“In the last days of the American republic, it’s become eccentric enough to work with non-abstract tools that it has become a hobby with a specialty magazine. Socialists become socialists because they like the graphic design of socialist realism, but despise anyone who actually works with their hands, considering the act of manufacturing to itself be oppressive.”

This somehow brings to mind the unwaveringly hip ‘socialist’ journal Jacobin which seems to be a graphic design project first, and a political magazine second. It is very upbeat about reviving the mummified corpse of socialism, without bothering to analyze what went wrong, why it went wrong, or for that matter to define socialism in the first place. I assume its writers are scoring academic brownie points for appearing in it, but its relationship to reality strikes me as extremely tenuous.