Yvan Craipeau

Personal

Vocation

French Trotskyist activist. In 1936, Craipeau became a leading member of the new Internationalist Workers Party (POI). The following year, in reaction to Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, he began a re-analysis of the nature of the Soviet Union. He concluded that it could not be defended, as Trotsky held, as a degenerated workers' state, but that it was a bureaucratic collectivist system - an idea he introduced to Trotskyism. In 1944, Craipeau was the architect of unity between three of France's four Trotskyist groups: the POI itself,the Comités Communistes Internationalistes and the Octobre group. They formed the PCI Internationalist Communist Party, and in 1946, he was elected its General Secretary. In the same year, he was also elevated to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. However, he could not agree with the International's perspective that a crisis in capitalism was imminent, and soon after the POI sided with the International, he was expelled. He died on 13 December 2001. Link to Wikipedia biography