The Third Camp tradition

The Revolution Betrayed

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 opened up a new epoch for humanity. What no other social upheaval before it had ever dared to hope for, the Russian Revolution proclaimed boldly and confidently. Not the great French revolution, not even the Paris Commune of 1871, not even the rehearsal of the Russian Revolution in 1905, dreamed that it was the immediate forerunner of international socialism. The Russian revolutionists of 1917, from their leaders down to the most obscure militant, did believe that they had only made the magnificent beginning, and that the flame they lighted would burn until it...

Joanne Landy

Joanne Landy, one of the last surviving representatives of a thin thread of living continuity between the Third Camp Trotskyists of the 1940s and politics today, died on 14 October in New York, aged 75. She was one of the early members of the Independent Socialist Club which was founded by Hal Draper in Berkeley, California, in 1964, to regroup the revolutionary socialist wing of the remnants within the Socialist Party USA of the old “Shachtmanite” Workers’ Party and Independent Socialist League. The ISC expanded rapidly into a US-wide organisation, and in 1969 renamed itself “International...

Remembering the Russian revolution

Less than three months after the victory of the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin remarked at a meeting that the soviet power of the Russian workers and peasants had already lasted longer than the Paris Commune of 1871 which lived for only 10 weeks. The statement was made with pride, but no doubt with some wonderment. It reflected the conditions, incredibly complicated and difficult, under which the Russian proletariat took power into its own hands. We live in an age when change is rapid, frequent and profound. The thirty-one years since the Russian Revolution have seen epochal changes. None is so...

Sam Bottone, 1926-2016

This obituary first appeared in the New York Times Socialist activist, intellectual, and labor organizer Sam Bottone, 90, died on December 30, 2016 in Portland, OR of multiple chronic illnesses. Sam is survived by his wife of 42 years, Toni Propotnik, and his daughters Lisa and Andrea Bottone of Manhattan and Staten Island, children of his first marriage to the former Elsie Yacubovich. Born in Brooklyn in 1926, Sam graduated from Brooklyn College and attended graduate programs at Columbia University, NYU, and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. Sam's undergraduate years were...

Learning from the three Ls

It was once a tradition for revolutionary socialists to mark every January by remembering the life and work of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In this 1949 article, the US socialist Hal Draper discusses the relevance of the socialism of “3Ls” for the German working class, then under the yoke of imperialist occupation, and for the American working class facing a war-mongering ruling class. We socialists are not hero worshippers. But we have our heroes. Socialists are not hero worshippers because the very essence of socialism — far deeper than demands for specific social reforms or...

What the Workers Party Stands For: Max Shachtman Testifies (1949)

Max Shachtman, national chairman of the Workers Party, before the Loyalty Board of the United States Department of Commerce, on January 14 1949. MAX SHACHTMAN was called as a witness, was duly sworn, and testified as follows: DIRECT EXAMINATION By Chairman Short: Q. Will you state your full name to the reporter? A. Max Shachtman. By Mr. Migdal: Q. Mr. Shachtman, will you identify yourself please, for the Board? A. I am National Chairman of the Workers Party. Q. Do you know T.? A. I met him this morning Q. Had you ever seen him before? A. No. Q. Had you ever heard his name before? A. No. Q. Do...

When we reassessed the Stalinist states

In 1988, the Socialist Organiser Alliance, a forerunner of Workers’ Liberty, at its annual conference, officially dropped the “degenerated and deformed workers’ states” description of the USSR and similar systems which we had inherited from “Orthodox Trotskyism”. It categorised these states as exploitative class systems not superior to capitalism. There was a lengthy discussion before and after the conference about more detailed descriptions. The debate encompassed discussion on a number of different theories as to the class nature of these states. Probably a majority thought that the USSR and...

Help us raise £20,000 to improve our website!

2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the political tendency which is now the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Over the years, this tendency has broken much new ground in socialist ideas, and rediscovered lost histories of the Marxist, Trotskyist tradition, especially that of the “other” American Trotskyists — the group of comrades around Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. Much of this “Third Camp” literature is available on our website. From Trotskyists newspapers of the 1940s and 50s, to older Marxist classics, to discussion articles on feminism, important national questions, religion...

From Shachtmanite Trotskyism to Anarchism: Exploring the Relationship of a Marxist Tendency to Anarchism

This article, by the anarchist writer Wayne Price, was published in the journal The Utopian . It explores the relationship between the “Third Camp” Trotskyist tradition, with which Workers' Liberty identifies, and anarchist politics. It is republished with the author's permission. Visit the website of The Utopian here . In recent years there has been an increase in articles, books, and special journal issues on the relationship between anarchism and Marxism. (For example, Pittman, Dale, & Holt 2015; Prichard & Worth 2016.) One difficulty with such discussions is that both “anarchism” and...

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