Michel Pablo

Michel Pablo (August 24, 1911 - February 17 1996 ) was the pseudonym of Michel N. Raptis, a Greek Trotskyist leader. He began a lifetime involvement with revolutionary politics in the late 1930s in Greece.

Illness found Raptis in France when the Second World War began. The same ill health meant that until 1944 he played little part in the activities of the French Trotskyists although he was reported to have given educational classes to David Korner's Union Communiste. By 1944 he was fully involved with the movement', and was elected to the newly formed leadership of the European Trotskyists who had re-established contact with each other.

After the war, Raptis became the central leader of the Fourth International with the support of the SWP of America and James P. Cannon himself. They jointly sponsored a faction within the British movement that opposed the leadership of Jock Haston in the RCP, contributing to the collapse of the RCP as an independent force.

Raptis and Ernest Mandel were instrumental in these years in winning the Fourth International to a position that asserted that the Eastern European states conquered by the Soviet Armed Forces in 1944-45 had become what they described as deformed workers' states and for the expulsion of comrades who disagreed with this thesis from the FI. It was believed at the time that the international "centre" should be able to impose democratic centralist discipline by directing intervening in the politics of local parties.

In the uncertain aftermath of the second world war, when the Trotskyists were numerically dwarfed by the mass Communist Parties and their hopes for a revolutionary breakthrough were dashed, Raptis also plotted a new tactic for the FI from about 1951 onwards. He argued that a Third World War, which was believed by many people to be imminent, would be characterised by revolutionary outbreaks during the actual war. Splits of revolutionary dissenters were likely to develop in the Communist Parties. To gain influence, win members and avoid becoming small sectarian cliques just talking to each other, the Trotskyists should - where possible - join, or in Trotskyist terminology enter, the mass Communist or Social Democratic (Labour) parties. This was known as entrism sui generis or long-term entry. It was understood however that each section of the FI would retain its political identity, and its own press.

In 1953 the American, British and part of the French Trotskyists declared themselves in opposition to this course of action, and left the FI to form the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The subsequent hostility of the ICFI to what became known as "Pabloism" became legendary. Raptis was demonised, and made into the exemplar for everything that had gone wrong in the Trotskyist movement. This was analogous to Nikita Khruschev's denunciation of the Stalinist cult of personality in the Soviet Union. Decades later, small Trotskyist sects were still writing "anti-Pabloist" tracts. The deeper problems of the Trotskyist stance however remained undiscussed.

Raptis himself continued with the European International Secretariat of the Fourth International, operating from Amsterdam and Paris. In reality, though, the entryist tactic he proposed could not be implemented in many countries and succeeded only to some extent in countries where a large social-democratic party could be 'entered'.

None of the various Trotskyist splinter groups gained large numbers of new members in the cold war years, whether 'independent party-builders' or 'entryists'. After the invasion of Hungary in 1956, many intellectuals split from the Communist Parties, and there was further political fragmentation resulting from the Sino-Soviet split, but the Trotskyists gained almost no new adherents from them.

As the 1950s became the 1960s, Raptis was convinced that the best revolutionary prospects were now in what was to become known as the Third World of Africa, Latin America and Asia. He also wrote a prophetic essay anticipating the women's liberation movement. He was personally closely involved in supporting the Algerian national liberation struggle against France, which led to a period of imprisonment in Holland in connection with counterfeit money and gun-smuggling activities.

A campaign for his release was led by Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1961 Raptis was freed from jail, and he moved to Morocco. After the victory of the revolution, he became a minister in the Algerian FLN government.

By 1963, inspired by common positions towards the Cuban revolution, the ICFI forces around the SWP of the USA were moving back towards unity with the ISFI. Pablo was regarded as a barrier to that unification. The reunification that was achieved in 1963 and formed the United Secretariat of the Fourth International rapidly led them to oust Pablo and his African Bureau in 1964.

Pablo continued with his revolutionary politics, and organised the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency and the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency based in France. These were never serious competitors to the larger Trotskyist groups. Raptis's influence at this time then was mainly through his writings. At the beginning of the 1970s, he was politically active in Chile, under Allende's socialist government.

The central theme of Raptis's thought in the later 1960s and 1970s was that of autogestion or "workers' self-management" (Arbeiter-selbstverwaltung). Possibly, this reaffirmation of the principle of the self-emancipation of the working class was in reaction to his earlier politically pessimistic outlook, according to which bureaucratically-deformed communism would be a long-lasting phenomenon.

In the 1980s, however Raptis receded into political obscurity. Unusually for a revolutionary, his funeral was a state event in his native Greece. This is explained by his personal friendship from the 1930s with Andreas Papandreou who had been a Trotskyist in his youth. Raptis's motto was: "The meaning of life is life itself, to live as much as you can".

References

• Michel Raptis, Socialism, Democracy & Self-Management.
• Michel Raptis, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Chile.
• Michel Raptis, Étude pour une politique agraire en Algerie.
• Pierre Frank, The Fourth International: The Long March of the Trotskyists.
• Francois Moreau, Combats et debats de la Quatrieme Internationale.
• Klaus Leggewie, Koffertrager. Das Algerienprojekt der Deutsche Linken in Adenauer Deutschland.
• Lena Hoff, Resistance in Exile. A study of the political correspondence between Nicolas Callas and Michel Raptis 1967-72
• Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement.

External link

• Marxist Internet Archive on Pablo (http://www.marxists.org/archive/pablo/index.htm)de:Michel Pablo