‘Socialist’ Jacobin Magazine founder endorses right-wing hawk Joe Biden in NY Times
The founder and editor of Jacobin, the pro-imperialist “socialist” magazine that humbly dubbed itself “a leading voice of the American left,” just published an op-ed in the New York Times, the US empire’s newspaper of record, effectively endorsing right-wing demented predatorial war criminal Joe Biden.
Many people on the US left have criticized me for supposedly being “too harsh” on Jacobin Magazine. They said they didn’t understand why I despised Jacobin so much — ignoring its serial collaboration with pro-imperialist organizations funded by the US government’s regime-change arm the NED and regular publication of suspicious academics who literally train the British military — instead arguing that, sure, while Jacobin published questionable articles at times, it purportedly had a net positive impact.
But in the past several months it has become absolutely undeniable what Jacobin’s ulterior motives were, and I’m just going to come out and say I told you so.
You now have no excuse to deny the obvious: Jacobin’s role is to construct a Respectable Left that is pro-imperialist, anti-communist, and essentially just a social-democratic arm of the Democratic Party.
Jacobin’s strategy, explicitly stated both in the Times and on its own website, is to use Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to build a faction within the Democratic Party, get new “progressive” Democrats elected (like opportunist AOC, who said she “deferred to caucus leadership” on Trump’s far-right coup attempt in Venezuela), and try to take over the party.
But you can’t take over the Democratic Party; it will eventually take over you. US socialists have tried for decades, and always failed. The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements.
In this NY Times article, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara even quoted DSA founder Michael Harrington (an ardent pro-imperialist cold warrior who refused to call for withdrawing US troops during the mass slaughter of the Vietnam War) in order to berate US socialists for risking “sectarian irrelevance” — by which he means irrelevance to the bourgeoisie and the Respectable Opinion Makers in the corporate media, not irrelevance to actual working-class Americans.
This is not just my “hyperbolic” opinion. They are admitting it openly in the New York Times! Stop denying reality.
Jacobin Magazine is no friend of socialists. It is the voice of 21st-century left-liberals and social democrats who want to reform capitalism without fundamentally challenging imperialism and the legitimacy of existing bourgeois institutions.
One other point to close: This is much, much bigger than just US bourgeois electoral politics. We are in the early stages of a new US cold war on China. And just as in last century’s cold war, factions of the anti-communist American “left” were crucial for the US government to manufacture consent for its imperialist crimes abroad, from wars to coups to blockades to massacres.
I’m telling you now, Jacobin and DSA are going to provide the US empire the “left” cover it needs to continue these crimes. We have seen them do exactly this already with Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Brazil, and Hong Kong, and it is going to get even worse as the new cold war heats up.
