Bhaskar Sunkara was twenty-one years old, sick, and reading Marx. It was the summer of 2010. He had missed two semesters at George Washington University due to illness, and during his convalescence he had worked his way through the canon of Western Marxism with the discipline of someone preparing for an exam no one had assigned. By the time he felt well enough to return to school, he had an excess of ideas and no outlet for them. So he made one. Jacobin launched online in September 2010 and published its first print issue at the start of 2011, named after the radical club of the French Revolution and, by extension, the Haitian one.
The timing was improbable. In 2010, "socialist" was the worst epithet in American politics, print media was supposedly dying, and the American left was, by most accounts, a permanent fossil. Then Occupy Wall Street happened. Then Bernie Sanders ran for president. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a congressional seat. Jacobin didn't cause any of these things, but it had built the intellectual infrastructure that made them legible to a generation of young Americans who had grown up after the Cold War and couldn't understand why the richest country on Earth couldn't provide healthcare to its citizens.
The magazine's genius was tonal. Sunkara wanted something accessible — not the academic jargon of old-left journals, not the insider posturing of political blogs, but clear, sharp, often witty writing that could explain democratic socialist ideas to people who had never encountered them. The design was bold and contemporary, the illustrations striking. By 2023, Jacobin had seventy-five thousand print subscribers and over three million monthly website visitors, making it the most successful American ideological magazine launch in decades. Sunkara also became president of The Nation and launched Catalyst, an academic companion journal, and acquired the British Tribune.
Whether you agree with its politics or not, Jacobin is a remarkable publishing achievement — proof that ideas, clearly expressed and beautifully presented, can still build audiences from scratch.
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