Third Camp politics in the 1960s-70s USA: Workers' Liberty 3/80

Andrew Stone Higgins is the editor of From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, published by Haymarket in March 2026. Andrew spoke to Daniel Randall from Workers' Liberty about the book.

1939-40: The US Trotskyist movement, the SWP (no relation to British SWP), which is then the strongest in the world and one of very few that would be able to operate with some freedom during World War 2, splits in a dispute over whether to back the USSR in its war against Finland (Nov 1939 to March 1940). The USSR “defencists” led by James P Cannon (and supported by Trotsky) expel the minority led by Max Shachtman. 1940, August: Trotsky killed by Stalinist assassin. Late 1940 to early 1950s: The minority, now organised as the Workers Party (WP), conclude that the USSR has become a new...

In his introduction to our book The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism, Sean Matgamna wrote: “The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, which had distant origins as ‘1953’, that is, sharply anti-Stalinist ‘Cannonites’, made our way to the Third Camp politics of the Heterodox Trotskyist tradition by our responses to successive political events, rather than by way of a sudden conversion. Then we revised our ideas about the history of the Trotskyist movement: we ‘went back to 1940’, to the parting of the ways of the two main Trotskyist currents [when Max Shachtman and the ‘Heterodox’ were expelled for...