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Aravindan Balakrishnan

So, the Maoist who was allegedly holding those three slaves.

Statements of the National Executive Committee, CPE (ML)

First Published: The Marxist-Leninist, (Internal Discussion journal of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist)) Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1974

Statement of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) – August 1st, 1974

At an extraordinary plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist) held on July 17th, the Central Committee decided unanimously to endorse the decision taken by the National Executive Committee of the Party on July 10th to suspend Aravindan Balakrishnan from all posts and from membership of the Party. The Central Committee also took appropriate disciplinary action on members of Aravindan Balakrishnan’s small clique.

Aravindan Balakrishnan and his clique were suspended from the Party because of their pursuance of conspiratorial and splittist activities and because of their spreading social fascist slanders against the Party and the proletarian movement.

The Central Committee regretted that, after 7 years of struggle to unite together in order to strengthen the proletarian revolutionary movement, and especially its proletarian headquarters, Aravindan Balakrishnan had unilaterally and without consultation attempted to destroy all the established unity instead of trying to strengthen it, had set himself up against the proletarian Party and violated all discipline, and had launched an entirely unprovoked and thoroughly unprincipled external attack on the Party.

The Central Committee noted that after several months of internal ideological struggle and disagreement on certain important questions, Aravindan Balakrishnan, suddenly attempted to abort the struggle to clarify differences and forge unity in the Party on the basis of principle and arrogantly and individualistically began to withdraw from his responsibilities to the Party and put himself above discipline, then after several weeks he launched his cowardly attack on the Party as ’fascist’. Through this Aravindan Balakrishnan has done serious harm to the proletariat and the Party.

The Central Committee resolutely opposed Aravindan Balakrishnan’s line of seeking disunity and using ideological differences to divide. This method is not the method of genuine revolutionaries but is used by individualists who refuse to subject themselves to the collective, and refuse to accept the discipline of the Party as the necessary conscious and voluntary discipline in order to serve the proletariat. Not only did Aravindan Balakrishnan seek disunity, but he also tried to conspire to build a clique of people around ’his line’ and establish his centre whilst still claiming to be in the Party, continuously saying one thing to the Party comrades and preaching and practising another to younger comrades and comrades under his ’discipline’.

It is just a classic. Worth reading in full. And reminds me of nothing other than Lenin’s Tomb and the SWP nonsense about factions etc etc.

And I expect various left leaning newspapers to become rather quiet about this story very soon indeed.

Oh, even better, The Guardian is reporting that he might have been one of the inspirations for Citizen Smith…..

36 thoughts on “Aravindan Balakrishnan”

  1. My goodness, what a list of crimes he committed against the party, how did we not hear about it on the BBC at the time?

  2. Story morphing into attack on Lambeth council for not noticing the young girl wasn’t attending school.

    But judging from her letters, she is more literate than most who do attend. So: is an inner city school better at education than a paranoid far left cult? Discuss.

    We’ll get her poetry in due course and can make our judgements on its merits.

    *gets more popcorn*

  3. @magnusw

    You have no idea… At one time Lambeth was the biggest magnet for leftoid groups in the country. In terms of Maoists alone there were three active groups all engaged in slagging the others off for not being pure enough. This lot were the
    loopiest though…

  4. I always thought “splittist” was one of those parody coinages. I didn’t realise people actually used it in all seriousness.

  5. @bloke in France

    “So: is an inner city school better at education than a paranoid far left cult? ”

    Get the fundamentals right first; is an LEA that much different to a paranoid far left cult? If not, maybe we should put the Balakrishnan’s in charge of a few to drive up standards, I bet truancy would plummet.

  6. Magnus
    Seems they were operating a boarding school. Truancy less of a problem in those.

    meanwhile here’s another question. Can you pretend to understand all that leftist jargon and still claim to be a proletarian?

  7. We should put it to a vote; which is your favourite leftist buzzphrase?

    I’ll go for the very first one: “Statements (plural folks!) Of the National Executive Committee – Vol 1, No. 1. ”

    I’m waiting for the follow-up.

  8. I think I got this from a Brookmyre novel, but:
    One Trot faction, sitting in a hall,
    one Trot faction, sitting in a hall;
    And if one Trot faction should have a nasty squall, there’ll be two Trot factions, sitting in a hall

    Two Trot factions…

    repeat and iterate

  9. I agree with Matthew and Rob.
    Splittist….
    We Catholics know the correct term is “schismatic” (ie Orthodox Church, unlike Prods, who are heretics). Maoists can’t get anything right.

  10. “is an LEA that much different to a paranoid far left cult?”

    My school in LB Wandsworth was run by the ILEA, which was probably the nearest to Stalin’s Russia you could find in the south-east. I still remember standing for 20 mins at a counter at County Hall in the 1980s while some scouser on the phone to a pal outlined his upcoming union activities and how he and his Militant mates were going to pack some elections.

    But “splittist” and “social fascist” are strokes of genius.

  11. @Sam

    Sorry – Trots and Maoists hate each other. A favourite Trot slogan at demos:

    The Maoists United, Will Never Be Repeated
    (to the tune of the Workers United, Will Never Be Defeated)

    A bit rich I used to think, given the fraternal atmosphere between Trot factions…

  12. Is the Little Red Book still a bestseller?

    If not how did these guys fund their life? Daily Mail seems uncharacteristically slow to pick up the leftie dole scrounger angle. Maybe they had a trust fund.

  13. BiF
    “So: is an inner city school better at education than a paranoid far left cult? ”

    Cheers mate, I’ve dumped half my morning coffee all over my keyboard while laughing at that one!

  14. Here’s another…

    “…had unilaterally and without consultation attempted to destroy all established unity..”

    Absolutely! To set about destroying establsihed unity without first undertaking a thorough and wide ranging consultation is revisionism in the extreme. I despair, I really do.

  15. i am of the mind that they should all adhere to their socialist doctrine and not squabble about the outcome, that is so reactionary.Give them a sickle and a hammer and make them work for the good of all socialism, Where is their commitment?

  16. Theodore Dalrymple calls it “langue de bois”, not sure if the term is precise for this sort of text, more the tedious speeches of communist officials. Still, all from the same cesspit.

  17. So Much for Subtlety

    Andy – “I told you they would be ethnics.”

    Although in fairness their crazed lunacy seems to have been picked up locally rather than an import.

    How do two illegal immigrants committed to the violent over throw of the British state, as well as several assaults on policemen, manage to stay in this country, and on welfare, for pretty much their entire adult lives?

  18. So Much for Subtlety

    So we previously knew that every Trot sect was a rapist sub-cult, but this does raise the obvious question – is any British Communist Party *not* actually a rapist Cult in disguise?

  19. Rob
    “Langue de bois” = wooden language,

    As in:
    Mistakes were made (but not by me)
    Lessons will be learned (ditto)
    Procedures must be put in place (which we will follow even if they clearly don’t work)
    And so forth.

  20. We shouldn’t let the spectre of amateurist local splittist cults haunt the idea of a glorious revolution, Comrades. Who benefits from such paranoid propagandist social fascist fantasies? Our enemies benefit. The problem, Comrades, is that it happened on too small a scale, and fails because individualism fails, just as voluntaryism never provided for the poor and we needed welfare statism.

    For the good of the proletariat, we need to put such woeful failures behind us, Comrades. The revolution can only happen on a national scale, safe in the hands of professional politicians and useful idiots (like certain retired accountants), who can all rise above splittist individualist tendencies, like choice and reason.

    The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again without any greater commitment each time, but expecting different results. Let’s not commit this fallacy, Comrades. When it fails, instead let’s commit on a greater scale, then try again.

    Right, would this earn me a few quid for a CiF article?

  21. The problem with homegrown Commies was they couldn’t even purge each other properly. The correct technique is that after the comrade to be purged is marched out of the interrogation room the executioner steps out of a side door, places the muzzle of his pistol to the condemned’s head and pulls the trigger. Our lot just wrote nasty pamphlets about each other. The NKVD must have been shaking their heads at the utter shower that were Western Bolsheviks.

  22. Anyhoo, I’m presuming that what’s happened here is that having run out of elderly DJs, the establishment are now moving on to purge the rest of the 1970s.

  23. Ian B:

    …the establishment are now moving on to purge the rest of the 1970s.

    It is time for the wise to denounce themselves and beg for leniency.

    I’ll begin.

    I once marched against Thatcher the milk-snatcher but it was only so that I could get up to Carfax and cash a cheque at the bank. I bitterly regret that I was a lackey of the system… betrayal…proletarian solidarity… pay for the bullet.

    Ah, that feels better.

  24. Alas dear Bison,

    I too protested against St. Margaret of Thatcher in the late 80’s (was it grants or the poll tax? can’t honestly remember). I do however remember protesting outside Leeds Poly’s main campus entrance to the tune of “Maggie Maggie Maggie, out, out, out” and then the more humourous “Cecil Cecil Cecil, in, out, in, out” (a reference to the then current favourite to succeeds extra-marital affair with his secretary).

    All good fun and cheap booze in the Poly bar for afters.

    We were naive, we were idiots. What the fuck did we know about life.

  25. @John Galt,

    What you knew about life up to then was that other people had been paying for it, and you wanted that to continue. This makes it hard to fault student politics as a simple example of naked self-interest, which ultimately explains most peoples’ politics.

  26. I helped organise a march to save West Midlands College of Education (or some such teacher training establishment in Walsall).

    A friend and I took placards “Free the Weed” and “Legalise It”.

    I got some rougher students from our college (Wolves fans – if know about Black Country folk you’ll understand the significance) to come on the coach to the march.

    One large ruffian got drunk and was sick on the coach, then he and another got arrested for racist chanting (at the distinctly anti-Maggie march), one of them then thumped someone.

    Only the big drunken fellow ( of the rougher types) returned to the coach for the return journey, and he then smashed out the back window, fortunately it was not far from Walsall to Dudley, as it was cold without the back window.

    That is a faithfully as I can remember it. Not eveyone on an anti-Maggie march is necessarily a maggie hater, never underestimate a teenage fifth columnist (and his placard bearing mate).

  27. Uh oh, plod has gone off-message…

    “Detectives stressed the unique nature of the case and warned about jumping to conclusions that the case amounted to “modern-day slavery”.”

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