In 2012, Jacobin launched its reading groups program with the slogan “Don’t Study Collective Action Alone.” For many years, it was far too easy for budding socialists and radicals to do precisely that — to feel a sense of profound unease with capitalist civilization’s approach to the cliff’s edge, while not being able to do much of anything about it.

That began to change when Occupy Wall Street went from a small encampment in Lower Manhattan to an international phenomenon practically overnight. Occupy didn’t immediately result in the establishment of new political formations — at least not those in the mold of more traditional parties or cadre groups. But it sent the old mole digging anew, and it put wind in the sails of what was, at that time, a fledgling publication still looking to make its mark.

After Occupy, media reports on the “new socialist wunderkinds of America” often mentioned Jacobin in the same breath as publications like n+1 or the New Inquiry. While this comparison wasn’t entirely unjustified, Jacobin never had the same literary ambitions as those publications. It was always more of a straightforward, left-wing agitprop campaign, a constant fire hose of material telling you the world can be better if we organize and fight. It sought not to emulate Partisan Review, but to resuscitate the spirit of a publication like The Masses for those organizing after the historic defeat of left and workers’ movements.