Very sleek stuff, but reading the analysis gives bad vibes - what is their deal? Trot stuff? Can someone give me a good workup (I’m lazy)?

6 points
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CIA. Look at what they say about Uyghur genocide. Same as democracy now which is the same as MSNBC which is the same as fox news which is the same as OAN.

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28 points

it’s literally called Jacobin, they’re liberals don’t overthink this

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30 points
16 points

How is anyone still a Kautskyite in the year of our Lord 2024?

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Actually, Kautsky wasn’t that bad

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6 points

orthodox marxists. Kautsky before 1910 was not bad and he published a lot of Engels writings

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11 points

I know one IRL, he’s in local DSA leadership

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Of course the DSA of all orgs would harbor modern Kautskyites.

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1 point

They still exist?

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44 points

Bhaskar Sunkara created Jacobin specifically with the intent of making Marxism more academic and aimed at the intelligentsia.

If you think that sounds like an attempt to sequester Marxism away from the proletariat by concealing it with obscurantist language and focusing on topics that are divorced from the concerns of the working class in order to strip all revolutionary potential from Marxism, well have you ever considered that maybe Kautsky was right all along?

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is that true? it’s really not a very highbrow publication, and it’s not like marxists need help being obscurantist

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5 points

There was a quote from him about Jacobin wanting to be highbrow from a long time ago. I have probably read two Jacobin articles since the early days of the publication so I’m not sure where it’s at today tbh.

Sunkara is a curious figure because he either changes his position a lot, he says what his interviewer wants to hear, or he is intentionally concealing what his goals are. He vacillates from being a loyal opposition Democrat supporter to a revolutionary communist to a person who extols the virtues of social democracy and European welfare capitalism. It could be that he’s just flattering whoever hosts him or that he’s trying to sugarcoat his words so that his message is well-received by the audience of the publication in question idk. I haven’t bothered to look closely enough to try getting a decent read on the guy.

Maybe obscurantist was a poor choice of words on my part but in that old quote he was saying that he wanted to make a socialist publication that was slick and intellectual. So if I gave the impression that he said he wanted to rival French philosophers or the Frankfurt School for their obscuranism then that’s my bad.

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24 points

Bhaskar Sunkara created Jacobin specifically with the intent of making Marxism more academic and aimed at the intelligentsia.

Menshevism then

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9 points

The name:
Jacobin

The character of the writing:
Narodnik

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31 points

Jacobin is like the DSA, all over the place and often quite shit

Even the other trots dunk on them, e.g. WSWS - Jacobin magazine embraces Trump administration’s murderous “herd immunity” policy

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18 points

As long as they’re not talking about how communist AES is WSWS has fairly good takes.

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12 points

Or ML parties, broadly speaking

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WSWS published a series of articles defending Roman Polanski and a bunch of stuff against #MeToo. I don’t think they have good takes outside AES either. I believe that they think feminism is “identity politics” and a distraction from revolution, which will somehow unify the whole working class without addressing the special problems within its constituent blocs. Common L.

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1 point

Ooff. Ok yeah that’s some spiked com grade squick right there

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Or Harvey Weinstein.

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17 points

Confusingly takes on Epstein seem fine from the briefest of skims

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1 point

I think they’re closer to where the DSA was maybe 6-7 years ago when it was basically an amalgam of social democratic aims and means with Trotskyist analysis.

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10 points

Stalin Head In Hands: Just send them to Siberia to work it out

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