Joti Brar

Joti Brar, the Vice Chair of the Communist Party in Great Britain (CPGB-ML), discusses many of the mediatised and popular misconceptions regarding communism and the shifting political valences of the left and the right through neoliberalist discourse in recent years. Historicising how the term “communist” was used as an insult in the mid-19th century, even before the publication of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Brar elaborates how the ruling class feared the working class, recognising communism as the leading militant edge of the working class and a threat to capitalist exploitation. The slur of “communist” then, as it is also being reinvigorated by the right today, attempts to demonise Marxism among the working class whereby people will shy away from the idea of communism before ever understanding what it actually is. Brar delves into the history of capitalism and its many violent confrontations within the labour landscape and the misery capitalism effected upon workers’ lives for the majority of its existence. Expounding upon the Keynesian consensus in the post-war era where the ruling classes agreed to make reforms to stave off communist revolution by implementing certain social measures such as nationalising certain services and creating the welfare state, Brar notes how capitalism exists in a constant state of crisis, harbouring a persistant fear of Marxism while projecting the ruling class’ degeneration and crimes onto its opponents. Noting how capitalist ideology served to destabilise communism since the 1950s, Brar elucidates the current era where the struggle for women’s rights and racism quickly became institutionalised within bourgeois academic disciplines thusly neutering all class criticism. As a result, feminism was not framed as a struggle between workers and capitalists for which the solution to the oppression of women was never the end of the exploitation societies, but rather women’s oppression was postured in terms of various enemies such as men and underwear.