This article examines the global travel that Cedric Belfrage took during the 1930s, and the political commitments he articulated as he observed the world around him. Exposure to worlds beyond their immediate surroundings was an experience central to the intellectual and political development of leftist thinkers in the interwar decades, Belfrage included. Born into London’s “gentleman class,” Cedric Belfrage (1904–1990) suffocated in the insularity of his elite upbringing and despaired of becoming a banker or a functionary in one of Britain’s colonies, careers appropriate for his class. Instead, he became a journalist who covered the emerging movie industry, a somewhat less reputable occupation. In 1934, fed up with his class’s complacency toward those below them at home and abroad, he traveled through the globe, documenting the tumult and his class’s indifference to it in an anti-imperialist travelogue Away from it All.

This article explores the ways in which Angela Davis’s celebrity in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s coincided with the USSR’s shifting discourses around communism, especially the emphasis on “developed socialism” that defined the so-called stagnation era under Brezhnev. As Soviet leadership sought to bolster public investment in stabilizing communism, the image of an imprisoned Davis—member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and a victim of American capitalism, racism, and sexism—offered an opportune symbol around which they could sympathize and organize. I focus in particular on how Soviet engagement with the “Free Angela Davis” movement, as evidenced by the letters and objects in the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (NUCFAD) archive, further constructed a mythology around Davis that could reflect evolving cultural narratives around Soviet belonging and Soviet personhood. This depiction of Davis, I argue, produced desirable ways of re-envisioning communism that countered, at least symbolically, the rigid authoritarianism of Stalinism, but detracted from (or at least attempted to) present internal crises, namely the reliance on capitalism and colonialism in the efforts toward developed socialism.

During the 1930s and 1940s, three unified Communist front organizations were established under the auspices of the Communist Party of the United States of America: The National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The strategies employed by the National Negro Congress not only contributed significantly to the civil rights movement of the 1960s but also established a framework for collaboration among interracial civil rights organizations. The Southern Negro Youth Congress fostered a tradition of activism among Black youth, particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, thereby creating a robust foundation for the subsequent civil rights movement and cultivating numerous civil rights leaders who emerged in the 1960s. Members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare were staunch supporters of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, and its successor organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, provided both financial assistance to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and guidance on civil rights principles. Collectively, these three Communist front organizations exerted a significant influence on the civil rights movement in the United States post-1960s, and their activities served as a vital origin for the contemporary American civil rights movement.

Going beyond the idea that utopia, when it becomes a reality, is necessarily doomed in the long run, this article proposes to analyze the nineteenth century Icarian communities. Based on the current interest within the field of communal studies on the measurement of the success of utopian communities, and following the developmental communalism theory, our study addresses the economic organizational dimension of these communities, which were a testing ground for innovation and new social practices. The article provides a better understanding of how the Icarian communism inserted itself into American society and some key lessons for the implementation of emancipatory alternatives.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s peace crusade was influenced by his second wife Shirley Graham and their friend Claudia Jones. Both Graham Du Bois and Jones understood that peace was a prerequisite to global emancipation and that war and militarism affected the most vulnerable; only by securing peace would the most oppressed be liberated. By the time of Du Bois’s arrest and trial chronicled in In Battle For Peace, Jones was also under indictment for her peace work. She had long articulated an emancipatory ethos that recognized Black women as the most vulnerable population, and she theorized that peace was necessary to their liberation. Graham Du Bois articulated the same in her letters and work during the peace movement. Both women argued that war and militarism were an attack on the Black home and that women were the most susceptible to the exploitative labor conditions and violence that predominated in military societies. While scholars have often dismissed this focus on gender and home as maternalist; Jones and Graham Du Bois recognized that the home was the site of revolutionary potential and socialist transformation, and they were instrumental in influencing Du Bois’s own peace commitments. The personal was not just political; the personal was the site for socialist liberation and all three believed that socialism could secure peace and equality.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc countries and “actually existing socialism” circa 1989–1991, the traditional Left workers parties (Labor, Social Democratic and Communist) have ...