How any group collectively decides to represent itself visually often comes with the same debate and perturbation that mark the drafting of a written manifesto. The image you see on the banner of this website is no exception. I had originally presented four options to the Jacobin editorial board and a discussion over the choices ensued. Technically, there were four options, but really the debate was always between two: the pictoral logo which, referencing The Black Jacobins, finally won the bout and an abstract logo (one of the other three).

I understand where my fellow Jacobins in the abstract camp are coming from. With so much of the Left desperately plastering any image that could possibly signify rebellion onto their rally flyers — burly arm clasping burly arm, clinched fist grasping X object, Angela Davis wailing into something — their appetite for something neutral and more timid appears reasonable. Yet no image is truly neutral and attempting to dissolve a visual identity in the acid bath of high modernism isn’t a design solution.

Of course, no one wants to issue another risible facsimile of Adbusters, a bound pile of expensive pages with vapid content inciting suburban teenagers to purchase hemp boots, but why should leftists have to make a choice between visual content that’s honest and impassioned and sober political analysis? Ironically, leftists who scoff at bold imagery suffer the same delusions of the Guy Fawkes Left; they opt for lazy applications of style over an attempt to grapple with a world of meaning, because even timid design has semantic consequence. Like the fist-wielding activists who try to beckon to the world their rebellion, they tell us through simple abstraction or just utter lack of design of their tepid intellectualism. In either case, design should do more than surface treatment.