Is Jacobin a political magazine?

My older, more traditionally Marxist mentors from my activist days-- the genuine commies, I mean, the Troskyites, not the AFSC/Green/popular front types-- used to sometimes say, "Marxism is not a political movement." It was an admonishment, to me, as I was known as something of a squish. Their point was that, in traditional Marxism, the point is not to win elections. Indeed, the class conflict that Marx identified, they said, made conventional political victory impossible; the capitalist class (which is distinct from the rich) could not and would not join, as the division between them and workers was natural and disqualifying. Indeed: the very logic through which we would convince workers to unite precluded the possibility of the cross-class solidarity that would make it possible to win elections. Marxists naturally and necessarily could never get electoral votes or Senate seats.

What they could do, instead, was get enough workers together to violently seize the means of production. Not today, mind you, and that's a whole other ball of wax, the receding horizon. But someday, you seize control through force. I know some who would talk about nonviolent takeover, and I suppose there's that, too. But one way or another, you weren't interested in convincing most people. Trotsky was an intellectual. But he also led Lenin's army.

Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, speaking at a Young Democratic Socialists conference, said recently

 I think these “warm-and-fuzzy” goals have to be rooted in class antagonism. 

Creating a society built around different values requires a revolutionary transformation of our socioeconomic order. These shifts, a radical extension of democracy into the social and economic realms, are not only desirable, but possible. The roadblocks to their implementation aren’t technical ones, like they’re often portrayed to be, but rather rooted in the political resistance of those who benefit from the exploitation and hierarchy inherent in class society. 

It’s important that the socialist message be wedded to moral and ethical appeals, but it can’t lose track of this antagonism against the class that makes even tepid social democratic reforms hard to envision in the 21^st century. Yet there’s also the second half of that antagonism, the identification of the class and social forces capable of challenging capitalism and pushing us towards a better social order.

Well and good. I agree on all counts. What I wonder is how Bhaskar specifically, and a lot of the younger socialists I read, believe that antagonism will be materially articulated. In a less inflammatory way, I wonder if they think victory can be achieved politically, in the broader sense of convincing enough people, if not the narrower sense of winning elections. I don't mean to be too cute with this post title; I know that there's a lot of internal debate at Jacobin and that Bhaskar is not its mouthpiece. Nor do I expect Bhaskar to have a perfectly articulable set of anodyne prescriptions, in the way that the wonks would demand.

But I do think that whether the ultimate mechanism is political or direct is a very important question, an existential one. Because I happen to think that my old Troskyite friends were right: you can't, actually, convince people into working against their own class. Marxism's power lies in the fact of class conflict, not the potentiality for it. Personally, the interdiction against violence precedes my desires for social change, so I can't get on board with a violent capture of the means of production. (Like I said: a squish.) Yet I also don't doubt that justice and equality can't be achieved through a market economy, or that we will leave the market economy through our formal political system. So I'm at a loss, as usual.

Then again, I'm a pessimist, a defeatist. And when the new order comes, it won't be made up of men like me.