M.N. (Pablo) Raptis

Michalis N. Raptis (1911–1996) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and studied engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. From a young age, he had been actively involved in the left-wing movement. He was noted for his distance from the regimes of so-called real socialism and, during the Second World War, he became secretary of the Fourth International in Paris. Described as an internationalist revolutionary, he travelled to many countries where he took part in liberation movements and served as an adviser and collaborator to leading figures such as Ben Bella in Algeria, Makarios and Allende in Chile. His prolific body of work is closely linked to his political activism and is characterised by a critical and creative approach to Marxism, by his steadfast commitment to humanist principles, and by his vision of a socialism based on direct democracy and ‘generalised social self-management’, of which he was the principal theorist. He died in Athens on 20 February 1996, aged 85.