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The ABCs of Jacobin

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Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#41

Post by icebraining »

rauhl wrote: post #20
orhmeh09 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#42

Post by thatfrenchguy »

tuxmascot wrote: post #10
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #3

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 cap…

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 th…

"Published in 2000"

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#43

Post by icebraining »

eadmund wrote: post #19
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#44

Post by fancyfish »

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...

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#45

Post by zozbot123 »

icebraining wrote: post #43
eadmund wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#46

Post by icebraining »

zozbot123 wrote: post #45
icebraining wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leas…

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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#47

Post by dang »

ghostcluster wrote: post #8
dang wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#48

Post by uxp100 »

icebraining wrote: post #40
uxp100 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 qu…

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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#49

Post by icebraining »

uxp100 wrote: post #48
icebraining wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The ABCs of Jacobin

#50

Post by tuxxy »

rustyboy wrote: post #16
tuxmascot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

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