Joti Brar interview: ‘We are links in the long chain of revolution’

This is the first instalment of an interview for the Krasnoyarsk-based Russian Marxist journal Za Pobedu! (For Victory!). The interviewer was Evgeny Spirin.

Download this edition of Za Pobedu! as a pdf.

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We present to you an interview with Joti Brar, one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). She is already familiar to our readers. In August this year, her article On the current state and problems of the communist movement was published in our newspaper.

Evgeny: Dear Joti, this year (2024), your lengthy article on the problems of the global communist movement appeared in issues 26-27 of the newspaper Za Pobedu!. As the translator of this article, I was pleased to receive feedback from readers. Several people wrote on Vkontakte and asked me to tell them about you and your party. It turned out that while I could provide some information about the party thanks to a few communist Telegram channels, I knew almost nothing personally about you, other than the fact that you are the daughter of the great Harpal Brar.

Please tell us about yourself. Share about the family in which you were born.

I am not sure that personal biographies are very useful politically, but I will share with you a few details of my childhood. I was born to communist parents in England in 1972. My father, Harpal Brar, came to London from Punjab, India as a law student in 1962. While waiting for his course to start, he spent time in a library and picked up a book by Lenin. From then on, he was hooked. He has never stopped studying Marxism and trying to implement what he has learned in the working-class movement from that day forward.

My parents began their political journey together in various parties, principally Maoist ones in the late 1960s, and in the mass movements against the Vietnam war and for women’s liberation. Although they did not remain official ‘Maoists’ into the 1970s, they retained their deep love for the Chinese Revolution and respect for the leadership of Chairman Mao. But it was also clear to them that the Maoists were not getting everything right in their struggle against the revisionism of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. In order to understand what was correct and what was not, they considered it to be their duty to stop depending on leaders to tell them what Marxism is and to master the science for themselves.

This was the great task they set themselves: to understand Marxist science so as to be able to evaluate the claims of all the competing groups into which the left was splintering, and to try to find a way forward that would keep the flame of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism burning in Britain. This I believe they successfully did, and it is this work that forms the theoretical and experiential basis for our party today.

As an example of the way they tried to work out what was right and to connect that understanding with those who need it, I will tell a small story: While she was pregnant with me, my mother was physically attacked by anti-Marxist feminists on the stage at a women’s conference. She was simply trying to give a speech based on Engels’s work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State! (Strangely enough, many years later, I was pregnant with my own daughter when I gave a talk on the same topic. The audience was much smaller, but no one tried to attack me!)

Evgeny: Tell us about your childhood and early years.

My childhood was quite ordinary in most respects. I went to ordinary British schools and did the same things as other children did, but my parents’ political activity and connections meant that I was exposed to a wider array of ideas, cultures and people, including working-class communists from Britain’s Indian community, Irish, Palestinian and Zimbabwean freedom fighters etc.

I also grew up reading many children’s story books from People’s China, which had a great impact on my priorities in life, although I did not realise that at the time. My mother gave me copies of The Communist Manifesto and The Origin of the Family for Christmas when I was 15. I read them and very much identified with their content, but did nothing further by way of Marxist studies or activity for many years.

In December 1991, I arranged the music for and led a string trio (consisting of myself and my brothers) playing Khachaturian’s ‘Song of Stalin’ at the founding meeting of the Stalin Society, which was formed as the USSR was falling by anti-revisionist communists in Britain. All these activities were planting seeds of my future development as a communist; exposing me to ideas and people far away from the mainstream of British bourgeois culture and ideology.

Comrade Harpal was the chairman of this diverse group, which didn’t agree on enough to form a single organisation, but did agree on the need to uphold the legacy of the construction of socialism and of Josef Stalin’s leadership of that construction. I was not yet ready to play more than a musical part in the proceedings, but some years later (1998) it was to the Stalin Society that I gave my first ever presentation – on the topic of the counter-revolutionary propagandist and police spy George Orwell. [1]

It was not until I was nearly 23 that I decided to attend a meeting of the regular study class held by my father and his comrades in west London. Two hours of reading Lenin was enough. I, too, was hooked. It was very clear to me that here was someone who spoke the truth, and here I could find the solutions I had been looking for to all the problems I saw in the world.

Evgeny: Was Marxism a common interest among your friends and the youth around you at the time?

This was, of course, a strange time to become a communist, since it was less than four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and ‘everybody knew’ that communism had failed and there was no other future than capitalism; nothing for anyone to do except please themselves and take care of their immediate family.

I was part of a generation that had quite easy access to a decent enough education, to university without debt, to jobs and to housing. None of my friends and very few in my generation had any interest in Marxism and the class struggle; we were fed a diet of social pessimism and the culture that was promoted to us was based entirely on hedonism and escapism.

Evgeny: The late 1980s and early 1990s – what was the Marxist movement in Britain like at the time? What challenges did you, your father and your comrades face?

My studies showed me that the crisis of capitalism was bound to recur; that the problems of humanity were bound to get worse, especially with no apparent opposition to US military power in the world; and that ultimately the only solution to our problems, and the only future for humanity, lies with socialism.

For this reason, I joined the movement in 1995 and did my best to be useful in it. I learned to write, to edit, to speak in public, to run meetings and street stalls, to hold banners and hand out leaflets, to build websites and design pamphlets, and to do whatever else was needed. I was a trade unionist for ten years while working at the BBC (putting music radio on the internet, not as a news journalist).

I studied Marxism as well as I could alongside working and later alongside raising a family (my two children are now teenagers). I am by no means a brilliant theoretician, but I have had the great good fortune to be guided for 30 years by comrades who have given their lives to the study and practice of revolutionary Marxism, and so I have been able to learn much from their accumulated knowledge and experience as well as from my own.

My father and his comrades had been in the movement for decades when I joined them. My father was in the national leadership of (and edited the newspaper Lalkar for) a large mass organisation called the Indian Workers Association. They also worked in the Zimbabwe solidarity movement, the Irish solidarity movement, the Palestine solidarity movement, the antiracist movement and more. After the demise of the USSR, my father began to write books as well as newspaper articles, his first being on the subject of the fall of socialism in the Soviet Union: Perestroika, the Complete Collapse of Revisionism (1991).

While they worked in these mass organisations, my father and his comrades were also Marxists with a desire to stay true to the revolutionary essence of our movement. But through the decades when the movement was riven with organisational splits and ideological degeneration and confusion, they struggled to find more than a handful of people with whom to work as organised revolutionaries.

The British movement had been in decline ever since the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had issued its British Road to Socialism programme in 1951, which (even before the death of Stalin!) gave up on the revolutionary road and instead told the British workers they could achieve socialism via parliamentary elections and an alliance with the imperialist Labour party. Over the following decades, a once vibrant and strong party gradually disappeared into irrelevance, and then dissolved itself in 1991 (declaring that the October Revolution had been “a mistake of historic proportions”!) After all, if the Labour party is a vehicle for socialism, what do we need a Communist party for?

Of course, now that the working class has learned in such a painful way that the Labour party is not its friend it has also lost all its militant organisations – first the Communist party, then the trade unions, then any consciousness of itself as a class at all. We have a huge job in front of us to rectify this situation, but as the Chinese saying says: every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We have no choice but to start from where we are and to take whatever steps we can in the direction of our goal.

When he finally broke with the Labour party in 1996, the great miners’ leader Arthur Scargill founded the Socialist Labour party (SLP). We joined this organisation soon after, seeing in it an opportunity to try to break the working class from its fatal dependence on that pillar of the imperialist order. [2]

I learned many of my first organisational and political lessons in that party, to which our comrades brought their study ethos, running many party schools on Marxist topics. When the SLP finally proved itself unable to break with social-democratic politics and expelled its entire Yorkshire region and many central committee members rather than allow them to influence the party in a Marxist direction, we founded the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). That was 20 years ago, in July 2004.

Since then, we have worked hard to establish ourselves and to grow. Not only is there blanket avoidance of even the name of our party (never mind of our leaders or our politics) in the mainstream media (and most ‘independent’ media too), but the entirety of the self-identifying ‘left’ in Britain are united in trying to keep us out of the movement they dominate.

The reason for this is clear: they all share the aim of keeping the working class tied to the allegedly ‘left wing’ of the Labour party, while our aim is to smash the Labour party along with the entire edifice of British imperialism. For this reason, we have epithets like ‘sectarian’, ‘cult’, ‘anti-union’ and many other insults hurled at us. Trotskyite and revisionist ‘socialists’ alike are united in trying to keep their members from reading our literature for fear they might actually learn something.

All the same, despite these concerted efforts, and despite shadow bans and algorithmic suppression on social media platforms and search engines, our party has established itself as a small but unmissable presence on the British left. The weight of our combined experience, the depth of our political knowledge, the consistency of our analysis, makes our work hard to ignore once you have found it. The breadth and depth of our Marxist analysis is unrivalled in the English-speaking world.

Today, the global crisis of overproduction is worse than it has ever been and getting worse all the time. Conditions for British workers are becoming worse by the day and the future consists only of more economic hardship and an accelerating drive towards war.

As their objective conditions change and the sources of profit that paid for their privileges disappear, we are seeing a change in the mood of the British working class. The last 20 years have taught them many lessons about the real nature of British democracy, about the role of the corporate media and bourgeois politicians. They are not yet ready for revolutionary action as a group, but they are increasingly frustrated and angry, and many more individuals are waking up to the necessity of taking action than at any time in my life.

Evgeny: So, you see prospects for increasing your allies and strengthening the class struggle?

The scope for real growth in our activity and our organisation is opening up before us as the crisis of capitalism deepens.

We see ourselves fundamentally as a vehicle for connecting Marxism with the masses. This is the vital missing link that is needed to bridge the gap between the people’s righteous anger and a successful revolution that can take on the task of the building of a planned socialist economy.

For this reason, we focus on trying to find those workers in Britain who are ready and willing to be trained, and on doing what we can to turn them into serious, dedicated, educated revolutionaries: into cadres who are able to connect Marxist science with the people around them, and who are willing to devote their time and energy to the cause of socialist revolution, no matter what the difficulties or obstacles.

We study Marxism in order to connect its profound insights with the masses, who need this knowledge to carry out their great historical mission of replacing decaying capitalist-imperialism with socialism and to put humanity on the path towards the higher stage of communism which is our ultimate future.

I consider myself and my comrades to be links in the long chain of revolutionaries that begins with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These great thinkers bequeathed to our movement not only incredible knowledge, but also important habits and attitudes. They bequeathed to us a mindset of service rather than of self-aggrandisement. An attitude of taking the long-term view of our movement and our work rather than a short-term one. They bequeathed essential values that need to be adopted by every generation of revolutionaries: humility, service, dedication, discipline, sacrifice.

Only an organisation guided by such values and made up of such individuals will be capable of carrying out the task that history has put before us. Our aim is to become such people and build such an organisation.

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Notes

[1] In 1996, it was revealed that in 1949, George Orwell had offered the secret propaganda department of the foreign office, which was linked to British intelligence services, names of writers who could be trusted to create anticommunist propaganda, as well as the names of writers and journalists he considered secret communists and therefore ‘unreliable’.

This department was set up by the Attlee government in response to the “growing communist threat to the entire structure of western civilisation”. Notable writers like Bertrand Russell, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler were hired to create disinformation about the USSR, the people’s democracies of eastern Europe and the communist parties of western Europe. The publication of documents also shows that the IRD (Information Research Department) actively promoted the foreign publication of Orwell’s anticommunist ‘classic’ Animal Farm.

[2] Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British left-wing politician and trade union activist, known for his work as a miner. He led several strikes and was president of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. He is recognised as one of the most principled leaders of the workers’ movement in England.