I honestly think the quality and rsdicslity of writing on verso books is far higher than on jacobin, even for the same writers. Idk if it’s the jacobin editors shutting radical ideas down, or verso people encouraging radical ideas, but there’s a big difference.
Co-signed. There are definitely some limits as to what Verso will publish (note that they’ve printed plenty of Losurdo, but drew the line at Stalin: A History and Critique of a Black Legend) but by and large they have the best library of contemporary theory that’s readily available in English. They also publish books that disagree with their other books. For example, they have several books advocating for degrowth, and they also have Matt Huber’s Climate Change as Class War, which argues against it.
Chibber’s podcast here, Confronting Capitalism, shares a title with a Jacobin-branded book that Verso published, but that book (as I recall) aims a hell of a lot more toward guiding people leftward (by explaining basic concepts like the reserve army of labor, and that kind of thing) than it does at stopping them in their tracks. I gave my copy to a lib I was trying to radicalize and while my work is very much not done it made the task a bit easier.
Here is Sebastian Budgen (Senior Editor of Verso, Editorial Board of Historical Materialism, Contributing Editor to Jacobin) insulting Rockhill with ad-hominem attacks on social media for daring to criticize Western Marxism, and explicitly saying that he stopped the publishing of Rockhill’s book with them: https://x.com/GabrielRockhill/status/2005093043012337674
I’m not interested in going to bat for any publishing house or editorial team. I have no dogs in any of these races. I just mentioned something I noticed reading the same authors, first on verso, then on jacobin, and noticing the differences, even when speaking about the same topics.
Then I just wrote some conjecture on whether this difference could be explained by each org’s editorial lines or teams, which seemed the most likely to me.
Hope this clears up what I meant by the other comment.
I don’t understand what you meant by that comment, or if it was directed at me or the people you mentioned earlier.
It also feels to me like you have an axe to grind, and I’m not interested in participating or feeling like I have to keep explaining myself, so I’ll disengage.
I honestly think the quality and rsdicslity of writing on verso books is far higher than on jacobin, even for the same writers. Idk if it’s the jacobin editors shutting radical ideas down, or verso people encouraging radical ideas, but there’s a big difference.
Co-signed. There are definitely some limits as to what Verso will publish (note that they’ve printed plenty of Losurdo, but drew the line at Stalin: A History and Critique of a Black Legend) but by and large they have the best library of contemporary theory that’s readily available in English. They also publish books that disagree with their other books. For example, they have several books advocating for degrowth, and they also have Matt Huber’s Climate Change as Class War, which argues against it.
Chibber’s podcast here, Confronting Capitalism, shares a title with a Jacobin-branded book that Verso published, but that book (as I recall) aims a hell of a lot more toward guiding people leftward (by explaining basic concepts like the reserve army of labor, and that kind of thing) than it does at stopping them in their tracks. I gave my copy to a lib I was trying to radicalize and while my work is very much not done it made the task a bit easier.
Here is Sebastian Budgen (Senior Editor of Verso, Editorial Board of Historical Materialism, Contributing Editor to Jacobin) insulting Rockhill with ad-hominem attacks on social media for daring to criticize Western Marxism, and explicitly saying that he stopped the publishing of Rockhill’s book with them: https://x.com/GabrielRockhill/status/2005093043012337674
I’m not interested in going to bat for any publishing house or editorial team. I have no dogs in any of these races. I just mentioned something I noticed reading the same authors, first on verso, then on jacobin, and noticing the differences, even when speaking about the same topics.
Then I just wrote some conjecture on whether this difference could be explained by each org’s editorial lines or teams, which seemed the most likely to me.
Hope this clears up what I meant by the other comment.
This is how the Compatible left operates.
I don’t understand what you meant by that comment, or if it was directed at me or the people you mentioned earlier.
It also feels to me like you have an axe to grind, and I’m not interested in participating or feeling like I have to keep explaining myself, so I’ll disengage.
I am talking about Verso.