HOUDINI Magazine rebukes Jacobin writer Annie Levin for a racist hit piece targeting Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls. We stand with them against these smears disguised as criticism.
Foreword by Mindape
You're about to read a piece that calls Jacobin magazine's attack on Chris Smalls exactly what it is: a racist hit piece. Some people are going to say we're too harsh. That we're fracturing the left, that this is an unfair attack on the DSA’s Reform & Revolution Caucus. That we should play nice.
We don't care.
Jacobin Magazine emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as something of a millennial attempt at a style rebranding of "the Left". With its (then) slick Corporate Memphis flatlay style design and its apparent distancing from overworn leftist factionalisms of the cold war era, it appealed very much to a disenfranchised generation of North Americans groping about for a new voice in the aftermath of the recession and the chaotic upsurge of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Jacobin pervaded the discourse of the 2010s, encouraging reading groups and podcasts, weighing in on topics such as the "rediscovery" of mainstream leftism, unionizing, the dirtbag left, austerity programs, the Syriza movement in Greece, the growth of identity politics, Jeremy Corbyn, Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter and other defining moments of that period.
In the mid-to-late 2010s I was an organizer for a Jacobin affiliated leftist reading group. In the beginning we found much to admire in the publication; attractive design, an open engagement with multiple voices from across the left, and an overall excitement at finally having a new focal point for emancipatory politics. However, it quickly became apparent that Jacobin itself was more-or-less cosplaying at revolutionary politics, by and large providing us with the "image" of radical politics while keeping us firmly on the track of "democratic socialism". By 2018 we had all but abandoned the magazine and were not in good conscience able to share readings from it at all… We often joked about rebranding to Jacobin (Original Tendency) so as to affiliate ourselves more with the Jacobins of 1790s France (Robespierre, Marat, Saint-Juste!) over the lukewarm politics of the Fortune "40 Under 40" winner Bhaskar Sunkara.
The project ultimately culminated in the endorsement and enfranchising of Bernie Sanders, Fetterman, AOC, and a (pseudo) left-wing flavour of Democratic politics; once these avenues got effectively wiped out by MAGA, Biden, and the full-throated support of Democratic socialists for Israel, Jacobin’s sway became far less credible. Still, Jacobin has always had a savvy approach to its image, pulling in a myriad of contributions from across the left, while subtly or not so subtly acting as a funnel towards the "inevitability" of electoral politics and the support of democratic socialist candidates within the Democratic party.
Infamous for their "house style" that emphasizes safe words like "democracy" or "socialism" over more radical concepts like communism or anarchism, and for constantly pushing a "practical" form of concessionary politics that has proven to be anything but pragmatic, Jacobin ambles on today in a kind of delirious haze, vaguely latching onto any opportunity to trip up authentically revolutionary politics in favour of a kind of Neo-Fabianism masquerading as something more radical than it is, while clearly clinging onto what is left of "the squad" in a cynical bid for power. Here at HOUDINI, we don't have a house style that bans words. Anarcho-Feminists, Situationists, Anarcho-Communists, Syndicalists, Marxist-Leninists, Libertarian Socialists. Our affinity group contains multitudes.
Consider this: the logo of this mild-mannered "voice of the left" magazine is a tongue-in-cheek silhouette of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian revolution… Would the editors of Jacobin ever really have endorsed someone like that? You can draw your own conclusions from the piece that follows…
Let's call this what it is. Jacobin published a racist hit piece on Chris Smalls, one of the most important labor leaders in this country, a Black man who organized an Amazon warehouse against the most vicious anti-union corporation on earth. The piece, written by Annie Levin, is no strategic critique, it's a racially motivated character assassination clothed in "leftist" dress. It is a knife in the back of a comrade who returned from being imprisoned by the IDF on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. And it was published the moment Smalls released his memoir, strategically timed to bury his book in search results. This is SEO warfare against a revolutionary working class leader.
Chris Smalls is legitimately inspiring to me. He is someone from the working class. He is someone I could go smoke with. We probably like a lot of the same music. He does not play the respectability game, and that is exactly why he is dangerous to them and appealing to us. News to the staff at Jacobin: most actual revolutionaries do not come from academia. They do not come from the NGO pipeline. Smalls does not have a college degree. Chris Smalls has infinitely more in common with the worker at your local mechanic shop than he does with the type of people who write for Jacobin. Chris Smalls is the closest we have to a modern Big Bill Haywood, I am proud to stand with him. He is one of the most legitimate representatives of the working class we have, because he is of the working class, not an academic studying it from a comfortable distance.
When was the last time Annie Levin was grinding hard as a wage slave? Clocking in for an hourly paid job? She has been a professional writer since 2005. She writes opera reviews and thinks she can speak on behalf of the working class? The audacity is staggering. Here is a woman whose byline exists because of connections to well-funded publications, positioning herself as an authority on a workplace she has never stepped foot in. She has never stocked a shelf at Walmart. She has never pissed in a bottle under full biometric surveillance. She's never driven the forklift on 3 hours of sleep and one to many five hour energies. She has never known the exhaustion of a ten-hour sortation shift. What gives her the right to speak for the working class? What gives her the right to speak over Black working-class voices? Her academic credentials? Her connections? Her theater reviews? Fuck no. You know what gives me the right to speak about this? I am a working-class person from the streets. Do you think that these people have ever listened to Young Dolph?
We bring up Young Dolph quite a lot at HOUDINI Magazine. He is one of my favorite artists. He is appealing for the same reason Chris Smalls is appealing: deeply connected to the culture, promoting an image of self-betterment, authentically of the people. You would be hard pressed to find someone from the working class, black or white, who doesn't like Young Dolph. Young Dolph was not a socialist, but that same energy of cultural connection is what makes Chris Smalls so powerful and relatable. He understands this. That is just one reason why he is important. And so for him to be attacked on the basis of his culture, black culture, American culture, for his presentation to be deemed not professional enough, is counter to the claims of being a leading voice of working class, because so much of working class culture is black culture. We have a professional writer, speaking under a veil of progressivism staking a claim that a Black man cannot wear a chain because it is not professional enough. Not only is it absolute bullshit, it's racism, if you listen closely, you can hear the dogwhistles hum.
"His flashy personal style, pairing gold grills and chains with union merchandise and political streetwear, transformed the ALU into something like a fashion brand." God forbid someone have some drip. Do you need time to search for the word drip in Urban Dictonary Annie? We can wait for you.
"Like a music act, Smalls and his ALU cohort toured the country, spreading the good news of worker organizing to Amazon warehouses and university campuses."
Because black men are only allowed two paths of success in this country, the music or the sports. Because of this Annie feels the need to compress Chris into one of the two categories. She's not comparing him to a music act as a positive, not talking about his touring as a means of agitprop, as a means of reaching the masses, no, she's attempting to make him smaller, to say that he's just a rapper, he cannot be a revolutionary to them, because that is neither music nor sports. The only way this could be more on the nose if Annie had compared him to a basketball player.
The double standard is intensely hypocritical. Levin herself wrote a piece in 2020 about how important Zohran Mamdani's rap career was to his development as a socialist. When he raps, it is a charming sign of cultural fluency, something to connect to the working class with. When Chris Smalls mentions his music career in his memoir, it is evidence of ego and celebrity-seeking. The difference is twofold, class, because Chris Smalls is first and foremost from a working class, service worker, warehouse worker background, that is why he was working at Amazon in the first place, in comparison to Levin's professional writer background. Second is race, because Chris Smalls is a black man, and there are systemic constructs on what is and isn't acceptable and professional for black men.
Compare the way she speaks about each man:
In her 2020 piece on Mamdami:
"This ability to engage people where they are using as many vectors of communication as you can opens up a vast array of possibilities for socialist candidates."
In her 2026 attack on Smalls:
"[...]we hear about his hazily successful music career that he exited after being offered a $150,000 record deal. These stories cut themselves short before they begin to offer an intimate glimpse into Smalls's life. We hear repeatedly that he is a charismatic leader good at everything he puts his mind to — athletics, music, organizing — and his only character flaw is that he is so talented and charismatic that he incurs other people's jealousy."
Smalls is a working class Black man, not a DSA darling in an elected office, and so his culture is treated as a liability rather than a strength. They wouldn't want the type of person a Chris Smalls attracts to the struggle, the movement, the revolution. Why might that be? Who might he attract? Let's be real. It's racially motivated. To these people, Chris Smalls has an "ego" problem, but a white leader? He's got a "vision".
Another quote:
"He describes these ‘professional activists' who joined JFK8 specifically to unionize it as having a 'white leftist mindset' and not understanding the mainly black and brown Amazon workers."
The quote is presented without engagement, as if the very idea of a "white leftist mindset" is self-evidently absurd. As if racism can't possibly exist on 'the left'. As if it isn't something we have to be vigilant against, because it can and absolutely will fracture a movement if we are not. Annie Levin can't treat Smalls's experience of intra-movement racism a legitimate grievance. She has to erase lived black experience for her points to land. There's no context, no follow up, no deeper discussion of something that is clearly real because the article itself is the white leftist mindset he's talking about! Any critically trained writer would have engaged with this context further, does Annie Levin not understand that the path to becoming a revolutionary that Chris Smalls took is directly related to the racial discrimination he faced at Amazon? Why is this not mentioned, at the very least for context?
"What is most striking about Smalls's memoir is its lack of tension... We hear repeatedly that he is a charismatic leader good at everything he puts his mind to... and his only character flaw is that he is so talented and charismatic that he incurs other people's jealousy."
A white writer is literally faulting a Black man's survival story for not having the right narrative. The demand for "tension" as Annie calls it, is a demand for a trauma narrative that makes white readers comfortable. This is a well known social phenomenon, Smalls's refusal to perform that is treated as a literary flaw, not a radical act. She can't handle real, lived black experience, and because of this, black experience must be packaged in an acceptable way that allows her to be the savior. Chris Smalls does not need a white savior named Annie Levin. The working class does not need a white savior named Jacobin.
The article itself has almost nothing of substance. No real critique on strategy of praxis. It would be one thing if the article was a scathing tactical review of lessons learned. If it was a piece about actual controversies, actual issues, mistakes made, lessons to be learned. Yes, we are aware that Chris Smalls is no perfect person, nor do we seek to build a cult of personality around him. When it comes to serious, pragmatic action oriented politics, criticism is always welcome in that regard, it's how we improve. But this article isn't that, it's a hit piece. What kind of praxis do you think Annie gets up to? Probably considerably less than Chris, probably nothing compared to the everyday people who do the work, whether that's speaking truth to power in the workplace or feeding the people in the streets. Don't you get tired of these academic types speaking for us?
The entire article frames his political work as an individual morality tale about ego, not a revolutionary fight against the most intensely anti-union corporation on planet Earth. Chris Smalls can't be elevated because that wouldn't benefit the white career leftists who want a slice of the empire's spoils. What are the actual complaints? He traveled too much. His drip was too noticable. He didn't wear a suit. He didn't listen to the white organizers enough. Why are the white organizers the yard stick to be measured against? He did not hold officer elections on a timeline the writer approves of. This is the only actual critique, and it makes up only a single sentence. If this article had any level of critical substance, she would have wrote the entire article about that. But she didn't. She's never worked at Amazon, and surely never had to deal with organizing within it. He criticized Democratic politicians. Good. They are genocidal, and they are public servants. They should be criticized at every turn. He compared himself to Malcolm X and Fred Hampton. White leftists seem to prefer their black leaders dead and quoteable, we'll get to that. None of this amounts to a serious strategic critique. None of this actually talks materially about mistakes he may have made. The article is a collection of petty, racist grievances dressed up as political analysis. The absence of substance is itself the tell. You don't write a takedown like this because you have a disagreement about organizing tactics. You do it because you want to bury someone.
The reason they want to bury him is obvious. Chris Smalls criticized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the wider Democratic Party. He criticized her publicly, repeatedly, and justifiably, over Palestine, over her capitulation on genocide, over her failure to use her platform to materially defend the working class that elected her. For Jacobin, AOC is the flagship project of the electoralist strategy. She is prototype, the proof of concept. An attack on her from the left, especially from a Black worker-organizer with more revolutionary credibility than their entire electoral project, is a threat to the entire political line of the right wing DSA. The hit piece is payback. It screams, "Attack the left before AOC runs for president." I cannot wait to see how much money she sends to Israel for "defense" if she ever wins. I'm under no illusions about her vow to the MUG to stop supporting Israel.
Let's talk about what actual labor organizing accomplishes versus the electoral dead end of democrat promises. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25. Amazon workers do not get paid $7.25. They fought for $15, and then that went up, why? To give workers less of a reason to unionize, why? Because Chris Smalls proved they could be unionized! They accomplished this through collective struggle on the warehouse floor, not through voting. Biden promised to raise the minimum wage. There was a technical reason, the parlimentarian, and he could not do it. Then there that administration went on to fund a genocide that is still ongoing! So forgive me if I do not care that Chris Smalls criticized the Democratic Party. The idea that criticizing the party is something you simply cannot do if you are a DSA member is absurd. I am a DSA member myself, very active in Florida in terms of organizing, and I am telling you there is a growing faction of people, some might say we outnumber the others, who do not fuck with the Democrats and want to break away as a separate party. The faction that wants this, that wants genuine working-class representation and a pathway to a new constitution for a new nation, requires exactly the kind of shop-level, interpersonal organizing that Chris Smalls did. The faction that does not want this, the faction that wants to maintain empire, pinkwash genocide, and manage dissent, controls Jacobin.
These people are not our allies. They are our enemies. And they have made it clear. If you support Jacobin, you cannot support revolutionary politics. That simple.
Chris Smalls is an actual revolutionary. He is not a politican. He has put himself in a position where he could be killed by the state at any time. But they would like that, would they not? The white left is comfortable with Black radicalism as history, not as living politics. If he was a martyr, then they could take his politics, his principles, his actions and reduce them down to easily quotable sound bites to make money from. They could recouperate his work into their social imperialism. There is a reason his self-comparison to Malcolm X and Fred Hampton offends white leftists. They don't see that he is carrying on the lineage of black radical thought, they can't because he hasn't been made a martyr. The white left loves a black martyr, but not a living revolutionary. Malcolm and Fred were made martyrs. The state killed them, and now they are safe to quote on t-shirts. Chris Smalls is still alive. He is still unruly. He can still show up uninvited and embarrass you. He doesn't show up the Met Gala to smooze around with the rich in a "tax the rich dress", he shows up to disrupt their debauchery on behalf of the working masses. And for that he must be neutralized. Let me make it as clear as I can to the people over at Jacobin: Black men do not need to be killed by the state for their voices to matter.
Consider the Met Gala incident. The only two things I saw from the Met Gala were The Rock standing next to Jeff Bezos wearing a $1.1 million watch, and footage of Chris Smalls trying to G-check Jeff Bezos. That is gangster as fuck. It was all over social media. It was a strategic disruption. It is the legacy of real radical politics, not some ego driven stunt. You know what is an ego driven stunt? This racist as fuck hit piece. No one knew who Annie Levin was until she wrote this. Think about that watch, it would take me, a working-class person making $16 an hour, 17,187 weeks to make enough to buy that watch. I am supposed to care about being respectable to these people? Go put on a suit and maybe they will take you seriously. I do not care about being taken seriously by the same class of people that rapes children on a private island. I do not care about being respectable to the people who went straight out of college into writing about the working class like we are some kind of anthropological project to be studied instead of real, actual people who live and labor on this planet.
Chris Smalls just released a When the Revolution Comes, a memoir of his life, his fight and the work he's done for the struggle. Instead of celebrating this, instead of uplifting our black leaders, Jacobin runs a hit piece. It's all so intentional. So obvious. So played out. The hit piece now ranks higher than the book when you search for his name. Jacobin knows they have significant SEO reach. That is why they ran this article, to hurt the sales of the book and control the narrative. They don't like how "uppity" Chris Smalls is. They are waging a digital war against a labor leader because they are upset that he called out AOC and the rest of the genocidal Democratic Party. Do you really think AOC would have disavowed her previous stances on supporting Israel if not for the pressure that the DSA and public figure organizers like Smalls put on her? Further do you really believe the disavow?
Imagine coming home after doing the Gaza flotilla, being treated specifically worse than everyone else because you are Black, imprisoned and assaulted by the IDF, continuing to struggle against the system despite the brutality, only to find yourself critiqued for your Blackness by white leftists who paint themselves as allies. That is an intense level of betrayal and we simply cannot tolerate it. The people do not stand with Jacobin. There is no revolution in the United States of America without the leadership of Black and brown people. To think that Black and brown organizers must be sublimated to the correct white tactics, to the Jane McAleveys and the Annie Levins of the world, is absolutely ludicris and anti-revolutionary. Chris Smalls has every reason to be a leader in our movement. He is infinitely more inspiring than AOC. We will not sit and stand for this racist attack from supposed allies.
We run a much smaller magazine than Jacobin. We are not funded nearly as well. We are not here to manage dissent, to instill 'professionalism' or to get an inroad into being published by the type of magazine Jacobin is. I've submitted to Jacobin. In 2024 I submitted multiple pro-Palestine pieces to them. I am incredibly grateful that they never ran them, that my name isn't attached to their brand. We are here to represent the working class, we are here to go to the masses, we are not here to position ourselves as the "educated experts" who you have to listen to, because we know better than you. We are the working class. This article is the greatest piece of proof we have ever gotten that Jacobin is anti-revolutionary and in opposition to the working class. Do not look to them for solidarity. Look to the workers on the warehouse floor. Look to the Chris Smalls' of the world. Look to the people who have never written an opera review but know exactly what it is to struggle against wage slavery.
Jacobin's loyalties are with the empire. HOUDINI's loyality is with the working class.
