Yes tonight is the big night! The Communist University opens in London with speeches and festivities and fraternal greetings. I’m afraid comrades that I won’t be able to make it as the CIA were on the phone and they want me to draft some new ideas on how best to divide the anti-imperialist forces of progress and you know, what can you say when duty calls?
I suspect most readers will be otherwise engaged tonight as well. But if you want a taste of what you are going to miss out on then simply read Stop the War leader Andrew Murray’s incredible piece – ‘Unity our strength’ from the Morning Star – it should give you a perfect flavour of the nostalgia-fest that kicks off tonight. (And for those of you who have heard of a chap by the name of Rajani Palme-Dutt the Murray piece is one for the tribute album).
Comrade Murray sees dark forces ranged against a powerful movement which “almost stopped the imperialist war”. These forces of reaction are
1. The Daily Telegraph (of course)
2. Journalist Nick Cohen whose “whining may amount to nothing more than a protracted resignation letter from the left, following in the unsteady footsteps of his hero Christopher Hitchens”,
3. The comedian Mark Thomas (who dared to criticise Murray’s new friends in the Socialist Workers Party)
4. The New Statesman (who dared to print articles by Thomas and Cohen).
A true axis of evil. But comrade Murray knows what is behind this unprincipled cabal.
All this is predictable. To the politically experienced, it is as transparently the work of imperialists as the direct pro-war propaganda.
But the movement needs to be on guard against this period, when the level of mass mobilisation is inevitably loweer and the millions drawn into protest for the first time in the early part of the year can be disorientated and driven back into apathy. Every opportunity needs to be taken to avoid these provocations, consolidate the breadth of the movement locally and nationally and entrench both the movement and its demands for peace and democracy as a permanent element in political life.
There is only one possible response to this:
Long Live Comrade Murray! Hail the unbreakable alliance of Trotskyism-Stalinism-Islamism!
