Justin Paulson and Rebecca Schein’s Response to “The Left After Politics”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thom Workman’s provocative intervention on how to revitalize the Left 1 makes an important contribution to this ongoing debate, not least for arguing explicitly for a strategy that socialists too often fail to consider a serious possibility. When an election campaign arrives, many on the Left feel the impulse to ignore it or to reject the vote, but the argument for doing so often relies on anarchist truisms and is rarely posed in such stark and coherent ways. Certainly we agree with Workman’s starting point: that most of us engaged in Left politics of any kind feel stuck in a never-ending Sisyphean task of pushing against an array of neoliberal boulders. We also wholeheartedly agree with the premise that the emergence of a Left culture is integral to the project of renewal. Yet we disagree entirely with the propo sition that a retreat from politics helps us to get there. Most fundamentally, Workman misidentifies the problem. He insists that the “civics reflex” is the proximate cause of a “politics of minimum salvage that assumes the wholesale sublimation of the instinct to rebel.” 2 We argue instead that such a politics is a function of neoliberal society and that a failed civic politics merely reflects that. The Left’s small size, low expectations, disorganization, and lack of sufficient interest in “afternoon public lectures and weekend retreats” 3 are hardly caused by a concern with electoral politics or the mediocrity of the NDP and Greens, but are a function of people working too much amid too much personal and financial insecu rity in an ideological climate hostile to critical thought. Even at the university, we see this in our own students: they are taking too many classes while working full time and, with a few admirable excep
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.031 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".