Mihalis Raptis (Pablo)
1911-1996
MIHALIS RAPTIS BECAME INVOLVED IN THE struggles of the Greek workers' movement at a young age. From the early thirties on he played a key role in the construction of anticapitalist and anti-Stalinist organisations, in collaboration with Pantelis Piliopoulos, that lucid and courageous revolutionary Marxist leader, shot by the Italian fascists in 1943.
Raptis found himself in his country's prisons on several occasions, and was obliged to spend a large part of his life in exile, mainly in France. It was in France, in September 1938, using the pseudonym Speros, that he participated in the founding conference of the Fourth International. He stayed in France during the Nazi occupation, dedicating himself to an extremely dangerous underground struggle to reorganise the Trotskyist movement in Europe, after it had been ravaged by repression. It was in these war years that he began to play a major role in the International. A role that would be his for another two decades.
From 1948-1960, as a member of the International Secretariat, I had the chance to become familiar with the activities and development of 'Michel Pablo.' In our fraternal relations, I came to appreciate all his qualities. Each of us has a number of friends and comrades who have contributed to our development, to the key choices we make in our lives. For me, looking back after 30 years, I can only conclude that I learned a lot from Michel Raptis. I consider that his qualities were best in evidence in the 1950s. Particularly his capacity to understand quickly the essence of a changing situation. To know when we should re-direct our aim, and when we should redirect our strategy. And to put into practice, without hesitation, the result of new analysis and new generalisations.
For example, Michel was certainly one of the first to stress the full importance of the rupture between Stalin and the Yugoslav leader Tito. One of the first to adapt when the Korean war started, rejecting any 'equidistance' between the two parties. One of the first to help revolutionary Marxists understand the importance of the populist movements in by Livio Maitan Latin America, such as Peronism in Argentina.
It was Raptis who stressed, after 195152, the need for revolutionary militants, particularly in capitalist Europe, to avoid any 'propagandist' deviation. He argued for an entryist orientation towards the Communist Parties, which were profoundly Stalinist at that time. In other words, he argued for such policies as would permit us to avoid separating ourselves from the actually existing workers' movement, and make it possible to seize and exploit, from inside, and contradictions which began to
And it was Michel's contribution which enabled the Fourth International to rapidly sketch an analysis of changes in the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin (see his editorial in the April 1953 issue of Quatrième Internationale.)
It was Michel's articles and reports, in the later 1950s, which most clearly stressed the capital importance of the new rise in the colonial revolution. Even at the price, in my opinion, of underestimating the potential of the workers' movement in some European countries.
Michel's best writing also dates from this period. Take his numerous articles in the press of the International, above all those, (sometimes signed Jean-
Paul Martin). Or his contribution to the history of the first 20 years of the Fourth International. Or his reports to our World Congresses sessions of the and the
International
Executive
Committee. And his books, such as the 1980 collection of essays published in English by Allison and Busby as Socialism,
Democracy and Self-management
We should not forget either his
May 1960 text on women's liberation. Many readers may judge now, more than a quarter century of reflections and feminist initiatives later, that this work is partly obsolete, and criticisable in a number of respects. But it had the merit of being the first text to bring a series of crucial problems to the attention of revolutionary
Marxists.
Michel was directly involved, from the beginning, in a multi-faceted solidarity with the Algerian revolution. He was arrested in June 1960 in Amsterdam, together with another International
Secretariat member, Sal Santen, and accused of having prepared false papers and forged banknotes. A wide solidarity movement developed around the world during his detention, and during his trial in
1961. The appeal launched by Jean-Paul
Sartre and signed, among others, by Simone
Beauvoir and the Brazilian writer Jorge
Amado was a central part of this campaign.
Michel was finally sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, and liberated at the end of his trial. He took refuge in Morocco.
After the victory of the revolution he moved
Livio Maitan is a leading member of the Fourth international, and of the left wing within the Italian Party of Communist
Refoundation
International Viewpoint n° 275 27
* Mihalis Raptis "Pablo", 1911-1996 to Algers, where he collaborated with
Ahmed Ben Bella's government.
He rejoined the leading bodies of the
International after his release from prison. His report on the Algerian revolution was one of the most moving moments of the 1963 world congress.
But nevertheless, something was broken
Memories of Mihalis between us. Michel began a minority struggle, which led to a rupture in 1964-5. Following this split, he led a revolutionary Marxist current outside the Fourth
A few years ago, he wanted to rejoin the International, the historical importance of which he had never disputed, along with his current. We came to an agreement but, for various reasons, revolutionary Marxist movement in
Greece, and important differences of opinion on the approach one should take to the war in former Yugoslavia, the agreement was not applied in his personal case.
It is for historians of the international workers' movement to judge Michel Raptis' activities and publications, alongside all the others who have participated in our common purpose. Me, I will never forget his tireless contribution to the revolutionary struggle. *
Mihalis Raptis, better known as Michel Pablo, died suddenly and peacefully while sipping a cup of coffee with friends at a streetside cate in Athens. He was buried at the expense of the Greek Republic. Tassos Anastassiadis explores the contrast between Pablo's quiet death, and his turbulent life in a turbulent century. Raptis said recently that he felt that the end was close. But, he told me, "the long voyage has been worth it." His intellectual and militant stature, and his strong character, made him an imposing man. A man who never ceased struggling for the emancipation of all the oppressed, and against all forms of injustice. He was a major figure in our international movement: he made a decisive contribution above all in the dark years of the Nazi occupation of Europe, and in the immediate post-war period. Flowers and messages from movements, parties and individuals all over the world accumulated at his funeral in Athens. A testimony to the stature of this sincere revolutionary, cosmopolitan humanist, man of action and analyst. Pablo's had no real special relationship with his country of origin. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1991. Like the poet Kavafis, who, praised the search for the thacca which would give sense to a man's life. Raptis dedicated his life to concentrating the universal on world-wide Mihalis Raptis joined the workers' movement while studying engineering at the Athens Polytechnic School. After a period with the anarcho-Marxists, he gravitated towards the Trotskyists. Greece was in political, economic and social turmoil. The millions of Greekspeaking refugees from Asia Minor (Western Turkey) were becoming the raw material of a transformation of the workers' movement. Raptis left the country to represent the Greek section at the Founding Congress of the Fourth International. Greece tell into dictatorship. Raptis was unable to return. During this period, particularly during the imperialist war which soon broke out, he threw all his efforts into the International's solidarity
Arab, Latin American, East European and European countries. He became Secretary of the 28 International Viewpoint March 1996
Fourth International, a post he would hold for twenty years. He retumed to Greece secretly in 1946, in the middle of the civil war. for the Congress of re-unification of the Greek section of the International. He next saw Athens in the 1960s, when he returned for a few days just before the Dictatorship of the Colonels was installed. He only returned more-or-less definitively to Athens in the 1970s, after the Colonels fell. He had maintained contacts with Greek comrades, and tried to contribute to the struggle of the Greek people, dictatorship. During this period he established a relationship with each of the "resistance" movements, including the PAK, which was to become the PanHellenic Socialist Party, (PASOK), Greece in the 1970s was no 'sublime Ithacca' for the man who had spent forty years in exile. The country was well engaged in a long period of capitalist reorganisation. And Raptis returned during the 20 year long wave of depression. The Greece of his youth, with its misery, its humanity and its youthful workers' movemen, was gone forever. He never forgive this 'modern barbarism'. I remember seeing him infuriated by diverse aspects of the degradation of political and social life, which accompanied each step of Greece's capitalist, liberal modernisation. And I suspect that his unhappiness with the nakedness of the concealed agressivity of this mythical Ithacca was, at least partly the reason behind the divergences which separated us in recent years. Well aware of our differences, we nevertheless began working together in the 1980s, long before he indicated his desire for a rapprochement with the International he had taken his distance from in the 1960s. But, just as he decided to rejoin the international, we were confronted with the most burning question of our Balkan Ithacca: Greek nationalism. This was the source of the other, important but, especially in Greece, rather accessory disputes, such as our evaluation of the war in Bosnia, Turkey's role in the region, and so on. These differences of analysis made the regroupment project more and more complicated, and finally resulted in the rupture of our common effort to build a new left in Greece: socialist, revolutionary, feminist and ecologist. The great analyst sensed the coming danger, but was unable to protect himself completely in the climate of nationalist hysteria orchestrated by the most reactionary circles, who dreamed of an "orthodox" axis against the supposedly "eternal" enemies: Islamic fundamentalists and Papists. Any ambiguity could have dangerous repercussions. Ithacca took its revenge on our cosmopolitan humanist and revolutionary. They transformed him, posthumously, into a "national" hero. His funeral had a painful (for us) but very real duality: a bunch of ministers and ambassadors, and a bunch of Trotskyists, anarchists and others. Not the first time in history that a great man has been the victim of such a media and political operation. The easiest and surest way to neutralise a man like Raptis. But for us, no message of [Bosnian Serb] General Mladic or any of the Greek hypocrites stops us from paying cur own homage to our Pablo. To the Pablo who fought, from his youth until the day of his death, against oppression. Including, or particularly the various forms of national oppression. His commitment to the Algerian cause is ample testimony. We will preserve our best memories of this gentle revolutionary, this active theoretician, and this researcher in social emancipation. *