The media and education system have tried to erase their legacies, but some of the world’s greatest artists, leaders, and thinkers were—and are—firmly on the Left.
History, as the old cliché goes, is written by the victors. In practice, this tends to mean history is written by people with money—the victors in our current economic system. To really shape the way the past is understood, you need a book deal, a teaching position at a university, or a biopic with a big Hollywood budget, and all of it comes with financial barriers. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the version of history we’re given in school, and in popular culture, leaves out anything that’s considered too radical or threatening to the status quo. In the United States, we’re told a lot about the Founding Fathers and how great they supposedly were. But we learn much less about the really important stuff, like the militant labor unions that won us the standard eight-hour working day, the weekend, and an end to widespread child labor. And we’re seldom told anything about the world’s great socialists.
Back in 2023, Current Affairs brought you a list of “Seven People They Never Told You Were Socialists”—famous figures like Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Malala Yousafzai who were (and are) firmly on the Left, but whose political convictions have been carefully airbrushed out of their stories. But that was just a start. Today, let’s look at another seven people who fought for revolutionary political change, and who deserve to be remembered that way.
Nelson Mandela
We all accept the need for some form of socialism to enable our people to catch up with the advanced countries of this world and to overcome their legacy of extreme poverty… I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.
Today, Mandela is remembered as a kind of secular saint, especially outside South Africa itself. He’s the inspirational mentor figure in sports movies like Invictus, where he’s played by Morgan Freeman. He’s the leader politicians from both of the major American parties, including Joe Biden and, perversely, even Donald Trump, reference when they want to invoke a noble political prisoner. But, like with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., creating this two-dimensional image requires ignoring huge swathes of what Mandela said about politics and economics. And when we look at his actual record, it becomes clear why the same man Western political leaders now praise in death was one they viewed as far too radical while he was alive.
Nelson Mandela didn’t just advocate racial equality or human rights as bland, harmless generalities. He led an underground revolutionary movement fighting for them, and he was branded a terrorist for doing it. After the white apartheid government committed the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, he was instrumental in creating the uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), the armed counterpart to the civilian African National Congress (ANC). Its tactics were inspired by those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the other leaders of the Cuban revolution, and its fighters carried out hundreds of guerilla attacks on apartheid police stations, military bases, and industrial sites throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In 1986, Ronald Reagan made a radio address where he condemned apartheid with one side of his mouth, but with the other said that “the Southern African Government has a right and responsibility to maintain order in the face of terrorists”—and for his efforts to free his country, Mandela himself would be on U.S. terror watchlists until 2008.
In his apartheid-friendly speech, Reagan also said that “the South African Government is under no obligation to negotiate the future of the country with any organization that proclaims a goal of creating a Communist state,” and Mandela’s economic agenda gave him good reason to worry. In the ANC’s Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955, the party laid out a goal of wide-ranging nationalization: “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the Banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” At his trial in 1964, Mandela made clear that he had disagreements with Marxism (including his admiration for the “parliamentary system of the West,”) but also that he embraced many elements of it:
Today I am attracted by the idea of a classless society, an attraction which springs in part from Marxist reading and, in part, from my admiration of the structure and organization of early African societies in this country. The land, then the main means of production, belonged to the tribe. There were no rich or poor and there was no exploitation.
Mandela and the ANC had a foreign policy platform, too. They formed a close alliance with revolutionary Cuba, which sent troops to fight the apartheid South African government when it attacked Angola, and Mandela later credited the Cuban military with having “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor.” He was also a proud supporter of the Palestinian cause, saying that “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” a slogan that can be found graffitied on the separation wall of the West Bank. Today, as South Africa has been among the most courageous opponents of the genocide in Gaza, his more radical legacy is alive and well.
Suggested further reading: A compilation of the speeches Mandela and Castro made at a joint event in 1991
Bela Lugosi
Half a year ago, I launched the struggle with the decision that the national trade union of socialist actors should be established.
Yes, that Bela Lugosi. Count Dracula himself, and the star of lesser-known classics like White Zombie, The Raven, and—if you like your horror movies with extra cheese—Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Today, more than 90 years from his career-making role in Tod Browning’s Dracula, it’s hard to picture Lugosi as anything but a villain in a black cloak. But long before he was a celluloid vampire, he was a young actor named Blaskó Béla Ferenc Dezső, and he was struggling to make a living between the world wars. In 1919, he wrote an op-ed for the Hungarian trade paper Szinészek Lapja (“The Actor’s Paper,”) arguing that actors were just as “proletarian” as any farmer or mechanic:
After putting aside the glamorous trappings of his trade at the end of each performance, an actor had, with few exceptions, to face worry and poverty. He was obliged either to bend himself to stultifying odd jobs to keep body and soul together (while of course being unavailable for work in his true profession) or he had to sponge off his friends, get into debt, or prostitute his art. And he endured it, endured the poverty, the humiliation, the exploitation, just so that he could continue to be an actor, to get parts, for without them he could not live. Actors were exploited no less by the private capitalist managers than they were by the state.
It was that experience of poverty and precarious work that turned Lugosi to socialism. As his biographer Arthur Lennig details, he was a firm supporter of Count Mihály Károlyi—the leader of the short-lived First Hungarian Republic, who promised “general suffrage, social changes, and land reform”—and later of the more radical, but equally short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, which established the eight-hour working day. Lugosi was also a labor organizer, and he helped to found the Free Organization of Theater Employees, the first trade union for actors and other entertainment workers in Hungary. But the country’s fledgling Soviet government lasted less than a year, and it was replaced by the far-right dictatorship of Miklós Horthy, who waged a counter-revolutionary “White Terror” against socialists. So Lugosi, like many of his fellow trade unionists, fled overseas, and it was only when he landed in the United States that he took up the name “Bela Lugosi.”
In Hollywood, Lugosi kept his dedication to organized labor and the political Left. When World War II broke out, he was an influential leader in the Hungarian-American Council for Democracy, an antifascist group that advocated for the overthrow of the Horthy regime (now an ally of Nazi Germany) and lobbied for the United States to accept more Jewish refugees. He also signed a petition in support of Harry Bridges, a prominent socialist and labor leader who the U.S. government was trying to deport, much as it is to Mahmoud Khalil and other dissidents today. And just as he’d been in Hungary, Lugosi was a pioneering trade unionist—only the 28th person to join the Screen Actors’ Guild when it was formed in 1933, and a member of its advisory council for years afterward, where he “lobbied strongly for the better treatment of freelance actors in Hollywood, a situation in which he would find himself more than once.” Working together with Boris Karloff, he secured seven new members for the Guild from the cast of The Raven in 1935, before the union was even officially recognized, and the pair successfully unionized the entire cast of The Invisible Ray the same year. To the bosses of old Hollywood, there could be nothing scarier—and as W. Scott Poole notes, the FBI kept a file on Lugosi until his death in 1956.
Frida Kahlo
I’m more and more convinced it’s only through communism that we can become human. — Frida Kahlo
I recently wrote a full article about Frida Kahlo’s politics, and how cruelly ironic it is that her pop-culture legacy mostly ignores them, treating her instead as a marketable face for all kinds of gift-shop kitsch products. It’s a fate she would likely have despised, because she was a committed socialist from her teenage years, when she watched the Mexican Revolution unfold firsthand. Soon after, she became part of a radical student group called the Cacuchas that tormented conservative teachers at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, demanding they teach Marx and Hegel and tossing firecrackers into their lecture halls when they refused. Kahlo is also one of the only people in history to support both Leon Trotsky—who she and her husband Diego Rivera sheltered in exile—and Joseph Stalin, who became the subject of one of her last paintings. A paradox, to say the least.
But Kahlo’s communism isn’t just a historical curiosity. It’s incredibly relevant today, because one of the issues she cared about most was the fight for healthcare. In part, she blamed her lifelong disability and chronic pain on the poor medical treatment she received at a Red Cross hospital after a 1925 bus accident, and one of her most important paintings is called “Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick”—a revision from the even less subtle title “Peace on Earth so the Marxist Science may Save the Sick and Those Oppressed by Criminal Yankee Capitalism.” As people across the world are still fighting for healthcare as a universal right, that’s a message that resonates.
Nina Simone
We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution—real girls’ talk.
To describe Nina Simone simply as a singer or a musician does her an injustice. She was those things, of course, and fully deserved the title “High Priestess of Soul.” But she was also a key figure in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and a political thinker just as important as Lorraine Hansberry, Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael), or Langston Hughes, all of whom were her contemporaries and allies. (More about Hughes in a moment.) In her autobiography, she writes that she “loved Dr. King for his goodness and compassion,” but came to sympathize more with Malcolm X’s more aggressive stance, and to believe in revolution over reform:
I realized that what we were really fighting for was the creation of a new society. When I had started out in the movement all I wanted were my rights under the Constitution, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that no matter what the President or the Supreme Court might say, the only way we could get true equality was if America changed completely, top to bottom. And this change had to start with my own people, with black revolution.
One of Simone’s most famous songs, “Mississippi Goddam,” reflects this evolution in her thought. Written in response to a wave of racist violence in 1964, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, it excoriates the political voices—white and Black alike—who say that change has to “go slow,” answering them back with a chorus from her background singers: “Desegregation (Too slow!), Mass participation (Too slow!), Reunification (Too slow!), Do things gradually, but bring more tragedy.” And when the Black Panther Party came along, with its explicitly Marxist demands for socialized housing and “An End to the Robbery By the Capitalists,” Simone writes that “I agreed with every word”:
I thanked God for them, because they showed young blacks who thought the only means of protest was passive non-violence that there was another way, that they didn’t have to take all the mental and physical cruelty inflicted on them by whites. With the arrival of the Panthers black kids realized there were black heroes who would fight and die if necessary to make sure they got what they wanted. I thought that was wonderful.
One of Simone’s greatest and most underappreciated tracks, though, is “Revolution,” written as a direct response to the Beatles song of the same name. Where John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s lyrics smugly and whitely dismissed would-be radicals, telling them that “when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out,” Simone’s embraced political revolution, and they form a credo for her life:
And now we got a revolution
'Cause I see the face of things to come
Yeah, your Constitution
Well, my friend, it's gonna have to bend
I'm here to tell you 'bout destruction
Of all the evil that will have to end
Tupac Shakur
I feel like there’s too much money here. Nobody should be hitting the lotto for $36 million and there’s people starving on the streets. That’s not idealistic, that’s just real. That’s just stupid. There’s no way Michael Jackson or whoever Jackson should have a million thousand, quadruple billion dollars and then there’s people starving.
Even if you don’t listen to rap music, you know who Tupac Shakur is. His face is on a million T-shirts and tattoos, along with murals in major cities from Compton to Sierra Leone. He’s probably the most famous rapper of all time. But most people know Tupac from his chaotic last few years: his larger-than-life “gangsta” persona, his scathing diss tracks against East Coast rappers like Jay-Z and the Notorious B.I.G., and finally his untimely death at age 25. But that’s actually the least interesting part of his life. A lot fewer people know the more important thing about Tupac Shakur: that he was a committed communist who carried the legacy of the Black Panther Party into the 1990s.
Practically everyone in Tupac’s immediate family was a Black Panther, and practically all of them had to deal with police brutality and repression. To this day, right-wing politicians like Secretary of State Marco Rubio are trying to capture his godmother Assata Shakur, a legendary activist and poet who was convicted of killing a New Jersey state policeman in 1973. (Like with Leonard Peltier, she never got a fair trial, and there’s serious doubt about whether she actually committed the crime.) The persistent conspiracy theories about Tupac faking his death and hiding out in Cuba—which, unfortunately, are pretty far-fetched—are inspired by Assata, who actually did flee to Cuba after she escaped from prison in 1979. Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, was equally impressive. She helped to run the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programs for poor children in Harlem, played a key role in the creation of the “Patients’ Bill of Rights” that’s still used by healthcare advocates today, and mounted a brilliant legal defense that led to the acquittal of the “Panther 21” activists. (She pulled this last feat off while five months pregnant with Tupac and malnourished on jail food, making it all the more heroic.) His stepfather, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, was a federal prisoner for more than 35 years, convicted of orchestrating armed bank robberies to fund the Black Liberation Army (an offshoot of the Panthers). And in 1988, when he was still living in Baltimore, Tupac himself joined the local chapter of the Young Communists League, an affiliate of the Communist Party USA. Today, it’s named the Tupac Shakur Club in his honor.
Image: Communist Party USA
Musically, Tupac’s later albums, All Eyez on Me and The Don Killuminati: The Seven Day Theory, are hard-hitting, and songs like “California Love” are famous for a reason. But his early work is where the deeper political content lies, and a lot of that music is a direct expression of both his socialism and his family’s Panther history. It’s all there in the lyrics of “Panther Power,” one of his first recorded songs:
I couldn’t settle for bein’ a statistic
Couldn’t survive in this capitalistic
Government ‘cause it was meant to hold us back
Usin’ ignorance and drugs to sneak attack
In my community, they killed the unity
But when I charged them, tried to claim immunity
I strike America like a case of heart disease
Panther power is runnin’ through my arteries
Try to stop me, oh boy, you’ll be clawed to death
‘Cause I'll be fightin’ for my freedom with my dyin’ breath
Tupac wasn’t just making classic West Coast rap; he was weaponizing rap to spread the politics he’d learned from the Black Panthers and the Young Communist League. He knew he’d reach more people that way. In sharp contrast to his later “gangsta” image, he talked about reproductive freedom (“since a man can't make one / He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one,”) and about the connection between poverty at home and imperialism abroad (“It’s funny, when it rains it pours / They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.”) In track after track, he railed against the police and prisons, spinning fiery stories of rebellion (“Them motherfuckers catch a hot one / You wanted to start a problem, now you coward cops have got one”) and liberation (“Much love to my brothers in the pen / I’ll see ya when I free ya, if not, when they shove me in.”) And it worked: by 1992, he’d been so successful that Vice President Dan Quayle was up in arms about it, saying that his album 2Pacalypse Now had “no place in our society” and demanding it be pulled from shelves because it contained a song about George Jackson with a line about “droppin’ the cop.” Rather than moderate his language, though, Tupac answered the vice president on his next album:
To my homies on the block gettin’ dropped by cops
I’m still around for ya
Keepin’ my sound underground for ya
And I’ma throw a change up
Quayle ain’t do nothing but blow my name up!
Today, we’re still dealing with the same conversations about political censorship of art and music, especially in rap. But a new generation of left-wing politicians like former representative Jamaal Bowman got their political education partly from Tupac’s lyrics, and you can find his words on protest signs around the country. Almost 30 years from his death, he’s still going strong.
Langston Hughes
Part of the same generation of groundbreaking Black artists and activists as Nina Simone, Langston Hughes is in nearly everybody’s high school English textbook. But it’s only selected bits and pieces of his work that you’ll get shown there. In school, you might learn “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” or “I, Too” ; you’ll almost certainly be taught “Harlem,” with its famous line about the “raisin in the sun.” But the teachers and the editors of anthologies are less likely to give you “Park Bench,” the poem that cost Hughes the support of a wealthy patron when he wrote it in 1925:
I live on a park bench
You, Park Avenue.
Hell of a distance
Between us two.
I beg a dime for dinner—
You got a butler and maid.
But I’m wakin’ up!
Say, ain’t you afraid
That I might, just maybe,
In a year or two,
Move on over
To Park Avenue?
“Park Bench” is strong stuff. It doesn’t fit neatly into the established categories and periods, like “the Harlem Renaissance,” that the American education system is comfortable with. “Park Bench” is a threat—a declaration that the poor and abused people of this world won’t take it lying down forever, before they wake and rise up. It’s a pity they don’t teach it more often, because it’s more exciting than “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” So is “Good Morning Revolution,” where Hughes speaks directly to the spirit of workers’ uprisings, and “Lenin Walks Around the World,” a slightly florid paean to the Bolshevik leader. Or there’s “Chant for May Day,” or “One More S in the USA,” or any of the dozens of poems Hughes wrote against poverty, exploitation, and the ruling class. For those, you have to get the book Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest—and it’s been out of print since 1992.
There are other things worth knowing about Langston Hughes that your high school English teachers probably didn’t tell you, or didn’t know themselves: that he published a lot of his early work in The New Masses, an avowedly communist magazine with a fascinating history of its own; that he toured the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933, and came away impressed (although Stalin’s government tricked him, and didn’t show him any of the grisly repression it was carrying out); that he admired Vladimir Mayakovsky, the great Bolshevik poet, so much he translated Mayakovsky’s work from Russian to English; and that the FBI was so threatened by his art that they kept a file on him. By now, you might be seeing a pattern—that whenever someone shows unusual cleverness, courage, and principle, the FBI wants to put a stop to it. But Hughes saw that coming, too. As he put it in “My Adventures as a Social Poet”:
I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such. But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.
Tilda Swinton
Finally, it’s good to remember that the story of socialism is far from over. There are still people who believe in an end to the miserable inequality that capitalism causes, and you can find them in the last places you’d expect. Tilda Swinton is one of these unexpected socialists, as she revealed to an interviewer back in 2010:
It’s common sense[...] It seems to me that capitalism is an anti-human mechanism. That it does not and cannot work for the human spirit. It can only create an obstacle to happiness. It can only suppress, because it’s about denial and dishonesty. You can’t get rich without exploiting others. And that wealth has to be continued and protected and sustained, and that can only happen through corruption on an even grander scale.
Once you know this about Swinton, some of her artistic decisions start to make a lot more sense, like the time she directed a documentary about the influential Marxist art critic John Berger. Or there’s her performance as a fur-coat-wearing villain in Snowpiercer—director Bong Joon-Ho’s extremely unsubtle allegory about class conflict, in which the underclasses fight their way through a giant train hurtling through a dystopian wasteland until they reach the luxury compartments in the front. More recently, Swinton has been vocal about her opposition to the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, something that sets her apart in an entertainment industry where many celebrities have been reluctant to speak up:
Inhumanity is being perpetrated under our watch. I am here to name it, without hesitation or doubt. And to give my unwavering solidarity to all those who recognize the unacceptable complacency of our rapacious governments, who curtsy to planetary destroyers and war criminals. No matter where they come from.
Now, obviously it’s interesting to know that Tupac Shakur was a card-carrying communist, or that Nina Simone supported the ten points of the Black Panther Party, or that Bela Lugosi went around unionizing his film crews between scenes. But why is it important? Mainly, because the United States is filled to the brim with anti-socialist propaganda, dating all the way back to the days of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. In this country, there’s a certain picture of who and what a socialist is, and it’s not a pretty one. Socialism, according to this dominant narrative, is for lazy people who want handouts, or ignorant people who just don’t understand “basic economics.” Or socialism is a dusty relic that flourished in the late 19th century when Marx and Engels were around, died in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, and has little relevance today. You can hear the narrative echoing everywhere. But the existence of people like Simone, or Lugosi, or Shakur, or Frida Kahlo, or any of the others, shatters this propaganda into a million pieces. It reveals that “socialist” and “communist” aren’t dirty words, but some of the most honorable labels there are. It teaches us that some of history’s bravest and most brilliant people have been socialists—and that there’s no good reason you can’t be one too.
