David Korner was a Romanian and Frenchcommunist militant, trade unionist, and journalist. A Trotskyist for most of his life, he was active in the labor movement of France from the 1930s to the 1960s. Born into a Jewish family, Korner was a member of the Romanian Communist Party in 1932-1933. In July 1933, alongside Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Constantin Doncea and other PCR activists, he was brought to trial in front of a Bucharest court for his part in convening the Griviţa Strike, and ultimately sentenced to 18 months in jail. Recruited to Trotskyism as a student in Paris in the 1934, he formed the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Romania upon his return to Romania. The latter faction opposed the Stalinist PCR, as well as the Social Democrats and the Unitary Socialist Party of Leon Ghelerter. When the Spanish Civil War and the June 1936strikes took place, Korner again returned to France and was a member of the Internationalist Workers Party. In line with Leon Trotsky's advice to his French followers to enter the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party he joined that party and stood on its far left. Upon the start of World War II, as the PSOP collapsed, he formed the tiny Trotskyist Group in opposition to what he considered the petty bourgeois methods of organization of the other French Trotskyist groups, as well as to the politics of mainstream socialist party. This group was active in clandestinity under the Nazi German occupation of France, and later became the Communist Union. The group concentrated on factory work but also maintained the regular production of its political publications and took part in agitation against the colonial politics of France. The factory work came to fruition with the Renault strike of 1947, which Korner's group helped lead and organize. The request for support addressed by the newly formed Democratic Trade Union of Renault was accepted by the UC, which effectively caused a merger between the two. While the SDR broke apart in 1949, the political grouping was revived only briefly in 1950, without enlisting support; when some former militants of the UC began publishingVoix Ouvrière in 1956, Barta did not partake in the move. Relations between Barta and the leadership of the Voix Ouvrière group remained poor until his death, in part because Barta believed that the group had wrongly appropriated his work and was philistine in its methods.
