Joti Brar

In this episode, Joti Brar, chair of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist CPGB-ML), discusses the compassionless media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the obfuscation of the horrors of the siege in Gaza, much less the fact that contrary to legacy media, the violence has gone on for far longer than two years. Similarly, workers of the world recognise the pervasiveness of similar propaganda within their own trade unions which are often complicit with the bourgeois propaganda of the ruling elite. As a result, workers today, Brar relates, feel powerless in the absence of strong leadership within their unions. Stressing the need for workers to start making demands of their unions and governments, Brar runs through a list of demands upon which we must all insist, from the breaking of links with the pseudo-leftist parties such as the Labour Party in the UK or the Democratic Party in the US, to refusing to allow the state to oversee the running and organisation of unions, and the building up of strike funds. Brar also notes how workers are increasingly disenfranchised and angry as governments promote culture wars and tribalism (eg. climate change, immigration, and gender ideology) in order to pivot workers against each other, while media and politicians collude with each other, promoting one side as wrong, the other as right, leading populations to bypass reason and to identify with the ruling class. Brar also chronicles the root problems of mass migration, a phenomenon primarily caused by wars and the follow-up looting process promoted by Western nations, all while the imperialist class benefits from paying the bare minimum in immigrant wages while driving a wedge between members of the domestic working class and the immigrant working class, creating an anti-migrant fear. Covering the positive influence of her father, Harpal Brar, on her political education, Brar historicises mid-twentieth century Marxist organisation within Britain in which both her father and mother participated. Get full access to Savage Minds at www.savageminds.co/subscribe