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.”

Anti-communism is a terrible form of bigotry with tragic consequences for humankind — and it needs to be recognised as such. 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.

Addressing a World Marxist Review symposium in the late 1980s, the late Bert Ramelson, legendary former industrial organiser of the Communist Party said this: “Anti-communism is often referred to as a subjective phenomenon but it is an objective factor in today’s world. Anti-communist hysteria has been with us for four generations and it would be unrealistic to believe that anti-communism in the West has not struck deep roots in politics, ideology and consciousness.”

Anti-communism is also anti-humanity, for it impedes the development or progress of society to its full potential and keeps us in a dystopian rat race. The last sentence of Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto reads: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Anti-communism blocks our goal of achieving what John Lennon sings about in his classic track Imagine.

We call it out in other countries but not here, it seems. We demonstrated outside the Ukranian embassy in 2014 when that regime had banned the Communist Party. We need to do more of that sort of thing.

New members of Nato and the EU feel no shame in outlawing communist symbols, the most recent being Finland, that exemplar of social democracy. Anti-communist legislation is still on the statute books of a number of states in the US; Texas forbids members of the CPUSA from standing in elections to its local and state legislatures.

It was only in 1991 that Communist Party members were no longer denied jobs in Britain’s Civil Service departments.

In this country, the first place to tackle anti-communism is the labour movement. Officialdom within the Labour Party and trade unions, with notable exceptions, carried on a crusade against the Communist Party from its formation.

The Communist Party History Group, in the Appendix to Noreen Branson and Bill Moore’s July 1990 pamphlet Labour-Communist Relations 1920-1951, listed 71 organisations on the proscribed list, of which only two were fascist — the rest were the sort that Communist Party members were or might be part of.

In 1933, Labour proscribed the European Anti-fascist Congress and in 1934 the Relief Committee for Victims of German and Austrian Fascism and in 1941 it proscribed the Anti-Fascist Relief Committee and in 1950 the League for Democracy in Greece. Aside from banning organisations which opposed fascism, it also banned 41 peace and solidarity organisations, although CND was too big to ban.

The post-war Labour government led by Clement Attlee was involved in fighting communism in Greece and Malaya, and during the McCarthy era, he wrote in the US quarterly review Foreign Affairs: “We are pardonably annoyed at being instructed by a beginner like McCarthy. The British Labour Party has had nearly 40 years of fighting communism in Britain.”

In the Chicago Daily Tribune he wrote, “The British Labour Party and I myself have been vigorously opposing the Communist Party in this country ever since its formation — long before Senator McCarthy was ever heard of.”

Instead of being ashamed of his anti-communism, he proclaimed it. This was despite British communists having held up a banner saying “British Battalion — Major Attlee Company — International Brigade.” He dishonoured those who had honoured him.

Let us make clear our rejection of and contempt for anti-communism — wherever it rears its ugly head.