The Third Camp tradition

Is Stalinism left wing?

Originally titled 'Stalinism, a Left Wing of the Labor Movement? Its Nature and Role' The labor and socialist movements have had a good quarter century of experience with Stalinism. The experience is not yet at an end, but there is now enough of it to warrant the dogmatic statement that the working-class movement cannot and will not make real progress, let alone achieve its basic aim, until it has succeeded in destroying the incubus of Stalinism. In 1858, Fredrick Engels, disgusted with the direction taken by the British labor movement under the leadership, of former Chartists like Ernest...

The Leningrad delirium

Among many other things, the new book published by Workers’ Liberty and edited by Sean Matgamna — “The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism” — digs out a dramatic lurch in the “Orthodox” Trotskyist movement in 1941, described in this excerpt. The “Orthodox” were those who stuck to Trotsky’s formula of the Stalinist USSR being a “degenerated workers’ state” while, in the 1940s, the elements in reality on which Trotsky based that formula were changing dramatically. Along the way, they lurched one way and then another, never properly assessing their mistakes. The book argues that the “Heterodox” —...

Grace Lee Boggs, 1915-2015

When Grace Lee Boggs died, on 5 October in her beloved adopted city of Detroit, she was well into her eighth decade of activism. A brilliant philosophy student who found decent-paying opportunities blocked by discrimination against Chinese Americans, by her mid-twenties Grace Lee was a socialist militant and contributor to the revolutionary Marxist journal New International . Under the party name Ria Stone, her essays there included analyses of the history of World War I and the anti-imperialist opposition, the rising importance of China, and particularly powerful pieces on the March on...

Beyond the fragments of the Trotskyist movement

Why is the revolutionary left today in such a mess? Why are the politics of the SWP, the Socialist Party, the various Fourth Internationals and most of the splinters, grouplets and fragments so incoherent? When did it start to go wrong for the classical Marxist tradition, which had reached such a flowering with Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks? And what were the alternatives, the roads not taken or barely trodden, which might help orientate Marxists today in the situation we start from? The AWL’s new book, a second volume of documents from the early Trotskyist movement goes a long way...

The four lives of Laurent Schwartz

I recently came across Laurent Schwartz’s autobiography, published in French in 1997, and in English in 2001. Maybe for reasons which I’ll indicate, it has not become a well-known book; but there is much to be extracted from it. Schwartz was a Trotskyist from when he was shocked by the Moscow Trials, in 1936, at the age of 21, until 1947; and an energetic left activist all his life, often cooperating with Trotskyists. In 1946-7 he had become active enough to serve on the day-to-day leading committee of the small French Trotskyist movement, and to be invited to work for the movement full-time...

The Third Camp and the Vietnam war

Martin Thomas’ article on Vietnam and the left in Solidarity 364 rightly advocates a Third Camp position opposed to both the US and its allies and the victorious Vietnamese Stalinists. However the war also posed political problems for the Third Camp socialists of the time which he does not elaborate on. These issues remain relevant and, I think, unresolved today. A central slogan in the Vietnam solidarity movement in the UK and across Europe was “Victory to the NLF”. The Vietnamese National Liberation Front (aka the Vietcong) was formed in 1960 and became the guerilla army and political...

Triumph and disillusion: Vietnam 1975

Just over forty years ago, on 30 April 1975, the Vietnam war ended. The Stalinist National Liberation Front swept into Saigon, and the US Embassy was hurriedly evacuated by helicopter from its roof. Two and a half weeks earlier, on 12 April 1975, the Cambodian Stalinists had triumphed, seizing the capital, Phnom Penh. For the previous ten years or more, big demonstrations against the US war in Vietnam had been a major route by which tens of thousands of young people came into revolutionary socialist politics. The demonstrators not only denounced the corruption and authoritarianism of the...

An Eyewitness Account of Norway's General Strike Against the Nazis

We present a day-by-day diary of the greatest strike movement which has yet taken place in the Nazi-occupied countries. It was written by a man who. Escaped from Noray. We think that this diary in its simplicity gives a better picture of Europe than ever-so many elaborate articles.It should be remembered, however, that events like this are as yet the exception and that in general the class struggle has not yet taken on such acute form. Monday, September 8 —The rationing of milk becomes effective. It provides that people will no longer get milk at offices or places of work. Only at retail...

The four lives of Laurent Schwartz

I recently came across Laurent Schwartz's autobiography, published in French in 1997, and in English in 2001. Maybe for reasons which I'll indicate, it has not become a well-known book; but there is much to be extracted from it.

Schwartz was a Trotskyist from when he was shocked by the Moscow...

The “Third Camp”: Hal Draper debates Ignazio Silone

The debate that follows occurred in the weekly paper of the Independent Socialist League of the USA, Labor Action, in January and April 1956. Click here to download as pdf Ignazio Silone (1900-1978) is best known today as a novelist, author of Bread And Wine, Fontamara, and other books. He was a founder member of the Italian Communist Party (in 1921); he broke with Stalin in 1931, speaking out for independent working-class politics, and moved to the right in the 1940s and 50s, contributing to the famous anthology The God That Failed (1949). Recent historians have found evidence that he was...

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