Michel Pablo

Michel Pablo (Μισέλ Πάμπλο; 24 August 1911, Alexandria, Egypt – 17 February 1996, Athens) was the pseudonym of Michalis N. Raptis (Μιχάλης Ν. Ράπτης), a Trotskyist leader of Greek origin.

Pablo joined the Trotskyist faction of the Group "Archeion marxismou" in 1928, and subsequently followed that faction when it split in 1929.

He continued to be deeply involved in the factional struggles, splits and re-unifications of the Greek followers of Leon Trotsky until in 1934, this group joined forces with another Trotskyist group, led by Pandelis Pouliopoulos, resulting in the foundation of the Organisation of International Communists of Greece (OKDE).

During the 1936 military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, Pablo was arrested and exiled in the Aegean island of Folegandros.

There he was not admitted by the orthodox communists, also in exile, so he joined the company of cattle and horse thieves, who at that time were punished with exile.

In Folegandros he met his future wife Elli Dyovounioti.

Together they escaped from the island and later from Greece.

At the end of 1937, they went to Switzerland and finally to Paris, France, where Pablo represented the Greek Trotskyists at the founding conference of the Fourth International, which was held just outside of Paris in 1938.

When Nazi-Germany occupied France in 1940, Pablo stayed in Paris where he organized illegal propaganda and was involved in the re-construction and re-unification of the French Trotskyist movement, which was operating underground into the Provisional European Secretariat of the Fourth International.

By 1944 he was fully involved with the movement, and was elected the organizational secretary of its European Bureau, which had re-established contact between the Trotskyist parties.

After the war, Pablo became the central leader of the Fourth International (FI) with the support of the SWP of the United States and James P. Cannon.

Pablo played a key role in re-unifying, re-centralising and re-orienting the International.

Pablo 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 by 1948 become what they described as deformed workers' states.

In 1946 Pablo visited Greece to successfully reunify the four separate Trotskyist parties.

In the uncertain aftermath of World War II, when the Trotskyists were numerically dwarfed by the mass communist parties and their hopes for a revolutionary breakthrough were dashed, Pablo also advanced a new tactic for the FI from its third world-congress in 1951 onward.

He argued that a Third World War, which was believed by many people to be imminent.

In his document "Where are we going", Pablo writes "such a war would take on, from the very beginning the character of an international civil war, especially in Europe and in Asia. These continents would rapidly pass over under the control of the Soviet bureaucracy, of the Communist Parties, or of the revolutionary masses".

Splits of revolutionary dissenters were likely to develop in the traditional mass parties of the working class.

To gain influence, win members, establish a Marxist wing and most importantly to avoid becoming isolated sectarian circles with no connection to the working class, the Trotskyists should—where possible—join, or in Trotskyist terminology enter, the mass communist or social democratic (Labour) parties.

This form of Entryism was intended to be a long-term tactic.

It was understood by all that the FI would retain its political identity, and its own press.

Entry was seldom carried out without splits or even violent conflict within the local propaganda circles, but proved to greatly add to local groups' flexibility where it was put into practice.

Independent work should continue in Latin America, Ceylon, the United States, India.

The innovative part of Pablo's proposed "Entryism sui generis", which was accepted by the Tenth Plenum of the Third World-Congress of the Fourth International was in the approach to the Stalinist parties wherever they were majority working-class party.

Due to the extremely bureaucratic leadership of the Stalinist parties, Trotskyists would be prevented from proceeding in the same way as they would with reformist mass-parties, and had to maintain separate independent work, which "must be understood as having its chief aim to assist the work of entry".

Pablo was speculating on a split between the Stalinist regimes in China and the USSR as early as 1951.

Pablo writes: "the rise of Communist Parties to power is not the consequence of a capacity of Stalinism to struggle for the Revolution, does not alter the internationally counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism, but it is the product of an exceptional combination of circumstances which has imposed the seizure of power either upon the Soviet bureaucracy (in the case of the European buffer zone) or upon certain Communist Parties (Yugoslavia, China)".

These changes in policy were adopted by the Fourth International in the early months of 1952.

Under the weight of the controversy that was caused by the resolutions adopted at the Third World-Congress of the Fourth International, factions in the US-SWP as well as the British section of the FI started to build a faction within the International, which broke away in 1953, constituting the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

The Fourth World-Congress of the Fourth International was entitled "Rise and Decline of Stalinism".

Inspired by the Cuban Revolution as well as the Tito–Stalin split demonstrating that the Stalinist Communist Parties may not unalterably subordinate to Stalin, Pablo also started to argue that even the Stalinist parties who were in power in various countries at the time could be pushed into taking leadership in revolutionary conflicts by the mass activity of the working class, which caused further controversy and division within the ranks of the FI.

The Fifth World-Congress in 1957 recognized for the first time that a major world depression was not likely in the near future.

The central document emphasized the basic role of workers' democracy, not only as political factor, but also as indispensable for economic development.

The second document was on "Colonial Revolution since the End of the Second World War", focusing on conflicts between French imperialism and the Vietminh, the Algerian war, and the Suez crisis which led to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.

The document argued that since the world revolution had first been successful in the east, instead of—how it was expected by Marxist theoreticians—in the Western countries.

Colonial revolution, which could only be victorious as permanent revolution, thus was an integral part of the world revolution, and constituted a link between October and the triumph of the world revolution.

The document contained a detailed study of the colonial movements, examined the respective roles of proletariat and peasantry in the colonial countries and emphasised the importance of guerrilla warfare in colonial countries, not only as military factor but as a factor in the organisation and political education of the masses.

The congress insisted on the necessity for the Trotskyist movement, especially in the imperialist countries to devote a large part of its activity to aiding colonial revolution.

Pablo was personally engaged in supporting the Algerian national liberation struggle against France.

In 1959 he set up and operated a secret munitions factory, hidden within a citrus plantation in the Moroccan city of Kentire, where they manufactured a lightweight version of the Sten submachinegun while also overseeing a workshop on the Dutch-German border that produced counterfeit passports and cash to support the FLN.