Third camp

From the 1930s and beyond, Leon Trotsky and his American supporter James P. Cannon described the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state", the revolutionary gains of which should be defended against imperialist aggression despite the emergence of a gangster-like ruling stratum, the party bureaucracy. While defending the Russian revolution from outside aggression, Trotsky, Cannon and their followers at the same time urged an anti-bureaucratic political revolution against Stalinism to be conducted by the Soviet working class themselves.

Dissidents in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, witnessing the collaboration of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the invasion and the partition of Poland and the Soviet invasion of the Baltic states, argued that the Soviet Union had actually emerged as a new social formation, which was neither capitalist nor socialist. Adherents of that view, espoused most explicitly by Max Shachtman and closely following the writings of James Burnham and Bruno Rizzi, argued that the Soviet bureaucratic collectivist regime had in fact entered one of two great imperialist "camps" aiming to wage war to divide the world. The first of the imperialist camps, which Stalin and the Soviet Union were said to have joined as a directly participating ally, was headed by Nazi Germany and included most notably Fascist Italy. In that original analysis, the "second imperialist camp" was headed by England and France, actively supported by the United States.{{cite magazine |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1940/05/mayday.htm |title=Against Both War Camps — For the Camp of World Labor! |magazine=Labor Action |date=1 May 1940 |page=1 |first=Max |last=Shachtman |author-link=Max Shachtman |via=Marxists Internet Archive}}, and the May Day 1940 manifesto of the Workers Party, the political offshoot of the SWP established by Burnham, Shachtman and Martin Abern in April 1940.

Shachtman and his cothinkers argued for the establishment of a broad "third camp" to unite the workers and colonial peoples of the world in revolutionary struggle against the imperialism of the German-Soviet-Italian and the Anglo-American-French blocs. Shachtman concluded that the Soviet policy was one of imperialism and that the best result for the international working class would be the defeat of the Soviet Union in the course of its military incursions. Conversely, Trotsky argued that a defeat for the Soviet Union would strengthen capitalism and reduce the possibilities for political revolution.A series of sharply critical articles and letters from Trotsky's debates with Shachtman was published posthumously under the title In Defense of Marxism. Cannon's polemics against Burnham and Shachtman are contained in the book The Struggle for a Proletarian Party.

With the demise of fascism in World War II and the emergence of Soviet-controlled governments in Central and Eastern Europe, the "three camps" conception was modified. The leading imperialist camp was held to be that of the chief capitalist powers (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), with the Soviet Union consigned to a second imperialist camp.

Over time, Shachtman's aggressive calls for the defeat of official communist nations' expansionism (the second camp) drifted rightward into support for the capitalist nations (the first camp). That position has led orthodox Trotskyist groups to declare it reactionary. However, some supporters of the three camps analysis split with Shachtman and continued to develop their analyses of the changing world situation.

The Congress Socialist Party of India also adopted a third camp position, with the slogan "We want neither the rule of London or Berlin; nor the rule of Paris or Rome; nor that of Tokyo or Moscow" (September 1939).{{cite book |first=Sherman |last=Stanley |url=http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/judd/1940/04/india.htm |title=India and the Third Camp |date=April 1940 |via=Marxists Internet Archive}}

A third camp position is held today by the Workers Liberty groups,{{cite web |url=http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3186 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130416035251/http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3186 |archive-date=April 16, 2013 |title=Workers' Liberty and the "Third Camp" |website=Workers Liberty |url-status=dead}} New Politics{{cite journal |first=Alan |last=Johnson |url=https://archive.newpol.org/issue27/johnso27.htm |title=The Third Camp as History And a Living Legacy |journal=New Politics |volume=7 |number=3 |date=Summer 1999}} and by some in the multi-tendency Marxist organization Solidarity in the United States as well as some in the Democratic Socialists of America and the Socialist Party USA.

More recently, a movement by the Worker-Communist Party of Iran and its leaders such as Hamid Taqvaee and Maryam Namazie, together with groups including Left Worker-communist Party of Iraq, has emerged calling for a third camp opposing American militarism and Islamic terrorism.{{cite web |url=http://www.thirdcamp.com/indexe.php |title=Third camp}} However, this is unrelated to the Trotskyist third camp theory{{Citation needed|date=September 2011}} as neither organisation comes from a Trotskyist background.

{{cols}}

• Anti-Stalinist left
• Centrism
• Council communism
• Left communism
• Neoconservatism
• Non-Aligned Movement
• Shachtmanism
• Three Worlds Theory

{{colend}}

{{reflist}}

• {{Cite journal|first=Alan|last=Johnson|year=1999|title="Neither Washington Nor Moscow": The Third Camp as History And a Living Legacy|url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237661906|journal=New Politics|volume=7|issue=3|pages=135–165|issn=0028-6494}}
• {{cite book|first=John|last=Kelly|year=2018|title=Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0mJRDwAAQBAJ|publisher=Routledge|pages=26, 41, 85-90, 101, 226, 230, 236|isbn=978-1-138-94379-7|lccn=2017052868}}

• Max Shachtman. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1940/04/ussrwar.htm "The Soviet Union and the World War"].
• Leon Trotsky. [https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/04/finnish.htm "Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events"].
• Pierre Frank. [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/frank/1951/12/3rdcamp.htm "Under Pressure of the Coming War, Imperialism Beckons "Third Camp"].
• Tony Cliff. [http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1948/xx/burcoll.htm "Marxism and the theory of bureaucratic collectivism"].

Category:Trotskyism

Category:Marxist theory