COMMUNISTS laid flowers at the International Brigades memorial statue in Belfast following a May Day solidarity meeting at the weekend.

Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) incoming chair John Pinkerton called, in the year of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday, for an “all-Ireland anti-imperialist alliance” to develop “a new type of national political and economic sovereignty” and build “a future in which the needs of the people, the planet and peace come before greed for profits.”

Tudeh Party of Iran international secretary Navid Shomali warned that a “powerful coalition” of forces was gathering around US President Donald Trump with “very dangerous designs for Iran, within the scope of ‘regime change.’ Its agenda is to exert crippling pressures on the Iranian people.”

Communist Party of Britain chair Liz Payne told the meeting that, alongside Marx’s bicentenary, socialists could look to the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and the 220th of the rising of the United Irishmen as evidence that “unity and change are possible.”

Marx’s dialectical materialist approach proved the working class and its allies could indeed overthrow and replace capitalism, she said.