Harpal Brar

Harpal Brar (born 5 October 1939) is an Indian-born communist politician, writer and businessman based in Britain.

Born in Muktsar, Punjab, British India, Brar has lived and worked in Britain since 1962, first as a student and lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education (later merged into the renamed University of Westminster), and later in the textile business. He is noted for his anti-revisionist positions describing the Soviet project of collectivisation and industrialisation under Stalin as the working class's willing "forgo(ing of) consumption in order to build the mighty Soviet state" and other Stalinist policies.

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, though the group continued as an active faction within the SLP. This led to the Indian Workers Association severing its links with Lalkar. 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...
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