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Record W4409402527 · doi:10.18740/ss27366

The Worse, The Better

2025· article· en· W4409402527 on OpenAlexaffvenue
James Cairns

Bibliographic record

VenueSocialist studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMarxism and Critical Theory
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I often hear students say that the reason there's no mass movement for revolution is that things haven't gotten bad enough yet. I argue back, explaining why worse doesn't automatically lead to better. Yet, I must admit, as a political activist, I routinely emphasize the depths of the latest crisis and warn of worse to come. If the path to liberation runs through catastrophe, why do I have such a hard time admitting that? If not, why do we on the Far Left revel in bad news? This essay answers these questions by comparing “the worse, the better” politics as attributed to Lenin with what Lenin actually said and did. I make a case for seeing a crisis as neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but instead as a collection of forces fueling resistance and reaction.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.763
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0030.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.047
GPT teacher head0.322
Teacher spread0.275 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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