Yvan Craipeau

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Yvan Craipeau (24 September 1911 - 13 December 2001) was a French Trotskyist activist.

Born in Roche-sur-Yon, he helped found a local independent Marxist organisation while still in his teens. Expelled from school, he moved to Paris and joined the Trotskyist group around La Verité. The following year, he became a founder member of the Communist League and the first member of its executive committee with responsibility for developing a youth wing. By 1933, he was able to organise a meeting attended by one thousand members of the youth wings of the Communist Party of France and the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière. During 1935, he was Trotsky's personal secretary.

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.

During World War II, he was pronounced unfit for duty, and attempted, with Marcel Hic, to publish La Verité secretly. This was difficult, and following a series of setbacks, he turned instead to work influencing the German Army.

In 1944, Craipeau joined the newly formed 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.

Craipeau temporarily withdrew from politics, and in 1951, he moved to Basse-Terre in Guadalupe, where he became a school teacher and soon secretary of the National Education Federation trade union.

In 1954, Craipeau returned to mainland France, where he participated in the creation of the New Left. This fused with the Movement for the Liberation of the City to form the Socialist Left Union and, in 1960 with several groups to form the Unified Socialist Party. He remained a leading member of this party for many years, during which he wrote numerous books on left-wing politics and revolution.