The Third Camp tradition

Third Camp politics from the 1930s to the 21st century: an interview

An interview with Phyllis and Julius Jacobson has just been published on the website of the US socialist magazine New Politics. Click here to read it online . The interview is taken from three taped conversations with Phyllis and Julius Jacobson that the author conducted in November 1992, September 1994, and November 1994. It incorporates, with permission, a small amount of material from an interview conducted by the labor historian Jon Bloom in November 1983. It was previously published in the journal Left History, vol. 18, no. 1 (2014).

Bogdan Denitch: “a tireless organiser”

Bogdan Denitch was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1929. His father was a Serbian diplomat. In 1940 Bogdan went to London when his father moved to the Yugoslav embassy there. Eventually Bogdan came to New York in 1946. He enrolled at City College New York and soon joined the Young People’s Socialist League, YPSL, the youth group of the Socialist Party. Maurice Isserman, in his biography of Michael Harrington, who by the 1960s and 70s would become the USA’s best-known socialist, describes how Bogdan Denitch recruited Harrington to the YPSL. He met Harrington, then a devout Catholic, a member of the...

How to wipe out left-anti-Semitism

Jackie Walker, a woman of mixed African-Jewish background, and vice-chair of the Labour Party's left-wing group, Momentum, has been suspended by the Labour Party on grounds of anti-semitism. The charge of anti-semitism is based on a fragment of a Facebook conversation from some months ago. Her anti-semitism consisted in the statement that Africa too had experienced a Holocaust. The Labour Party now has a regime of capricious and arbitrary instant exclusions. This paper and its predecessor Socialist Organiser have argued that anti-semitism in the labour movement needs to be rooted out. But this...

Letter: No socialist content in Hungary

Gemma Short is quite right in her comments on Steve Bloom’s review of The Two Trotskyisms ( Solidarity 402): the nationalisations in Eastern Europe had no socialist content. I lived in Hungary from 1991 to 2000 and in this time became acquainted with the giant Ózd steelworks complex near the border with Slovakia. I hasten to add that I never, unfortunately, visited the steelworks, but I knew a documentary filmmaker, Tamás Almási, who made a series of films on the workers there and their experience of going through privatisation and finally the closure of the works. In all Almási made eight...

Standing against counter-revolution

The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism. The fate of the Russian Revolution, Volume 2. Edited and with an introduction by Sean Matgamna. London, UK: Workers’ Liberty, 2015. 790 pages. $30 paperback. Order here . This review first appeared in Against the Current #182 ON JULY 23, 1939 the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed an agreement that would be known to history as the infamous Stalin-Hitler Pact. A week later, pursuant to secret clauses in the deal, German troops smashed into Poland and on September 17 the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The impact on global...

Returning to the sources

Andrew Coates reviews The Two Trotskyisms confront Stalinism, edited by Sean Matgamna. Part one of the review was printed in Solidarity 394. The debates in this volume are about the armed foreign policy of the USSR. But behind this is the issue of the nature of that regime. Some might consider that arguments about the character of the former Soviet Union — whether it was a workers’ state, a degenerated workers’ state, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist, a “new class society” — resemble discussion on the Trinity. If some Trotskyists have sunk into religious veneration for Trotsky a...

"An antidote to Stalinist thinking": in conversation with Herman Benson

Herman Benson was a founding member, along with Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, and others, of the Workers Party, which broke from the US Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the British group of the same name) in 1940 following a debate about how to understand the Stalinist state in Russia. While the SWP majority maintained that the USSR remained some kind of "workers' state", however "deformed" or "degenerated", a large minority, which went on to become the Workers Party, argued that it was a deeply oppressive society based on a new form of class exploitation. They developed their ideas into...

This book is really about now

Ed Strauss reviews The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism The book is an amazing textbook. As a young student in the 1950s, I was reading some of the documents which are in the collection, I was coming in at the tail-end of some of these debates; but we had nothing like this. We could read a few older documents, but we didn’t have much published in book form. I was in the Young Socialist League [YSL], the youth group linked to the Independent Socialist League of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, in 1954-1958. By that time, the ISL had pretty much given up on recruiting, but the YSL was still...

Orthodox Trotskyism reshaped Trotsky's ideas

Paul Le Blanc’s review of The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 2 ( Solidarity 388) is a thoughtful and detailed piece. Le Blanc defends The Two Trotskyisms against some on the left who deride the book as pointless obsessing over long-ago spats. He is right to do it: such complaints remind one of Homer Simpson, who, warned that he’s late for English class, sneers “Pff! English, who needs that? I’m never going to England!” The truth is that the two Fate of the Russian Revolution books are about the Trotskyist movement as it is right now. They are not just...

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