Harpal Brar

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Harpal Brar was born in Muktsar, Punjab, India in 1939.

Since 1962 he has lived and worked in Britain, first as a student and then as a lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education, later University of Westminster. He is noted for his defence of Stalinism.

Brar became active in the anti-Vietnam War movement during the 60s and was 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.

For many years, he was on the executive of the influential Indian Workers Association (GB) and was the editor of that organisation's journal Lalkar, which gained an international reputation for its Marxist-Leninist analysis.

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 extremely controversial.

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 revolutionary programme and marxist understanding to the SLP, but were eventually expelled seven years later.

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, the majority of SLP activists resigned in disgust.

From this nucleus, in July 2004, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) was formed, and Brar was elected as its Chair.

Since 1992, Brar has published seven books on various aspects of anti-imperialist politics. These works are a combination of original material and articles previously published in Lalkar:

Perestroika: The Complete Collapse of Revisionism (1992)
Trotskyism or Leninism? (1993)
- 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 (2004)