An ideal Xmas gift
Marx: with quote 'The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves.'
In khaki, grey, aqua
Trotsky: with 'Third Camp' quote
In aqua and white
Sizes: medium, large and extra large
£11 including post and packing, from AWL, PO Box 823, London, SE15 4NA.
Comments
Will you be using this Trotksy quote on the Third Camp?
What is this animal? There is the camp of capitalism; there is the camp of the proletariat. But is there perhaps a “third camp”—a petty-bourgeois sanctuary? In the nature of things, it is nothing else. But, as always, the petty bourgeois camouflages his “camp” with the paper flowers of rhetoric. Let us lend our ears! Here is one camp: France and England. There’s another camp: Hitler and Stalin. And a third camp: Burnham, with Shachtman. The Fourth International turns out for them to be in Hitler’s camp (Stalin made this discovery long ago). And so, a new great slogan: Muddlers and pacifists of the world, all ye suffering from the pin-pricks of fate, rally to the “third” camp!
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1942-dm/ch07.htm
No, this much better quote
“The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflict to oblige humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas. This method is as old as bourgeois society, or more exactly, as class society in general. No one is obliged to become a Marxist; no one is obliged to swear by Lenin’s name. But the whole of the politics of these two titans of revolutionary thought was directed towards this, the fetishism of two camps would give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends.”
Marvellous but ...
...will it fit on a T-shirt?
You're in the group, Pete, not me!
So ask your comrades, they made the tee shirt. I'm just a sympathetic observer from across the pond.
Hah nice one.
Hah nice one.
Another good quotation from Trotsky
“But it is precisely why I believe you have made an error... where you say that in China, ‘two camps that are bitterly hostile to one another have come into being: in one are the imperialists and militarists and certain layers of the Chinese bourgeoisie; and on the other are the workers, artisans, petty bourgeoisie, students, intelligentsia and certain groups from the middle bourgeoisie with a nationalist orientation...’ In fact, there are three camps in China — the reactionaries, the liberal bourgeoisie and the proletariat — fighting for hegemony over the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. We know how complex and contradictory the course of the revolution is, especially in such a huge and — to an overwhelming extent — backward country like China. The revolution can still pass through a series of ebbs and flows. What we must safeguard in the course of the revolution is above all the independent party of the proletariat that is constantly evaluating the revolution from the point of view of three camps, and is capable of fighting for the hegemony in the third camp and, by so doing, in the entire revolution.” (1927)
Of course, the point is not to deny that Trotsky contradicted himself on the 'third camp' idea. He did. But it's to establish that simply wheeling out the above quotation does not settle the question from the Trotskyist point of view - and to seek to draw out the different strands in Trotsky's politics.