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№44 / WINTER 2022 REASON IN REVOLT JACOBINMAG.COM “After the failure of every revolu- tion or counterrevolution, a feverish activity develops among the fugitives, who have escaped to foreign countries. The parties of different shades form groups, accuse each other of having driven the cart into the mud, charge one another with treason and every conceivable sin. At the same time they remain in close touch with the home country, organize, conspire, print leaflets and newspapers, swear that the trouble will start afresh within twenty-four hours, that victory is certain, and distribute the various government offices beforehand on the strength of this anticipation.” — Friedrich Engels, “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune,” 1874 Citoyens EDITOR & PUBLISHER COMMISSIONING EDITORS Bhaskar Sunkara Nicolas Allen Emma Fajgenbaum CREATIVE DIRECTOR Owen Hatherley Remeike Forbes Cyrus Lewis DEPUTY EDITOR Daniel Lopez Jacobin is a leading voice of the Micah Uetricht American left, offering socialist COLUMNISTS perspectives on politics, economics, MANAGING EDITOR Ross Barkan and culture. The print magazine Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino Ben Burgis is released quarterly. Liza Featherstone SENIOR EDITOR Eileen Jones SUBSCRIPTION PRICE Shawn Gude $29 US (print) ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER $39 Canada (print) DESIGN DIRECTOR Jason Farbman Lauren Traugott-Campbell $59 international (print) EXECUTIVE EDITOR $19 (digital) ART DIRECTOR Seth Ackerman Solidarity $59 Benjamin Koditschek Institutions $69 EDITOR AT LARGE Lifetime $295 ASSOCIATE EDITOR David Sirota Meagan Day 388 Atlantic Avenue, DEVELOPMENT Brooklyn, NY 11217 ASSISTANT EDITORS Roz Hunter Alex Caring-Lobel Nick French CIRCULATION jacobinmag.com/subscribe/ Louisa Nyman Hadas Thier [email protected] John-Baptiste Oduor JACOBIN A/V © 2022 Jacobin Foundation EUROPE EDITOR Cale Brooks David Broder Conor Gillies BOOKSTORE DISTRIBUTION Central Books (Europe) STORY EDITOR PUBLICITY Disticor Direct Connor Kilpatrick Wes House Magazine Heaven FEATURES EDITOR GRAPHIC DESIGN Media Solutions Daniel Finn Cara Buzzell One Source Small Changes STAFF WRITERS EDITORIAL ASSISTANT TNG Branko Marcetic Piper Winkler Alex Press CIRCULATION (JANUARY 2022) Luke Savage EDITORIAL INTERN Magazine: 72,248 Elias Khoury Web Visitors: 2,545,070 Jacobin (ISSN: 2470-6930) is published quarterly by Jacobin Foundation Ltd., 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217- 3399. Periodical postage paid at 1050 Forbell St., Brooklyn, NY 11256-9602 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Jacobin, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217-3399. Contributors cover art by Liam Eisenberg Loren Balhorn is a Jacobin contri- Michael Grasso is senior editor at Chris Maisano is a Jacobin buting editor and an editor of the We Are the Mutants, a web contributing editor and a board German language edition of magazine analyzing the pop and member of Catalyst: A Journal Jacobin. underground culture of the of Theory and Strategy. Cold War era. Ross Barkan is a Jacobin columnist Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff based in New York City. He is the Owen Hatherley is the culture writer and the author of Yesterday’s author of The Prince: Andrew editor of Tribune. He is the author Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of several books, including He lives in Chicago, Illinois. of New York. Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London. Natalie Shure is a writer and Marianela D’Aprile is a writer living researcher in Boston. Her work in Brooklyn. She is a member Anton Jäger is a doctoral student focuses on history, health, and of the Democratic Socialists of at the University of Cambridge, politics. America. working on the history of populism Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor and in the United States. Liza Featherstone is a columnist publisher of Jacobin and the for Jacobin and the author of Eileen Jones is a film critic at author of The Socialist Manifesto: Selling Women Short: The Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, The Case for Radical Politics in an Landmark Battle for Workers’ USA. She also hosts a podcast Era of Extreme Inequality. Rights at Wal-Mart. called Filmsuck. Daniel Finn is the features editor at Fergal Kinney is a freelance music Jacobin. He is the author of One and culture journalist based in Man’s Terrorist: A Political History Manchester. of the IRA. Photo Attributions — Page 15: Photo by Yogesh Rane / Getty Images; Page 25: Photo by David Fenton / Getty Images; Pages 32–33: Photo by Frank May / picture alliance via Getty Images; Photo by Daniel Schäfer / picture alliance via Getty Images; Photo by Martin Divisek - Pool / Getty Images; Photo by Popow / ullstein bild via Getty Images; Photo by snapshot-photography / ullstein bild via Getty Images; Pages 34–35: Photos by Filip Singer - Pool / Getty Images; Pages 36–37: Photos by Clemens Bilan - Pool / Getty Images; Pages 38–39: Photos by Christophe Gateau / picture alliance via Getty Images; Page 41: Photo by Matthias Makarinus, Moment; Page 43: Photo by 20th Century Fox / Handout, Moviepix; Pages 46–47: Photos by Evening Standard / Stringer, Hulton Archive; Page 49: Photo by Keystone / Stringer, Hulton Archive. ISSUE 44 WINTER 2022 Features 19 NATALIE SHURE 32 LOREN BALHORN Are These the Last The End of the AOC Days of Die Linke? Honeymoon In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio- Die Linke was founded on the Cortez was heralded as the promise of unifying Germany’s millennial successor to Bernie left and rejuvenating what Sanders. Today, some on the was once the world’s leading Left are starting to have doubts. socialist movement. Fifteen years later, it’s struggling to survive. 51 ADAM TOOZE 76 ANTON JÄGER A Historian of Economic From Post-Politics Crisis on the Fire This Time to Hyper-Politics Adam Tooze is the leading If everything is political, then expert on how economic crises nothing is political. have remade the modern world. Here, he tells Jacobin that the covid-19 pandemic will transform global politics even more than the 2008 financial crash, inaugurating an age of instability. Departments FRONT MATTERS READING MATERIEL CULTURAL CAPITAL 08 PARTY LINES 27 CANON FODDER 41 WAYS OF SEEING The Left in Purgatory The Liminal Left’s Bid Palaces of Lost Promise for Power 12 THE SOAPBOX 43 RED CHANNELS Letters + Internet Speaks The Coen Brothers and Their Big Socialist Losers 14 STRUGGLE SESSION The Coming Democratic 46 BASS & SUPERSTRUCTURE Minority The Beatles and the Revolutionaries 49 RED CHANNELS The Tenured Radical on the Telly THE TUMBREL LEFTOVERS 64 THERMIDOR 87 DUSTBIN The Socialist (Almost) And Now, a Message From Mayor of Buffalo Our Sponsors — the Organized Working Class 68 GIRONDINS Working-Class Politics 91 POPULAR FRONT Without the Working Class The Political Isn’t Personal 74 VERSAILLES 96 MEANS & ENDS The New State Church Jacobin in Purgatory DEPARTMENT NAME SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME BY AUTHOR NAME Lorem Ipsum FFrroonntt Dolor Sit Amet MMaatttteerrss DEK: Nam aliquet, ipsum et semper convallis, quam lacus luctus nisi, ac cursus enim diam ut leo. LLOOCCKKEEDD OOUUTT OOFF HHEEAAVVEENN FRONT MATTERS PARTY LINES BY BHASKAR SUNKARA organized in industrial unions tied a political presence in parts of the and specifi cally in the home, today to socialist parties fi ghting for country — and a subculture for we seem to be trying to escape democratic rights, workers in the thousands of activists — but far a scenario where politics is only United States were represented too disorganized and powerless to personal — and where we lack any by narrow craft unions and carry out your political program. means to express collective pledged allegiance to bourgeois agency. That is the path to political self- parties. Classwide worker satisfaction, a marginality that is And yet there was something organizing capable of bridging just large enough to sustain itself undeniably collective in the exper- The Left in ethnic and racial divides remained but that will never be strong ience thousands of us had of Bernie elusive. enough to move beyond perma- Sanders’s presidential campaigns. Purgatory When glimmers of radicalization nent resistance. Will it be enough They not only off ered the prospect did emerge through organizations for the thousands of people who of improving the lives of millions like the Industrial Workers of read this magazine, or the many of workers, they also helped to the World and the Socialist Party, more radicalized by recent years cohere widespread discontent into they were smashed by state and across the United States? communal diagnoses of common employer violence. At best, in problems — a shared worldview the twentieth century, those on Nine Circles of Hyper-Politics that saw the political and economic Socialists in the United States are Dante sees much the same ten- the American left were voices I hope not, and I hope we won’t system was designed to benefi t dency in his audience. At one of conscience, pushing a certain confl ate the cultural radicalism of a tiny elite. stuck. How do we become masters point, he warns against abandoning strain of liberalism toward recent times with real advance. As Natalie Shure and Chris of our own fate? penitence because it seems too confrontation with capital and As Anton Jäger writes in this issue, Maisano remind us in their articles, diffi cult: “Reader, I would not have racist reaction and winning while our era has certainly moved the Bernie moment shaped the you fall away from good intentions concessions for working people. beyond the post-politics that politics of a generation of young when you hear the way God wills dominated the 1990s and 2000s, it The fi rst century and a half of the people and gave the Left nation- the debt be paid.” has not done so on the terms many US left told a story of qualifi ed ally recognized tribunes. Most of us on the Left might have After all, the Italian poet says but not absolute defeat. How, then, of these successes, however, have imagined. reassuringly, whatever suff ering should we situate what’s happened happened at the local level, in we incur “cannot last beyond to us in the past decade? In place of a post-politics, we now relatively low-turnout races. The Here is a place where time But for Dante, Purgatory was the fi nal Judgment.” Failure to live in what he describes as a considerable talents of even There is no doubt that we’re at the stretches on. Where food has no somewhere physical: a mountain confront your sins involves a more “hyper-politics,” a time when national fi gures like Alexandria end of a period of rapid politiciza- fl avor. Where we grow neither the penitent must climb to eternal damnation. everything is seen as political — Ocasio-Cortez seem to be directed tion and settling into one of either old nor young. It’s not bad, exactly. approach Paradise, replete with and subsumed within the culture less toward confrontation with gradual decline or slow advance. But it’s not where we had hoped stages, each of which imposed The Fires of History war debate — but we lack the political and economic elites and Hence “the Left in Purgatory.” to be. their own challenges that must be Okay, maybe it isn’t all our fault. organization to actually progress more toward the terrain of Socialists are now an entrenched overcome to address past sins. Certainly, any account of today’s political disagreement beyond cultural battles of late, destined to Don’t worry, American socialist, part of mainstream American That sounds a lot like our current socialist movement in the the discursive level. Power is rarely resonate most in “deep-blue” you’re not in the Inferno — politics — no immediate setback, political predicament. United States has to start with an contested, let alone seriously districts. hey, it’s not like we’ve ever had like the defeat of Buff alo mayoral awareness of history and the challenged. the power to err and commit mass The Left, however, isn’t always so candidate India Walton, covered Even when we do foreground obstacles in the way of our eff orts. crimes — you’re in Purgatory! willing to undertake this trek. in this edition by Branko Marcetic, Liza Featherstone adds, later in bread-and-butter issues, we’re When we fail in our eff orts to Our early progress was stymied or even the possible return of this volume, that this state of couching them in rhetoric that has When we use the word “purga- reach promised lands, we are often less by America’s bounty of “roast Donald Trump to the White aff airs brings into question some limited appeal. That was the tory” today, we tend to think content in blaming the incalcu- beef and apple pie” than by a House in 2024, will relegate us to popular left-wing common sense. lesson from a new study Jacobin of stasis, interregnum, even lable power of our opponents or peculiar combination of early our pre-2011 state. When once feminists argued did with YouGov and the Center unresolved contradiction. It’s the intractable maze of the system. industrialization and white male that socialists needed to see the for Working-Class Politics, a place between places, a some- Yet there is something dangerous Our own misdeeds are rarely suff rage. Instead of being politics in their day-to-day lives, whose director, Jared Abbott, was what empty impermanence. about being large enough to be identifi ed, let alone rectifi ed. interviewed in this edition. 10 № 44 / WINTER 2022