So there is a strain of left-wing thought that see smaller businesses as a bigger evil that big businesses.
From the article:
"In reality, small business promotion is mostly a bad idea. Small businesses pay lower wages, provide worse benefits, are often exempt from important worker protections, and are incompatible with the way unionization works in the US."
Given that exactly these sorts of changes to the status quo are table stakes for socialist political movements including the one that's been trying to form around Bernie Sanders for half a decade or more by now, it is, again, strange to see an ostensibly socialist publication treat the status quo as immutable.
Poking around a little more, I get the sense from Jacobin's articles that they're written by the sort of, again soi-disant, socialist who can spend all day toying with highflown theories, but turns contemptuous on the instant when faced with the expectation to back up words with action, and thinks nothing of crossing a picket line when it'd be even slightly less personally convenient to do otherwise. In other words, I think they're a bunch of useless academic liberals who enjoy the cachet of calling themselves socialist but can't be bothered to do the work of earning the name.
Perhaps I'm doing Jacobin's writers an injustice, but seeing as I'm judging them by their writing, I don't think that I am.
Whether that qualifies as a "credential for speaking on socialism", I can't properly say. But I'm not inclined to listen to anyone speaking on socialism who I don't even trust to not cross a line.
I haven't paid Jacobin much attention heretofore. If this article is any representation of how well worth taking seriously they are, I'll continue that policy. This reads more than anything like a Republican caricature of leftist thought.