This article by Alan Johnson, from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 27, Summer 1999, sets out to "reconstruct the birth of Third Camp socialism in the split with Trotsky over the question of Russia's wars in Finland and Poland in 1939-40, and its development in the epoch of expanding Stalinism after World War II. I set out why the concept was indispensable to a politics of self-emancipation and revolutionary democratic internationalism in the period of the Cold War. The concept was not simply a rejection of the two imperialist war camps -- although that was the beginning of all wisdom. The partisans of the Third Camp, in the most unpropitious of circumstances, also developed a positive alternative to both war-camps, and to war itself, through the concepts of a 'democratic foreign policy' and 'political warfare.' I explore the Third Camp's rejection of the neutralism of the 'one-and-a-half-camp,' and its transcendence of the kind of crippling antinomies, the 'either-or' frameworks, which left Sidney Hook, Irving Howe and ultimately Max Shachtman as critical supporters of the capitalist camp, and the likes of Isaac Deutscher and the orthodox Trotskyists as critical supporters of the Stalinist camp. Second, the essay will explore the meaning of the Third Camp in today's post-Communist world, when the second camp has joined the first but the world is no nearer 'peace, freedom and prosperity'."
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