Last month, on Saturday, September 13, Jacobin Magazine held a day-long conference at Church in the Village, a politically progressive, combined Methodist congregation on the corner of 13th and 7th in Manhattan. Titled Socialism In Our Time, the conference featured an uneven mix of well-developed presentations and incoherent rants. Interestingly, the dividing line between insight and inchoate seemed related to each speakers’ proximity to the center of Jacobin’s infrastructure. The closer to the center of the Jacobin project a speaker was, the less intelligible their presentation.

Much of the conference, whether the panel in question covered it or not, became a vehicle for Jacobin-affilitated speakers to vaguely wax eloquent about Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) member Zohran Mamdani’s recent NYC mayoral primary victory. However, on the opening panel, Jacobin editorial director Bhaskar Sunkara commented that he had not been to a meeting of the DSA in half a decade. Later on, Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht admitted he was convinced that Mamdani would be defeated until the moment of his victory. Statements like these, of course, were no impediment to Jacobin’s editorial staff framing themselves as both central to his victory and, therefore, uniquely equipped to discuss the state of the socialist movement locally, nationally, and internationally. Indeed, a naive attitude of self-congratulatory confidence permeated the event.

The self-congratulatory naivete on display was critiqued in one of the conference’s few highlights, Irish journalist and trade unionist Ronan Burtenshaw’s presentation for the panel “Municipal Socialism and Its Limits: The Mamdani Moment in New York City.” While other panelists struggled to articulate anything beyond self-assured back-patting regarding Mamdani’s primary victory, Burtenshaw presented a series of tentative strategic ideas developed through a comparative analysis of the post-Indignados, left-wing municipal governments of Madrid and Barcelona, Spain. Burtenshaw began his presentation with a friendly, but serious reminder to conference participants of the US socialist Left’s continued marginality, making clear that, until relatively recently, the view of the US socialist Left from without was one of a hopelessly lost movement.

Burtenshaw’s call for a humble, realistic attitude toward the recent growth and gains of the US socialist Left was not only ignored, but positively rejected in the conference’s keynote speech, given by Professor Vivek Chibber of New York University (NYU). In an incredible show of chauvinistic hubris, Chibber claimed the Mamdani primary victory had successfully returned New York City to its rightful place as the world-center of the socialist movement. This was not meant as a joke and Chibber’s statement was met with rousing applause. Burtenshaw, standing at the back of the hall, noticeably recoiled in response and intentionally refrained from clapping.

Chibber then subjected the audience to fifteen minutes of angry railing against “intersectional identity politics,” in effect an attack on his academic rivals, followed by a dubious historiography of the Euro-American socialist Left’s position as one of “starting over.” This is Chibber’s usual invective. It is merely the tired, fickle politics of the dying institutions that are US academia. One wonders why Chibber spends his time reproducing these largely useless battles? His time would be better spent taking his own advice to the US socialist Left, which came much later in his speech: we must more aggressively engage with the trade union movement. NYU non-tenured faculty, adjunct faculty, and graduate teaching and research assistants are all unionized. NYU tenured faculty, of which Chibber is a member, are conspicuously absent from this list. Maybe Chibber would find he was less intellectually embattled in US academia if he stopped pretending the trade union movement was somewhere “out there” and organized with his colleagues to save and rebuild their moribund industry?

In a recent review of Flowers For Marx, an anthology that featured the writing of some Jacobin commentators, regular Cosmonaut contributor Nicolas D Villarreal pointed out how the role of Jacobin within the US socialist Left has transformed as of late:

For the generation that encountered socialism first in the mid 2010s, the Jacobin crowd, despite any complaints we had, represented the adults in the room. They represented a level of competency in both organizing and theoretical rigor which seemed a step above other factions on the Left. That, however, no longer feels true, even if it's only a result of the younger generations slowly accumulating their own theoretical knowledge.^[1]

Socialism In Our Time’s fundamental lack of direction outside self-congratulations and chauvinism supports Villarreal’s diagnosis of Jacobin’s recent trajectory. The US socialist Left is stronger than it has been in decades, yet it has found itself in an extended crisis since the defeat of Bernie Sanders’ second challenge to the Democratic Party establishment in 2020. Only a fool would deny that the contemporary US socialist Left owes its resurgence primarily to Sanders' historic assault on the Party’s elite in 2016, the result of a meticulous, cumulative construction of an independent political force in Vermont over the course of four decades. Jacobin, far from creating the current moment, was, like most of us, a beneficiary of Sanders’ breakthrough. The socialist movement, however, remains on the terrain Sanders produced. Mamdani’s primary victory has the potential to map a way out of this crisis, but it remains exactly that: a potentiality. Despite silly claims to the contrary, it remains to be seen whether the US socialist Left is “bigger than Bernie.”^[2]

In a comment that ironically resonates with Villarreal’s assessment of Jacobin, Uetricht stated that a successful Mamdani administration will necessitate the support of a “mature” socialist Left. I concur that successfully navigating our current crisis will require the leadership of the “adults” of our movement. What remains unclear is who those adults are. Socialism In Our Time proves beyond a doubt, however, that they are not Jacobin’s editorial staff.

-Michael Rattner

1. Nicolas D Villarreal, “When Science Is Abandoned, The Flower Withers: A Review of 'Flowers For Marx',” Cosmonaut Magazine, August 20, 2025, https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/08/when-science-is-abandoned-the-flower-withers-review-flowers-for-marx/.

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2. Megan Day and Micah Uetricht, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism (Verso Books, 2020).

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