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90•Nov/Dec 2014

NLR 90, November–December 2014

https://doi.org/10.64590/e8s

NEW MASSES, NEW MEDIA

The last years have seen the eruption of one unexpected urban uprising after another—in New York, Athens, Madrid, Cairo, Kiev, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Hong Kong. The occasions, forms and compositions of these have each been particular, though patterns of long-distance inspiration and emulation are also clear. These popular insurgencies have been the most striking phenomenon within a broader gamut of different kinds of resistance to the established order of capital, the ‘new masses’ whose potential or actual components were surveyed by Göran Therborn in NLR 85; articles on the explosions in Brazil and Turkey have followed. Alongside the emergence of new masses has come, in the same period, the arrival of new media, challenging the system of inequality in its own ways. With this issue we begin a series of interviews and reports on these too. Their appearance has also been local in origin and variegated in kind. But at least three broad determinants can be detected behind them. The first is the altered political and economic landscape since the continuing round of imperial wars in the Middle East, and above all the financial crash of 2008 and its global consequences. The second is the technological ease and reach of internet publication, transforming the possibilities of well-judged, adventurous intellectual start-ups. The third is generational renewal, bringing new levies of radical thinkers, writers and activists into ideological battle. Taken internationally, these forces have overlapped to produce a wide spectrum of forms of expression: dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, bulletins and blogs, audio podcasts or online video. We open the series by publishing an interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, founder in his early twenties of one of the most remarkable socialist enterprises of the decade, the stylish US periodical Jacobin, which within four years of its creation now reaches over half a million readers on its website—an example to creative rebels everywhere.

Bhaskar Sunkara

Project Jacobin

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Could you tell us about your background and personal formation?

I was born in June 1989. My parents had come to the us from Trinidad about a year before I was born. My mother’s family, originally indentured labourers from Punjab and Bihar, had been on the island since the 19th century, but my father had arrived there from Andhra Pradesh as a young man, training as a doctor. In the us, though, his medical qualifications didn’t count for anything, so he became a clerical worker; my mother worked as a telemarketer. So I had a typical immigrant lower-middle class background. We were some of the least wealthy people in the particular town in Westchester County where I went to school, but it was a pretty affluent suburb. I had my first inklings of political engagement in middle school, with the rallies against the war in Iraq. But my actual political development came mainly through my reading. Both my parents worked late, so after school I would spend a few hours in the library. I read 1984 and Animal Farm, and reading about Orwell and the poum got me interested in the Spanish Civil War, and also in Trotsky. It was a very detached kind of politicization—at the age of 12 or 13, My Life was more important to me than going to protests or what have you. I guess it’s the fickleness of the middle class—I’m lucky I didn’t pick up Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman before I got to Trotsky. From there I worked my way through the Deutscher trilogy, I read New Left Review, the work of Lucio Magri, Perry Anderson, Ralph Miliband and others. At 17, I joined the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York chapter.footnote¹ I edited The Activist, the blog of the dsa’s youth branch, which gave me some experience of editing and commissioning. It was also where I got to know a lot of the people who would become writers and editors for Jacobin—Chris Maisano and Peter Frase, for example, who were also on the left wing of the dsa.

Did your parents’ backgrounds have an influence on your politics?

They were always supportive of left populists, in a very broad sense. People like my mother, from a rural background in Trinidad, felt positive about anyone running a developmentalist state of any kind, or even figures with vaguely progressive policies; the same went for my father, coming from India. They liked both Castro and Clinton in equal measure. They weren’t very actively political, but there was always passive support for the kind of ideas I was getting interested in. Plus their generation tended to have books lying around that one would associate with the left—we had a lot of C. L. R. James in the house, since he was Trinidadian, but also The Wretched of the Earth, and so on. I actually heard of the Haitian Jacobins before I heard of the French ones. The Black Jacobins was probably in the back of my mind when I first started thinking about the magazine.

When was that?

While I was in college. I studied international relations at George Washington University in dc, where I got more involved with the anti-war movement and student activism. Between my sophomore and junior years I was sick and had to take two semesters off—I was throwing up three or four times a day. I was off for all of 2009. During that time I disciplined myself auto-didactically. I would read a couple of non-fiction books a week as well as one work of fiction. The fiction was useless, I regret that. But I read through the canon of Western Marxism and socialist thought more generally, taking a lot of notes. By the summer of 2010, when I turned 21, I was feeling better and getting ready to go back to school, and that’s when I conceived of Jacobin. I’d spent a year doing very little apart from thinking and reading within this very particular niche, and I had this excess of ideas to work through and pieces I wanted to commission. Initially it was going to be an online magazine, but then I felt there was such a glut of stuff on the web that it would have more impact if it was also a print journal. We launched online in mid-September 2010, and the first print issue came out at the start of 2011. At the time I had no particular idea of how to run a publication—I still have my first expense sheets, and I remember worrying about having spent all of my $240 annual budget too quickly.

What about the magazine as a political project—what were you aiming to do that wasn’t being done by other publications?