“Setting the Free Thinker Free”: The Use of an Activist Archive to Analyze a Pivitol Moment in the History of the South African Communist Party (SACP)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article draws extensively on an activist archive held at the University of Witwatersrand in order to analyze an important historical struggle within the South African Communist Party (SACP). A critical history of the crucial debates taking place within the SACP in the late 1990s is constructed from this archival material in order to explore the expulsion of Dr. Dale T. McKinley from the Party in 2000. The article argues that the expulsion of McKinley was a pivitol moment in the history of the SACP, and helps us understand the post-apartheid trajectory of the Party. Expelling McKinley fulfilled the SACP leadership’s goal of managing dissent at the rank-and-file level, and ensured that the Party’s loyalty to the ANC would remain an integral aspect of its strategy and tactics. Moreover, the use of this activist archive was absolutely essential in (re)constructing this critical story about the Party’s history.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".