Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Labor unions occupy a paradoxical position within Marxist theory. They are an essential yet limited vehicle for shaping the working class into a collective actor, as unions’ role is to manage the employment relationship, not transform it. This chapter assesses how that paradox has shaped Marxist debates surrounding trade unions. Unlike previous socialists, Marx and Engels highlighted unions’ necessity, while noting their structural limitations. Capitalism’s resilience after their deaths, combined with working class weakness and conservatism, led some Marxists to conclude that unions were irredeemable, destined to obstruct revolutionary impulses and create a conservative “labor aristocracy.” Others resisted this conclusion, focusing on the need for mass action and organic working-class leadership to ensure unions’ vitality. As the postwar “consensus” between labor and capital pushed revolution off the table, many Marxists adapted, with some abandoning the working class as a revolutionary agent. For the minority who did not, their task was not simply to denounce the bureaucratic and conservative character of existing unions, but how to rebuild dynamic working-class organizations in a context where labor and the left were separated. This task became more challenging as the postwar expansion came to a halt in the 1970s. While neoliberal restructuring and attacks on unions led some to pronounce the “death of class,” others cautioned not to confuse class recomposition with class disappearance. The challenge was how to rebuild power as workers’ traditional organizational vehicles faltered. This problem persists today, although some signs of renewed working-class dynamism are emerging.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.003 |
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".