Harpal Brar
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Harpal Brar (born 1939) is an Indian-born communist politician and writer, based in Britain.
Born in Muktsar, Punjab, India, Brar has lived and worked in Britain since 1962, first as a student and then as a lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education (later merged into the renamed University of Westminster). He is noted for his "antirevisionist" positions describing the Stalinist project of forced collectivisation and industrialisation as the working class's willing "forego(ing of) consumption in order to build the mighty Soviet state". [1]
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[edit] Political Activities
Brar became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement during the 1960s. He 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, set up in opposition to Tony Blair's New Labour though the group continued as an active faction within Scargill's party. This led to the Indian Workers Association severing its links with Lalkar. Brar and his comrades worked to bring a Stalinist programme to the SLP, but were eventually expelled seven years later. [2]
After Scargill expelled the entire Yorkshire Regional Committee and five members of the National Executive Committee without due process and for what Brar's supporters claim was for attempting to engage in serious debate as opposed to petty personal politicking, a number of SLP activists resigned from the party. From this nucleus, in July 2004, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) was formed [3], and Brar was elected as its Chair.
[edit] Stalinism
Ideologically Brar uncritically defends the governments and leaders of the USSR up to 1953. After the death of Joseph Stalin he claims that the USSR abandoned the project of socialism. As an unapologetic admirer of Stalin he is seen by some as an anachronism and somewhat controversial. [4] He, along with his daughter Joti Brar, is an active member of the Stalin Society, the website of which contains articles denying the Katyn Massacre [5] the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor) [6] and the Stalinist show trials [7] which they variously blame on Germans, dismiss as propaganda, and describe as fair process.
[edit] 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.
Since 1992, Brar has published eight 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.
- Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism (1992)
- Trotskyism or Leninism? (1993)
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- Includes the chapter "Trotsky killed by a Trotskyist" (see:Ramon Mercader)
- Social Democracy: The Enemy Within (1995)
- Imperialism: Decadent, Parasitic, Moribund Capitalism (1997)
- Bourgeois Nationalism or Proletarian Internationalism? (1998)
- Imperialism in the Middle East, With Specific Reference to the Struggle of the Palestinian People for National Self-Determination (with Ella Rule) (2002)
- Chimurenga! The Liberation Struggle in Zimbabwe (Editor) (2004)
- Imperialism - the Eve of the Social Revolution of the Proletariat (2007)
All books available from [1].
