The Third Camp tradition

The Fourth International Without Trotsky: Need a New Start, 1940

From Labor Action , December 16 1940 The utter collapse of the two old Internationals, even before the outbreak of the Second World War, has only been spectacularly emphasized since the war began. Also emphasised, over again, is the burning need of reconstructing the world vanguard of the working class, of regrouping all the revolutionary Marxists who have remained true to their principles, and of organising them on the basis of the fundamental program of the Fourth International. Now, more than ever before, can it be said that without this program, the downward march of mankind into the abyss...

A Marxist surveys mid-50's Ireland: Matt Merrigan in Labor Action, 1955-57

Matt Merrigan was a member of the small Irish Trotskyist group in the 1940s, the Revolutionary Socialist Party, and a socialist all his life. He eventually became president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and died in 2000. In the mid-50s, for a while, he wrote reports on Ireland for Labor Action , the paper of the Independent Socialist League of Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, and others in the USA. Matt Merrigan’s first article on Ireland for Labor Action was on 19 September 1955. There had been nothing in 1954 Labor Action . His reappearance coincided with an obvious quickening of links...

An organiser for black workers

Ernest Rice McKinney (1886-1984) was a black US trade union organiser, revolutionary socialist and central leader in the "Third Camp" socialist organisation the Workers Party. Born in Malden, in West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley, McKinney’s father was a coal miner and then a teacher (his mother was a teacher too). McKinney Sr. eventually landed a job at the US Treasury through his involvement in the Republican Party, which had widespread black support in the decades after the American Civil War. Although it did experience a brutal white-supremacist reaction following the defeat of post-war...

Trotsky's Last Letter to the Russian Workers

Greetings to the Soviet workers, collective farmers, soldiers of the Red Army and sailors of the Red Navy! Greetings from distant Mexico where I found refuge after the Stalinist clique had exiled me to Turkey and after the bourgeoisie had hounded me from country to country! Dear Comrades! The lying Stalinist press has been maliciously deceiving you for a long time on all questions, including those which relate to myself and my political co-thinkers. You possess no workers’ press; you read only the press of the bureaucracy, which lies systematically so as to keep you in darkness and thus render...

Last Letter to the Russian Workers

Greetings to the Soviet workers, collective farmers, soldiers of the Red Army and sailors of the Red Navy! Greetings from distant Mexico where I found refuge after the Stalinist clique had exiled me to Turkey and after the bourgeoisie had hounded me from country to country! Dear Comrades! The lying Stalinist press has been maliciously deceiving you for a long time on all questions, including those which relate to myself and my political co-thinkers. You possess no workers’ press; you read only the press of the bureaucracy, which lies systematically so as to keep you in darkness and thus render...

Last Letter to the Russian Workers

Greetings to the Soviet workers, collective farmers, soldiers of the Red Army and sailors of the Red Navy! Greetings from distant Mexico where I found refuge after the Stalinist clique had exiled me to Turkey and after the bourgeoisie had hounded me from country to country! Dear Comrades! The lying Stalinist press has been maliciously deceiving you for a long time on all questions, including those which relate to myself and my political co-thinkers. You possess no workers’ press; you read only the press of the bureaucracy, which lies systematically so as to keep you in darkness and thus render...

Third Camp Trotskyism and after

Dan Gallin is a life-long union official so his memoirs might not seem an obviously thrilling read for revolutionary socialists. But his career has been about as different from the standard dull trajectory of union officialdom as one could imagine. Gallin has been a stateless exile, a member of the heterodox Trotskyist movement of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, and was expelled from the United States for subversive activities. Rising through the ranks of the International Union of Food workers, he clashed with CIA infiltrators and Soviet bloc bureaucrats, and succeeded in turning the IUF into...

In Defense of Revisionism (1946)

The survival and expansion of Russian Stalinism threw all the political compass points of Trotsky's pre-World War "Trotskyism" into seismic confusion. Years of political ferment produced two "Trotskyisms" - Shachtmanites and Cannonites. The tiny Irish Group in this document declared for Shachtman. Since the formation of the Workers Party the theories of Shachtmanite comrades have reached the average party member in the Fourth International only at second hand; and, even then, chiefly in the form of excerpts published with the aim of discrediting them. The majority of comrades interested in...

The Irish Trotskyists of the 1940s condemn "Irish only" trade unionism

A leaflet produced by the small Irish Trotskyist group in the mid 1940s, after nationalists split the Irish trade union movement. This is a leaflet produced by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which was then the (small) Irish section of the Fourth International, some time soon after the splitting of the Irish trade union movement (Irish TUC) by Irish Transport and General Workers' Union leader William O'Brien and his allies. Protesting against alleged "British domination" in the Irish TUC, they formed a separate Congress of Irish Unions, made up solely of Irish-based unions, and rejecting...

For Open Borders and Free Migration!

My Dear Brewer:— Have just read the majority report of the [Socialist Party] Committee on Immigration. It is utterly un-socialistic, reactionary, and in truth outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation.... Away with the “tactics”...

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