United we Stand, Divided we Fall: Class Actions and Corporate Hegemony
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper examines the changes to Ontario’s Class Proceedings Act resulting from Bill 161 through a Marxist lens, with the aim of understanding class action proceedings as a tool for challenging corporate power by providing access to justice to plaintiffs and behaviour modification incentives for corporations. This paper argues that a class action proceeding is a form of collective action that can act as an effective way to challenge corporate hegemony under Neoliberalism. This essay commences with a brief background on corporate hegemony and Marxist theory, and then moves to an examination of consumer protection and collective rights under Neoliberalism. Finally, the bulk of this essay addresses how class action proceedings can be understood as an excellent tool for combating corporate hegemony and demanding consumer protection in a political and legal landscape that would seek to see vast numbers of plaintiffs denied meaningful redress. By situating this discussion within Marxist theory and a Neoliberal climate, the final section outlines the ways the changes made in Bill 161 not only further the agenda of corporate interests while potentially denying redress to plaintiffs, but also fail to follow the three main objectives of class action proceedings, as iterated by the Supreme Court of Canada.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".