Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on Marxism as a religious movement has primarily focused on its theological implications. Building on this work, this article instead examines the practical aspects of revolutionary Marxism as a religious experience during the Latin American Cold War, and compares it to two other non-Christian religious traditions, Judaism and Umbanda. Drawing on secret police records, memoirs and oral history interviews, this article explores the influence of Judaism, Marxism and Umbanda on the anti-dictatorship activism of Alfredo Syrkis. Through an analysis of Syrkis’s life history, it assesses his conversion from liberal anticommunism to revolutionary Marxism, his participation in Marxist proselytising as a high school activist and his political activity in the clandestine Marxist organisation Revolutionary Popular Vanguard (VPR), highlighting group dynamics that were comparable to millenarian movements. It also considers the importance of other religious traditions in Syrkis’s life, including Judaism, the religion of his parents that equipped him with valuable social ties, and Umbanda, a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion that Syrkis turned to during times of extreme anxiety in the armed struggle. This article argues that the religious traditions of Judaism, revolutionary Marxism and Umbanda influenced Syrkis’s political activism in both complementary and competing ways. While none of these traditions were able to command Syrkis’s undivided loyalty, collectively they informed the terms of his engagement with and disengagement from the Brazilian armed struggle against military rule. By analysing Syrkis’s life history through the lens of religion, this article broadens the study of cultures of militancy during Latin America’s Cold War.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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; 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".