Third Camp Marxism

The profoundest contribution the average bourgeois thinker has made to analyzing the struggle between the principal currents in the modern revolutionary movement which have clashed most violently in the Soviet republic has been that it is a struggle between Trotsky and Stalin “for power”. Particularly is this the conception of the petty bourgeois and his intellectual offspring, that hopeless section of modern society which constantly seeks salvation from the hammer and anvil by the intervention of some great man who has no relation to the classes and stands above them.

Stalin is the greatest man of all times, of all epochs and peoples.—Sergei Kirov

Stalin proves himself a ‘great man’ in the grand style… Stalin is Lenin’s heir. Stalinism is Communism.—James Burnham

Having recently completed a witch-hunting series of articles 'exposing' various left-wing organisations as being responsible for industrial strife in Britain, the News of the World on December 10th [1971] launched a new series. This time the message is that the real cause of the "trouble" in Northern Ireland is not that the Catholics are being repressed. No, it's all produced by the intervention of... yes, Russian and Fast European agents!

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.]