On Withdrawal (into Darkness): George Jackson and the Imperative to Abandon Reformism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the wake of George Jackson’s critique of reformism as aiding fascism, abolitionists continue to prescribe non-reformist reforms as a viable approach to dismantling carceral structures. I argue that abolition’s attachment to reforms is evidence of an affirmationist drive to insist that the state is not fully overdetermined by an antagonistic oppressive contract. For Jackson, the state is directed by an unrelenting enemy determined to violently maintain the abjection of black people and thus cannot be reconfigured to enable the flourishing of black life. I conceptualize “dark abolition” as an onto-epistemological reorientation to politics in light of Jackson’s assessments that involves an acceptance of black existence as ontologically captive and an embrace of the imperative to destroy the oppressive contract. Jackson strives to generalize this dark acceptance by closing off all non-conflictual outlets, forcefully inviting the black populace to abandon reformism and embrace conflictual struggle as a mode of care.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".