Andrew Coates on Pabloism
The well- dressed revolutionary: The Odyssey of Michel Pablo in the age of uprisings by Hall Greenland published by Resistance Books.
“Michel Pablo was a 20th century revolutionary whose life and ideas remain relevant and inspirational in the 21st.” begins the first page in this, the first serious biography of Michalis Raptis, known as Pablo. His burial in Athens in 1996, whilst “not exactly a state funeral” was paid for by the Greek Socialist (PASOK) government, and attended by half the Greek Cabinet. Ambassadors from Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Serbia and Cuba came.
Michel Pablo (1911-1996) remains known on the left, not just in Greece and also in France where he lived for many years. His name has recently appeared in relation to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who was some decades ago a member of a group, Socialist Alternatives, aligned with the “Pabloite” International, the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency, and the various incarnations of the Association Marxiste Révolutionnaire Internationale, (AMRI). This group was present in the late 80s Socialist Society (a forerunner of the journal Red Pepper) where they vigorously promoted the ideas of “alternative” and red-green politics, not always to everybody’s appreciation.
Michel Raptis joined the Trotskyist faction of the Group “Archeion marxismou” in 1928, and subsequently followed that faction when it split in 1929. He was the representative of Greece at the 1938 founding conference of Trotskyist Fourth International. His involvement in this body meant, after escape from exile in Greece and exile in Paris, clandestine activity in France under the German occupation. Now, operating with the pseudonym Pablo, he attempted to unify the French Trotskyists.
Unity briefly happened after the Liberation with the Parti Communiste Internationaliste-Section Française de la Quatrième Internationale (PCI-SFQI). Disputes in the international itself, over the rise and consolidation of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the role of mass Communist Parties, including proposals to try the tactic of “deep entryism”, arose. Pablo believed in a global war revolution prognoses. The FI split in 1955 as the boss of the American party, James P Cannon, wanted to annihilate Pabloism politically and organisationally
Of interest to a wide readership are excellent chapters on Pablo’s commitment to the FLN in the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 to 1962. He offered unconditional practical aid. This included setting up an arms factory in Morocco. Their activities led to his and Sal Santen’s trial and imprisonment in Amsterdam for helping the Algerian revolution. The gaol sentence, for 15 months, was on the lenient side and perhaps reflected the international campaign on their behalf.
Practically supporting the anti-colonial revolution marked Pablo out. After the victory of the Algerian revolution in 1962, he became an adviser on economic reconstruction in the Government of Ahmed Ben-Bella, with attempts to introduce socialisation and a degree of self-management in the economy.
By the mid-1960s Pablo moved outside the orbit of the Fourth International (FI). Pierre Frank had “attacked Pablo and his supporters as “rightists” and virtually uncritical allies of Khrushchev and Tito”. The leadership ruled that the Pabloists had placed themselves beyond the FI.
There was a limited truth in some of the claims about Tito. Pablo and his current long backed self-management, Autogestion. It is said that this came reinforced from the post-break with Stalin in Yugoslavia and experiments there. But as Greenland makes clear, he was, in contrast to the sometimes autocratic ruler, always a supporter of enhanced and revolutionary democracy. “Socialisation of management and government went hand in hand with socialisation of ownership of large-scale industry, essential services and what used to be called the commanding heights of the economy.” Equally he was a supporter of feminism, writing on this back in 1961, long before 1968 popularised women’s liberation on the radical left. His partner Elly played a role in this.
The backing for workers’ control continued, and included time as an adviser to Salvador Allende before the coup in Chile in 1973 put an end to these hopes, and was reinforced by his group’s time in the 1970s in the French Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) which made the idea a cornerstone of their politics, for the economy and more widely. Yet during this period the prospect of self-management seemed to decline, as union federations like the CFDT dropped it. As one of its theorists, André Gorzobserved in the period, not just the “reorganisation of work” and the growth of individualism, but the existence of a layer of trade union and workplace activists supporting it had shrunk.
Pablo himself moved back towards the Fourth International, though he was not re-admitted to full membership. Yet, he was not without friends, comrades and influence at the end of his life, but he was without any organisation. Doing justice to Pablo’s broad and revolutionary vision that had led away from identification with narrow Trotskyism to a wider Marxism, drawing on figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, a man of action and of writing, Hall Greenland has written an exceptional biography of the man.