Michel Pablo - Outside The Fourth International

Outside The Fourth International

Pablo's influence through this period then was mainly through his writings. The central theme of Pablo's thought in the later 1960s and 1970s was that of autogestion or "workers' self-management" (Arbeiter-selbstverwaltung). At the beginning of the 1970s, he was politically active in Chile, under Allende's government. After the fall of the Junta, he returned to Greece and, from 1981, served as Special Advisor to Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou; Greek TV also made a documentary about his life. Pablo continued with his revolutionary politics, and organized the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency and the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency based in France. These were not however serious competitors to the larger Trotskyist groups. The sections of the IRMT rejoined the reunified Fourth International in 1994 and 1995, although the agreement was not applied in Pablo's individual case.

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. Pablo's motto was: "The meaning of life is life itself, to live as much as you can."