Sunkara says that the Pleasantville library, where he spent afternoons waiting for his parents to get off their shifts, proved especially important. It was there, in seventh or eighth grade, right around the time the Iraq War was getting underway, that he first read George Orwell. From Homage to Catalonia he became interested in the Spanish Civil War, which led him to Leon Trotsky and other Marxists. “I think it was just completely random,” Sunkara says now. He counts himself fortunate he didn’t stumble on Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman first.
While books helped shape his worldview, by far the deeper pull toward politics came from his experience as the only natural-born citizen in his family. Unlike his immigrant siblings, Sunkara grew up with the full complement of Pleasantville’s property-tax-funded social programs. He says he was attracted to socialism in large part “because I saw how much of life was an accident of birth.”
Sunkara went to his first Democratic Socialists of America meeting just before graduating high school. The DSA then had just 6,000 members nationwide, and the New York chapter, which Sunkara attended, skewed old and Jewish. He recalls sitting patiently through hours of stories about what it was like to grow up in the Bronx in the forties and fifties, when everyone had to choose whether they were an anti-Stalinist socialist or a party-line Communist. “It felt like they were trying to make certain things relevant,” he says, “but it was basically relics.”
In college, at George Washington University in DC, Sunkara supported John Edwards’s presidential run and began editing the blog of the youth wing of the DSA. He developed a taste for British polemicists—Alexander Cockburn, Perry Anderson, Christopher Hitchens, V.S. Naipaul—and read back through the archives of left-wing stalwarts like Dissent, New Politics, New Left Review, and The Nation. He admired many of these publications, but he also identified unclaimed territory between those that seemed almost afraid to be too accessible to their readers, and others that settled for mindless cheerleading. (In a blog post he published around the same time, Sunkara lamented “the deterioration of The Nation into a vapid, politically complacent mouthpiece of the establishment.”)
When he decided to start a new magazine, in the summer of 2010, Sunkara looked to William F. Buckley’s National Review as a model. That magazine had been careful to define itself as conservative, not Republican, and it had taken certain positions—encouraging Barry Goldwater to run for president in 1964, for instance—even when they might spell short-term trouble for the Republican Party. In a similar way, Sunkara says, he hoped to use Jacobin “to cohere people around a set of ideas, and to interact with the mainstream of liberalism with that set of ideas.”
Sunkara says now he had no real idea how to run a magazine—he didn’t know, for instance, that publisher was a job title a person might aspire to. But what his youth cost him in experience, connections, and, most critically, cash (his initial annual budget was just $240) compensated Sunkara with a certain editorial liberty. For decades, Marxism had been treated as a fringe concern by mainstream media outlets. Free enterprise was the American way, and any suggestion otherwise, it was understood, risked planting a fatal first step on the slippery slope toward Stalinism. But these hangups had little purchase for the millennial cohort Sunkara hoped to address. Having lived their entire adult lives under the shadow of the Great Recession, for them it was capitalism, not Communism, that counted as the god that failed.
What his youth cost him in experience, connections, and, most critically, cash compensated Sunkara with a certain editorial liberty.
The editor’s note introducing the first online issue of Jacobin was echt Sunkara: at once swaggering and modest, funny and sober, earnest and desperately afraid of being caught taking itself too seriously. “Publications with tiny audiences have a knack for mighty pronouncements,” he wrote. “A grandiloquent opening, some platitudes about ‘resurrecting intellectual discourse’ followed by issue after issue of the same old shit.’” The About page described Jacobin in a style (and with a typo) only an undergraduate could love: “A magazine of culture and polemic that Edmund Burke ceaselessly berates on his Twitter page. Each of our issue’s contents are poured over in taverns and other houses of ill-repute and best enjoyed with a well-shaken can of lukewarm beer.” Sunkara solicited writers he knew from the DSA blog and from Doug Henwood’s Left Business Observer listserv. His first issue included essays on European social democracy and the Zapatistas, interviews with Azar Nafisi (the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Walter Benn Michaels (The Trouble with Diversity), and a review that found in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad Love Story “a distracting, superficial critique of capitalism.”
By any standard, the launch was a dud. The site registered only 600 visitors in its first month, causing him to reconsider the project. Unconvinced that a website alone could distinguish Jacobin among the glut of other small online outlets, Sunkara decided he needed a print magazine. This idea was, to put it extremely mildly, counterintuitive. After all, 2010 was the year Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT Media Lab, declared that physical books would be dead in half a decade, the same year Apple introduced the iPad, which was widely seen as the last best hope to rescue the magazine industry from otherwise certain extinction.
If you could get an actual copy of your magazine into the hands of your readers, you could force them to pay attention.
Sunkara had no idea that both of these predictions would prove wildly mistaken, but he figured that a physical object couldn’t be ignored as easily as a blog post. If you could get an actual copy of your magazine into the hands of your readers, you could force them to pay attention. With this logic in mind, he prepared a print issue that duplicated much of what had already appeared for free online, and published it early in 2011.
The first print issue sold well enough to convince Sunkara that he ought to start work on a second. Later that year, he told an interviewer that he had stumbled into a niche. “I don’t really see anyone doing what we’re doing and I’m not sure whether I should be proud or disheartened by that,” he said. “I do know that if the response to our haphazard launch is any indication, there is a market for what we’re producing.” His goal, he said, was to produce an eight-issue run.
In September 2011, a day after Gage noted that “the left has mounted no effective mass protests, inspired no significant uprisings” in the Times, Occupy Wall Street set up in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Jacobin covered the movement on its blog and was mostly bemused about its anarchist flavor. But while the protest would have an important long-term influence—it taught a generation of activists to think in terms of class—its most immediate effect on Jacobin was the publicity generated by an Occupy-themed video that went viral thanks to a concentrated blast of right-wing outrage.
Around the same time, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design named Remeike Forbes emailed Sunkara, offering to design a T-shirt as a fundraiser. It didn’t take long for Forbes to be drafted as the magazine’s sole designer. His involvement led to an immediate improvement. The first issues of Jacobin, with hot-pink display copy and four-color art, had offered clear proof that Sunkara wanted nothing to do with the drab design of most left-wing publications, which seemed to draw aesthetic inspiration from the East German Plattenbauten. But the earliest issues of the magazine were erratically laid out, with odd accumulations of negative space that betrayed their amateur origins.
Forbes’s covers established a hip new tone for the magazine, whether it was the Bastille-era guillotine done up as an Ikea assembly diagram or an unflattering allusion to Jacobin’s Gen X antecedent, The Baffler, which implied that it was time to turn the page—literally—on the previous generation. (Sunkara admitted to me that he had no idea The Baffler existed until a year or two after he started Jacobin.) Forbes’s most distinctive contribution was a stylized silhouette of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture that appeared on the cover of the Spring 2012 issue. In an accompanying essay, Forbes wrote that the choice of a black person as Jacobin’s logo “provoked some anxiety on the editorial board,” given the potential for causing offense. But as a black Jamaican immigrant himself, he saw in L’Ouverture’s revolution an encapsulation of “the historic mission of the Left.” (L’Ouverture was also the subject of The Black Jacobins, by the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James, which Sunkara has credited with indirectly inspiring the name of his magazine.)
Jacobin’s design was easily the most distinctive thing about it, and helped propel the magazine from 2,000 subscribers in early 2013 to 7,000 the following year. But the magazine also began to attract notice for its frank and often surprisingly sensible articles on the theory and practice of socialism. Mike Beggs, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, had a hit with “Zombie Marx,” from the Summer 2011 issue, while Peter Frase’s “Four Futures,” from Winter 2012, imagined a taxonomy of possible outcomes that might follow the deployment of full automation, such that the economy no longer required human labor.
And yet as important as these articles were for Jacobin’s reputation, the magazine more closely resembled Wenner’s Rolling Stone, or Harold Hayes’s Esquire, or Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair than it did Dissent or the New Left Review in at least one respect: its whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Reading Jacobin you got the sense that socialism had as much to do with a sensibility as any particular set of arguments. It was, or became, part of who you were.
Henwood, who has an essay in the latest issue of Jacobin, its twenty-seventh, told me recently that the magazine’s success in making socialism seem vibrant should not be underestimated. When he started writing for leftist publications in the 1980s, “it was just such a lonely landscape. You’d go to these left spaces and they are often filled with freaks, like really odd people.” Jacobin, he says, helped American socialism escape its dreary Cold War reputation. “To have this lively, attractive magazine, this young culture—it’s definitely a very important part of what turned this thing around. It created an audience for radical socialist politics among a younger generation.”
“[Jacobin] created an audience for radical socialist politics among a younger generation.”
Keenly aware of how few options there were for people who might be curious about socialist politics but not ready to dive headfirst into the DSA, Sunkara helped facilitate the organization of Jacobin reading groups across the country and around the world. Over lunch, he told me that he still felt this practical urgency. “What most people encounter as Marxism—from going to college, for instance—is Frankfurt School cultural criticism, things that are actually quite complicated and often pretty meaningless. We just say, ‘This is the core idea, and you can understand it.’” A similar spirit informed The ABCs of Socialism, a book Jacobin published in 2016, and Sunkara’s own Socialist Manifesto, which Basic Books is publishing in April. He told me that he wrote the book, a history of socialism, in hopes that a high school student would “be able to pick it up and understand it and be interested in it.” Last year, as part of a themed issue on childhood, Jacobin even published a children’s book about socialist bats.
On a clear Monday night in mid-October, I went to watch Sunkara debate Gene Epstein in Manhattan. Epstein, who is 74, is the former economics editor of Barron’s and the director of the Soho Forum, the organization that sponsored the debate. The event was a reprise of a similar debate that Sunkara had organized in 2017, during which he and Vivek Chibber, the editor of Catalyst, had debated two editors from Reason, the libertarian magazine, in front of a left-leaning audience at Cooper Union. Now the libertarians would have their revenge: it would be Sunkara’s charge to defend the thesis that “socialism is more effective than capitalism in bringing freedom to the masses” at a debate series whose mission is “to enhance social and professional ties within the NYC libertarian community.”
Before the debate began, a comedian in an unzipped hoodie warmed up the crowd with jokes about #MeToo and Bernie Sanders. Shortly after an ill-considered crack about hungry Africans earned him a few boos from the audience—“I’m sorry if I stereotyped Africa,” he told his hecklers, not sorry at all—he ceded the stage to Sunkara, Epstein, and the debate’s moderator, Naomi Brockwell, a red-haired bitcoin enthusiast.
Sunkara took to the lectern dressed like a McKinsey associate, in a pale-blue business shirt and brown leather derbys. He made little effort to dispel the impression that the event had attracted something less than his full enthusiasm, reminding the audience that he’d been paid for his appearance at the debate. A thundering Eugene Debs he was not: When his prepared text summoned a future in which workers might “reach their God-given potential,” Sunkara stopped himself abruptly and looked up from his notes. “I’m an atheist, I’m not sure why I said God.” Later he broke out laughing when he realized that his claim that “to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person no matter who they are, where they came from, or what they did” very nearly plagiarized the chorus of a Backstreet Boys song.
“He’s a capitalist success story! He started a magazine that’s got 38,000 subscribers! He bought a magazine in Britain! He’s the wunderkind of socialism!”
Epstein proved the more natural debater, but about an hour into the program, his emotions got the better of him. “Walk the walk and quit talking the talk!” he sputtered at Sunkara, waving his hands like an aggravated pelican. “Bhaskar, learn some economics!”
After the debate I found Epstein at the center of a circle well-wishers. A few of them were trading news about a blockchain conference in Malta and a cruise off the coast of the Mexican Riviera whose entire purpose, according to Brockwell, was “talking about how much they dislike Paul Krugman.” Epstein was gracious about his erstwhile opponent. “Isn’t he kind of a charming personality?” he said to a man with an Ayn Rand Institute pin in his lapel. When I asked why he wanted to debate Sunkara, Epstein grew rhapsodic: “The guy is the socialist entrepreneur par excellence! He’s a capitalist success story! He started a magazine that’s got 38,000 subscribers! He bought a magazine in Britain! He’s the wunderkind of socialism!”
Epstein’s awe at Sunkara’s output speaks to a commonly held view that socialism is the last refuge of the truly unproductive. Socialists are “the kind of people who would casually crash the best of plans with a last-minute bad hair day,” the libertarian economist Bryan Caplan suggested recently. “They radiate incompetence. I doubt their families would trust them to plan a simple trip to Sea World.” This notion is by no means exclusively held by the right. As Micah Uetricht, Jacobin’s managing editor, told me recently, “If you’ve hung out on the left for a while, you’re not used to people having a fire under their ass to do much of anything.”
Sunkara couldn’t play more contrary to type. He has written about his fondness for starting businesses as a high school and college student, including a “shady business import/exporting out-of-market software” and a “small-scale bootlegging” operation. During Jacobin’s early years, while working as a receptionist at Brooklyn College to support himself, he occasionally flipped used Playstations for a profit on Craigslist.
“He’s a real hustler. He’s a real operator,” Henwood says. “And charming: he’s not an obnoxious thruster.” Uetricht marveled at Sunkara’s drive. “He likes the competition part. He likes when we’re up and our enemies are down. He enjoys that kind of thing, as well as figuring out the big picture. If you are in charge of an organization, you have everything from, ‘What will be the lead editorial?’ to ‘How much are we paying for shipping?’ He likes every aspect of that process. I once went with him to a shipper. We met with this guy in this industrial area, and Bhaskar just came alive discussing the shrink wrap per-piece rates. ‘Can we get a discount?’ It’s like, we need to negotiate a good rate for the bags for our issue, because that is part of how we are going to move more further toward socialism.”
“Bhaskar just came alive discussing the shrink wrap per-piece rates.
Sunkara, for his part, told me that there’s no contradiction between his entrepreneurial enthusiasm and his socialist ideals. “The market logic of creating a publication,” he says—attracting readers, getting them to subscribe, finding competitive advantages that will keep them on the rolls—“is politically pure.” By contrast, he finds “profoundly narcissistic” the idea that publishing worthy ideas is a sufficient reason to expect a sustaining income. “When people are, like, ‘I want to create a publication because I believe in community, and I believe in bringing together all these people and ideas,’ part of me is, like, This is fucking all bullshit,” he says. “No. You want to create a publication, you have to think about who are going to be your readers, and how your readers are going to give you money. Otherwise you won’t have a publication.”
At the start, Sunkara thought that Jacobin would subsist on a steady diet of advertising revenue, supplemented by donations, subscriptions, and a Kickstarter campaign. (“I’d run public service announcements from the Republican National Committee and/or local drug dealers if it didn’t change the editorial content of the publication,” he said early on.) Very quickly, however, he learned the same lesson that the rest of the industry has spent the past decade rediscovering: subscription revenue was the way to go.
“Print publications are very simple,” he says. “You produce a good, and you take subscriptions. You make sure, over the course of the year, that the goods cost less than the cost of fulfillment. Let’s say we have 1,000 lifetime subscribers, and we get $300,000 from those lifetime subscribers. That’s $300,000 up front. Obviously it’s a liability, too, but not one they can call all at once. A lifetime subscriber can’t say, ‘Give me twenty years of issues right now.’ It’s almost like a finance game. Your liability isn’t a fixed thing, it’s a moving target. Let’s say 15 years is a lifetime subscription. You then have to make another assumption: what’s your median print run over the course of that 15 years? From that you deduce your cost of goods sold. If we make the assumption that it’s 15 years, and it’s going to cost 10 dollars per year to fulfill that subscription, then you can spend $150,000. You can hire staff, you can expand, or whatnot. But the best way to spend that $150,000 is to do things that will actually lower your cost of goods sold. It’s very simple.”
That the economics of print publishing are as simple as Sunkara suggests might strike someone familiar with the media business as naive if not slightly insane. And yet to see Jacobin’s bottom line, as captured on its IRS filings—since 2014 the magazine has been organized as a non-profit organization—is to discover what appears to be a socialist magazine operating in rude economic health. In its first year as a non-profit, the magazine received a stock donation worth nearly $100,000 from Alex Payne, who was one of the earliest employees at Twitter—also, full disclosure, a cash donation worth $140 from me—but in the three years that followed, donations never accounted for more than a fifth of Jacobin’s operating revenue. Revenue from magazine subscriptions and book sales, meanwhile, grew from just under $200,000 in 2014 to more than $1.1 million in 2017. Sunkara is wary of claiming to be profitable, and not only for the obvious political reason. Lifetime and multiyear subscribers, he says, constitute a long-term accounting liability not captured on his tax forms. Still, it’s significant that Jacobin reported a six-digit surplus in each of those four years. (Over the same period, the free-market-cheering Reason Foundation, which subsists almost entirely on contributions, gifts, and grants, reported annual operating deficits of more than $2 million from its magazine and website.)
What Sunkara’s neat story about the economics of lifetime subscriptions leaves out is just how much uncompensated sweat equity he and his colleagues put into the operation. For the first three issues, Sunkara did essentially all the production, design, business, and publicity work himself. (He gave his writers official-sounding titles on the masthead to make the operation seem bigger than it was.) Eventually he assembled an editorial board to help with commissions and brought Forbes on board as the magazine’s first full-time employee. In 2013 Sunkara started paying his print writers, but he did not take a salary for himself until two years later, and then only $36,000 a year.
Uetricht became Jacobin’s first paid editor in 2013. At the time, he’d been working as a labor organizer in Chicago, but he started out on the left under the sway of a punk-inflected anarchism that was relatively common in the mid-2000s. He says that his road to democratic socialism started in 2008, at a protest outside the Republican National Convention, when a police officer’s rubber bullet landed two inches from his groin. “That was probably the actual moment where I was like, ‘Why was I doing that? Why was I with these people picking fights with the cops for no discernible reason? It could have been really bad, and we didn’t really accomplish anything here. That was a real turning point, laying on my cot in jail.”
Uetricht, who is now 30, had never been an editor when Sunkara hired him to edit Jacobin’s website; his only relevant experience was writing a book under the Jacobin imprint at Verso. He says he learned his new job by doing, editing one or two articles a day and making, as he puts it, “half-time wages for full-time hours.” After a brief stint in Canada for graduate school, Uetricht came back to work as Jacobin’s managing editor. Today he works out of the magazine’s Chicago office and, over Slack, helps Sunkara and Forbes oversee five online editors, two designers, and four staff writers, two of whom are full time. The staff writers are responsible for most of the twenty-five pieces that are published each week online. And while the editors have heard complaints that Jacobin doesn’t pay enough for its freelance pieces—rates start at $75 per piece—Sunkara figures the magazine spent more than $100,000 on freelancers over the past year.
“Online is where you spend your money,” he told me, since the pull for fresh content on the internet—content that has to be commissioned, edited, and promoted—is essentially endless. Like magazines several times its size, Jacobin uses its website as a loss leader for its print publication. “It’s kind of a freemium thing,” Sunkara says. “Our goal is to convert people.” He is not at all apologetic about using every means at his disposal to attract attention. Nor was he embarrassed when the Times revealed in 2018 that Jacobin was one of several publications and celebrities to purchase followers on Twitter. At the time, Uetricht was trying to convince Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s agent to let him publish an essay by the former Lakers star. Sunkara thought a round number would help make the case, so he purchased a thousand followers without telling Uetricht. (The piece, on the exploitation of college athletes, ran in November 2014.)
Sunkara also spent heavily on Facebook advertising, at least until a few years ago. “We had a really good Facebook strategy,” he says. “Facebook is like a bottleneck, in that you can’t publish things one on top of each other. The Nation, The New Republic—all these publications have the money to produce twelve or thirteen pieces a day. We only have the money for four. But because of the Facebook bottleneck, it was a leveler.” When Facebook changed its algorithm in the middle of 2017, Sunkara told me, Jacobin’s referrals from the site fell 40 percent. These days, he says, he gets much more mileage out of conventional subscription campaigns that rely on email marketing, or even direct mail.
Less conventional is Sunkara’s insistence that revenue maximization should not be his primary goal. “Part of what we do with staff positions, is we want to give young socialists training and expertise and jobs,” he says. Sunkara likes to boast that Jacobin’s employees get good benefits and belong to a union, and he is justifiably proud that the gap between the lowest and highest salaries at the magazine is less than ten thousand dollars. “If the goal was revenue maximization, Jacobin would probably have a slightly smaller circulation, and we would publish a lot less online. I could make it profitable. But the goal isn’t profit,” he says. “The goal is reaching as many people as possible, within certain moral limits.”
In May 2015, just a few days after Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Jacobin published a long essay called “The Problem with Bernie Sanders.” The essay, by Ashley Smith, argued that “the Democratic Party has co-opted and changed Sanders,” and that the same was bound to happen to any leftists foolish enough to place their hopes in two-party electoral politics. Sunkara, writing around the same time, took a different view. Though Sanders was certain to lose against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, Sunkara argued, the Vermont senator might prove a boon to the left in the long run. “Having Sanders openly defend socialism, and contest the New Democrat record before a national audience, is a baby step in the right direction,” he wrote. “When he fails, there’s every reason to believe that radical voices can take his place.”
Nearly four years later, it seems clear that Sunkara had the more prescient perspective. Sanders’s surprisingly competitive run for the Democratic primary—during which he won 23 states and 13 million votes—persuaded many people to believe that American socialism, however vaguely defined, might still have a future.
Meagan Day, one of Jacobin’s two full-time staff writers, was one of them. Before 2015, Day told me recently by phone, she’d considered herself a “left-liberal”—a faithful reader of The Nation and The Atlantic—but by no means a socialist. She’d been in college when the Great Recession hit, and like most of her classmates was too young to understand what it was all about. (At a Mountain Goats concert she attended, John Darnielle had asked the crowd what they thought about the bank bailouts. “There were crickets,” Day recalled. “He was like, ‘Do you guys even know what I’m talking about?’”) Though Day was demoralized by her one visit to Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street—“weirdos and drum circles,” she recalls—she says that the protest’s motto had stuck with her. “Some part of my mind was insistent on applying that ninety-nine percent versus one percent framework to the news.”
Day first encountered Jacobin while she was living in Turkey in the wake of the Gezi Park protests, at a time when she was “starting to see the importance of class division and of class conflict everywhere, and was finding that left-liberal media was insufficient to explaining the world.” Still she says, she remained “ideologically free-floating” until Sanders came along.
“I just really fucking liked Bernie Sanders,” she says. “I liked him because he is a straight shooter, and the things that he was saying made sense, and nobody else would say them. I didn’t know what single-payer health care was until Bernie Sanders started talking about it. You read a little bit about what he’s proposing, and you’re like, ‘Why in the hell don’t we have that?’” Day says now that Sanders oriented her political inclinations much the way a magnet shapes a tray of iron filings. “That’s what it felt like for me when Bernie Sanders came along. I already had the makings of a socialist, but I felt completely emboldened to pursue those politics.”
Day’s political evolution proved the plausibility of the thesis that Sunkara had laid out in 2015. “Jacobin actually helped me understand what it means to be a socialist,” she told me. “It turned me from somebody who was sympathetic to socialism, and maybe even willing to identify as a socialist, into somebody who was capable of understanding socialist strategy and applying it to real-world political activity.”
“[Jacobin] turned me from somebody who was sympathetic to socialism. . . into somebody who was capable of understanding socialist strategy and applying it to real-world political activity.”
Sanders’s run—and Trump’s victory—proved crucial to Jacobin’s growth. Though the magazine’s 501(c)3 nonprofit status meant that it could not explicitly endorse political candidates, Jacobin’s Bernie-friendly editorial outlook made it a natural intellectual home for his new admirers. The magazine became the unofficial house organ of the movement and saw its circulation triple as a result, from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 in the first issue of 2017. (Jacobin attracted 16,000 new subscribers in the two months after Trump was elected.)
Jacobin has also benefited from its symbiotic relationship with the DSA, which grew from around 6,000 in 2015 to more than 50,000 last fall. Given Sunkara’s own relatively long membership in the organization, the overlap of Jacobin’s readership and DSA’s membership is hardly a surprise. But Sunkara says that he is careful to try to keep the magazine a step removed from day-to-day political concerns. Jacobin’s loyalty to socialist ideas expresses itself in what he describes as an editorial box, as distinct from an editorial line: “A line publication says, ‘This is what we think about this.’ A box publication says, ‘Here’s the debating ground on which we operate. Nothing outside, but everything within in it.’” Though many of Jacobin’s staff are members of the DSA, Sunkara says that “everybody knows to keep separate debates in DSA from the publication. The publication has its own logic, its own mission.”
Jacobin’s current print circulation of 40,000 far outpaces Sunkara’s original aspirations. He told me that he’d originally hoped only to match the high-water mark of the Partisan Review, which topped out at 15,000 subscribers. And while he’s convinced that Jacobin could last for fifty years if managed properly, he also feels that Jacobin is running in overtime: “It has completed what it initially set out to do. We helped put socialism back on the map in the United States, we helped shape and cohere a new generation of people who are on the left, a new generation of socialists. And now we have to figure out what we are.”
Though Sunkara believes that this is the best time to be on the American left since at least the late sixties, he guesses that it will be difficult to expand his subscriber base much beyond 50,000 without changing the magazine significantly. “I think we used to be in an era where you could have a flagship publication and it just builds. You would build up The Nation to like 150,000 subscribers, or Mother Jones to like a quarter million.” Now, though, he says, “the way that publishing is working is extreme segmented markets. I think that in order to get to the six-figure size, there would have to be some sort of dilution, becoming something you’re not.”
To avoid that fate, Sunkara has embarked on several new projects. In addition to its book imprint, published by Verso, which averages four books a year, Jacobin has launched Catalyst, its academic journal, plus a series of podcasts and Jacobin Italia. The Italian edition runs on what Sunkara calls “a classic franchise model”: Jacobin provides publishing and editorial advice, and takes a small cut of revenue, but otherwise lets it run independently. The podcasts, too, receive marketing and business support. It’s a way, Sunkara says, of expanding Jacobin’s reach without taking too much risk: “We severely limit our upside, but in return we have little to no downside.”
Jacobin’s biggest recent bet was the purchase, last year, of Tribune, a left-wing British magazine that once employed George Orwell as literary editor. Sunkara’s interest in the British left is long-standing. He has established connections with the upper echelons of the Labour party, led by democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and Jacobin has not hesitated to defend Corbyn against accusations of anti-Semitism. (At the Tribune launch in Liverpool, Corbyn was introduced to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French socialist who ran for president in 2012 and 2017.) Sunkara says that by contrast with Jacobin, Tribune is mainstream and institutional: “Jacobin is more flippant and immature and insurgent, whereas Tribune is more avuncular and burdened by history.”
The Tribune acquisition was not without controversy. Under the previous owner, Owen Oyston, a convicted rapist who was found to have “illegitimately stripped” more than £26 million from the professional soccer team he owned, Tribune had been in dire straits. Three writers who were owed back pay from Oyston agreed to accept 70 percent of their claims from Sunkara, believing that this compromise would facilitate their continued involvement with the magazine. When Tribune’s new editorial staff did not ask the writers to contribute to the first issue, they took their complaints public. (“In the capitalist world someone who buys an ailing company and dumps its committed workers is known as an asset-stripper or robber baron,” one wrote in an open letter, “but at least they don’t claim to be socialists.”) Sunkara insists that the plan all along was to invite the writers to contribute to the second and third issues. “They thought, and had reason to think, that they would be incorporated into the relaunch at a closer level. . . . But the thing is, they have different models and different visions than some of the new staff.”
In late November, I met up with Sunkara at a mostly empty bar in Brooklyn, not long after he’d returned from the UK, where he’d hawked Jacobin at the annual Historical Materialism conference and met with Tribune’s new editors. The trip was one of several he’d made to Europe in recent months. While the Pixies brayed from the overhead speakers, Sunkara told me, with evident relief, that Tribune had signed up 4,000 subscribers since its relaunch, a quarter of whom came in the first 72 hours. “One thing with Tribune is it has every advantage, unlike Jacobin. It’s not really a bootstrap project—it has resources and lists, things like that, at its disposal. So the stakes are higher, and its expectations are higher.”
“What I discovered over the course of the years, is that publishing is a craft just like editing or just like writing. It’s just practiced by fewer.”
Sunkara clearly enjoys the challenge. “What I discovered over the course of the years, is that publishing is a craft just like editing or just like writing. It’s just practiced by fewer,” he told me. “If you think of your work as worthwhile, and you think of your political mission as worthwhile, then I think there is a tendency to chase scale. If you’re connecting with 500 people, then can’t you do this in 12 cities or 15 cities? If it works in the US, can’t we encourage it in different countries? You want it to spiral out of control.”
I mentioned to Sunkara what Uetricht had said to me, that his appetite for the cut and thrust of business did not seem to be an especially common attitude on the left. From memory, Sunkara quoted A. Philip Randolph’s suggestion that “at the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take and you keep what you can hold onto.” He noted that “it sounds like the most rabid, aggressive, right-wing whatever,” before noting that Randolph was a socialist. “He was talking about helping people organize for some basics of their livelihood.”
We packed up to leave the bar. Earlier in the evening, Sunkara had told me that he tries to avoid New York publishing and media circles whenever he can. Instead he spends ten to 14 hours a week watching NBA basketball, he goes out once a week with his high school and college friends, and he visits his girlfriend, a law student at Harvard. He said he hopes to get married and have kids in the next couple of years. As we walked out onto a sidewalk still heaped with snow from a storm a few days before, he told me, “If you want to be happy, then you can find happiness in your personal life. In my personal life I have a very stable routine, because in your personal life you’re not in a conflict to succeed. But if you’re engaging in a political project, that’s not your imperative. Your imperative is to win, right?”
Correction: The piece has been updated to reflect that Bhaskar Sunkara did not personally introduce Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon and that Meagan Day did not live in Turkey during the Gezi protests. It has also been updated to clarify that Jacobin’s podcasts do not share revenue with the magazine.
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Robert P. Baird has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, newyorker.com, Esquire, and Harper’s.
Sunkara couldn’t play more contrary to type. He has written about his fondness for starting businesses as a high school and college student, including a “shady business import/exporting out-of-market software” and a “small-scale bootlegging” operation. During Jacobin’s early years, while working as a receptionist at Brooklyn College to support himself, he occasionally flipped used Playstations for a profit on Craigslist.
“He’s a real hustler. He’s a real operator,” Henwood says. “And charming: he’s not an obnoxious thruster.” Uetricht marveled at Sunkara’s drive. “He likes the competition part. He likes when we’re up and our enemies are down. He enjoys that kind of thing, as well as figuring out the big picture. If you are in charge of an organization, you have everything from, ‘What will be the lead editorial?’ to ‘How much are we paying for shipping?’ He likes every aspect of that process. I once went with him to a shipper. We met with this guy in this industrial area, and Bhaskar just came alive discussing the shrink wrap per-piece rates. ‘Can we get a discount?’ It’s like, we need to negotiate a good rate for the bags for our issue, because that is part of how we are going to move more further toward socialism.”
“Bhaskar just came alive discussing the shrink wrap per-piece rates.
Sunkara, for his part, told me that there’s no contradiction between his entrepreneurial enthusiasm and his socialist ideals. “The market logic of creating a publication,” he says—attracting readers, getting them to subscribe, finding competitive advantages that will keep them on the rolls—“is politically pure.” By contrast, he finds “profoundly narcissistic” the idea that publishing worthy ideas is a sufficient reason to expect a sustaining income. “When people are, like, ‘I want to create a publication because I believe in community, and I believe in bringing together all these people and ideas,’ part of me is, like, This is fucking all bullshit,” he says. “No. You want to create a publication, you have to think about who are going to be your readers, and how your readers are going to give you money. Otherwise you won’t have a publication.”
At the start, Sunkara thought that Jacobin would subsist on a steady diet of advertising revenue, supplemented by donations, subscriptions, and a Kickstarter campaign. (“I’d run public service announcements from the Republican National Committee and/or local drug dealers if it didn’t change the editorial content of the publication,” he said early on.) Very quickly, however, he learned the same lesson that the rest of the industry has spent the past decade rediscovering: subscription revenue was the way to go.
“Print publications are very simple,” he says. “You produce a good, and you take subscriptions. You make sure, over the course of the year, that the goods cost less than the cost of fulfillment. Let’s say we have 1,000 lifetime subscribers, and we get $300,000 from those lifetime subscribers. That’s $300,000 up front. Obviously it’s a liability, too, but not one they can call all at once. A lifetime subscriber can’t say, ‘Give me twenty years of issues right now.’ It’s almost like a finance game. Your liability isn’t a fixed thing, it’s a moving target. Let’s say 15 years is a lifetime subscription. You then have to make another assumption: what’s your median print run over the course of that 15 years? From that you deduce your cost of goods sold. If we make the assumption that it’s 15 years, and it’s going to cost 10 dollars per year to fulfill that subscription, then you can spend $150,000. You can hire staff, you can expand, or whatnot. But the best way to spend that $150,000 is to do things that will actually lower your cost of goods sold. It’s very simple.”
That the economics of print publishing are as simple as Sunkara suggests might strike someone familiar with the media business as naive if not slightly insane. And yet to see Jacobin’s bottom line, as captured on its IRS filings—since 2014 the magazine has been organized as a non-profit organization—is to discover what appears to be a socialist magazine operating in rude economic health. In its first year as a non-profit, the magazine received a stock donation worth nearly $100,000 from Alex Payne, who was one of the earliest employees at Twitter—also, full disclosure, a cash donation worth $140 from me—but in the three years that followed, donations never accounted for more than a fifth of Jacobin’s operating revenue. Revenue from magazine subscriptions and book sales, meanwhile, grew from just under $200,000 in 2014 to more than $1.1 million in 2017. Sunkara is wary of claiming to be profitable, and not only for the obvious political reason. Lifetime and multiyear subscribers, he says, constitute a long-term accounting liability not captured on his tax forms. Still, it’s significant that Jacobin reported a six-digit surplus in each of those four years. (Over the same period, the free-market-cheering Reason Foundation, which subsists almost entirely on contributions, gifts, and grants, reported annual operating deficits of more than $2 million from its magazine and website.)
What Sunkara’s neat story about the economics of lifetime subscriptions leaves out is just how much uncompensated sweat equity he and his colleagues put into the operation. For the first three issues, Sunkara did essentially all the production, design, business, and publicity work himself. (He gave his writers official-sounding titles on the masthead to make the operation seem bigger than it was.) Eventually he assembled an editorial board to help with commissions and brought Forbes on board as the magazine’s first full-time employee. In 2013 Sunkara started paying his print writers, but he did not take a salary for himself until two years later, and then only $36,000 a year.
Uetricht became Jacobin’s first paid editor in 2013. At the time, he’d been working as a labor organizer in Chicago, but he started out on the left under the sway of a punk-inflected anarchism that was relatively common in the mid-2000s. He says that his road to democratic socialism started in 2008, at a protest outside the Republican National Convention, when a police officer’s rubber bullet landed two inches from his groin. “That was probably the actual moment where I was like, ‘Why was I doing that? Why was I with these people picking fights with the cops for no discernible reason? It could have been really bad, and we didn’t really accomplish anything here. That was a real turning point, laying on my cot in jail.”
Uetricht, who is now 30, had never been an editor when Sunkara hired him to edit Jacobin’s website; his only relevant experience was writing a book under the Jacobin imprint at Verso. He says he learned his new job by doing, editing one or two articles a day and making, as he puts it, “half-time wages for full-time hours.” After a brief stint in Canada for graduate school, Uetricht came back to work as Jacobin’s managing editor. Today he works out of the magazine’s Chicago office and, over Slack, helps Sunkara and Forbes oversee five online editors, two designers, and four staff writers, two of whom are full time. The staff writers are responsible for most of the twenty-five pieces that are published each week online. And while the editors have heard complaints that Jacobin doesn’t pay enough for its freelance pieces—rates start at $75 per piece—Sunkara figures the magazine spent more than $100,000 on freelancers over the past year.
“Online is where you spend your money,” he told me, since the pull for fresh content on the internet—content that has to be commissioned, edited, and promoted—is essentially endless. Like magazines several times its size, Jacobin uses its website as a loss leader for its print publication. “It’s kind of a freemium thing,” Sunkara says. “Our goal is to convert people.” He is not at all apologetic about using every means at his disposal to attract attention. Nor was he embarrassed when the Times revealed in 2018 that Jacobin was one of several publications and celebrities to purchase followers on Twitter. At the time, Uetricht was trying to convince Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s agent to let him publish an essay by the former Lakers star. Sunkara thought a round number would help make the case, so he purchased a thousand followers without telling Uetricht. (The piece, on the exploitation of college athletes, ran in November 2014.)
Sunkara also spent heavily on Facebook advertising, at least until a few years ago. “We had a really good Facebook strategy,” he says. “Facebook is like a bottleneck, in that you can’t publish things one on top of each other. The Nation, The New Republic—all these publications have the money to produce twelve or thirteen pieces a day. We only have the money for four. But because of the Facebook bottleneck, it was a leveler.” When Facebook changed its algorithm in the middle of 2017, Sunkara told me, Jacobin’s referrals from the site fell 40 percent. These days, he says, he gets much more mileage out of conventional subscription campaigns that rely on email marketing, or even direct mail.
Less conventional is Sunkara’s insistence that revenue maximization should not be his primary goal. “Part of what we do with staff positions, is we want to give young socialists training and expertise and jobs,” he says. Sunkara likes to boast that Jacobin’s employees get good benefits and belong to a union, and he is justifiably proud that the gap between the lowest and highest salaries at the magazine is less than ten thousand dollars. “If the goal was revenue maximization, Jacobin would probably have a slightly smaller circulation, and we would publish a lot less online. I could make it profitable. But the goal isn’t profit,” he says. “The goal is reaching as many people as possible, within certain moral limits.”
In May 2015, just a few days after Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, Jacobin published a long essay called “The Problem with Bernie Sanders.” The essay, by Ashley Smith, argued that “the Democratic Party has co-opted and changed Sanders,” and that the same was bound to happen to any leftists foolish enough to place their hopes in two-party electoral politics. Sunkara, writing around the same time, took a different view. Though Sanders was certain to lose against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, Sunkara argued, the Vermont senator might prove a boon to the left in the long run. “Having Sanders openly defend socialism, and contest the New Democrat record before a national audience, is a baby step in the right direction,” he wrote. “When he fails, there’s every reason to believe that radical voices can take his place.”
Nearly four years later, it seems clear that Sunkara had the more prescient perspective. Sanders’s surprisingly competitive run for the Democratic primary—during which he won 23 states and 13 million votes—persuaded many people to believe that American socialism, however vaguely defined, might still have a future.
Meagan Day, one of Jacobin’s two full-time staff writers, was one of them. Before 2015, Day told me recently by phone, she’d considered herself a “left-liberal”—a faithful reader of The Nation and The Atlantic—but by no means a socialist. She’d been in college when the Great Recession hit, and like most of her classmates was too young to understand what it was all about. (At a Mountain Goats concert she attended, John Darnielle had asked the crowd what they thought about the bank bailouts. “There were crickets,” Day recalled. “He was like, ‘Do you guys even know what I’m talking about?’”) Though Day was demoralized by her one visit to Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street—“weirdos and drum circles,” she recalls—she says that the protest’s motto had stuck with her. “Some part of my mind was insistent on applying that ninety-nine percent versus one percent framework to the news.”
Day first encountered Jacobin while she was living in Turkey in the wake of the Gezi Park protests, at a time when she was “starting to see the importance of class division and of class conflict everywhere, and was finding that left-liberal media was insufficient to explaining the world.” Still she says, she remained “ideologically free-floating” until Sanders came along.
“I just really fucking liked Bernie Sanders,” she says. “I liked him because he is a straight shooter, and the things that he was saying made sense, and nobody else would say them. I didn’t know what single-payer health care was until Bernie Sanders started talking about it. You read a little bit about what he’s proposing, and you’re like, ‘Why in the hell don’t we have that?’” Day says now that Sanders oriented her political inclinations much the way a magnet shapes a tray of iron filings. “That’s what it felt like for me when Bernie Sanders came along. I already had the makings of a socialist, but I felt completely emboldened to pursue those politics.”
Day’s political evolution proved the plausibility of the thesis that Sunkara had laid out in 2015. “Jacobin actually helped me understand what it means to be a socialist,” she told me. “It turned me from somebody who was sympathetic to socialism, and maybe even willing to identify as a socialist, into somebody who was capable of understanding socialist strategy and applying it to real-world political activity.”
“[Jacobin] turned me from somebody who was sympathetic to socialism. . . into somebody who was capable of understanding socialist strategy and applying it to real-world political activity.”
Sanders’s run—and Trump’s victory—proved crucial to Jacobin’s growth. Though the magazine’s 501(c)3 nonprofit status meant that it could not explicitly endorse political candidates, Jacobin’s Bernie-friendly editorial outlook made it a natural intellectual home for his new admirers. The magazine became the unofficial house organ of the movement and saw its circulation triple as a result, from 10,000 in the summer of 2015 to 32,000 in the first issue of 2017. (Jacobin attracted 16,000 new subscribers in the two months after Trump was elected.)
Jacobin has also benefited from its symbiotic relationship with the DSA, which grew from around 6,000 in 2015 to more than 50,000 last fall. Given Sunkara’s own relatively long membership in the organization, the overlap of Jacobin’s readership and DSA’s membership is hardly a surprise. But Sunkara says that he is careful to try to keep the magazine a step removed from day-to-day political concerns. Jacobin’s loyalty to socialist ideas expresses itself in what he describes as an editorial box, as distinct from an editorial line: “A line publication says, ‘This is what we think about this.’ A box publication says, ‘Here’s the debating ground on which we operate. Nothing outside, but everything within in it.’” Though many of Jacobin’s staff are members of the DSA, Sunkara says that “everybody knows to keep separate debates in DSA from the publication. The publication has its own logic, its own mission.”
Jacobin’s current print circulation of 40,000 far outpaces Sunkara’s original aspirations. He told me that he’d originally hoped only to match the high-water mark of the Partisan Review, which topped out at 15,000 subscribers. And while he’s convinced that Jacobin could last for fifty years if managed properly, he also feels that Jacobin is running in overtime: “It has completed what it initially set out to do. We helped put socialism back on the map in the United States, we helped shape and cohere a new generation of people who are on the left, a new generation of socialists. And now we have to figure out what we are.”
Though Sunkara believes that this is the best time to be on the American left since at least the late sixties, he guesses that it will be difficult to expand his subscriber base much beyond 50,000 without changing the magazine significantly. “I think we used to be in an era where you could have a flagship publication and it just builds. You would build up The Nation to like 150,000 subscribers, or Mother Jones to like a quarter million.” Now, though, he says, “the way that publishing is working is extreme segmented markets. I think that in order to get to the six-figure size, there would have to be some sort of dilution, becoming something you’re not.”
To avoid that fate, Sunkara has embarked on several new projects. In addition to its book imprint, published by Verso, which averages four books a year, Jacobin has launched Catalyst, its academic journal, plus a series of podcasts and Jacobin Italia. The Italian edition runs on what Sunkara calls “a classic franchise model”: Jacobin provides publishing and editorial advice, and takes a small cut of revenue, but otherwise lets it run independently. The podcasts, too, receive marketing and business support. It’s a way, Sunkara says, of expanding Jacobin’s reach without taking too much risk: “We severely limit our upside, but in return we have little to no downside.”
Jacobin’s biggest recent bet was the purchase, last year, of Tribune, a left-wing British magazine that once employed George Orwell as literary editor. Sunkara’s interest in the British left is long-standing. He has established connections with the upper echelons of the Labour party, led by democratic socialist Jeremy Corbyn, and Jacobin has not hesitated to defend Corbyn against accusations of anti-Semitism. (At the Tribune launch in Liverpool, Corbyn was introduced to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French socialist who ran for president in 2012 and 2017.) Sunkara says that by contrast with Jacobin, Tribune is mainstream and institutional: “Jacobin is more flippant and immature and insurgent, whereas Tribune is more avuncular and burdened by history.”
The Tribune acquisition was not without controversy. Under the previous owner, Owen Oyston, a convicted rapist who was found to have “illegitimately stripped” more than £26 million from the professional soccer team he owned, Tribune had been in dire straits. Three writers who were owed back pay from Oyston agreed to accept 70 percent of their claims from Sunkara, believing that this compromise would facilitate their continued involvement with the magazine. When Tribune’s new editorial staff did not ask the writers to contribute to the first issue, they took their complaints public. (“In the capitalist world someone who buys an ailing company and dumps its committed workers is known as an asset-stripper or robber baron,” one wrote in an open letter, “but at least they don’t claim to be socialists.”) Sunkara insists that the plan all along was to invite the writers to contribute to the second and third issues. “They thought, and had reason to think, that they would be incorporated into the relaunch at a closer level. . . . But the thing is, they have different models and different visions than some of the new staff.”
In late November, I met up with Sunkara at a mostly empty bar in Brooklyn, not long after he’d returned from the UK, where he’d hawked Jacobin at the annual Historical Materialism conference and met with Tribune’s new editors. The trip was one of several he’d made to Europe in recent months. While the Pixies brayed from the overhead speakers, Sunkara told me, with evident relief, that Tribune had signed up 4,000 subscribers since its relaunch, a quarter of whom came in the first 72 hours. “One thing with Tribune is it has every advantage, unlike Jacobin. It’s not really a bootstrap project—it has resources and lists, things like that, at its disposal. So the stakes are higher, and its expectations are higher.”
“What I discovered over the course of the years, is that publishing is a craft just like editing or just like writing. It’s just practiced by fewer.”
Sunkara clearly enjoys the challenge. “What I discovered over the course of the years, is that publishing is a craft just like editing or just like writing. It’s just practiced by fewer,” he told me. “If you think of your work as worthwhile, and you think of your political mission as worthwhile, then I think there is a tendency to chase scale. If you’re connecting with 500 people, then can’t you do this in 12 cities or 15 cities? If it works in the US, can’t we encourage it in different countries? You want it to spiral out of control.”
I mentioned to Sunkara what Uetricht had said to me, that his appetite for the cut and thrust of business did not seem to be an especially common attitude on the left. From memory, Sunkara quoted A. Philip Randolph’s suggestion that “at the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take and you keep what you can hold onto.” He noted that “it sounds like the most rabid, aggressive, right-wing whatever,” before noting that Randolph was a socialist. “He was talking about helping people organize for some basics of their livelihood.”
We packed up to leave the bar. Earlier in the evening, Sunkara had told me that he tries to avoid New York publishing and media circles whenever he can. Instead he spends ten to 14 hours a week watching NBA basketball, he goes out once a week with his high school and college friends, and he visits his girlfriend, a law student at Harvard. He said he hopes to get married and have kids in the next couple of years. As we walked out onto a sidewalk still heaped with snow from a storm a few days before, he told me, “If you want to be happy, then you can find happiness in your personal life. In my personal life I have a very stable routine, because in your personal life you’re not in a conflict to succeed. But if you’re engaging in a political project, that’s not your imperative. Your imperative is to win, right?”
Correction: The piece has been updated to reflect that Bhaskar Sunkara did not personally introduce Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon and that Meagan Day did not live in Turkey during the Gezi protests. It has also been updated to clarify that Jacobin’s podcasts do not share revenue with the magazine.
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Robert P. Baird has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, newyorker.com, Esquire, and Harper’s.
Socialists: Help Organize Your Workplaces
BYNICK FRENCH
Socialists and other radicals played crucial roles in American labor’s greatest victories. To rebuild a fighting union movement, socialists must organize in the workplace.
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Giant and Safeway grocery store workers protest in front of a Safeway store for fair union contract negotiations on February 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. Mark Wilson / Getty
The coronavirus is causing a major global social and economic crisis. In the United States, the government’s response to this crisis has been disastrous, and employers are showing, as usual, that they have no qualms about putting their own profits above the health and safety of their workers and of the public.
Strikes and other forms of on-the-job organizing have kicked off all over the country. But workplace militancy on a much greater scale will be required to force a humane pandemic response from corporate owners and policymakers, both to win the kind of measures we need to fight the disease, like Medicare for All, and to slow the disease’s spread.
The labor movement has a key role to play in this. Unfortunately, labor’s strength is at a historic low. The percentage of workers in unions was 10.1 percent in 2019, the lowest rate since 1983 (when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting data). There was a revival of strikes in 2018, with the most workers going on strike since 1986. But that number is mostly confined to public education and still way below the historic heights of the Great Depression and World War II era, or even the 1960s and 1970s, when public-sector strikes kicked off in large numbers.
A fighting labor movement is one of the only forces that can prevent needless misery and death during this outbreak and in coming capitalist-created crises. Socialists need to understand why labor is so weak — and what we can do to bring it back.
Reversing Labor’s Decline
Micah Uetricht and Barry Eidlin write about this conundrum in a 2018 article for Labor Studies Journal. They argue that there are three principal approaches to understanding labor’s relative weakness in the United States and what to do about it. Understanding these approaches, and what’s wrong or missing with them, is critical for formulating a successful strategy to revitalize the labor movement today.
One approach says that labor is being held back by unfriendly policies, and that the solution to the labor movement’s woes is to reform labor law. Another approach holds that labor’s problem is due to union leaders using flawed organizing strategies; the solution, then, lies in improving those strategies. The third, related to the second, argues that labor has suffered from the absence of elected officials who are friendly to labor, and that rebuilding the labor movement requires electing more pro-labor politicians.
Uetricht and Eidlin argue that all three are not so much fully wrong as misguided in their emphasis. Labor-friendly policies have generally been the effect, not the cause, of upsurges in labor militancy. The often illegal and occasionally violent strikes of the early 1930s, for example, spooked legislators into passing the Wagner Act, which institutionalized collective-bargaining rights through new labor laws. Leaders’ adoption of new organizing strategies, usually emphasizing research and communications over building power on the shop floor, has failed to revitalize unions. And for decades, unions have tried to strengthen themselves by using connections with the Democratic Party — again, to little avail. Even with Barack Obama, who campaigned on pro-labor policies like the Employee Free Choice Act, in the White House, unions failed to make significant gains.
All of these views, Uetricht and Eidlin argue, rest on a flawed theory of how worker power is built. This theory sees worker power as being granted from the top down, whether by union bureaucrats, politicians, or laws. But the history of the US labor movement shows that power must be built from the bottom up, through rank-and-file workers organizing and taking action themselves. That is because workers’ ability to organize and engage in disruptive action on the shop floor is labor’s ultimate source of power.
Rebuilding rank-and-file worker organization must be labor’s priority. And central to that project will be recreating and strengthening a core of class-conscious workplace activists: the militant minority.
The Militant Minority and Workplace Radicals in the Depression Era
What is the militant minority? Charlie Post defines it as the “layer of workers with a vision and strategy for how to organize, fight, and win.” The militant minority consists of the rank-and-file workers who are fiercely and consistently committed to organizing their coworkers to fight the boss.
In the period stretching from the end of World War I through the Great Depression and World War II, these workers were essential to the formation of class consciousness and militancy in their workplaces. Although the militant minority of this era included many non-leftists, radical leftists played a central role. Communists, socialists, Trotskyists, and other radicals took the lead in forming and maintaining first workplace militancy, then strong worker-led unions across the country. These organizing efforts were critical to the massive wave of victorious strikes in the Depression era, including in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis.
Uetricht and Eidlin identify five important contributions of these workplace radicals. First, they infused their workplace organizing with class-conscious ideology. Unlike other unionists, leftists’ “beliefs in the illegitimacy of management’s authority on the shop floor led to their refusal to cede control of shop-floor conditions to management.” Radicals’ willingness to challenge the bosses’ authority helped them build fighting, democratic unions. For instance, communists were extremely influential in the formation of the radical longshore workers’ union that eventually sparked the 1934 San Francisco general strike.
Second, workplace radicals were the most dedicated and became the most experienced organizers. Their commitment to class struggle motivated them to organize and fight even under threats of firing and violence. Communists and others organized throughout the 1920s, when employers successfully crushed most efforts at unionization. But the organizational infrastructure leftists built and the experience they gained during this period paid off in the 1930s, when worker unrest exploded.
Radical leadership and organization channeled worker energy into victorious mass strikes in 1934. Communists helped lay the groundwork for the San Francisco general strike, while Trotskyists and socialists affiliated with the American Workers Party led victorious mass strikes in Minneapolis and Toledo, respectively. Later in the decade, radicals played key roles in the massive wave of wildcat sit-down strikes at auto plants, devising strategy and keeping the strikes going when union leaders wanted to shut them down. Communists and socialists also led the drive to organize meatpacking and other industries.
Third, leftist organizers connected workplace and community struggles. Radicals did not organize just to win better wages or conditions for a particular workplace, or even a whole industry. As Uetricht and Eidlin put it, radicals saw union organizing as a “means to organize the entire working class.” That perspective led leftists to build solidarity between workers and their broader communities.
The importance of this sort of organizing can be seen in the 1934 Toledo strike, for instance, in which radical-led groups of unemployed workers joined picketing autoworkers to fight strikebreakers and police. The alliance with the unemployed was crucial to the strikers’ eventual victory. In Austin, Minnesota, socialists, Trotskyists, and communists led the charge in organizing the Hormel meatpacking plant that dominated the city, and then turned to helping workers across the city and region in various industries win union recognition.
Fourth, radicals were very active in the day-to-day life of their unions. That day-to-day participation involved building extensive networks of shop stewards, which allowed rank-and-file workers greater influence on union leadership. Leftist organizers also prioritized education and agitation, especially through newspapers. Publications like the Organizer in Minneapolis, the Waterfront Worker in San Francisco, and the Unionist in Austin, Minnesota, provided both news and analysis of issues affecting workers from a class-struggle perspective. These newspapers helped stoke the militancy that led to historic worker victories in all three cities.
Radicals’ involvement in day-to-day union life was directly connected to their fifth contribution: the development of democratic unions in which workers actively participated. Their commitment to challenging management’s authority over working conditions led leftists to build rank-and-file worker power as a counterweight to union leaderships, which were usually happy to cede control to management in exchange for higher wages.
Through the shop-steward networks just mentioned, radicals created channels of communication among workers and between workers and union leaders, ensuring the leadership’s responsiveness to the rank and file. This was true, for example, in the United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers Union and the United Packinghouse Workers of America, which remained democratic and responsive to worker concerns even when they came under the control of the undemocratic Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Rebuilding the Militant Minority
The post-WWII “Red Scare” resulted in the purging of communists and other radicals from unions. The severing of the connection between American labor and the Left meant the disappearance of the militant minority. As Post observes, “[T]he divorce between socialist politics and working-class life protected the labor bureaucracy from significant opposition.” Without committed rank-and-file organizers around to challenge conservative union leaders, unions embraced a strategy of attempting to secure better wages and benefits through grievance procedures while avoiding the disruptive strikes typical of the Depression era.
This approach worked well enough during the “boom years” of the 1950s and early ’60s, when owners were willing to make concessions to workers. But when a crisis of profitability set in in the mid-’60s, capitalists began to roll back gains made by workers. Conciliatory union leaderships made little effort to resist capital’s offensive, and rank-and-file workers were ill-equipped to fight back.
Although the wave of wildcat strikes that erupted in the late ’60s and early ’70s won significant gains, without a sizable militant minority to channel this upsurge into durable workplace organization, conservative union leaders were able to reassert control when the strike wave died down. And capital has continued to extract concessions from workers since. The result has been a continuous decline in union membership and workplace militancy.
Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, the teacher strike wave, and now the coronavirus pandemic have breathed new life into the Left and the labor movement. Sanders has revived socialism as a popular idea in American life. His campaigns helped spur the rapid growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which now boasts close to sixty-six thousand members and elected officials throughout the country at all levels of government. Teacher strikes in West Virginia and Arizona — themselves guided by a militant minority — ignited a national strike wave unlike any seen in decades. And now, the coronavirus outbreak is pushing workers to protest and go on strike to shut down nonessential businesses, to win paid leave and safety protections, and to ensure hospitals have adequate staffing and protective equipment to handle the disease.
Socialists should seize on the opportunities offered by the twin revival of labor and the Left to reconnect the two. That is the point of the rank-and-file strategy, which aims to rebuild the militant minority. One way we can start doing that is by taking jobs in strategic sectors (such as logistics) and companies (like Amazon), either to unionize nonunion workplaces or to reform corrupt and undemocratic unions. Labor Notes, which has been building a network of class-conscious rank-and-file activists since the 1970s, provides an excellent model for socialists trying to build organization on the shop floor.
While a critical mass of leftists working in strategic industries may be needed to cohere a new militant minority, getting jobs in these sectors is not the only way socialists can help build worker power. Socialists can also help workers organize for safety during the pandemic through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint project of the DSA and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.
They can also support the struggles of rank-and-file workers locally. Members of my own DSA chapter have done this for health care and fast-food workers, amplifying their struggles and joining their picket lines and protests. And through campaigning for class-struggle politicians like Bernie Sanders, socialists can help raise the expectations of working people and inspire them to fight their bosses (just as Sanders’s 2016 campaign inspired important leaders of the red state teacher revolt).
Radicals’ contributions to workplace organizing were once crucial to labor’s strength and fighting spirit. With socialism again a prominent current in American life and the need for a strong labor movement clearer than ever, it’s time for the Left to go to work.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/labor-organizing-rank-file-strategy-workers-movement
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