Ruthless Empire(s), Activist Subcultures, or New Solidarities? Choices for Today's Global Radicals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an inspiring and broad-ranging comment piece entitled “Ruthless Empire(s), Activist Subcultures, or New Solidarities? Choices for Today’s Global Radicals,” Joel Davison Harden grapples with some of the enduring problems of progressive organizing and struggles to capture the unique characteristics of contemporary forms of mobilization. His piece centres on the dilemma apparent to many: while recent demonstrations against war and neoliberalism have attracted hundreds of thousands if not millions of protesters and have displayed considerable inventiveness and energy, it is less clear what impact they have had. He examines four key features of today’s “movement of movements.” First, he raises debates about the appropriate site of struggle, whether transnational or local. Second, he discusses debates about agency, and argues that traditional activists like trade unions still play an essential role in radical politics. Third, he looks at the “imaginary” of today’s movement of movements. While radical protesters are often viewed as lacking any positive alternatives to contemporary forms of capitalist globalization, Harden argues that large-scale activism is an inspiring learning process in itself, one that leads rapidly away from mere opposition to far-ranging proposals and critiques. Finally, he directs our attention to the “mode” of radical strategy and to claims about contemporary movements’ lack of organizational coherence. Again, he contends that organization is never absent, and advocates democratic socialist approaches to collective action. While he offers no concrete blueprints for action, he calls for continued optimism and attention to the enormous potential of contentious politics in the current world environment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".