On January 19, the Socialist Equality Party held an international meeting in memory of Wolfgang Weber, who died on November 16 after a serious illness. Wolfgang Weber was an outstanding fighter for Trotskyism and longtime Central Committee member of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) (Socialist Equality Party, Germany). Following the speeches by Ulrich Rippert and Christoph Vandreier, we are publishing further contributions from the event here. Further obituaries, as well as important books and articles by Wolfgang Weber, can be found on this page.

Chris Marsden (Socialist Equality Party, Britain)

Comrade Wolfgang was an extraordinary man.

There was nothing showy or boastful about him. He dressed modestly, spoke softly, listened to what you said. But when he did speak he did so with an authority that reflected a lifetime of study and political work. And he was driven to study, to discuss, to speak by profoundly held political convictions.

I cannot speak as someone who was personally close to Wolfgang, and their experience will not be mine. But I don’t recall many discussions that were small talk, or polite inquiry. Wolfgang wanted to speak about politics and history, contemporary developments, especially with comrades from overseas. He wanted to know your take on things, not just to tell you his own. And he asked the questions that mattered, which made you think hard and strive for precision, context, to explore contradictions. He made you reach for the high standards that he set for himself.

Likewise, with his interventions in political meetings and party schools. His contributions were carefully prepared, thoughtful, above all, historically rooted. He wanted to elevate the discussion to focus on essentials.

And he could do so because he had done the necessary work, possessing an extraordinary intellect but also one shaped by intense political struggle.

In the aftermath of the split, as members of the British section began a now decades-long political collaboration with our German comrades, Wolfgang played a significant part in our re-education and familiarisation in the historic conquests of the Trotskyist movement.

And that is the essential, defining characteristic of Comrade Wolfgang. We are not dealing with mere personal traits. Wolfgang was a Trotskyist, with all that this implies.

Our tendency is a movement of history, as Comrade North has stressed again and again. And an assimilation of its protracted struggle for capitalism’s overthrow is the only way to really understand the often-tragic experiences through which humanity and the working class has passed in the 20th century. That is why Wolfgang, who was animated by a deeply felt need to understand why the horrors of fascism emerged in Germany, took the decision to join this movement and to dedicate half a century of his life to building it.

He understood that it was the betrayal and derailing of socialist revolution by Stalinism that had such devastating consequences for Germany, Europe and the world and determined to build the International Committee of the Fourth International as the world party of socialist revolution.

We who mark his passing today understand very well the role of generations in our movement, especially that generation which came into struggle in the 1970s without which the continuity of Trotskyism could have been broken by the degeneration and betrayals of the Workers Revolutionary Party. Wolfgang and the BSA leadership rallied to the struggle waged against the WRP’s betrayal of Trotskyism, becoming part of the living link to the historic struggle of the ICFI to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

From that time onwards, Wolfgang sought in his writings, spoken contributions, and above all in his relations with cadre, old and new, from Germany and internationally, to animate the lessons of the past as a guide to the essential political conflicts of our present. This took the form of a historically grounded offensive against Stalinism, German social democracy, the WRP renegades, Pabloites and state capitalists—including his part in exposing the filthy lies about Trotsky of Robert Service.

For all of this, Wolfgang has an honoured place in our movement and will be remembered by those now coming forward in the fight against war and fascist reaction, and for socialism.

Ulrich Rippert, Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, Germany)

V. Gana (Parti de l’égalité socialiste, France)

I bring greetings from the Parti de l’égalité socialiste to this commemoration of Comrade Wolfgang Weber’s life.

He is remembered by his comrades in France as a tireless fighter for Trotskyism, against Stalinism, Pabloism and all forms of petty-bourgeois anti-Trotskyist revisionism.

As he fought to bring Trotskyism to the European working class, he collaborated over decades with comrades fighting to build a section of the ICFI in France.

I first met Comrade Wolfgang at the end of the 1980s. As part of a group of refugees in France breaking with Tamil nationalism to support Trotskyism, we traveled to a summer camp of the German section in Darmstadt.

Comrade Wolfgang was one of the comrades who spoke with us there. He asked me where I came from, my political past and about our experiences inside the Tamil bourgeois nationalist movement against the Sri Lankan capitalist state.

Comrade Wolfgang stressed the great political lessons of the ICFI’s recent split with the nationalist renegades in the WRP.

He urged us to study David North’s writings on the WRP, the WRP renegades’ adaptation to Middle Eastern bourgeois nationalism, and how this had affected millions of workers in the region. These great lessons were essential to building a nucleus of Tamil workers fighting for the perspectives of the ICFI in France.

Comrade Wolfgang repeatedly came to France with other leading members of the German section, notably during the 1995 rail strike against the Juppé government. He always stressed the importance of building our party in France and the protracted political struggle that would be required.

Comrade Wolfgang understood profoundly the power of the ICFI’s response to globalization and the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union.

At a meeting of the German section that we attended in Essen, he spoke in support the ICFI’s launch of the WSWS in 1997. Stressing the significance of the newspapers previously published by our national sections, he explained the critical importance of an internationally-coordinated online publication through which the ICFI speaks to the world working class.

He always spoke powerfully for the initiatives of the German section that prepared the founding of our party in France.

We warmly remember his leading role in alerting German historians and the German public to Comrade North’s exposure of Robert Service’s slanderous biography of Trotsky, opposing the publication of the German edition of Service’s hack work.

It is a critical chapter in the ICFI’s great struggle against the post-Soviet school of historical falsification.

We remember how Comrade Wolfgang strongly supported the decision to legally challenge the Verfassungsschutz’s false, anti-communist classification of our German section as extremist.

He thus played an important role in the struggle against German remilitarization and the legitimization of fascism and militarism that placed the SGP at the center of the political struggles of the working class not only in Germany but across Europe.

The intensification of our collaboration with comrades in Germany and across Europe is the most fitting way to commemorate the internationalism and the political commitment that Comrade Wolfgang brought to the work of the ICFI.

Christoph Vandrier (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, Germany)

Peter Symonds (Socialist Equality Party, Australia)

On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party in Australia, I would like to pay tribute to Wolfgang Weber, a veteran fighter for Trotskyism, that is, for the liberation of the working class and a socialist future for humanity.

Wolfgang was a member of the International Committee of the Fourth International for more than 50 years of his life, which encompasses half of the history of the Trotskyist movement from the founding of the Left Opposition to today.

As a member of the German section of the ICFI, the League of Socialist Workers (BSA), he stood with the ICFI against the renegades of the Workers Revolutionary Party leadership—Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter and Mike Banda—in the decisive split of 1985-86 that marked the victory of the orthodox Trotskyists over Pabloite opportunism.

Wolfgang’s writings were voluminous and far too extensive to deal with in any detail here. But they were preoccupied with the great historical questions of the 20th century—the 1917 Russian Revolution and its degeneration under the Stalinist bureaucracy, and Nazism in Germany. Trotsky’s writings provided the political key to understanding both Stalinism and its responsibility for the rise to power of Hitler in 1933.

Wolfgang made an imperishable contribution to the renaissance of Marxism in the ICFI in the wake of the split with the WRP renegades. I want to focus on just one aspect—his book Solidarity in Poland 1980-1981 and the Perspective of Political Revolution published in German in 1987 and English in 1989.

I got to know Wolfgang in 1988 when we were in Detroit for a period as part of the discussions surrounding the 1988 international perspectives document. At his request, I played a very small role in preparing the English-language edition of the book by polishing the translation. We spent not a few hours discussing the choice of words, phrases, commas, the peculiarities of the English language, and the politics of Solidarity, among many other issues.

Wolfgang’s approach to it all was meticulous. The book was part of the ongoing political exposure of the WRP renegades, who had played a pernicious political role during the mass strikes of Polish workers in 1980-81 and the formation of independent Solidarity trade unions. While the strike movement demonstrated the enormous political strength of the working class, its great weakness lay in the political perspective of its leadership under Lech Walesa—to pressure the Stalinist regime for reforms.

The Pabloites, who had abandoned the Trotskyist perspective of political revolution, reinforced the reformist program of the Solidarity leaders and associated intellectuals, such as Jacek Kuron. The WRP simply ignored the decisive question of revolutionary leadership and glorified the spontaneous movement of the working class.

In its statement of December 1980, the WRP declared that the struggle of the Solidarity movement for independent unions and the right to strike was “entirely in line with the policy of Lenin and Trotsky.” It continued: “Regardless of its immediate policy and leadership, the working class of Poland is now thrust into the forefront of the world socialist revolution.”

The statement was just one expression of the WRP’s infamous “new world reality” of the “undefeated nature of the working class,” which, for all its radical sounding phrases, was the political means for the WRP’s adaptation to the existing leaderships of the working class. According to the WRP, everything expressed the undefeated working class—in Poland, both the mass strikes and the crushing of the Solidarity movement in 1981.

As Wolfgang pointed out what the WRP failed to do was to examine what kind of “immediate policy and leadership” the Polish working class had, and to point out reformist limitations and expose its petty-bourgeois advisers. He noted that similarity with the spontaneous conceptions of the German Pabloite Winfried Wolf, who had dismissed the necessity of revolutionary leadership with the phrase: “What counts is not what the revolutionary actors think—It is only their action that is decisive.”

Wolfgang’s book subjected the politics of its Solidarity leadership and, in particular, figures like Kuron to a withering critique, along with the different but equally treacherous roles of the Pabloites and the WRP leadership. These layers regarded the Stalinist regimes as permanent, historically necessary features of world politics right at the point when they were heading for disaster. Wolfgang’s book was part of the work of the IC by David North and others in analysing the crisis of Stalinism and seeking to clarify for workers the necessity of Trotsky’s perspective of political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies as a component of the world socialist revolution.

In 1988, events were moving rapidly. Wolfgang felt compelled to add an epilogue to the English-language edition examining the reemergence of strikes in Poland and Gorbachev’s pro-market Perestroika policies. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe, beginning with the bringing down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, resulted in capitalist restoration.

This was in no small part due to the political roles of the Pabloites and the WRP, who had hailed Gorbachev as the vehicle for political revolution. In Poland, it was starkly exposed by the installation of Walesa as president in December 1990 who presided over the return of capitalist market relations.

I have referred to just one aspect of Wolfgang’s prodigious work, which epitomised his approach to political issues—rigorous, scientific and, above all, committed to clarifying the working class in the best traditions of Marxism.

I also regarded Wolfgang as a friend, not that, given that Australia lies at the ends of the earth, one could just drop around for a cup of coffee. But we were able to speak at various international meetings. He stayed with me on the occasion that he was in Australia, and in 2010, when I was in Germany, kindly invited me to make a trip to Munich, where he treated me to his hospitality and showed me the sites—not the tourist ones but those of significance to the working class.

Wolfgang was a highly cultured, warm and generous comrade with a subtle sense of humour. His premature death is a loss to the International Committee and the international working class. He will be greatly missed by his comrades, friends and particularly, his family—his companion Annie and their children. It is certainly fitting that we commemorate his life and work today.

Deepal Jayasekera (Socialist Equality Party, Sri Lanka)

Dear comrades,

On behalf of all members and supporters of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in Sri Lanka, I bring greetings to this memorial meetings and also pay revolutionary tribute to the memory of Comrade Wolfgang Weber.

His death is an immense loss not only for the SGP but also for the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as a whole. His dedication to the struggle to defend and develop Trotskyist principles of international socialism is a real inspiration for all of us in the SEP and other sections of the ICFI.

As I learned through the WSWS, Comrade Wolfgang played a crucial role in defending historical truth, mainly in the struggle of the Trotskyist movement against the Stalinist bureaucracy, which carried out treacherous betrayals of Soviet and international working class. He fully utilized his immense intellectual capacity in this revolutionary effort to establish the powerful legacy of historical struggle by the Trotskyist movement against the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy. It has been crucial for the political education of the cadres of the IC and also new layers of workers and youth who have been attracted to our movement.

We learned about Comrade Wolfgang as a leading member of the BSA, the predecessor of the SGP, mainly as the editor of the Neue Arbeiter Presse, organ of the BSA.

I had the opportunity to meet Comrade Wolfgang. The first time I met him was in 1991, when I traveled to Berlin as a part of the delegation of the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), the predecessor the SEP, to the Berlin Conference organized by the ICFI against imperialist war. During that visit, I also participated in an international meeting to discuss the editorial work of the IC sections. Wolfgang, in his capacity as the editor of the Neue Arbeiter Presse, took part in this meeting and spoke.

Also I recall meeting with him in Australia between December 1995 and January 1996 at the summer school hosted by the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the predecessor the SEP in Australia. It was my first visit to the Australian section. Yes, during that time, I stayed with Wolfgang at Comrade Peter Symonds’ apartment.

The theme of that summer school was the ICFI’s split with the WRP renegades in 1985-86. When he visited Australia, Wolfgang had visited Paris, as a member of the IC team, which intervened in the general strike in France in November-December 1985 against Prime Minister Alain Juppe’s economic reform measures, including a pay freeze in the public sector. Wolfgang had written a series of articles analyzing the French general strike.

During a special evening session held during the summer school, Wolfgang delivered a report drawing crucial political lessons from his experiences in intervening in the general strike.

And also later too, during my several visits to Berlin for international party events, I had the opportunity to meet Wolfgang.

During those occasions, I learned much from his contributions elaborating on the program and perspective of international socialism.

The legacy of Comrade Wolfgang will live forever in the cadre of the SGP and the ICFI.

Long live the memory of Comrade Wolfgang!

K. Nesan (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, Germany)

Dear Comrades,

It is a privilege to make some points on the memory of a lifelong revolutionary and comrade, Wolfgang Weber.

Even though Wolfgang was seriously ill for the last five years, he successfully managed to control the harshness of his sickness so that it would not undermine his revolutionary spirit as he carried out his political work.

Whenever he spoke—whether in a national committee meeting, a party school or at a public meeting—his smooth tempo, concentrated and determined style overpowered his sickness.

His only aim was to fight for the political independence of the working class embodied in the International Committee of the Fourth International.

As a strong and dedicated fighter for Trotskyism, his contributions were rooted in the historical lessons of the Marxist movement in developing and explaining the internationalist perspective in the fight against German militarism and imperialist war in Ukraine and Gaza.

He was confident in the analysis of the International Committee that the present decade is the decade of socialist revolution.

In his contributions he always pointed out the developing class struggles around the world against mass layoffs and social cuts and the development of the opposition against war.

In October, one month prior to his death, we had a discussion in the National Committee on the recruitment of new members to the party. He said the discussion demonstrated that there had been a fundamental change in class relations, paving the way to recruiting workers. He said:

“We must fight for this clarity by constantly working through and educating workers in the lessons of the history of the class struggles in the 20th century—lessons that have only been learned and documented in the history of the Fourth International and the ICFI.”

After the split with the WRP, the German section, the Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter (BSA), started to work intensively among the Tamil exile community, first organising a meeting with Keerthi Balasuriya in early 1987 in Stuttgart.

This meeting was attended by a large number of youth. It was a decisive political turn among the Tamil workers and youth. Together with Peter, Uli and Ludwig, Wolfgang played an important role in recruiting and educating Tamil workers to the party.

Many in the Tamil exile community which supported various armed groups understood the dead end of their politics during their negotiations with the Indian government which led to the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord.

It was a reactionary accord, which paved the way to the invasion of the Indian Army in the North and East of Sri Lanka, massacring thousands of civilians.

The International Committee opposed this accord and published a statement in November 1987, “The situation of Sri Lanka and the Tasks of the Revolutionary Communist League.”

In early 1988, I met Wolfgang at a meeting that discussed this statement in Stuttgart. He spoke in English, and I was his translator into Tamil. Wolfgang spoke in detail on the theory of permanent revolution.

He insisted on the unification and mobilisation of the Sinhala and Tamil people under the leadership of the working class for a socialist perspective, represented by the International Committee.

The democratic demands of the Tamil masses could only be achieved through a socialist revolution.

It is appropriate to recall Wolfgang’s answer to a question related to the support the JVP was getting in the rural areas in Sri Lanka.

Wolfgang explained that the JVP’s influence among the rural poor was the result of the betrayal of the LSSP and CP, and this can only be prevented through the intervention of the working class.

Wolfgang said the JVP represented neither the workers nor the rural poor. It represented the interests of sections of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie.

He further said that the JVP’s opposition to the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord was chauvinistic in its support for the anti-Tamil war.

The International Committee’s opposition to the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord was based on socialist principles, that is, to unify the working class to fight against the reactionary national bourgeoisie and the betrayal of LSSP.

In the background of the present JVP/NPP government, which is implementing the IMF’s austerity demands on the working class, Wolfgang’s answer was highly relevant.

Wolfgang had a close political relationship with Tamil members. During the summer camps in between sessions, he used to discuss political issues at length, as well as topics related to film, music and literature.

Over the years at party conferences and schools, he would meet with us and also hold discussions with each of us.

In June 2022 prior to his 70th birthday celebration, he was keen to confirm whether Tamil-speaking comrades would be participating in the event.

Wolfgang’s contribution in the event was directed at the political education of the young comrades, sharing his own experiences when he joined the party and what political issues were involved at that time. Uli also spoke in detail about that, a task that he undertook at every opportunity.

Even months before his passing, he maintained his humour. Once he needed a comrade’s help in installing a program on his computer. After receiving the instructions, he wrote back, “Aha, all right! I’ll make sure I install it over the next few days and let you know if I end up in a ditch!”

Wolfgang is no longer with us. But his lifelong fight to build the party of socialist internationalism will inspire millions of workers and youth in the developing mass struggles of the working class.

Peter Schwarz (Socialist Equality Party, Germany)

I knew Wolfgang for 50 years, initially and briefly when he still lived in Munich, then after his move to Essen, through our daily collaboration. It’s hard to believe he’s no longer with us.

He was part of a generation that, like myself, came to Trotskyism through confronting the issue of National Socialism. The question “How was it possible?” troubled hundreds of thousands of people at the time.

Wolfgang found the answer in Trotsky. The mass strikes in England and the important role played in them by the Socialist Labour League clearly demonstrated to him that building a revolutionary movement in the working class was not only necessary but also possible.

Ever since, Wolfgang has been a Trotskyist, a socialist and a convinced internationalist. The large international turnout at this commemoration event confirms this. For Wolfgang, there was never any doubt that the ICFI—and only the ICFI—is the only revolutionary, Marxist party. When the ICFI broke with the WRP renegades in 1985, Wolfgang stood firmly on the side of the ICFI.

The question that preoccupied Wolfgang more than any other was that of Stalinism. It is no coincidence that two of his three books, published by Arbeiterpresse Verlag, now Mehring Verlag, address this question: GDR—40 Years of Stalinism and Solidarity 1980–1981.

Germany is not only the land of Nazi barbarism—It is also the land of Marx and Engels, the first Marxist mass party under the leadership of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht and the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union.

The betrayal of the Social Democratic Party, which abandoned its opposition to German militarism in August 1914 and embarked on a course of war, was relatively easy to understand.

For four decades the party sailed under the banner of Marxism and grew steadily but never had a single opportunity for a revolutionary test of strength. These conditions created a conservative layer at its top that came to terms with bourgeois rule, supported the war in 1914, strangled the proletarian revolution in 1918 and murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919.

But why did the German Communist Party (KPD), which had hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters, fail so miserably when Hitler came to power in 1933?

This wasn’t just a historical question. When Wolfgang became politically active, as Ulrich Rippert has mentioned, thousands of Nazi criminals still occupied ministries, professorships and corporate boards through postwar Western Germany. In East Germany (GDR) —where many of us, including Wolfgang, had relatives—a Stalinist regime ruled that, although it had abolished capitalist property, brutally oppressed the working class and drove West German workers back into the arms of social democracy.

The DKP (the postwar German Communist Party)—the West German branch of the East German state party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED)—propagated peaceful coexistence and was hysterically hostile to a socialist perspective. We felt this not only politically and ideologically but also physically when they tore down our banners at May Day demonstrations.

The most-read book in the BSA during the 1970s was Trotsky’s Writings on Germany, which Helmut Dahmer published in a two-volume edition in 1971. Dahmer had studied with Horkheimer and Adorno and was close to the Frankfurt School and Pabloism. Nevertheless, he understood that Trotsky’s writings had tremendous political significance. As recently as 2011, Wolfgang managed to persuade him to sign the letter of protest against Robert Service’s diatribe against Trotsky.

Wolfgang responded enthusiastically to the insurrectionary movements that developed against the Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland, Eastern Europe and the GDR during the 1980s. His book on Solidarity, published as a series of articles in the Neue Arbeiterpresse in 1987, was an important preparation for the events that led to the end of the GDR two years later.

Wolfgang examined in detail how this massive, spontaneous movement, which at its peak comprised 10 million workers, was first suppressed and then diverted in a reactionary, nationalist direction. He particularly focused on the counterrevolutionary role of Pabloism and its support for Jacek Kuron and other pro-capitalist figures inside and outside the Stalinist party.

In 1989, this largely determined our irreconcilable stance toward the petty-bourgeois democrats who mushroomed in the GDR in the fall of 1989 to mislead and suppress working class opposition. Ranging from Stasi (East German secret police) agents to right-wing bourgeois politicians, including a 35-year-old physicist named Angela Merkel, and even the Pabloites, everyone was represented.

Wolfgang wrote numerous polemical articles on this topic and was also personally and energetically involved in our political interventions in the GDR.

In the years that followed, the ICFI drew far-reaching conclusions from the capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the GDR and Eastern Europe.

Every type of national perspective had been exhausted—not just those of the Stalinists but also those of social democracy, the trade unions and the national movements. A new revolutionary leadership of the working class could not emerge through tactical intervention in these organizations, but only through the building of the ICFI. We therefore transformed our sections from leagues into parties.

We were confronted not only with a “crisis of leadership” but also with a “crisis of socialist consciousness” within the working class. We developed our work accordingly. We founded the WSWS, which, in addition to political analyses and a daily perspective, also encompasses historical, theoretical and cultural issues. We expanded our publishing work with numerous books—especially by David North—on burning theoretical and historical issues.

Wolfgang made an important political contribution in this regard, as previous speakers have already explained. What distinguished him was the importance he attached to the political education of the working class. He wasn’t satisfied with platitudes but insisted on a thorough understanding of history and Marxism. This shaped his work until the last day of his life.

Wolfgang’s early death is a great loss for his family and our party. But he lived a fulfilling life, one that was not useless and aimless but dedicated to a better future for humanity. For this, he will be remembered and live on.

Hakan Özal (Sosyalist Eşitlik Grubu, Turkey)

On behalf of the Socialist Equality Group in Turkey, I remember Comrade Wolfgang with deep respect.

Wolfgang’s loss is a source of profound sorrow for Trotskyists worldwide who are committed to Marxist doctrine. But his life and struggle, together with the legacy he left behind, will be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for our continued work and will continue to illuminate our path.

Comrade Wolfgang Weber dedicated his life to the continuity of the Trotskyist movement and fought for more than half a century for the victory of the worldwide socialist revolution. In the 1970s and 1980s, he played a crucial role in defending and advancing the Marxist perspective during a particularly critical period in history. His remarkable works on Stalinism and the revolutionary struggle in the GDR and Poland are only a few of his significant contributions to revolutionary theory.

The time I spent with Wolfgang, although brief, was an unforgettable period. During my studies at Bielefeld University, we invited him as a speaker at the events we organized as the IYSSE. During this time, in which I was in close contact with him through party work, I was able to experience firsthand his extraordinary dedication to the revolutionary struggle and his profound theoretical clarity. I was particularly impressed by the event entitled “Historical Quartet”—a moment in which I was able to experience Wolfgang’s intellectual strength and modest personality up close.

This meeting impressively demonstrated Wolfgang’s determination to lead the intellectual debate against attacks on Leon Trotsky’s historical legacy. Four renowned history professors participated in the panel discussion. Wolfgang was not just a participant in this select group but a true guide with his profound knowledge, clear analysis and strong stance.

His calm yet highly effective style not only helped steer the discussion but also enabled participants to grasp the issues in greater depth. On that day, Wolfgang courageously refuted the attacks on Leon Trotsky’s ideas and historical facts—It was not just an academic debate but a powerful defense of revolutionary consciousness, scientific integrity and the Trotskyist perspective.

As a listener present in the meeting, I could clearly sense the respect the professors had for him and the audience’s admiration for his analysis. In that hall, Wolfgang was not just a speaker but also a courageous advocate for historical truth and the interests of the working class.

His knowledge and intellectual depth were exceptional. His understanding of history, philosophy and political theory enabled him to convey complex topics clearly and understandably. But what truly distinguished Wolfgang was his humility and deep respect for his comrades. He always willingly shared his knowledge and experiences with young people, never displaying arrogance. His patience, his explanations and the persuasive power of his words left a deep impression on his listeners.

Comrade Wolfgang Weber’s tireless struggle for the independence of the working class and the international socialist revolution lives on in the ICFI. Wolfgang’s legacy will continue to guide the world Trotskyist movement and the international working class. His dedication, his humility and his revolutionary faith, which he carried with unshakable confidence until his last breath, are an inexhaustible source of inspiration for us.

We honour his memory and will continue his struggle.

Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, Russia

Dear Comrades,

We express our deepest condolences on the death of Comrade Wolfgang Weber to the German section, to the entire International Committee and to the relatives and friends of Comrade Wolfgang.

Wolfgang Weber devoted much of his conscious life to the cause of the struggle of the working class against the capitalist system of oppression and exploitation. Having embarked on this path as far back as 1971 during his studies in the UK, when he first became acquainted with the Socialist Labour League, he continued this struggle right up to his last breath.

In fact, at the very beginning of his political career, he dropped out of his studies and began working full-time for the party. During the split with the opportunist wing in the Workers Revolutionary Party, Comrade Wolfgang did not hesitate to support the Trotskyist majority. When Robert Service organized a political attack on Leon Trotsky’s biography, it was Wolfgang Weber who helped counter it.

He spent the last five years of his life battling a severe form of cancer, but even during this difficult time he continued his party work.

Over the last few years the International Committee of the Fourth International and the entire working class has lost many of its fighters, among them: Comrade Wije Dias, longtime leader of the Sri Lankan SEP, who died in 2022; Comrade Helen Halyard, whose death occurred almost a full year ago; and now Comrade Wolfgang Weber, who died on November 16.

Despite this loss for the whole International Committee, it cannot be said that his life was lived in vain. It will serve, especially for us, who have just embarked on this path, as a model for the life of a true fighter and as an incentive to go forward. Comrade Wolfgang may not see the birth of the new world, but he staunchly believed in it, and we must do everything we can to ensure that our generation will continue his struggle and rid the world of this outmoded social system that threatens to destroy all of humanity.

Rest in peace, Comrade Wolfgang.