The Third Camp tradition

In Defence of Ukrainian Independence

Ukraine: Russian troops out! Seamus Milne's shoddy arguments for Putin Putin: hands off Ukraine! East Ukraine: it’s mostly Russian imperialism, not democratic protest Why socialists should side with Ukraine against Russia Ukraine is not just a token Russian Imperialism threatens Ukraine The Crimean Tatars: the nation Stalin deported The left and Maidan Leon Trotsky: Marxism and Ukrainian independence

“Third camp” or no camp?

Many responses from the left to the Ukraine crisis have ignored, sidestepped, or downplayed the right to self-determination of the Ukrainian people. Yet Ukraine is one of the longest-oppressed large nations in the world. In an article of 1939 where he raised Ukraine’s right to self-determination as an urgent question, Leon Trotsky wrote: “The Ukrainian question, which many governments and many ‘socialists’ and even ‘communists’ have tried to forget or to relegate to the deep strongbox of history, has once again been placed on the order of the day and this time with redoubled force”. The same...

"Left-wing cartoons and comics offer unique view of mid-20th century"

This review was originally published by the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and appears on their website here . To orders copies of the book, click here . This new book of political cartoons, In an Era of Wars and Revolutions: American Socialist Cartoons of the Mid-Twentieth Century , edited by Sean Matgamma, should be of interest to labour historians and those interested in mid-20th century Left politics. The title page of this unique volume of reprints indicates the art is “By Carlo and others.” Jesse Cohen, the artist who called himself “Carlo” was, along with Laura Gray, the...

Third camp memories: an outsider's view

A contribution to our ongoing symposium of reflection and recollections of the "third camp" left in the United States. Click here to view the rest of the symposium. Somehow, a copy of the lively, Chicago-based American Socialist found me in the Spring of 1965, at the University of Illinois in Champaign (my home town), at a moment when I was months out of the DeLeonite Socialist Labor Party, and not quite yet in Students for a Democratic Society. Around this time, Hal Draper visited the campus and spoke movingly about the Free Speech Movement. Jump down a year or so and a couple of SDS chapters...

A journey through the third camp left

In Solidarity 242 (18 April 2012), we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. They came to be organised under the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.” The assessment of the “third camp” tradition by the majority of the modern-day revolutionary left is bound up with the continuing holy...

New book portrays an era

Between the 1930s and the 1950s the revolutionary socialist press in the USA had talented cartoonists such as “Carlo” (Jesse Cohen). A new collection of their work gives a snapshot history of the times — the rise of the mass trade union movement in the USA, the great strike wave of 1945-6, the fight against "Jim Crow" racism, World War Two, the imposition of Stalinism on Eastern Europe... It puts socialist policy proposals — opening the books of the corporations, organising workers' defence guards... — in vivid form. For readers who already know a bit about the politics, it gives an...

The Third Camp socialists in the USA: a symposium of recollections and reflections

In Solidarity 242 (18 April 2012), we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. They came to be organised under the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.” The assessment of the “third camp” tradition by the majority of the modern-day revolutionary left is bound up with the continuing holy...

1960s and 70s American "third camp" socialist archives now online

The Marxists Internet Archive has uploaded the journals of the Independent Socialist Clubs and the International Socialists, organisations which continued the revolutionary "third camp" socialism of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. In the late 1930s and early 40s, the Trotskyist movement (particularly in America) was split by a debate about whether the Soviet Union could be characterised as some form of "workers' state", or whether its society was based on exploitative class rule (variously characterised as "bureaucratic collectivist" or "state capitalist"). The "third camp" socialists were those...

Tradition and Living Revolutionary Policy

The question of the relationship of tradition and party policy is far from simple, especially in our epoch. More than once, recently, we have had occasion to speak of the immense importance of the theoretical and practical tradition of our party and have declared that we could in no case permit the breaking of our ideological lineage. It is only necessary to come to an agreement on what is meant by the tradition of the party. To do that, we must begin largely by the inverse method and take some historical examples in order to base our conclusions upon them. Let us take the “classic” party of...

Blitzkrieg and Revolution (May 1940)

I. IF HITLER WINS – PERSPECTIVE FOR SOCIAL REVOLUTION The fundamentals of Marxism have not changed. But the German blitzkrieg has radically altered the political situation. For years all informed persons, from Roosevelt to Trotsky, believed that the Germans would be defeated in the second imperialist war. Revolutionaries looked forward to this defeat as initiating an era of socialist revolution. The imperialist perspective was not very different. The bourgeoisie dreaded the exhaustion of both sides, followed by the revolt of the millions in Central Europe against the long drawn out slaughter...

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