LAST year, in celebrating the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary, tribute was paid to past comrades who committed their lives to the struggle against imperialism. In the 1920s and ’30s they included Joan Beauchamp, Rajani Palme Dutt and the Communist MP for Battersea Shapurji Saklatvala.

In the 1950s the Daily Worker journalist Alan Winnington faced treason charges if he returned to Britain after exposing British and American atrocities in Korea. In the 1970s there were the London Recruits who risked their lives in apartheid South Africa.

All saw the fight for peace and socialism as inextricably linked to the fight against imperialism. They understood that capitalism in its monopoly phase is inherently expansionist, that its political and economic survival requires external exploitation.