Wolfgang Weber, an outstanding fighter for Trotskyism and a longtime leading member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP), died on November 16, 2024. We are publishing here a message of condolence by the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the US, Joseph Kishore.
Dear Comrades of the SGP,
On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, I send my deepest condolences on the death of Comrade Wolfgang Weber. In his more than 50 years as a member of the Trotskyist movement, Comrade Wolfgang made invaluable contributions to the struggle for socialism, the education of workers and youth, and the liberation of mankind from imperialist war and capitalist oppression.
When Wolfgang had the opportunity to travel to the United States, his contributions at summer schools and Congresses were always immensely valuable and insightful. In conversation, Wolfgang always brought to bear an enormous historical knowledge, particularly, though not exclusively, of the Trotskyist movement.
Comrade Wolfgang’s essays on Solidarity in Poland remain critical reading to this day for an understanding of the crisis of Stalinism, the role of the Pabloites and the treachery of the WRP renegades. More recently, he played a very important role in the struggle against what Comrade North referred to as the “preemptive strike against the reemergence of Trotskyist influence,” helping to irreversibly discredit Robert Services’ hackwork posing as a biography.
In the concluding section of his book on Solidarity, Comrade Wolfgang cited Trotsky, in 1935, addressing the central strategic issue confronting the movement then and today—the question of revolutionary leadership.
Trotsky wrote:
The crisis of proletarian leadership cannot, of course, be overcome by means of an abstract formula.
It is a question of an extremely prolonged process. Not of a purely “historical” process, that is, of the objective premises of conscious activity, but of an uninterrupted chain of ideological, political, and organizational measures for the purpose of fusing together the best, most conscious elements of the world proletariat beneath a spotless banner, elements whose number and self-confidence must be constantly strengthened, whose connections with wider sections of the proletariat must be developed and deepened—in a word, of restoring to the proletariat, under new and highly difficult and onerous conditions, its historical leadership.
To the very end of his life and in the face of a prolonged battle with cancer, Comrade Wolfgang dedicated himself to the fight for this “uninterrupted chain of ideological, political and organizational measures,” embodied in the struggle of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Amidst the turn of the ruling elites to world war, fascism, genocide and all manner of barbarism, our movement is imbued with a confidence that Comrade Wolfgang possessed, that the Trotskyist movement, based on its history and its “spotless banner,” will come to the leadership of a resurgent movement of the international working class for socialism. We must, in honoring Comrade Wolfgang’s life, dedicate ourselves with redoubled force to realizing this perspective in practice.
Fraternally,
Joseph Kishore