Morning Star editor BEN CHACKO says assessing a Labour leader whose mission was to smash the left must involve addressing the delusions that fuelled his rise
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Showing anti-communism the red card
GERRARD SABLES argues that political persecution of communism and communists, by both the right and left, should now be confronted in the same way more common forms of bigotry have been
Other forms of bigotry like racism, sexism, and homophobia really start their transition from respectable, normal, acceptable and even policy, to being clearly understood to be out of order when the victims make a clear challenge. So far, we in Britain have not really called out home-grown anti-communism.
Rebuilding Labour’s working-class roots and organising power is essential if the party is to recover, says MERCEDES VILLALBA
ANDREW MURRAY looks back at a damaging career marked by dishonesty, incompetence and revolting complicity in war crimes
Britain’s historic vote to leave the EU was a rejection of the political Establishment and the strategic direction pursued by Britain’s ruling class since the second world war, writes ALEX GORDON
Over 1,000 hostile US sanctions remain in place on Venezuela, while Britain continues its colonial theft of gold, writes MATT WILLGRESS
MARY DAVIS says the centrality of the Jewish community and the Communist Party to anti-fascism in the 1930s is too often overlooked on the left
THE first English language translation of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party opened with the following: “A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism. All the powers of the Past have joined in a holy crusade to lay this ghost to rest — the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police agents.”
So we see that anti-communism has a long and sordid history. Indeed, Yanis Varoufakis’s preface to a recent edition of the Communist Manifesto is an anti-communist and inaccurate diatribe, with phrases like “card-carrying Stalinists” and “now defunct Communist regimes.” He also claimed that the Communist Manifesto was “commissioned by English revolutionaries” which is blatantly untrue.
By contrast, AJP Taylor’s introduction to the 1967 Penguin edition states: “Anti-communism causes more trouble in the world than ever communism does or did.”
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