The ABCs of Jacobin | Hacker News Reader

The ABCs of Jacobin

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100 pointsmagda_wang50 comments

While I think it is important to consider arguments across the entire political spectrum, reading Jacobin takes effort. It promotes a fictional world view where a command and control society makes purely altruistic, utilitarian decisions to maximize economic and social equality. Good and evil are too quickly ascribed to actors without consideration of attribution error. There is too much black and white thinking..

If your version of "across the political spectrum" stops short of democratic socialism, perhaps it's time to try harder to expand your mind.

What is democratic socialism?

If you'd like to find out more I can recommend a great magazine.

What people call “democratic socialism” is more accurately called “welfare capitalism” (where the means of production remain private). That’s not what Jacobin espouses.

That describes social democracy. I found an explanation of the differences on the magazine’s website: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/democratic-socialism-social-d...

You're thinking of "social democracy". Democratic socialism is where the people decide how resources are to be allocated, not the elite few.

See: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/democratic-socialism-bernie-s...

> a command and control society

If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is. The difference is all is geared towards the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time, instead of those of us who work and create wealth.

Very true, of course. I'd like to see less expropriation of labor effort, and more expropriation of unavoidable natural resource rents (as well as an institutional framework that's less vulnerable to rent-seeking in general!). But it's not clear that the radical left - even the 'pragmatic' radical left that's reflected by Jacobin Mag - meaningfully shares these policy goals.

> If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is.

I don't know if you're developing some difference between command economy and command society, but since you're talking about surplus labor I don't think so. The term command economy was developed to refer to soviet style socialist economy in the early days. Public ownership plus government allocation and production quotas.

It seems like a weird self own for a presumed leftist to say, "Oh yeah, capitalism is so bad we basically already have communism."

Some on the left consider both the US and the USSR to be capitalist (the term used for the latter is often "state capitalism"), not communist.

That's true, though I think mainly because of things that changed as the decades went along, but people were calling the USSR economy a "command" economy since nearly the beginning.

No, critics of the Bolsheviks, such as anarchists and left-wing communists, were warning against that since the revolution, and just a little time after people from other countries were doing the same, such as Emma Goldman in her article titled "There Is No Communism in Russia" from 1935.

I see. I was thinking of Goldman's earlier writings that more about the NEP, but I see that "There Is No Communism in Russia" has the distinction between nationalization and a true "public" ownership. (And it is true that most anarchist writing I've really just skimmed or read many years ago)

The quality and depth of the writing in Jacobin's stories is what keeps me coming back. They go very in-depth in each story and aren't afraid to use a diction that's probably a bit more academic than the average American is comfortable with. Each piece is exactly as long as it needs to be, and they don't dumb down the content or try to soften their ideological views the way most mainstream publications do.

I especially love that the subject matter is political but not reactionary, taking a longer view of social and economic issues rather than just producing articles focused solely on the outrage of the week. Only the writing in The New Yorker is better.

It's a leftist publication, of course it's not reactionary. It's Marxist, of course it uses obscure language.

They meant "reactive".

(I also thought that "Reacting to the past rather than anticipating the future, not predictive." was one definition of reactionary, but not according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reactive and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/reactionary ).

I thought so too, but at the very least it is confusing in this context.

> I especially love that the subject matter is political but not reactionary

And for those who do like reactionary subject matter, there is a nice alternative publication - which is of course named Jacobite https://jacobitemag.com/

I don't know why you got downvoted. Jacobite is more like a collective blog in the style of Quilette, but it's medium-to-frequently-high quality.

You don't deserve the downvotes. There is too little intellectual conservatism - it's good to read about it even if you don't agree. Progressive vs. stupid is not a productive discussion for society.

I don't think that's the kind of "reactionary" that abvdasker was talking about. A better word might be "reactive" (rather than proactive).

The graphic design of Jacobin is what always stands out to me. There is sort of a retro playful feel to the cover art and images inside. And a mix of different typefaces from article to article. Not to mention the articles themselves are printed on a variety of paper types within a single issue, from glossy and thin to thicker with a fold-out.

One of the few print magazines where I enjoy physically flipping through the pages.

https://coverjunkie.com/cover-categories/best-of-the-rest/ja...

Jacobin is one sharp publication. Baskar runs a tight ship, and somehow the books are even in order! Who would have thought?

This article gives me the feeling that the folks who run Jacobin have a "holier-than-thou" attitude towards the rest of the left. I get the feeling that they look down upon more idealistic leftists, and think of themselves as pragmatic and grounded, a quality they deem that the rest of the left lacks.

Might be the way the article is written (it seems to try hard to portray Jacobson's success as a demonstration of capitalism's successes), but there definitely seems to be an underlying kernel of truth. Turns me off of Jacobin even more.

Jacobin is really good and Catalyst, its long form companion publication, is even better. They're certainly surprisingly radical for the US; they're "leftists" in the European sense (not in the US sense, where a light-pink centrist such as Bernie Sanders is seen as some sort of rabid Bolshevik by many).

I had to do a double-take here, I was thinking "I don't think Bernie is all that radical, but I wouldn't describe him as center-right". But of course the US gets the colors backwards.

A large portion of the radical left feels this way about Jacobin. I enjoy some of their articles, but it doesn't come without critique.

Famously, a post-leftist, anarchist organization called "Crimethinc" published an essay called "Your Politics Are Boring As Fuck"[0] which addressed some of the problems with the attitudes of "Jacobin Leftists". I really like this quote:

> The truth is, your politics are boring to them because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest — your marches, hand held signs, and gatherings — are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo. They know that your post-Marxist jargon is off-putting because it really is a language of mere academic dispute, not a weapon capable of undermining systems of control. They know that your infighting, your splinter groups and endless quarrels over ephemeral theories can never effect any real change in the world they experience from day to day. They know that no matter who is in office, what laws are on the books, what “ism”s the intellectuals march under, the content of their lives will remain the same. They — we — know that our boredom is proof that these “politics” are not the key to any real transformation of life. For our lives are boring enough already!

0. https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/your-politics-are-boring-a...

While I agree with Crimethinc and that quote, I can't seem to get into their writing anymore. Most of their writing comes across as defeatist or exhausting, but it's understandable because they've been promoting leftist ideals for decades now while the world slides into more and more authoritarianism.

Perhaps so, but I see the writing as more of a "The status quo will continue until we take action."

I think there is something to be said about defeatism in this regard. Things absolutely will not change until there is action. Crimethinc is simply stating the obvious -- there is no action.

Lately, The Invisible Committee's books have kept me very enthusiastic. If you haven't read those yet (specifically, "Now" and "The Coming Insurrection") you've been missing out.

For anyone else who is not a radical leftist, there are some interesting takes on how technology has affected human interaction. I see it as an interesting read for many people in tech.

I havn't read the books, thanks for the recommendations i'll check them out.

Crimethinc/AdBusters has seem to be more about fostering counter culture rather than interesting leftist thought not to say one's more important than the other, but seeing even the most radical members of our party still consumed by selfies and starbucks makes me really dissapointed. Crimethinc taught me to about Buy Nothing Day, how to make my own soap, and go vegan/local.

Does crimethinc do anything more impactful than write screeds lie Jacobin does?

"Published in 2000"

IMO, more ethics of responsibility instead of ethics of conviction is exactly what is needed. Because "right-think" does not improve people's lives, but results do. They have every right to feel superior over lazy thinkers who just subscribe to some currently fashionable belief system including the crazy parts.

I googled Jacobin and on the results noticed a tweet from the Jacobin account

Angela Merkel has resigned as CDU leader. Her failed promises of "prosperity for all" are leading to the disintegration of the traditional mass parties.

Reads bit sacred scripturey to me, as in Marx tells us in chapter X verse XX

I wonder if they address one another as comrade?

And? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make / what you're trying to communicate.

The left regularly address each other as "comrade", albeit sometimes a little tongue-in-cheek. Solidarity is an important and necessary part of the culture, given the odds are heavily stacked against them.

To name your magazine after the frenzied murderous excess of the French Revolution reminds me of how rabidly violent the far left is. And when we have so many examples of radical collectivism leading to mass suffering (much of humanity's gains in the last 40 years can be traced to China's rejection of it in the late 1970s), and an intellectual foundation based on patently false dogma like Marx's 'labor theory of value'.. I wish the left would adopt some new role models and theory based on reality

Please keep generic ideological flamewar off this site. I realize the article is tempting in that direction, but there's also an interesting story there and plenty of specifics.

"Frenzied murderous excess" of whoever is the last thing the internet has anything new to say about, and in addition to being tediously repetitive, these discussions get hostile very quickly. Those are two reasons why they're off topic here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin - the second paragraph talks about the guillotining of 17,000 political opponents. I apologize if my comment seemed too ideological, but I think it's fair to assert that they're a provocative thing to name your magazine after, and the piece mentions Jacobin's featuring the guillotine as well.

The presence of a provocation doesn't mean we need to get provoked.

If you'd bother to read the linked article or to do a moment's research, you would have learned that the magazine is not named after the French Jacobins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(magazine)#Title_and_l...

I think it’s a bit disingenuous to attack that presumption, given that the magazine sells posters of guillotines. They definitely play on it. https://jacobinmag.com/store/product/1

> … the magazine sells posters of guillotines.

Sounds like glorifying political mass-murder to me. That seems in profoundly poor taste.

Every person who died under the blade of one of those guillotines was a human being, with hopes & fears, good & evil in his soul. The great number of them weren’t murderers, rapists or thieves: they were just people who had the unfortunate bad luck to be born into the wrong caste.

Eh, it's more making fun of the people who get in a frenzy over the name. Maybe still in poor taste, but not really glorifying the deaths. In fact, many of the guillotined were Jacobins themselves.

If anything, the Haitian Jacobins were worse: the Haitian Revolution entailed systematic genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre

I don't think Jacobinism or any other ideology had anything to do with that; they were slaves rising up to their captors.

> they were slaves rising up to their captors

And yet, nothing like this ever happened in the slave-holding U.S. South. Not during the U.S. civil war, not even in the worst depths of post-war "Reconstruction" (or the lack thereof, rather - ironically, true reconstruction in the historical 'South' would only happen as late as the Civil Rights era, creating the present-day "Sun Belt"). So, clearly, ideology had at least something to do with it.

Are you sure that ideology was the single only difference between Haiti and the US South?

In fact, the two were very different; Haiti was a slave colony far away from the mainland, unlike the Southern US. Even in Virginia, the state with the most slaves in 1800, they were never even 50% of the population. In Haiti, slaves outnumbered whites 10:1. And that mainland was turned into itself, and unable to provide decent governance or even military forces to keep them in line.

The massacre came about after the Haitian revolution, when ex-slaves took control. This never happened, and could never happen, in the US.

Yeah the Kingdom of France didn't have mass suffering or murderous excesses ... That wasn't shocking to the elite at the time, but people taking power were.

In principle, a democracy with mistakes is better than an enlightened monarchy.

Look at how the US has done business with tyrants, their foreign policy has a terrible record.

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