The Affective Politics of the Precariat: Reconsidering Alternative Histories of Grassroots Worker Organising
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article engages with Guy Standing’s arguments about the affective politics of the precariat by reflecting on the conditions that facilitate, as well as constrain, the solidaristic transformation of the precariat. After evaluating Standing’s Polanyian theory of social change based on assumptions about the destructive tendencies of neo-liberal capitalism and a liberal politics of hope, it offers two critical interventions. First, celebrating the solidaristic traditions of the past industrial era erases historical patterns of labour organising that were quite exclusionary for traditional denizens such as women, non-white immigrants and people of colour in the United States. Second, a top-down approach to solidaristic transformation neglects alternative histories of grassroots worker organising around non-work social identities and communities. This historical erasure and neglect overlooks how oppressed and socially devalued workers have sought to challenge the fundamental gap between reality and rhetoric under liberal capitalist democracy, a key predicament for long-standing members of the precariat that persists in today’s global era of pervasive inequality and precarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".