Third Camp Marxism

DURING THE two decades of the great labour militancy, roughly from the mid-'50s to the mid-'70s, the most important revolutionary socialist organisation in Britain was the Socialist Labour League.

In Solidarity 242 (18 April 2012), we began publishing a series of recollections and reflections from activists who had been involved with the “third camp” left in the United States — those “unorthodox” Trotskyists who believed that the Soviet Union was not a “workers’ state” (albeit a “degenerated” one), but an exploitative form of class rule to be as opposed as much as capitalism. They came to be organised under the slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.”

Early socialist debates about the United States of Europe help us orientate in today’s conditions.

Origins

The origins of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty: the thirteen questions
(This is an expanded version of the text in Workers Liberty 3/26)

The political tendency now organised as AWL originates from Workers’ Fight, a small Trotskyist group formed in 1966. Why, and how?

Workers’ Fight came into existence as a distinct tendency in response to two linked “crises”.

The ideas in this article and those also linked to here are expanded on in the Workers' Liberty book 'The Left in Disarray' which can be purchased here.

Click here to download parts 1 to 5 as pdf.

Or read online:

[This is a copy edited and slightly expanded version of a text published in Solidarity.]

1 Gangster rap! Lenin and Joe Columbo

2 Tory social philosophy: Thatcher advises Cameron and Clegg (verse)

3 The Lies Against Socialism Answered

4 And Shakespeare, which group was he in?

5 James Connolly: An Spailpin Fanach

6 The 1984-5 Miners' Strike and the Fate of the Pet Pig

7 Who Says Cannibalising People Is Wrong?

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