Internationalist Communist Organisation
국제주의공산주의조직
A French Trotskyist party led by Pierre Lambert: the name taken in 1967 by the PCI of the majority expelled from the Internationalist Communist Party in 1952. It grew rapidly after May 1968, reaching up to 8,000 members in the 1970s, with strong bases in Force Ouvrière, the National Education Federation and the national student union. It left the International Committee of the Fourth International in 1971 and renamed itself the Internationalist Communist Party again in 1981.
In depth
In 1952 Michel Raptis (Pablo), head of the Fourth International's International Secretariat, called for entry into the Stalinist parties; the majority of the French section around Lambert and Marcel Bleibtreu refused and was expelled. This "Lambert group" took part in founding the International Committee of the Fourth International on 23 November 1953.
Dissolved by presidential decree on 12 June 1968 together with other far-left groups, it worked for a time as the Trotskyist Organisation until the Council of State annulled the dissolution in July 1970. In 1970 it held a 10,000-strong youth rally. In 1971, after a theoretical dispute with the British Socialist Labour League, it left the International Committee and set up the Organising Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International. In 1972 it expelled the group of the Hungarian Balázs Nagy (Varga), and about a hundred members who objected founded the Revolutionary Workers League. The future prime minister Lionel Jospin was active in it from 1960 for more than ten years.