He took part as a volunteer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964) helping enable black American voter registration, and participated in the second abortive march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.
In other words, the shortages of skilled labour which created opportunities for Africans to be promoted into senior roles did not reduce racial inequalities but merely lowered the companies' wage bill.
Steele and his co-authors exposed how deeply British capital was embedded in the South African mining sector as well as banking, insurance, chemicals and car assembly.
They dissected the reform campaign being pushed by many liberals in Britain, including by his employer, the Guardian, for British companies to pay higher wages to their African workers in South Africa.
The book had wide resonance in the international sanctions movement which was gathering pace at the United Nations and in Western countries and which culminated in the collapse of minority rule and apartheid a decade and a half later.
Steele's book Socialism with a German Face (US: Inside East Germany, 1977) is a study of the Soviet Bloc country.
"[5] In a July 2007 letter to The New York Review of Books, Steele defended himself from an accusation of being "myopic" (made by Garton Ash in a NYRB article) in his writings about the former East Germany.
[6] Peter Hitchens a few years later, while praising Steele as one of "the more honest Western Leftists" and a "first-rate foreign correspondent", described the book as a "sympathetic" account.
The chapters on the postwar period make clear that the founders of the East German party and state were not, as they are so often depicted, merely Stalinist agents bent upon imposing Soviet-style socialism.
Steele's account of the 1953 uprising — the precursor of later revolts in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland — goes a long way to clearing up an episode that has been badly obscured by propagandists on both sides.
(With Noam Chomsky and John Gittings) The book elaborated on three talks given at seminars organised in London by Peggy Duff, general secretary of the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace.
In his talk Steele explained why an end had come to the period of what was called "detente" in East-West relations which brought the Soviet and US leaders together at four summit meetings between 1972 and 1974.
Each side recognised that there was "parity" in the Soviet and US nuclear arsenals, making victory impossible because of the prospect of mutual assured destruction (MAD).
For the Kremlin the achievement of reaching parity with the leading capitalist state was in line with the Soviet concept of historical progress.
Taught that their country was "the last best hope of mankind", they found it hard to accept that their major ideological enemy had become immune to attack.
They won out in the policy debates in Washington, which helped to propel Ronald Reagan into the US presidency in the 1980 election on a platform of resuming an arms race with the Soviet Union.
Debunking Reagan's taunt that the Soviet Union was an evil Empire, he described it as a society with a tired regime and a host of foreign and domestic problems.
The book argued that it was better to judge the Soviet Union's potential by analysing the historical record of its international activity rather than by examining Communist party ideology or Kremlin speeches.
Based on eyewitness reporting and interviews with Gorbachev and other senior Soviet officials during his time as the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief between 1988 and 1994, Steele analyses what went wrong with perestroika and the chaotic switch to a market economy in Russia.
Abraham Brumberg, editor of Problems of Communism, called it a work of "well-read open-minded journalism, with an eye for the lively vignette as much as the broader historical processes, above all resistant to the maladies to which correspondents in Russia so often succumb —flippant cynicism or mindless romanticism".
The Economist described the book as being a "fine modern history" with Steele's multiple visits to the country over many years meaning he "is well placed to compare the end of the Soviet era and the present 'transition', the favoured common euphemism for foreign withdrawal.