IN 1951, Jones was one of 13 leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) convicted in a show trial under the notorious Smith Act. She was found guilty of intending to overthrow or destroy the US government by force or violence and sent to prison for the fourth time.
 
Her real intention, of course, was to change the economic, social and political system in the US fundamentally, by popular mass activity rather than military action.
 
The prosecution called in aid of the state’s case a speech she had delivered one year previously on International Women’s Day. Republished later in the CPUSA journal Political Affairs, it linked the struggles for women’s liberation, black emancipation and international peace.
 
In particular, Jones had emphasised, firstly, the role of women — especially workers and trade unionists — in united front campaigns against the US development of the H-bomb, and for nuclear disarmament talks with the USSR. Mass peace movements were growing across the world, as Jones illustrated with references to the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the All-Asia Women’s Conference, France, Italy and the newly founded People’s Republic of China and German Democratic Republic.
 
Black women and men in the US, as in Britain, were the victims and direct descendants of capitalist slavery, super-exploitation, colonialism and modern-day imperialism. They, too, could understand the dire need for peace in place of imperialist domination, aggression and war.
 
As throughout the cold war, the US was driving and leading the atomic arms race while rejecting every Soviet proposal for negotiations to ban all nuclear weapons.
 
These issues remain with us today.
 
The overwhelming majority of UN member states have signed the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, but the atomic powers continue to resist even though the treaty commits them to a process of multilateral and not unilateral disarmament.
 
Secondly, Jones had spoken out against the policies of US imperialism, notably its Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Western Europe with loans that Britain spent 60 years repaying with interest as our markets were opened up to US monopoly corporations.
 
Thirdly, she condemned the surrender of social-democratic parties and, with honourable exceptions, labour movement leaders and other “Wall Street puppets” to Nato and its rearmament agenda.
 
Again, there are echoes today of the policy of Britain’s post-war Labour government to treble military spending while cutting social and welfare programmes, prompting Aneurin Bevan to resign from the Cabinet in protest at the introduction of NHS dental and eye-care charges.
 
Having won a landslide victory in the 1945 general election, Labour went down to defeat just six years later.
 
Nato had been established shortly before Jones’s speech, six years before the formation of the Warsaw Pact. Its membership has grown from 12 in 1949 (including fascist Portugal) to 32 today, half of them since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. Its expansion has taken Nato forces to the borders of modern-day Russia, despite all the Western assurances to Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin that there would be no eastward expansion.
 
Yet still some of the Guardian-reading intelligentsia tell us that Nato is a purely defensive organisation set up to defend us against the Warsaw Pact and communism, doubtless ready to confront the Soviet invaders arriving in Britain with snow on their boots.
 
Today, the surrender of social democracy to Nato militarism, EU free-market capitalism and neoliberal economics has created the political vacuum now being filled by the far-right and fascist movements across much of Western Europe.
 
Fourth, Jones had warned against the dangers of embracing anti-communism on the left and in the labour movement. Such warnings have never meant having to agree, therefore, with every idea or policy of communist parties or their governments.
 
But it does mean understanding that anti-communism based on lies, distortion and prejudice is usually the sharp end of the wedge, opening up the left and the labour movement to anti-socialist, anti-democratic and other reactionary ideas.
 
Finally, Jones always argued the case for working-class and people’s unity: between black and white, against racist division and on the basis of their common class interests; between women and men, while combating male chauvinism within the labour movement and “bourgeois feminism” which sees men as the main enemy rather than monopoly capitalism and exploitation.
 
For those today who believe that Trump represents a unique break from past US presidents in their capacity as leaders of the so-called “free world,” another of Jones’s articles in Political Affairs denounced President Truman’s “criminal crusade” of force and violence against the vast majority of the human race.
 
“Though demagogically prating about peace, he glorifies Wall Street’s aggressive expansionism now flagrantly directed against the coloured peoples of Asia and Africa,” she wrote.
 
In many speeches and articles, she opposed Nato, the Korean War and US support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in Formosa (now Taiwan) — an island which is as Chinese as the Isle of Wight is English.
 
Jones ridiculed the notion that governments can “sabre-rattle for peace,” sacrificing people’s public and social services in order to provide yet more profit for the arms producers.
 
Does this sound familiar today, as Britain’s ruling class, its mass media and this sham of a Labour government clamour for yet more of our GDP to be spent on the armed forces and nuclear weapons?
 
Jones had no time for the hypocrisy of the US ruling class, which claimed to stand for “freedom” while persecuting communists and presiding over the “genocidal oppression of the Negro people.”
 
In her view, prattle about defending the “American way of life” was intended to conceal the “looting of the national wealth” by the US’s capitalists.
 
Following her removal to Britain in 1955, Jones reflected on the reasons for her treatment:
 
“I was deported from the USA as a Negro woman communist of West Indian descent. I was a thorn in their side in my opposition to Jim Crow racist discrimination against 16 million Negro Americans ... for my work for redress of these grievances, for unity of Negro and white workers, for women’s rights... because I fought for peace... because I urged the prosecution of lynchers rather than the prosecution of communists and other democratic Americans who oppose the lynchers and big financiers and warmongers — the real advocates of force and violence in the USA.”
 
She came to London where she continued to campaign against racism and colonialism, founding and editing the West Indian Gazette and organising the Caribbean carnivals that laid the basis for establishing the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival.
 
She died in 1964, aged just 49 and ever a member of the Communist Party.
 
We are proud to honour the heroic life of comrade Jones. We follow in her footsteps in the struggle against capitalism and imperialist war, against racism and sexism, for socialism and communism.
 
Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.