Strategy, Meta-strategy and Anti-capitalist Activism: Rethinking Leninism by Re-reading Lenin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whereas Marxism is a theory, or rather a cluster of theories, Leninism is something else: a political strategy. And as Lenin himself pointed out, strategies are neither true nor false, but only effective or ineffective, depending largely on the context within which they are carried out. In the context of today’s North America, however, the adoption by radical activists of the standard Leninist norms for anti-capitalist organizing would be counter-productive. What is needed now is a very different approach: a strategy of attrition, as Lenin would have said, rather than a strategy of overthrow. This article concludes by sketching an attrition strategy for contemporary anti-capitalist activism. Tandis que le marxisme est une théorie, ou plutôt un agrégat de théories, le léninisme est autre chose: une stratégie politique. Et, comme Lénine lui-même l’a souligné, les stratégies sont ni vraies ni fausses, mais seulement efficaces ou pas efficaces, en fonction du contexte dans lequel elles sont mises en œuvre. Toutefois, dans le contexte de l’Amérique du Nord d’aujourd’hui, l’adoption par des activistes radicaux des normes léninistes habituelles pour des mobilisations anti-capitalistes serait contre-productive. Une approche très différente est désormais nécessaire: une stratégie d’usure, comme Lénine l’aurait dit, au lieu d’une stratégie de renversement. Cet article conclut en esquissant une stratégie d’usure pour l’activisme anti-capitaliste contemporain.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".