David Korner

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David Korner, also known as Barta, was a Romanian Jewish Trotskyist militant. Recruited to Trotskyism as a student in Paris in the 1930s he formed the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Romania. When the Spanish Civil War and the June 1936 strikes took place, he returned to France and was a member of the Internationalist Workers Party (POI).

In line with Trotsky's advice to his French followers to enter the PSOP Workers and Peasants Socialist Party he joined that party which collapsed at the start of World War II. At which point he formed the tiny Trotskyist Group in opposition to what he considered the petty bourgeois methods of organisation of the other French Trotskyist groups. This group became the Communist Union. The group concentrated on factory work but also maintained the regular production of its political publications and took part in anti-colonialist work. The factory work came to fruition with the Renault strike of 1947 which his group helped lead and organise.

However the strains of that activity caused the group to collapse. It was briefly revived in 1950 but nothing came of it and when some former militants of the UC began publishing Voix Ouvrière in 1956 Barta was not involved although as late as 1964 Bois, a leader of Voix Ouvriere, was still writing to him to request his involvement. Despite which there were hostile relations between Barta and the leadership of the Voix Ouvrière (now Lutte Ouvrière) group until his death. In part because Barta believed that VO had wrongly appropriated his work and was philistine in its methods.