They let all kinds of leftists write stuff, but the overall vibe is IMO more academic-brained bad rather than Trotskyist, trot vibes are a little bit funnier.
That's a good point, like they allowed some nerd-brained dudes read the cliffnotes of Marxism and then locked them in a room with a high grade printer and the 1968 Encyclopedia Britanniaca
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ye Jacobin by name, give an ear, give an ear,
Ye Jacobin by name, give an ear,
Ye Jacobin by name,
Your fautes I will proclaim,
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear, you shall hear
Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear
Jacobin is by and large good. As another commenter pointed out, they give space to all kinds of lefties. That leads to some pretty lib takes now and then, especially in the online edition. If tendencial purity or hard-line anti-electoralism is your chief desire then sure, not for you. But I think generally it's good for promoting left unity, discussing historical and current events, propagating trade union news &c. It's probably the closest we've got to a mass left publication in the US.
BTW anyone can send articles there so while i like to dunk on their shitty takes i think it would be more constructive if ppl just started sending in articles debunking the shitty takes (theres a good chance they wont publish them tho but then again there are other places you can send them).
What i want to say is, ive been in this space for about seven years and id love it if the relentless critiques people can muster up here would leak from the commentariat to the surface.
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.