22.01.1998

Harpal Brar plants flag

Around the left

Members of the Socialist Labour Party will find the latest issue of Lalkar, the bi-monthly journal of the Indian Workers Association (Great Britain), of particular interest. The editor and main contributor of this august publication is of course the newly elected member of the SLP’s national executive, Harpal Brar.

His election at the congress means that for the first time a member of the NEC is openly producing their own factional journal. The other trends and individuals represented on the party’s highest committee must bargain for space in Socialist News, the SLP’s official ‘monthly’, which is inevitably dominated by Bonapartist general secretary Arthur Scargill.

The January/February edition of Lalkar contains a lengthy report on the SLP’s 2nd Congress held in December 1997, written in comrade Brar’s inimitable style. As can be seen from its contents, he has constituted himself an ultra-loyal Scargillite, while attempting to occupy a clearly defined position in opposition to the most politically articulate of the other tendencies on the NEC, the Fourth International Supporters Caucus of Patrick Sikorski, Brian Heron and Carolyn Sikorski.

The tone of comrade Brar’s report is set in the opening section, dealing with the remarks of SLP president Frank Cave:

“He emphasised that we were proposing an alternative to capitalism - ie, socialism - and to that end had to defend our party and constitution against all those who wanted to destroy us ...

“... the NEC had unanimously agreed to circulate a recommended list of NEC candidates that proposed a fair balance.

“It rapidly became obvious that there were those who would have preferred a much less fair distribution of NEC seats. They wanted the NEC to reflect the aspirations of a Trotskyite minority to highjack [sic] the party, or failing that to emasculate the NEC by denying it any authority or decision-making power.”

The main ‘evidence’ that comrade Brar produces for this is the proposal from Wythenshawe and Sale East Constituency SLP for the establishment of a control commission to be “charged with the work of safeguarding all aspects of party democracy and discipline”.

He comments: “This theme, however, was present in many of the motions and amendments submitted to congress. In summary they either wanted the constitution changed to allow organised factions, or, on the belt and braces principle, wanted to remove authority from the NEC so that those who contravened the constitution and organised Trotskyite factions in the party would not be subject to party discipline, but would be protected by some committee or other ‘elected from the floor’ for the purpose.”

Several such proposals were ruled out of order - and a good thing too, according to the comrade: “In the usual Trotskyite fashion there was much moaning about how undemocratic, bureaucratic and dictatorial a strong constitution was (ie, it would not easily allow them to impose the undemocratic control of a minority clique).”

As an unreconstructed Third Period Stalinite and member of the Association of Communist Workers, comrade Brar is certainly in favour of “a strong constitution” - that is, one where “Trotskyite” factions are banned, but loyal members like himself, as long as they remain uncritical of the Great Leader, can organise and publish in whatever way they please. And of course all those who dare to raise democratic criticisms must by definition be “Trotskyites”.

Like JV Stalin comrade Brar has mastered the art of ‘Newspeak’. He explains that he and labour dictators like Scargill are the true democrats, the true revolutionaries. Those who have a genuine understanding of the need for workers’ self-liberation - including through the direct control of our own organisations - because they oppose the stunting of such self-activity are dubbed “anti-communist”.

“... in the language of the anti-communist sects which plague the working class movement,” writes comrade Brar, “congenitally counterrevolu-tionary elements are portrayed as ‘revolutionary’, ‘democratic’ and ‘left’, whereas serious-minded revolutionaries are ridiculed as being ‘right’, ‘undemocratic’ and ‘bureaucratic’.”

The most interesting part of the Lalkar report is the long section covering the constitutional amendment to abolish the black section moved by Harpal Brar himself. This succeeded only because comrade Scargill had secured himself a guarantee against defeat from any quarter in the shape of a 3,000 block vote wielded by the mysterious North West, Cheshire and Cumbria Miners’ Association. The three NWCCMA delegates cast their vote - on Scargill’s behest - in favour of abolition. This ensured victory for the mover by 3,297 votes to 506.

Comrade Brar reports his own speech in glowing terms: “Harpal Brar received the enthusiastic support of the majority of delegates,” he writes, despite the obvious fact that, if the block votes of the NWCCMA and the black section itself (75 votes) are excluded, there was a clear majority against. He puts this down to the fact that the NEC - in outvoting Scargill, who wanted to support the amendment - recommended rejection: “The fact of the matter is that, had the NEC not opposed motion number 8, there would have been no more than approximately 120 votes against it - including the 75 block votes that the previous constitution allotted to the black section.”

Comrade Brar is seriously suggesting that the delegates genuinely in favour of the black section carried fewer than 50 votes - ie, perhaps a dozen people in the hall. Apart from the sheer absurdity of this statement, he is also implying that, far from being clear-minded, not to say revolutionary, independent fighters - as the rest of the report would have you believe - the great majority of delegates were mere voting fodder for the leadership. In fact our own estimation was that, excluding the block votes, this ‘loyalist’ section carried just under 400 out of the approximately 900 votes available (see Weekly Worker December 18).

The movers of the amendment to abolish the black section won through the sheer power of their logic (a single speech by the author himself), the comrade asserts: “They were successful in it, not because the NWCCMA delegation voted for them in response to the dictate from ‘king Arthur’, as the scurrilous Weekly Worker insinuates, but because the NWCCMA delegates were persuaded by the force of the arguments put forward in support of the amendment ...

“The NWCCMA delegates are honourable and solid working class comrades; unlike our flabby and unstable petty bourgeois gentry, they have a serious attitude to questions of working class politics and organisation. The Ealing Southall delegation was proud to have had the support of such fine comrades as those who represented the NWCCMA. If they were people to be cowed down, they would not have voted against the NEC recommendation, as they actually did.”

The Lalkar article takes the Weekly Worker to task for its comments over comrade Brar’s remarks in his congress speech, “Don’t insult me by voting for me because I am black.” We had pointed out that “comrade Brar was elected to the NEC ... precisely because he is a leader of the Indian Workers Association with some influence in the black community. He was on the NEC’s ‘recommended’ list for that reason” (December 18).

Brar is outraged by this “despicable, not to say racist, comment”: “... had the NEC as much as hinted that Harpal Brar was on the recommended list precisely because he belonged to the Indian Workers Association ‘with some influence in the black community’, he would have doubtless declined the nomination.”

Pull the other one, comrade. We have no doubt that Harpal Brar is sincere in wanting to unite black and white in a single revolutionary party, where each member is viewed as “a communist who incidentally happens to be black [or white]”. But his views are not shared by the national executive. True, Scargill and one or two others might on occasion pay lip service to the idea of revolution. Most of the others are trade union militants with a vague image of the SLP as a more leftwing Labour Party, while Fisc is explicitly against the notion that the SLP should become a revolutionary party. “We are not building the Bolshevik Party,” said leading Fiscite Brian Heron at congress in a remark aimed at comrade Brar. “If comrades want to build a Bolshevik Party they should go and join one of the sects.”

Because Fisc does not want to build a party based on voluntary unity through revolutionary discipline (that would mean a ‘white’ party because of the majority of its membership), it sees the idea of an autonomous black section as a means of attracting black workers. Scargill does not agree - perhaps because he fears that he would not be able to exert complete control over such an autonomous component. But that does not mean he is not keen himself to recruit black members. On the contrary, he too needs to establish that ‘his’ party has leading members from all sections of the working class - including on its highest committees - as long as they can be relied upon to faithfully back up his every move. The fact that comrade Brar is an IWA leader “with some influence in the black community” was an advantage. The fact he is a sycophant was a positive recommendation.

It is true that Harpal Brar appears to be replacing Fisc as comrade Scargill’s political mentor. Nevertheless it must be gratifying for Scargill to have whole sections of his speeches reproduced uncritically in the pages of Lalkar, and reports of his faultless leadership skills under headings such as ‘Scargill defends the honour of the party’.

But what does comrade Brar think of the use of the block vote in a working class political party? The answer to this lies in his cryptic comment, “There is no abstract truth: that truth is always concrete”.

He writes: “Whatever our own views about the block vote, it remains a fact that when some of us joined the SLP, we joined fully aware of this provision in the constitution ...” (our emphasis).

“Even more bizarrely,” continues comrade Brar, “the very people who complained most about the block vote are the ones who have spent a lifetime infiltrating the Labour Party, where they have argued against the reduction of the union block vote at the Labour Party conference. And this, notwithstanding the fact that year after year, decade after decade, the majority of unions affiliated to the Labour Party have cast their votes on the side of reaction and in support of the interests of British imperialism. At the SLP congress however, the NWCCMA comrades were casting their vote in the furtherance of the revolutionary cause...

“If [the left] were so opposed in principle of course to the block vote, they ought to have proposed a simply worded, one-line amendment to the effect that ‘this congress does away with the block vote’. That would have been an honest, straightforward, serious and businesslike approach to the question.”

I wonder which way the NWCCMA delegation would have voted if such a hypothetical amendment had been moved - assuming of course it had not previously been ruled out of order. Still, truth is always concrete: that is, if the block vote goes in your favour, it is good; if not, it is bad.

The fact of the matter is that its use is inherently reactionary, whether in the Labour Party or the SLP. Trade unions, usually the most conservative of organisations, can almost always be relied upon to support the status quo, to back up the leadership in preventing democratic change.

Comrade Brar is keen to paint not only the revolutionary left, but also the democratic centre who were also highly disturbed by comrade Scargill’s NWCCMA ‘insurance policy’, as “professional squabblers”. He writes: “The history of the working class movement in all countries furnishes ample proof that those guilty of opportunism in the matter of organisation invariably hide behind fraudulent and deceptive phrases about democracy and the false slogans about the struggle against bureaucracy - all in an effort to undermine the authority of the party and its central institutions.”

Throughout his piece, comrade Brar names but one of these “Trotskyite disrupters” - Cardiff Central general election candidate Terry Burns. Brar repeatedly asserts that comrade Burns is “a prominent member of Workers Power”, who “led his Cardiff delegation in a walkout to the jeering of the majority of delegates”. In fact comrade Burns, who received the second highest number of votes of all the SLP general election candidates, has no connection whatsoever with the Workers Power group. Despite the taunting of the vociferous minority - in particular the homophobic supporters of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review - comrade Burns refused to abandon the party and remained in the congress. Unlike genuine supporters of Workers Power, grouped around the journal Socialist Labour Action who have now given up on the SLP, he has signified his intention to continue the fight for a mass democratic workers’ party inside Socialist Labour.

“That the incurable sects of anti-communists from Workers Power, the ‘Marxist Bulletin’ and the so-called CPGB should have behaved the way they did at the congress is quite understandable,” writes comrade Brar.

However, he also has harsh words for his comrades on the new NEC - those other ‘despicable counterrevolutionary Trotskyites’, the Fiscites - for declining at first to take up their seats on the national executive after the result of the black section vote was made known. He adds patronisingly: “That serious comrades such as Brian Heron, Pat and Carolyn Sikorski, Imran Khan, etc. should display, albeit temporarily, a disdain and disregard for the decisions of the congress is lamentable indeed.”

Despite this comrade Brar concludes: “The 2nd Congress will go down in the history of the SLP as the congress at which the party principle prevailed over personal considerations, at which opportunism in matters of organisation suffered a crushing defeat, at which anarchist phrase-mongering and demagogic intellectualist verbosity were shown the door.”

The coming year should certainly prove to be an interesting one for members of the national executive committee.

Alan Fox