The Third Camp tradition

70 years ago, on 22 May 1943, Stalin announced the formal shutting-down of the Communist International, the association of revolutionary socialist parties across the world set up after the Russian Revolution. Although Moscow retained close control of the Communist Parties until the 1960s, the shutting-down was a symbolic disavowal of socialist revolution. This is how socialists commented at the time. He long ago destroyed it as an instrument of socialism! By Albert Gates (Al Glotzer) The announcement by the Executive Committee of the Communist International that it was proposing its...

Mike Kyriazopoulos, a Workers’ Liberty supporter based in New Zealand/Aotearoa and active in Fightback, died on 18 January 2014 after a long battle with Motor Neurone Disease. This is a letter he wrote to comrades in April 2013. Early this year I was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. It appears as though the “progress” of the disease (oddly Stalinist terminology) is quite rapid. So I wanted to thank all of you who know me for your political guidance, solidarity, friendship and love over the years. I first came across the AWL at York University Labour Club. But I realised the group was...

Hal Draper answers the question: why is the working class fundamental to the socialist project? Why do socialists believe there is a special connection between their own great goal of a new society and the interests of labour, this one segment of society? Is it because we “idealise” workers as being better, or more clever, or more honest, or more courageous, or more humanitarian, than non-workers? Isn’t it rather true that the workers have time and again followed reactionary courses and leaders and have by no means shown any invariable affinity for progressive causes? ... Aren’t they filled...

“Standing resolutely on the side of the proletariat, the socialists do everything in their power to facilitate and hasten its victory. But what exactly can they do in this case? “A necessary condition for the victory of the proletariat is its recognition of its own position, its relations with its exploiters, its historic role and its socio-political tasks. “For this reason the socialists consider it their principal, perhaps even their only, duty to promote the growth of this consciousness among the proletariat, which for short they call its class consciousness. “The whole success of the...

Click here to download as pdf Click here to download as mobi Click here to download as epub Or read online below: Korea The SR Group 1950-5 SR and state capitalism Cliff on Russia and China 1956 SR and ISL SR in the Labour left, late 1950s SR and peace campaigning The turn to “Luxemburgism” From the Labour orientation to the shop stewards “Linking the fragments” mid and late 1960s 1968: growth and demagogy After 1970 The dispute on Europe 1971 1972-5 Chronology We can periodise IS, and the Socialist Review group which came before it, in the following fashion. • From 1948 to their expulsion in...

Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty are Trotskyist. But we have argued that “orthodox Trotskyism” from the 1940s became warped by traits and syndromes alien to the spirit, though sometimes not to the letter, of the ideas of Trotsky and the Bolshevik rearguard. More light and instruction can be found in the tradition of the “Third Camp” Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. To describe the SWP (IS, SR) as “orthodox Trotskyist with quirks” seems puzzling. The core idea of “orthodox Trotskyism” was that the USSR, despite become the world’s second big power, remained a “degenerated workers...

Stan Weir (1921-2001) was a Third Camp socialist, trade union militant and intellectual at the forefront of the post-Second World War US labour movement. Weir graduated from high school in 1940 and, because of his school’s participation in an experimental curriculum, was eligible for a place at the University of California. Neither Stan nor his classmates were told of this, however. The omission was no accident. As his former principal explained, kids from his school were needed as mechanics and factory workers, not college graduates. After learning this lesson in the politics of the American...

In 1940 the US Trotskyist movement split, primarily over its attitude to the 1939-40 Russian invasion of Finland. The split would prove far-reaching. The minority, led by Max Shachtman, which denounced Russia’s war in Finland as reactionary, soon moved to reject the idea that Stalinist Russia was any sort of workers’ state, and develop policy for a working-class “Third Camp” to confront both capitalism and Stalinism. The majority stuck to the formula that the Stalinist USSR was a “degenerated workers’ state”, and over the next decade was dragged by its adherence to that formula into claiming...

David Walters has announced the completion of a major milestone for the Left Opposition Digitization Project for the Marxist Internet Archive: the complete run of Labor Action, the newspaper of the Workers Party (U.S.) and Independent Socialist League from 1940 through the Autum of 1958. Writers for this paper included, among others, Max Shachtman, James T. Farrell, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, and Irving Howe. The 19 years of Labor Action represents approx. 1,000 issues published, over half of which are full broadsheet in size. Presented in beautifylly digitaly optimized PDFs...