Socialism and the Third Camp

Submitted by Zac Muddle on 21 November, 2019 - 3:54 Author: Julius Jacobson
Julius and Phyllis Jacobson

Julius Jacobson (1922-2003) was a long-standing figure in the Third Camp socialist tradition. He followed Max Shachtman and Hal Draper out of the Socialist Workers' Party and helped found the Workers Party with them in 1940. Together with his wife Phyllis Jacobson, Julius founded the independent socialist journal New Politics in 1961, serving as its editor for more than 40 years. After going into dormancy in 1978, New Politics was revived for its second (and ongoing) run in 1986. This article by Jacobson, "Socialism and the Third Camp", is from the first volume of the resurrected New Politics. It is valuable because, in appreciable detail, Jacobson restates and reaffirms the Third Camp stance of "Neither Washington nor Moscow!" at a point in history when the world was witnessing the developments in the Eastern Bloc that would soon culminate in its collapse. Over the course of his argument, Jacobson defends the Third Camp perspective from three "ghosts" of former comrades on the socialist left: one who has become a "neo-conservative ideologue", one who now services a "conservative labor bureaucracy", and one who has become a welfarist liberal.

Read the article as a PDF here.

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