The Third Camp tradition

A deviation from the road

“The force of things and the behaviour of men have contradicted all Lenin’s optimistic forecasts, his hopes in a superior democracy as much as his semi-libertarian ideas expressed in the State and Revolution and other writings of the same period, at the dawn of the revolution. Nothing in the individual theses of Trotsky has stood the test any better, in particular his wordy and abstract theory of the ‘permanent revolution’.” — Boris Souvarine, Stalin. A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, 1939. The labour movement is striving “to renew and reconstruct itself in politics”, writes Sean Matgamma in...

Socialism and singlejacking

A review of Stan Weir's writings, 'Singlejack Solidarity'. "The term singlejack... On-the-job organisers for the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World... used it to describe that method of organising where dedicated advocates are developed one at a time on a highly personalised basis..." The leading Minneapolis Trotskyist Ray Dunne was a prime example. An IWW shop steward met Dunne, aged 15, in a lumberjack camp. He identified Dunne as willing to stand up against the boss, and also thoughtful. The IWWer (according to a later interview by Dunne with Harry Ring)...

Under the Banner of Marxism

The AWL’s new book, In Defence of Bolshevism, will upset many people on the left – and is warmly welcomed for doing so. The bulk of the book consists of texts by the foremost Heterodox Trotskyist, Max Shachtman. In 1949, Shachtman published Under the Banner of Marxism, originally written as an answer to Ernest Erber, a former Third Camp comrade who had just deserted. In this review, however, I want to pay attention to the book’s introduction by Sean Matgamna, tying in the texts with today. The introduction spares no left tendency from withering criticism. The book is an indictment of Corbynism...

The professor and the helicopter

People tried to construct flying machines for thousands of years before the first planes were built in the early 20th century, and the first regularly-produced helicopters from the 1930s. Suppose a historian were to study all the documents she or he could find about that effort, prior to say 1900, but without registering that the purpose was to find a flying machine. Maybe the historian would imagine that the purpose was just to find some way of getting from place to place, and would comment: why didn’t they just walk? John Kelly, an academic at Birkbeck University, structures his account of...

“It’s good to follow a polemic in real time”

Q. Tell us a bit about your websites, Splits and Fusions and Red Mole Rising. A. Red Mole Rising came first, and it is now a nearly complete archive of the press of the Fourth International in Britain, that is, of the group best known as the IMG, from 1950s into the 2000s. It has complete runs of International, Black Dwarf, Red Mole, Socialist Challenge, Socialist Action, etc., and lots of magazines and pamphlets. I’ve worked with loads of people on that. Some of The Week is up there, and I’m intending to do the rest of The Week some time soon. Splits and Fusions is a much broader and more...

Socialism Makes Sense: Ideas For Freedom 2018 report

Just under 200 people attended Ideas for Freedom 2018, a weekend socialist summer school organised by Workers’ Liberty on 23-24 June in London. The title of the school this year was “Socialism Makes Sense”, and sessions aimed to make the basic case for a revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalist society. Another main theme was “challenges of a Labour government”, looking at the difficulties likely to be faced by a left-Labour government, for example in confronting the state, and the challenges for class-struggle socialists in relating to such a government and attempting to...

War, Realism and the "Lesser Evil". The Socialist Attitude on the Problem of War by Julius Jacobson, in Anvil and Student Partisan, Fall 1950.

One of the greatest tragedies of a Third World War which is now drawing closer is the lack of organized opposition to it. The mass of people are not enthusiastically pro-war but they are resigned to it, while the organized social, political and cultural movements, with rare exceptions, are exerting their influence to create the necessary enthusiasm for the all-out Atom War. Military men with their national honor, business men with their funds, publishers with their journalists, politicians with their rehearsed inflammatory speeches, are all busily using their respective resources to instill an...

TV fictions and AWL reality

An open letter to Ashok Kumar It’s been said before, and it will bear saying again. If everything published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in the last five decades were to disappear, and if future historians of socialism had to rely on what our political opponents said about us, then the historians would find it impossible to make political sense of the story. On the one hand we are people who do, and have always done, everything we can to help workers in their struggle against employers and governments. We throw everything we have into that. We preach working-class revolutionary...

Trotskyism, Stalinism and the Second World War

Barry Finger reviews The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: the Fate of the Russian Revolution volume two, edited by Sean Matgamna (Workers’ Liberty, 2015). ­Revolutionary socialism at its liveliest is always a vast theatre of ideological battlegrounds, a Permanent War of Questions, as Julius Jacobson — a one-time follower of Max Shachtman — so aptly put it. For those, and there were precious few, who still valiantly retained the capacity, the sitzfleisch as well as the activists’ militant vigour, in the years leading up to and through the Second World War, to think through and refine volumes...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.