This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism __________________________ Dr. Hans Meyer Associate Professor and Associate Director for Undergraduate Studies, Journalism Thesis Adviser ___________________________ Dr. Victoria LaPoe, Journalism ___________________________ Dr. Donal Skinner Dean, Honors Tutorial College 1 JACOBIN MAGAZINE, COMMUNITY JOURNALISM, AND THE LEGACY OF AMERICAN SOCIALIST PUBLICATIONS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Science in Journalism ______________________________________ By Eleanor Bishop April 2021 2 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Hans Meyer, and Director of Study Dr.Victoria LaPoe for their patience and support with me during the year that has made my brain turn into a bowl of oatmeal. I couldn’t have done this without my friends (especially Maggie Prosser, Krissy Wahlers and Katie Nolan), my family — who have always supported my weird niche interests and put up with my political rants — and my girlfriend Mady Nutter, who has been my literal shoulder to cry on through the last year. I love you all. Introduction A high-society event, 1906: men and women in tailored suits and ballgowns lounge around white-clothed tables, clinking glasses and silver cutlery. Lights dance across white marble statues and the gleaming ballroom floors. Suddenly—a rumble from below, like low thunder. The conversation stops. All eyes are on the floor, where the polished tiles appear to shake. The rumbling turns to a deliberate, forceful rapping. Wide cracks snake across the marble as the floor splinters open to reveal a single raised fist. Down below, men and women with dirty faces and ruddy clothes crouch together, huddled in the dark. Their faces are anguished, and some are collapsed in exhaustion, but most have their arms raised above their heads — not in solidarity but in desperation. They are holding up everything: the ballroom floor, the pure white tables, the marble statues and the people above in their black- tie attire. But not for much longer. It looks like things are about to come tumbling down. 3 This striking scene, depicted in J.A. Mitchell’s cartoon “From the Depths” (based on a painting by Balfour Ker) (Cohen, n.d.) was distributed to more than 270,000 people across the country on the front cover of Appeal to Reason’s December 29, 1906 edition (Wayland, 1906, p.1). The Appeal, America’s most popular socialist publication to date (Armstrong 1981, p. 38) was supported by devoted subscribers, largely working-class men and women (Graham, 1990, p. 11). The popularity of the socialist press – and of socialism itself – in the first two decades of the 20th century is an underreported facet of both journalism (Armstrong, 1981, p. 38) and American history (Graham, 1990, p. 1). In 2010, in an America that was both vastly different and yet in some ways eerily similar to that of 1906, a college student and longtime DSA member had the idea to start a socialist magazine (Baird, 2019). In these two parallel Americas, socialist publications found devoted audiences, but faced the challenge of keeping them without losing sight of their own goals. American socialist publications have all grappled with the conundrum of staying financially stable within a capitalist society. This has historically resulted in two outcomes: a compromise of values to increase funding like increased advertising, exploitive labor practices and/or the courting of wealthy donors, or the publication's demise. How does modern American socialist magazine Jacobin fall into this American tradition of socialist media? How has it stayed financially stable, and how has its content changed, if at all, in its 10 years of operation? The purpose of this thesis is to analyze Jacobin’s content and business practices and place it into the greater historical context of American socialist media. 4 Literature Review What is Socialism? One of the challenges of writing about something as polarizing and ideologically complex as socialism has been finding sources that are not carrying a heavy positive or negative bias. To define the idea in as politically neutral a way as possible, the encyclopedia is a good place to start: Britannica defines socialism as the “social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources” (Ball & Dagger, 2021). Although how to get to this position or even to what degree this public ownership should exist has been debated amongst socialists since its formal inception, the public ownership of the means of production, or the land, labor and capital needed to produce goods and services (Means of Production, n.d.), has been central to its definition (Meek, 1957, p. 135). Socialist ideas and societies operating under socialist principles existed for millennia before Karl Marx (Hudis, 2018) from medieval Christian monastic orders (Smith, 2011 p. 4) to the “utopian socialists” of the mid-1800s (Ball & Dagger, 2021). Karl Marx While Marx did not invent socialism, he is considered one of its most important theorists (Ball & Dagger, 2021). Marx, who lived from 1818 to 1883, was a philosopher, historian, economist, political theorist and journalist whose writings, along with those of his collaborator and friend Fredrich Engels, are the foundation of Marxism and much of the modern conceptualization of communism and socialism. Marxism is considered “the dominant ideological tradition” within socialism: 5 “Marxism originated in the attempt to see the failure of liberalism (and capitalism) in a historically conscious way. A Marxist is someone who attempts to understand why the shift from an unenlightened order to an enlightened order was not as successful as many had anticipated, and then attempts to understand how socialism can be the historical completion of this shift” (Alexander, 2015, p. 987). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels present a materialist conception of history: the idea that history can be understood as “the story of struggles between classes over material or economic interests and resources” (Ball & Dagger, 2021). Under capitalism, these classes in conflict are the bourgeoisie, who control the means of production and therefore the wealth, and the laborers, or proletariat, who are “slaves of the bourgeois class and of the bourgeois state” (Marx & Engels, 2021). Marx and Engels write that “[the bourgeoisie’s] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (Marx & Engels, 2021). In pursuit of increasingly global capitalism, the bourgeoisie will exploit the proletariat more and more, leading the proletariat around the world to unite against this oppressive force and seize the means of production in revolution, using “despotic inroads” (Marx & Engels, 2021) if necessary, to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (Ball & Dagger, 2021). During this time, credit, industry and the means of transportation and communication would be centralized and owned by the state (Marx & Engels, 2021). Once a classless, socialist society is established and resources are evenly distributed, “the public power will lose its political character … in place of the bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx & Engels, 2021). 6 In Capital, Marx introduces the theory of surplus value. Surplus value is “produced by the worker after he or she has produced the value of his or her wages” (The Marxist Project, 2019). Marx posits that under capitalism, since the proletariat does not own their own labor but are hired out for their work by the bourgeoisie, they are forced to work more than would be necessary simply to earn their own wages. This extra work creates “surplus value” which is collected by the bourgeoisie. “To make a profit, Marx argued, the capitalist appropriates this surplus value, thereby exploiting the laborer” (Britannica, 2016). The importance of labor is also emphasized in the idea of commodity fetishism, also outlined in Capital. This is “the tendency, within a capitalist system, for social relations between people to appear as a relationship between things” (Hudson & Hudson, 2003, p. 415). This concept is colorfully illustrated in an excerpt from Wallace Shawn’s The Fever: “People say about everything that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things -- one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money -- as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by 7 pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside” (Shawn, 1990). This concept is specific to capitalism because in a system where “production is not planned but performed by the uncoordinated decisions of independent commodity producers” (Hudson & Hudson, 2003, p. 415) it is easy to ignore the human element of production. Under socialism, with individuals in charge of their own labor, the social character of commodities is emphasized. “Labor takes on a social character prior to the exchange of products, on the basis of the communal character of production.