In this tumultuous political era, it’s common to hear that the Left needs to rebuild its historic sources of power. But it’s more accurate to say that the Left is essentially in the process of starting over again.
In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, we share Vivek Chibber’s keynote address at the Jacobin conference, “Socialism in Our Time,” which marked the fifteenth anniversary of the magazine. He discusses how capitalism has changed since the turn of the century, how the Left has been neoliberalized, and why Zohran Mamdani’s campaign may point in a new direction.
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. You can listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
It’s an honor to be able to speak on the fifteenth anniversary of Jacobin, because it’s always remarkable when any magazine in today’s climate manages to survive as long as Jacobin has. But for a magazine of the Left to survive and to grow and to flourish the way it has, and to actually get better over time the way it has . . . I think it’s no exaggeration to say that Jacobin is the most important magazine of the Left of the English language today anywhere.
It’s a very different time right now than when it started. When Jacobin started, there was not much of a hint of the political storm that was coming in the United States and really much of the world. We could see some glimmerings, with the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring. But it really only got going with the explosive arrival of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016. So if we start with Occupy and the Arab Spring, it’s been one development after another for fifteen years, all of which has given rise to a shift back toward a Left that had seemed at the very least dormant for the longest time.
As we saw these developments unfolding, what became clear, at least to some of us on the Left, was…
Auteur: Vivek Chibber
