Livio Maitan

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Livio Maitan (born April 1, 1923 in Venice , † September 16, 2004 in Rome ) was an Italian Trotskyist . He served in the leadership of the Fourth International for 53 years and was one of the most prominent representatives of the United Secretariat.

Life

youth

Livio Maitan was born in Venice on April 1, 1923 and grew up in fascist Italy. He studied classical literature at the University of Padua and joined the socialist resistance in the last years of the war. The occupiers forced him to emigrate to Switzerland, where he experienced the end of the war in an internment camp. After the end of the war he got involved in the youth organization of the socialist party PSIUP .

Fourth international

At a congress of the socialists in Paris in 1947, he met Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) and joined the Fourth International (Trotskyists). Its Italian section was then part of the PSIUP within the framework of the strategy of entryism (Trotskyists should join existing left parties and exert influence there instead of founding separate parties). He later moved to the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI). In 1948 Maitan was a member of the leadership of the Popular Democratic Front from PCI and PSI .

In 1951 Maitan was elected a member of the leadership of the Fourth International in order to spread the teachings of Leon Trotsky with his companions Michel Pablo (1911-1996), Ernest Mandel and Pierre Frank (1906-19984) . When Maitan was elected to the executive staff, the views of Trotsky, the movement's founder, who died in 1940, were first challenged. Maitan sided with his three friends, who believed that the socialist revolution would take the form of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Their positions were rejected and the movement joined the Stalinist parties. He published numerous books, including those on Antonio Gramsci , Leon Trotsky, the Italian Communist Party , the Chinese Revolution and the end of the Soviet Union, but few were published in languages ​​other than Italian.

Maitan shaped the appearance of the national section of the Fourth International in Italy for over half a century. This appeared from 1949 under the name Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari (GCR). In 1968/69 the Trotskyists broke away from the PCI and exerted significant influence on the extra-parliamentary New Left and student movement . The Democrazia Proletaria , with which Maitan and his Trotskyist group formed an "electoral cartel" in 1976, which received 1.5% of the vote in the national parliamentary elections, formed from this current . The GCR renamed itself in 1979 to Lega comunista rivoluzionaria IV Internazionale (LCR). This joined the Democrazia Proletaria in 1989 and the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista in 1991 , but without giving up its autonomous organization.

Maitan wrote the book "Per una storia della Quarta Internazionale" (ed. Alegre, Roma, 2006), a history of the Fourth International.

Last years

It was said of him that despite all seriousness, he always had a sense of humor. His greatest passion was football and at the age of seventy he was still playing on an amateur Paris team made up of activists from the French section of the Fourth International. After his health had been in poor health for a long time and could only keep himself up to date on current movements and changes by telephone, he died on September 16, 2004 in Rome, where he was buried on September 19 with a large crowd of his supporters.

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