ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: We've reached a milestone, so subscribe today for $30 a year!

Plus some notes on future content.

The main takeway from this chart is that if you ignore the little bumps and dips, this site’s audience has been growing pretty steadily since I started tracking subscriptions. Back when I used traffic rather than subscriptions before I migrated to Substack, the pattern was pretty similar.

But the second takeaway, you may have noticed, is that over the past year we’ve reached the second gray line from the top. Since I never really make much of a effort to market this site it would be silly to call that a “target”, but I do use this site’s growth as a kind of metric to gauge popular support for the sort of socialism I write about on this site, and was hoping that we’d at least reach this line by the end of the year. We’re already there!

So to celebrate I’m gonna do a little sale for the next week: 25% off annual subscriptions, meaning that you can get a full year of paid content for just $30!

While we’re talking about the next year, a word on what is to come.

Election season is coming and I’ll be frank: it’s not looking good for socialists. I have spent a lot of time writing about Bernie Sanders in the past for two reasons: first, because he was willing to name capitalism as the enemy and turn his campaign into a referendum on socialism; and second, because he was building the sort of campaign machine that it takes to potentially win. To date I do not see anyone who really checks either box.

A lot of left media is going to spend the next year using this election as an infotainment machine to juice their subscriber counts. Sometimes this will mean working as de facto comms for a given candidate so that they can get some exclusive interviews, signal boosts, maybe a future staff job in whatever comes next. Sometimes this will mean ginning up controversy over electoralism or purity or campaign staff drama or “mainstream” coverage or whatever.

In the off chance that we get a real policy debate out of all this I might weigh in. If, as happened with Sanders, I see a given campaign turning into an overt and credible referendum on socialism, I’ll certainly weigh in. If some actually interesting polling turns up then I’ll weigh in.

But barring that, I am not going to waste my time or yours with the kind of pointless electoral melodrama that’s going to dominate left media for the next year. I think that right now is a good time to pull back and work a bit on our broader analysis of capitalism in the twenty-first century, so this site will probably spend a bit more time in the weeds of scholarship than it has in the past. Right now I am working on a general primer on Marxism and language; expect the first installment soon.