Beginning a project like Peace, Land, and Bread is never easy. To do something that has not been done since at least the days of the Comintern—that is, to produce, from the ground up, an avant-garde, peer-reviewed, and rigorous journal of multidisciplinary communist scholarship—is indeed something of a Herculean task. As we kick off the present issue of Peace, Land, and Bread, our fourth issue, and as we embark upon the second year of our publication, it only seems natural to reflect upon not only the origins of the journal, but upon the process of journal production more generally. 

Back when several of our editors worked with the now-defunct Marx Engels Lenin Institute, we produced a solitary issue of what might be considered as the precursor-predecessor to Peace, Land, and Bread—a journal we called Forward! Popular Theory and Practice. Forward! was fraught with editorial mismanagements and was met with a lukewarm reception; but the articles themselves were both critical and important. We realized, as Forward! flopped, that something as important as a scholarly journal of communist theory and practice needed not only a robust institutional and editorial structure to support it, but that it needed a robust and a keen readership ready to engage with the intellectual rigor of advanced proletarian theory. Those several of us—Ember, Ethan, and myself—left the Marx Engels Lenin Institute due not only to a crumbling internal infrastructure, but also due to an overwhelming desire to continue the work of peer reviewed publication.

​

From this move, our parent research center, The Center for Communist Studies, was born, and we set about quickly in working on the logistical infrastructure for the publication that would eventually become Peace, Land, and Bread. We organized our fledgling journal around several key principles: 1. that all materials must be freely available to readers at no charge—in other words: no paywalls, ever—and that non-profit print sales would only exist for those who work better with the print medium, 2. that the materials we publish must be held to the highest standards of academic rigor, peer-review, and avant-garde scholarship, and 3. that our editorial board must reflect, to an individual, our organizational principles of dedicated public scholarship, international solidarity, and anti-imperial/anti-colonial/pro-communist action. Trusting fully in the intellectual capacity of our readers, and working to deconstruct the oft-impenetrable air of mystique and confusion that surrounds peer-reviewed scholarship, we worked to imagine Peace, Land, and Bread as a ranked academic journal made accessible to those outside of the academy as well.

Responding to the debased, capitalistic, hyper-monetization of research, as well as to the growing inaccessibility of knowledge, the mission of Peace, Land, and Bread was, and still is, to make rigorous academic scholarship both accessible and palatable with the interspersion of avant-garde design, poetry, and art; to make it colorful and an actual joy to read—as opposed to the sterile and dry academic journals currently in circulation—and to make a communist journal that refused, on ethical and geopolitical grounds, to engage in the ideological and institutional attacks on socialist states in the Global South. Several journals of communist studies in fact exist, as well as the more popular democratic socialist and social democratic journals which align, in almost every case, with the anti-communist trope of the United States State Department; we envisioned Peace, Land, and Bread and a response to these anti-communist “socialist” journals which reflect, eerily, the many “socialist” (in name only) journals funded by the CIA and the so-called Congress for Cultural Freedom throughout the 1950s and 1960s to polemicize against extant socialist and communist action. Peace, Land, and Bread was to respond to this by taking an explicit communist stance; a stance that fed the publication of rigorous and peer-reviewed materials supportive of extant socialist states. 

Further, we envisioned Peace, Land, and Bread as a scholarly journal that united communist action within the Anglosphere toward the purpose of furthering what is, in all actuality, the living political doctrine and thriving liberatory culture of Marxist-Leninist theory. Similar to the cultural commissions of the communist world in the 1930s, Peace, Land, and Bread would showcase the best revolutionary visual arts and poetry alongside cutting-edge academic scholarship.

What began in 2017 as a dream of three graduate students and educators has since grown into the journal you read today—a journal recognized with both ISSN and ISBN, cataloged in the various Libraries of State in the Anglosphere; a journal replete with hundreds upon hundreds of pages of full color graphic design, art and poetry; a journal overseen by a solidary and tight-knit editorial board of just around twenty-six editors, readers, and reviewers; and a journal that continues to receive critical international praise for its work, for its rigor, and for its adherence to the anti-imperial political line abandoned by so many radical journals in the modern era.

This past year of Peace, Land, and Bread has seen us publish close to a thousand pages of important new scholarship in the field of applied Marxist-Leninist and communist theory, it has seen us interviewed for, and presenting upon, our work through organizations like the Hampton Institute, Arizona State University, The Vanguard, and the Michigan Writer’s Club, and it has, probably most importantly, seen us on the Peace, Land, and Bread editorial board grow as scholars, editors, and as educators. 

What you hold in your hands now is the end of a yearly cycle—the last, Herculean, eight and a half by eleven inch, three hundred (plus) page issue. You also hold the herald of a new yearly cycle of Peace, Land, and Bread. Our next issue will come in much sleeker and much more accessible at a svelte one hundred and fifty pages, along with a new seven by ten inch size, as well as a dedicated aesthetic style grounded in the communist avant-garde. Our previous four issues were themed: spring renewal for our first issue, laborwave for our second, constructivist and suprematist themes for our third, and now, here, Soviet science-fiction and an avant-garde of the Soviet film for our fourth issue. We’re excited for the future of Peace, Land, and Bread, and we know you’ll love what we have in store for the journal.

The current issue is, in my opinion, our best (and biggest) yet. We’ve brought back our readers’ favorite authors—Christian Noakes, Jackson Albert Mann, and Amal Samaha, to name but a few—and we’ve packed the pages with incredibly critical, poignant, and important works from Thomas McLamb, Talia Lux, Sam Glasper, and more. Our arts and poetry section is more robust than ever, and contains beautiful works of art from Sindyan, Ian Matchett, M.S. Evans, and others.

This issue reflects the ethos and the character of Peace, Land, and Bread more generally: that is, it is robust, rigorous, poignant, relevant, and timely. And it is emblematic of the iterative process of journal production as well: we've taken what we've learned over this last year and worked to make issue four the best and most comprehensive issue yet.  

We’re incredibly honored to be on this journey of public scholarship and education with you all, in a time where it is most sorely needed—perhaps more than ever. We would not be who we are without our readers, our contributors, and without all of the hands and voices that go into this project, and it is to you all whom we dedicate this, our fourth issue.

Ben Stahnke

Editor & Designer | Peace, Land, and Bread

​

​

​