Harpal Brar

Harpal Brar
Harpal Brar speaks to young communists in Birmingham, on the 70th anniversary of the victory over fascism.
Born	(1939-10-05) 5 October 1939 Muktsar, Punjab, British India
Occupation	Chairman of the CPGB-ML
Political party	Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)

Harpal Brar (born 5 October 1939) is an Indian-born communist politician, writer and businessman, based in Britain. He is the founder and current Chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist).

Born in Muktsar, Punjab, British India, Brar has lived and worked in Britain since 1962, first as a student, then as a lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education (later merged into the renamed University of Westminster), and later in the textile business. Brar owns buildings in West London which he uses for CPGB-ML party activity, and he part-owns an internet shop called "Madeleine Trehearne and Harpal Brar" which sells shawls.

Brar is the editor of a far left political newspaper called Lalkar, which was a paper belonging to the Indian Workers' Association before Brar inherited it. Brar has written multiple books on subjects such as Communism, Indian republicanism, imperialism, anti-Zionism, anti-Colonialism, and the British General Strike. He is also a co-founder of the Hands off China Campaign.

Political activities

Brar joined the Maoist Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League but soon left to become a founder member of a small group of anti-revisionists, the Association of Communist Workers, as well as being a member of the Association of Indian Communists.

He and his comrades officially dissolved the ACW in 1997 in order to join Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, a breakaway from the Labour Party after its abandonment of the original version of Clause IV. Brar and his comrades worked to bring what they described as an Anti-Revisionist Marxist-Leninist programme to the SLP, but were eventually expelled seven years later.^[1]

Scargill expelled the entire Yorkshire Regional Committee and five members of the National Executive Committee. From this, in July 2004, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) was formed,^[2] and Brar was elected as its chairman.

Adopting positions maintained by Brar and his comrades since the 1960s, the CPGB-ML has been vigorously opposed to all those who work with or in any way endorse the Labour Party since its inception. Its stated aim on formation was to oppose opportunism in the working-class movement, revive the "class against class" programme embodied by the Communist Party of Great Britain during the 1920s, and to work for the establishment of socialism in Britain.^[3][4]

The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist) was registered with the Electoral Commission in 2008 under the name "Proletarian", which is the title of the bi-monthly newspaper of the CPBG-ML. The party was registered "to prepare for standing in elections".^[5]

Views on China

On July 19, 2008, Harpal Brar was one of the people who founded the Hands off China campaign. The campaign is dedicated to defending the Peoples Republic of China and "is aimed to defend China's sovereignty and territorial integrity" and "the country's just stands on issues of its vital national interest such as Taiwan and Tibet."^[6]

Views on India

Brar heavily disagrees with the belief that the fight for Indian Independence was a peaceful and pacifist movement, led entirely by Gandhi. He wrote a book on Indian history called Inquilab Zindabad: India's Liberation Struggle, in which he argues that the fight for Indian independence was a violent and bloody class struggle, and goes onto accuse Gandhi of supporting British imperialism. The back cover of the book says:

There is a widespread myth spread by bourgeois historians that Gandhi and the Indian National Congress were solely responsible for achieving India's independence from the much-hated British Raj, and that they did it using only the message of non-violence, peaceful non-cooperation and civil disobedience.

The truth is quite the reverse. The heroes of the 1857 revolt, the Ghadar patriots, and Bhagat Singh and his comrades inspired and led the Indian masses in armed struggle as the best means of liberating their country from British colonial occupation. Many thousands of ordinary people and many hundreds of revolutionary leaders made the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of this noble cause. Their struggle is summed up by Bhagat Singh's popular slogan, "Inquilab zindabad!" (Long live revolution!), which electrified the Indian masses. It is an insult to their memory, and to their self-sacrificing heroism, to credit India's independence to the most compromising, cowardly and obscurantist representatives of the India bourgeoisie.

All progressives, workers and peasants have a duty to honour these heroes, to perpetuate their memory and to learn from them in the continuing struggle against imperialism and exploitation.^[7]

Views on the Soviet Union

Brar defends the governments and leaders of the USSR until the appearance of "Khrushchevite revisionism" during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956.^[8] Lalkar, the newspaper edited by Brar, criticises The British Road to Socialism (the programme of the original Communist Party of Great Britain) from its earliest version in 1951 as "un-Marxist"^[9] and regards the claim that Stalin approved it as a "fiction".^[10] Brar is seen as an unapologetic admirer of Stalin and by some as an anachronism and controversial figure.^[11]

He, along with his daughter Joti Brar, is an active member of the Stalin Society, the website of which contains articles denying Soviet wrongdoing in the Katyn Massacre,^[12] the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor),^[13] and the Moscow trials^[14] which they blame on the Nazis, dismiss as propaganda, or describe as fair process, respectively.

Harpal is noted for his anti-revisionist positions describing the Soviet project of collectivisation and industrialisation under Joseph Stalin as the working class's willingness to "forgo consumption in order to build the mighty Soviet state."^[15]

Publications

For many years, he was on the executive of the Indian Workers Association (GB) and was the editor of that organisation's journal Lalkar. He continues to publish the journal, but the IWA cut its ties with the paper in 1992, when members of the Executive Committee with affiliations to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) objected to Brar's publishing of an article that was mildly critical of the adoption of market socialism in China.^[16]

Since 1992, Brar has self-published fourteen books on various aspects of Marxism, imperialism and revisionism. These works are a combination of original material and articles previously published in Lalkar and have been translated and distributed internationally by a number of sympathetic communist parties around the world.

Works

• Inquilab Zindabad, India's Liberation Struggle
• Revisionism and the demise of the USSR
• The 1926 British General Strike
• Nato's Predatory War Against Yugoslavia
• Imperialism and War
• Imperialism – the Eve of the Social Revolution of the Proletariat
• Chimurenga! The Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe
• Imperialism – Decadent, Parasitic, Moribund Capitalism
• Bourgeois Nationalism or Proletarian Internationalism?
• Social Democracy – the Enemy Within
• Trotskyism or Leninism?
• Perestroika – the Complete Collapse of Revisionism

Elections contested

UK Parliament elections

European Parliament elections

London Assembly elections (Entire London city)

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Harpal Brar

• Preface to Brar's book Trotskyism or Leninism?.
• Lalkar website.
• Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist) website.
• Brar's business website.