Harpal Brar and Women’s Lib in the 1970s

Harpal Brar of the CPGB-ML recently outlined some of his backstory in the British anti-revisionist/Maoist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Speaking on the Proletarian TV YouTube channel, he said: “So, when I looked around I became convinced that the Khrushchevites were wrong [in denouncing Stalin], I didn’t join the then only party that I could have joined, the [old official] Communist Party of Great Britain, because if I went there, I’m somebody who is not able to keep quiet about these things. I would have… been expelled. So, I didn’t, I waited until better times.”[i] In Brar’s case, that didn’t mean joining the ‘first wave’ of British Maoist groups that emerged in the early 1960s around the time of the Sino-Soviet split, notably Michael McCreery’s Committee to Defeat Revisionism For Communist Unity or the circle around the Forum journal. “Better times” were presumably ‘second-wave’ Maoist groups, including the Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League (RMLL) that formed in 1968 around Abhimanyu Manchanda (1919-85), of which Brar was a member.

It’s rather strange for Brar to reason that he didn’t join the CPGB because of the risk of expulsion through speaking out. That is exactly the process by which first- and second-wave Maoist groups in the CPGB and Young Communist League coalesced (localised rebellions in the latter, in particular, were a big feeder of Maoism in the late 1960s). Being disciplined and expelled by the CPGB leadership (as Manchanda was in 1965) was almost akin to a rite of passage for such revolutionary elements. It doesn’t really matter whether Brar was formally in or out of the CPGB/YCL; his whole milieux of the late 1960s would have been marked by the inner-party struggle in the post-Stalin ‘official’ communist movement; there was no ‘immaculate conception’ (a point I made about early Maoism in The kick inside that is also noted by Max Elbaum in his study of the US anti-revisionist movement).[ii] Therefore, the CPGB-ML, is, like the Trotskyist movement it so despises, completely beholden to the cultural and organisational mores of the ‘official’ communist movement as it existed before, during and after the Stalin era and a long product of factionalism.

‘Revolutionary travelling suitcases’
However, Brar takes this notion of his relative purity a step further when discussing the vexed issue of Chinese and Albanian recognition for Western anti-revisionist groups down the years: “It’s not helped by the fact that foreign parties give recognition to such nutters. They also have a responsibility to be very careful… They have a duty also to nurture people who talk sense. They have got their eyes and ears in these countries; they’ve got their ambassadors… they get all the literature. They should be able to find out who are the nutters and who are not the nutters… once the nutters get the recognition, the nutters feel they’ve got a licence to be nutters… You can only be a revolutionary if you do revolutionary work in your own country… otherwise you become revolutionary travelling suitcases.”[iii]

One does wonder if comrade Brar is alluding to more recent solidarity work with China and North Korea, where, of course, the CPGB-ML has to share the spotlight with precisely those “revolutionary travelling suitcases” who set themselves up as spokespeople for a regime; or disintegrating groups such as the New Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), who increasingly depend on meetings with this or that embassy as a source of public activity. Brar is also keen to distance himself from British Maoism’s history of loud-mouthed stunts and provocations as it developed through the 1970s. In other words, he’s telling his audience he is a serious and sober-minded revolutionary and definitely not a ‘nutter’.  

This narrative doesn’t really stack up with what we know about some of Brar’s history in and around the Manchanda organisation and its work in the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) through the RMLL’s own Women’s Liberation Front (WLF, not to be confused with the contemporary US organisation of the same name). Brar had split from the RMLL in August 1969 and his Association of Communist Workers (ACW) was based upon the former’s Hemel Hempstead branch. To rival the RMLL’s WLF, Brar set up the Union of Women for Liberation (UWL).

‘Hard-working but dogmatic Maoists’
For activists in the Manchanda group such as Diane Langford, people such as Brar were allegedly responsible for curtailing Maoist influence in the women’s movement: “Women were trying to develop a new, autonomous movement and we were seen as male-dominated and spouting tired old anti-imperialist rhetoric. In particular, women long remembered the incident at the national WLM conference in Skegness in 1971 when Harpal Brar leapt onto the stage and wrestled the microphone out of a woman’s hand.”[iv] The October 1971 conference was under the auspices of the Women’s National Co-ordinating Committee (WNCC), a body the conference chose to abolish in favour of a regional structure. A report in Socialist Worker said: “The changes were welcomed by the women at Skegness for whom the domination of WNCC by a small number of hard-working but dogmatic Maoists had become intolerable.”[v] (Interestingly, Sheila Rowbotham later attested to the influence that Manchanda had on the WLM developing political demands.[vi] I therefore don’t buy this tale, with its implication of ‘unpolitical women versus Maoists’.)

Langford’s later interpretation was disputed in a UWL letter sent to the RMLL’s WLF in February 1972. Referring to the same incident as Langford, the letter read: “The ‘abuses’ alleged against him [a UWL activist] by various factions were a) that he laughed and b) that he was violent. At the conference WLF put forward the view that it was unreasonable to demand that nobody should laugh when people make fools of themselves. With your desire now to increase your ‘reasonableness’ in the eyes of the feminists you would no doubt like to add the rider ‘except if a woman makes a fool of herself’. We do not accept that rider. Further, we would once more remind you that comrade [redacted] never initiated violence at the conference, as well you know. On two occasions he struck back when physically assaulted by the [Gay Liberation Front] led by Trotskyites … and … together with comrades of the UWL went to the rescue of a UWL comrade who was physically being prevented from speaking. If this correct behaviour made him an obvious target this was all the more so insofar as the WLF comrades were prepared to sit back and do absolutely nothing when comrade Harpal and UWL comrades were physically attacked…”[vii]

Without getting into rights and wrongs of this picturesque conflagration, it is obvious that Brar and his comrades were pretty much all of a piece with the confrontational and provocative style of Maoism at this juncture, replete with the idea of being in a state of perpetual war with your previous comrades. ‘Nutters’ in other words, fuelled by the sectarian grandstanding that was a result of a disputatious splitting culture that didn’t know the meaning of the term ‘unity in diversity’. Although they have mellowed down the years, Brar’s groups have never been free of this vice, and they still inhabit a world of political stunts and subsequent splits (hence the recent white-knuckle ride with George Galloway).[viii] But I’m not sure anything quite tops the vision of battling it out in 1971 with the Trotskyite fiends of the Gay Liberation Front…

There’s also some evidence of bigoted language in the 1972 letter. The UWL argued that people had in the past “quite rightly in our view, publicly referred to the women of the [Gay Liberation Front] as sexual perverts”.[ix] This appalling culture was, again, a product of the anti-revisionist movement of the time, which aped an illusion of a solidly heterosexual working-class culture (because no working-class person has ever been gay, right?), while its imagery of the 1960s was all muscle-bound male proletarians striding into a communist future, a cartoonish take on socialist realism.[x]  

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[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39ZF8KzUtZo

[ii] The kick inside can be read here: https://communistparty.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/The_Kick_Inside_-_revolutionary_opposition_in_the_cpgb_1945-1991.pdf. M Elbaum Revolution in the air: sixties radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che London 2006.

[iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39ZF8KzUtZo

[iv] https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.secondwave/langford.pdf

[v] S Peers ‘New structure for women’s lib movement’ Socialist Worker 23 October 1971.

[vi] https://www.bl.uk/sisterhood/articles/womens-liberation-a-national-movement

[vii] https://www.ucpi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/UCPI0000010912.pdf. This document comes from the recent Undercover Policing Inquiry.

[viii] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/cpgb-ml-splits-galloway/

[ix] Ibid.

[x] See Elbaum op cit pp138-139 for homophobia in the US anti-revisionist movement.

The end of the affair: CPGB-ML splits with Galloway

I predicted that the romance wouldn’t last long[i] but it seems that the, alas fleeting, love between the CPGB-ML and George Galloway and his Workers Party of Britain (WPB) has recently died. Now, obviously, we are in the throes of an immediate break-up: staring into space; long silences; eating cheese sandwiches in the park and looking sad… that kind of thing. So, I’ll resist the temptation to prolong the mutual heart-wrenching agony any longer than is strictly necessary. But it is worthwhile asking why this happened.

Neither party seemed particularly happy at the end. A WPB report of its national members council read: “Reviewing the party output and having regard to the conflicting work pressures of a number of comrades, not least deputy leader [and leading CPGB-ML member] Joti Brar, the following resolution was carried unanimously: ‘Resolution of demotion (rule book point 8): This NMC of the Workers Party places on record its thanks to comrade Joti Brar for the services she has rendered as deputy leader. In view of the conflicting demands on her work, the Workers Party removes Joti Brar from the NMC and position of deputy leader.’ On Tuesday 22 November party leader George Galloway received notification from Joti Brar that she and a small number of supporters were resigning or withdrawing their support for the Workers Party. The Workers Party of Britain welcomes the participation in its ranks of communists (and non-communists) from any party, but the Workers Party is not a communist party and had no intention of becoming yet another party of this type.”[ii]

This phrase of “reviewing the party output” suggests that Galloway and others were dissatisfied with the output of the WPB to date and one of the reasons proffered for this were the “conflicting demands” on the work of Joti Brar, an allusion to the fact that she is a very prominent and active leader of the CPGB-ML. I suspect Galloway wasn’t pleased with the amount of time being spent on the CPGB-ML, which Joti Brar obviously owes a primary loyalty to. That, after all, was why she and her comrades joined the WPB in the first place.

But we’ve been here before with comrade Galloway. When he fell out with the SWP in Respect in 2007, he made some harsh but truthful judgements: “Whole areas of the country are effectively moribund as far as Respect activity is concerned. In some weeks there is not a single Respect activity anywhere in the country advertised in our media. This has left a small core of activists to shoulder burden after burden without much in the way of support from the centre, leading to exhaustion and enervation.”[iii] The culprits for this sloth were the SWP, which had been unable to muster much internal enthusiasm for Respect and whose activists either flopped out or hunkered down onto a dread diet of Socialist Worker paper sales and pointless SWP petitions. Galloway knew the latter weren’t pulling their weight. I suspect some of the same feelings inform events in the WPB, although the CPGB-ML is a much smaller organisation than the SWP.

My own feeling is that the WPB stalled since it became clear that the Labour Party is likely to form the next government and will mop up a sizeable chunk of the British population’s displeasure at the current Conservative administration. While Labour was still prostrate and on the ropes in the early days of Sir Keir Starmer’s regime, there was perhaps a small chink in the armour for the likes of comrade Galloway to exploit. That window looks to have closed and candidates to the left of Labour are likely to have a thin time of it during the general election.

To find the CPGB-ML’s view of the departure we need to turn to an interesting addendum to a CPGB-ML resolution on British politics passed at a recent congress: “Editor’s note: This resolution was passed by our party’s ninth congress in October 2021. However, developments since that time have led the party to overturn that decision and to withdraw our members’ efforts from the Workers Party project, which we believe has failed in its stated aim of becoming a truly broad movement within which communists could work openly, transforming itself into a left-social-democratic vehicle for bourgeois parliamentarism and anti-communism. Our stance towards the Labour Party in particular and social democracy in general remains unchanged.”[iv] Again, the fact that the CPGB-ML suggests that the “communists” could no longer work openly in the WPB because the latter hadn’t achieved its aim of becoming “truly broad” indicates that the existence of the CPGB-ML and its pull on its members was a moot point for Galloway. The idea that the WPB has only just transformed itself into a “left-social-democratic vehicle” is, of course, absurd. CPGB-ML members working in the Batley and Spen by-election had to front up for a ‘law-and-order’ campaign for more bobbies on the beat and the whole livery and package of the WPB is of a national, British, popular front. As I have remarked before, back in 2004, the CPGB-ML denounced Galloway for his long membership of the “imperialist Labour Party”[v] and I suspect that, internally, the Brar family doesn’t have a high opinion of George’s not-so-marvellous medicine.

But, again, we’ve been here before with the CPGB-ML. Its opportunist method is to tag along with social democrats who are not averse to working with its brand of Stalinist politics (remember Arthur Scargill); go along with such figures in public for a while; until there’s a sudden need for it to emphasise its distinct and unique take on the world. This is hard-wired into all Trotskyist, Stalinist and Maoist sects that aspire to constantly close ranks in public. Such a method spreads to work in the broader movement until having to make common cause with the likes of Scargill and Galloway becomes simply unbearable. Then we have squabbles, falling-out, and splits with dubious justifications. Same old.  

The CPGB-ML is now seemingly throwing its energies into building the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, the Locomotive of World Anti-Imperialist Revolution[vi] and CPGB-ML founding father Harpal Brar thinks “imperialism is going to crash”[vii] (he might be right on that, of course). The CPGB-ML clearly sees an opportunity to recruit more directly to its organisation in our era of plague and war, and it hasn’t escaped its notice that Trotskyist groups are mostly stagnating; there are lots of young people calling themselves Marxist-Leninist again; and Stalin has been hauled back onto a revolutionary plinth by some. The CPGB-ML has tried to engage this year with the Morning Star’s growing Communist Party of Britain (CPB), launching a book on the history of the British road to socialism.[viii]

The CPGB-ML’s public engagement with the CPB’s largely pro-Stalin Young Communist League (YCL) has been strange. The aforementioned book alleges that the YCL “has been taken over by a petty-bourgeois student coterie infected by the liberal ideology of intersectionalist identity politics”.[ix] In fact, the YCL appears to be moving away from this type of regressive identity politics[x] and this seems to be a poor method of polemic against it. Even in the CPB itself, older comrades such as Mary Davis, who have largely adapted themselves to feminist identity politics, have been on the back foot inside the organisation after being criticised at the CPB’s 2021 congress for recruiting people from the intersectionalist milieu. According to my sources, Davis came somewhere near the bottom of the votes cast for the CPB’s current executive committee, partly because of this criticism. A struggle is clearly going on and the CPGB-ML’s clumsy assertions are way off.

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[i] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2021/07/05/galloway-cpgb-ml/

[ii] https://workerspartybritain.org/2022/11/22/national-members-council-met-in-manchester/

[iii] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/687/george-galloways-rebellion-rocks-swp/

[iv] https://thecommunists.org/2022/02/22/news/lessons-corbyn-project-break-labour-link-wpb/

[v] https://archive.thecommunists.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=10

[vi] https://wap21.org/

[vii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzloQDgQ7_E

[viii] https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3.cpgb-ml.org/BritainsRoadtoSocialism_read.pdf

[ix] Ibid.

[x] https://challenge-magazine.org/2022/11/18/socialism-not-individualism-glasgow-students-resist-identity-politics/

Galloway and the CPGB-ML: notes on a romance

Through his long and interesting career, George Galloway has had plenty of criticism hurled at him from left and right. This is how one splendid formation responded to his record in 2004: “We now hear from [the New Communist Party] words of praise for Respect, the SWP-led anti-communist electoral alliance fronted by George Galloway, a man who had to be thrown out of the imperialist Labour Party kicking and screaming (although anyone with anti-imperialist principles would have walked out long ago) and who also supported forces dedicated to the violent break-up of Yugoslavia as a state.”[1] So, Galloway, by virtue of his Labour Party membership, was deemed to be severely lacking in anti-imperialist principles.

These lines were penned by the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (CPGB-ML) in 2004, led by Harpal Brar and shortly to develop into a family dynasty (his offspring, Ranjeet and Joti, now play leading roles in the organisation). Of course, the CPGB-ML are loyal foot soldiers of Galloway in the Workers Party of Britain (WPB), so it would be interesting to know what the Brars now think of this 2004 characterisation of their new leader. This relationship is not being squirrelled away by the WPB. Joti Brar is deputy leader of the WPB and according to its website: “The Communists [the new branding of the CPGB-ML] have a long history of working with George on various issues. In 2019, The Communists stood alone with George on many questions, not least the defence of the Brexit referendum result and opposition to Labour’s treachery on this question… The Workers Party wants communists to play an active role, and we’re appealing to British workers, whether they have formerly been in the Brexit Party, UKIP, the Labour Party, a socialist organisation or none, to get involved with and build this party.”[2]

True love blossoms
It’s clear that the relationship between Galloway and the Brar dynasty began mellowing long ago. In fact, the CPGB-ML ended up by being heartened by events in Respect, as Galloway began to fall out with another fantabulous family dynasty in the form of the SWP’s John Rees and Lindsey German. After Galloway’s victory in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in the 2005 general election, Harpal Brar couldn’t quite contain his glee that Gorgeous George was giving the Trot SWP and its gormless leaders a hard time inside Respect. Obviously channelling Weekly Worker reports (of which Harpal was an avid reader) of the time, he said: “Although it is the counter-revolutionary Trots of the SWP who provide the foot soldiers for Respect, it is Galloway who takes the important policy and programmatic decisions. Time after time, on a whole range of issues, the SWP have voted with Galloway in defiance of their professed principles.”[3] Brar added, truthfully enough: “Galloway can do without the SWP. The latter, on the other hand, are nothing without Galloway.”[4] This is illuminating in the sense that during the Batley and Spen by-election we also had CPGB-ML members having to front a ‘law-and-order’ campaign for more bobbies on the beat, presumably in thrall to Galloway and in “defiance of their professed principles”. At least, the CPGB-ML has the consolation that communist parties campaigned for similar patriotic right-wing politics during the popular front era overseen by Stalin. (The pop-front SWP had no such firm ideological fall-back with the Anti-Nazi League or Respect; not that this made any difference.)

However, despite hailing Galloway’s election victory, there was no way at this point that the CPGB-ML could become Galloway’s foot soldiers in the manner that the SWP had. It still evinced suspicions of Galloway’s loyalties to the Labour Party. Hard-baked into the CPGB-ML’s ideology is auto-anti-Labourism and it has been traditionally hostile to those elements of the left that engage with the Labour Party. In 1995, Harpal Brar published a book entitled Social democracy: the enemy within, which set out the Labour Party’s counter-revolutionary betrayals in some detail. Twinned with this is a notion of Stalin as the supreme revolutionary icon and opponent of social democracy, with the Brarites rejecting even the essentially conservative ‘official communist’ critique that Nikita Khrushchev made of his former leader in 1956. Unfortunately, this narrative is substantively nonsense: Stalin oversaw and approved the old official CPGB’s own slide into social democracy in the form of the 1951 British road to socialism and the documentary materials proving this were widely shared in 2007.[5] (Laughably, the CPGB-ML claims, off the record and in conversation, that these documents are forgeries peddled by myself, the Weekly Worker and other bandits of ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite imperialism’. In fact, the documents emanated from Indian comrades who are supporters of Stalin’s political legacy. I only commented on it subsequently.)

It was clearly the fact that Galloway wasn’t let back into the Labour Party under Corbyn (he didn’t even get close) and gave up on any such ambition that meant the CPGB-ML could conceive of itself as playing a similar role that the SWP played in Respect. The CPGB-ML has worked with Galloway for a number of years now and he was speaking on its platforms in 2009 during its ‘Hands off China’ campaign. (The CPGB-ML also has excellent links with the Chinese embassy in London, whose personnel have appeared on platforms with Galloway and party members, much to the annoyance of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain [CPB].)

This is not the first time that the Brars have played the role of courtiers to movers and shakers in the labour movement. What became the core leadership group in the CPGB-ML (then working factionally through organisations such as the Indian Workers Association [GB], the Association of Communist Workers and the journal Lalkar), essentially took control of the London area of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP) in the late 1990s, with Harpal Brar becoming the group’s London president and, for a time, Scargill’s hatchet man. Brar came to relative prominence inside the SLP in 1997, opportunistically reversing an earlier critique of Scargill’s social-democratic proclivities, although recognising, quite correctly, the significance of his leader’s defection from the Labour Party. Brar’s ascension to the SLP national executive and the rise of his ACW supporters to the status of trusted courtiers of king Arthur coincided with the removal or departure of all other factions except those of Scargill himself. Predictably, Scargill fell out with Brar’s faction in 2001-02, partly over Scargill’s refusal to support the 9/11 suicide bombers and to back the North Korean regime in a sycophantic ‘Marxist-Leninist’ manner. Brar’s supporters pointed, with some justification (although they never once complained when Scargill was axing ‘Trotskyites’), to Scargill’s undemocratic and underhand methods. Scargill once again reverted to the status of an ‘old Labour’ bogeyman in the Brarite runes. It is likely that the CPGB-ML’s relationship with Galloway will run the same course, given that these sudden reversals from extreme opportunism to extreme sectarianism and denunciation are hard-wired into ‘Leninist’ sects such as the CPGB-ML, the SWP and the rest.  

This charming man
Whatever one makes of his bizarre ideas, Harpal Brar was an effective enough player in the little sectarian world of the British left and someone who knew how to manoeuvre and conduct himself in a generally charming and personable manner. He made no attempt to hide the fact that he read the Weekly Worker regularly and would go out of his way on demonstrations to greet CPGB-PCC members he knew and to ask them questions about this or that happening. This was usually followed by some ribbing on his part. He once told the CPGB-PCC national organiser that he looked rather pale and, as his ‘Leninist’ doctor, recommended that he give up the “revisionist counter-revolutionary Trotskyism” that ailed him. This was quite a contrast to some of the snarling specimens we encountered on the Trotskyist left, who would generally flounce off at the first sign of criticism or ribbing.

I make these points to underline, what attentive readers have hopefully picked up, that the CPGB-ML, if it has inherited anything from its patriarch, should not be dismissed as a mere nothing. Even though the formation of another pure Stalinist sect in 2004 was of no significance to the strategic woes of the revolutionary left, it was reasonably astute to form the CPGB-ML in 2004 in order to mop up what remained of the old ‘anti-revisionist’ communist milieu in the face of the terminal decline of older organisations such as the New Communist Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). Also, the Morning Star’s CPB had started to become more agnostic, at least in public, on issues such as Stalin’s legacy, which annoyed some of its members. By contrast, the CPGB-ML is defiantly unambiguous in praising Stalin’s Soviet Union, in a manner that echoes the personality cults of the 1930s and 1940s. Allied to this, the CPGB-ML is clearly a well-disciplined, well-financed, ‘cadre’ organisation that punches beyond its weight in terms of the money and commitment it gets from its members. It has obviously recruited younger members in some numbers, although there has recently been some internal controversy around the issues of identity politics and transsexual rights that I’m not qualified to comment on.

In the context of a Labour left that is in an advanced state of collapse after the Corbyn debacle, a revolutionary left in the throes of a deep existential crisis, and a Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) that puts a whole new spin on the word ‘useless’, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the WPB will at least establish itself as the most significant force in terms of Labour’s electoral opponents on the left, even though that might amount to pitiful numbers in terms of real forces and votes. But, if history is any guide, Galloway and the CPGB-ML won’t put up with each other for awfully long.

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[1] https://archive.thecommunists.org/index.php?secName=proletarian&subName=display&art=10

[2] https://workerspartybritain.org/frequently-asked-questions/#faq10

[3] https://thecommunists.org/2005/06/01/news/election-analysis-social-democracy-exposed/

[4] Ibid

[5] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/711/in-the-middle-of-the-road/