The Third Camp tradition

The two Trotskyisms during World War 2: Workers' Liberty 3/48

Tracing the development of "two Trotskyisms" through from the 1940 split to the 1944 polemic between Harry Braverman and Max Shachtman. Click here to download as pdf or read online . The pagination in the pdf is correct, but, by a mishap, the pages of the printed version of Workers' Liberty 3/48, as a pull-out in Solidarity 347, are in the wrong order. Our apologies to readers. Check the printed version with the pdf, or follow this guide: Page 2 has been mistakenly swapped with page 6, and page 7 with page 11. The printed pull-out can be navigated as follows: 1: the first page, with the...

Shoulder to shoulder for the strike

"Bevan Boys" during the Second World War In May 1944, four Trotskyists, Ann Keen, Heaton Lee, Roy Tearse, and Jock Haston, were jailed for “inciting and furthering” an illegal strike, after a prolonged press campaign, led by the Daily Mail and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker , against their efforts around an apprentices’ strike on Tyneside. This is Ann Keen’s speech for the court. Consistently throughout the trial the prosecution has attempted to separate me from my comrades. He has pictured me as a dupe of Lee and the others. I do not ask for any special consideration. The part I played in...

Ukraine and fetishising the anti-NATO call

Opposition to NATO has historically been a hallmark of the third camp political approach to the Cold War. Julius Jacobson ( Socialism and Thermonuclear War ), for instance, argued that NATO was pointless as a means of defending Europe from Soviet nuclear aggression. Quite the contrary: “(I)t makes the European continent an immediate nuclear target in the event of war.” That is, the NATO alliance was perceived as a tripwire to the expansion of otherwise containable conflicts and therefore existed “as a threat to the integrity of countries in and out of the Pact.” This was an extension of the...

More on our half-price book offer

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism : both large books for £10 post free. If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available. Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist...

The Third Camp in Theory and Practice: An Interview with Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison

Tom Harrison, back row, center; Joanne Landy, second row, right This interview was originally published in Left History . This version is reposted from New Politics , where it was republished in 2018. Joanne Landy died in 2017. See here for a brief obituary. Introduction Joanne Landy (1941–2017) and Thomas Harrison (1948–) became socialists as teenagers and have remained involved in the democratic left ever since. They were active in the student protest movement at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, where they met and became close friends and collaborators. During the 1970s...

Use the coming weeks to study

The coming weeks, as labour movement activity dwindles in the second half of December and in early January, are a good time to catch up on reading. Workers’ Liberty is running a half-price offer on all our older books, aiming to redress the backlog in circulation caused by the lack of in-person political meetings over the last two years. We also offer special deals if you buy a few books — for example, both The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1, and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism , for £10 post free. It’s an especially good time to read the longer books, more difficult to work...

Sam Farber, the Third Camp and Cuba

Repression in Cuba Samuel Farber has played an irreplaceable role in the third-camp Marxist tradition for more than six decades. Kent Worcester has conducted a fascinating interview with Farber about his political and intellectual history, now published in Left History journal (24, 1, Spring/Summer 2021). You can also read it as text, with photos and images, on the website of US socialist magazine Tempest here . Farber’s outstanding contribution has been his Marxist analysis of Cuban society, articulated in four books and countless articles. A simple rule should apply on the left: no socialist...

Debating internationalism in the Democratic Socialists of America

Dan La Botz is a US socialist active in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Solidarity . He is a co-editor of the independent socialist journal New Politics , and a supporter of the Internationalism from Below initiative. He spoke to Daniel Randall of Workers' Liberty about debates in and around the DSA, especially about what approach the organisation should take to international issues. What follows is an edited transcript. This interview was conducted prior to voting on resolutions at the DSA's recent convention. At that convention, a resolution broadly representing the “campist”...

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