The Trouble with Revisionism: or Communist History with the History Left In
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Whatever one makes of it, communism was one of the key political forces of the 20th century. At once a party, an international, a social movement and a system of government, to say nothing of a major pole of ideological and cultural attraction, the global extension of its influence helped define the “short” 20th century and was one of its characteristic expressions. The editors of the recent survey Le siecle des communismes characterize it in terms of diversity held together by a common project.1 Even restricting ourselves to the period of the Comintern and Cominform (1919–56), and to oppositional communist parties in Europe and North America, striking variations in political effectiveness and social implantation are immediately apparent. Intersecting with different national cultures, which even in their purely legal aspects ranged from tolerance to terror, these can be grouped according to no single periodization or line of determination. Among the historiographical tools which this distinctively transnational phenomenon demands, those of the comparative historian promise particular insight and illumination.2 As yet they have been only fitfully employed. John Manley’s comparison of the Canadian, British, and American communist parties is therefore especially to be welcomed.3 Comparative studies even of two communist parties are rare. To range with assurance across three is
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".