No published record of membership in a communist party is familiar, but his later works identified him as a 'paleo-Marxist', both in the historical materialist sense and as a supporter of centralised economic planning, even on a global scale.
Changes in the American immigration policies closed the traditional Greek safety vault, and under the yoke of depression and General Metaxas's dictatorship (1936–1941), Emmanuel, in 1937, went to work in commerce in the Belgian Congo.
In fact, the uprising was not supported by EAM (National Liberation Front) and it was violently suppressed by British troops, with Emmanuel being sentenced to death by a Greek court-martial in Alexandria.
The mutiny appears to have been directed more immediately against the return of the monarch, so that participation does not in itself suggest communist or Marxist leanings, rather than merely republican, although in Emmanuel's case this would seem probable.
Emmanuel pointed out that his theory fitted well with the observed absence of such solidarity, particularly between high- and low-wage countries, and, in fact, made the nationally enclosed workers movements into the principal cause of unequal exchange.