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Michael Pablo was a twentieth century revolutionary whose life and ideas remain relevant and inspirational in the 21st. He spent his life involved in revolutions around the globe – in Greece, France, Algeria, Chile, Palestine and Portugal, to name the most important – everywhere pursuing a genuinely democratic socialism. He was a hands-on participant and advocated and worked for what he called ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’ – on a local, regional, national and planetary scale. For Pablo, this was utopian but realisable.
He had his faults – he was reluctant to admit to error and could be blindly loyal. But his strengths – his insistence on full and direct democracy, pluralism, a principled life, his sympathy for the ‘wretched of the Earth’, an early recognition of the ecological crisis, the need for planetary solutions, the shape of the new revolutionary ‘subject’, the continued relevance of an open and creative Marxism, the value of an imaginative utopianism – make him vitally relevant in this new century. The Well-Dressed Revolutionary is a meticulously researched biography of an important international figure – and a cracking good read.