Bhaskar’s tweet on the Romanovs reminded me of this classic Jacobin cover, which was on the first print copy of the magazine I ever saw. It’s perfectly emblematic of the post-Occupy left of mostly urban surplus elites. It’s a cultural object that deserves a Barthesian analysis./1

The first thing to notice is its ambiguity. Like Jacobin’s branding as a whole, it offers a frisson of transgression by embracing an aspect of the revolutionary project usually abhorred by conventional liberalism, but at an aesthetic distance that offers plausible deniability./2

The two dimensions of this distance are, on one hand, the quality of the graphic design, making it a magazine that looks nice to display in respectable settings; and on the other, the IKEA joke, which resonates especially with Jacobin’s downwardly mobile educated constituency./3

But who is the joke on? The image represents the actual dilemma of the left Jacobin was trying to meme into existence. Can a revolutionary class emerge from scattered grad students and the like united by owning the same IKEA furniture and liking modern design on the cheap?/4

“Assembly required” points to the problem. IKEA furniture assembly is shadow labor, done in isolation, outside of wage labor. The IKEA class is thus a class difficult to organize in the terms of the historic struggles Jacobin’s branding recalls, but again, at a safe distance./5

As @SamuelBiagetti pointed in a brilliant essay, IKEA furniture—modular, mobile, made of deracinated composites—embodies many of the qualities of the surplus elites who own it and who make up the Jacobin readership and the base of the post-Occupy left./6 https://jacobitemag.com/2017/09/13/the-ikea-humans-the-social-base-of-contemporary-liberalism/

So again, “Giljotin” is a remarkable cultural artifact in that it contains within itself all the dilemmas an aporias of the new new left over the past ten years or so. Anyway, you can still buy the poster for only $15 to go with your IKEA aesthetic./FIN https://www.jacobinmag.com/store/product/1