Escaping Structuralism's Legacy: The Renewal of Theory and History in Historical Materialism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The project of renewing historical materialist theory for a new generation requires overcoming the limitations of Althusserian structuralism. Upon investigation, Althusser's theory is revealed to be idealist, inconsistent with the philosophy actually articulated by Marx, and unhelpful in understanding the dynamics of human societies. The flaws in this approach led both to E. P. Thompson's rejection of abstract theory altogether, and Michael Lebowitz's effort to “complete” Marx's theoretical project, while avoiding Althusser's structural determinism by incorporating agency and social struggle into the heart of political economy. Yet Lebowitz's theoretical system has very little to say about how these were historically practiced by classes as institutional formations in different spatio-temporal contexts. In this respect, the “Institutional Marxist” approach developed by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin shows the most promise for further developing today's revival of historical materialism.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.026 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".