Third Camp

[YugoslavSocialist]

Hello I'm new to RevLeft.
Just wondering is there any Third Camp supporters on this forum.

[Raúl Duke]

Could you explain to those of us who may be unfamiliar with this "Third Camp" you speak of?

Are you talking about the non-aligned movement? Tito?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

If by Third-Camp you mean Titoist than you will not find anyone who is still active. There used to be one comrade who sided with Titoism but he has since converted to Marxism-Leninism. However, you may find some older ones by scouring the Titoist usergroup...

http://www.revleft.com/vb/group.php?groupid=453

[Comrade Dracula]

From what I know, Third Camp refers to a theoretical branch of Trotskyism which views both Stalinism (or Marxism-Leninism, if such is your preference) and the various capitalist ideologies as equally reactionary and as such proclaims that the working class should organize into an independent "third camp".

The view was most famously espoused by Shachtman during WW2, who argued against supporting USSR, and Orthodox Trotskyists at the time rejected it as reactionary. Allegedly, Shachtman's fervent support for destruction of USSR et al., flirted closely with supporting the First Camp (aka the capitalist states).

The term was used predominantly during WW2, and has since the fall of USSR lost much of its meaning. As such, its usage here baffles me. I echo the speculation of previous users that YugoslavSocialist may well be referring to Titoism and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Edit: Since YugoslavSocialist seems to be a Trotskyist (from their set tendency), I'd assume they mean the original meaning.

In which case, I have to ask: How does Third Camp theory apply today and how does it differentiate itself from regular Trotskyism? Does it still argue for downfall of various states that proclaim themselves to be socialist (e.g. China, DPRK, Vietnam, etc.), and if so, by what means?

In any case, welcome to the forums, YugoslavSocialist!

[Ismail]

Adherents to the "Third Camp" more often than not went on defending the American invasion of Vietnam. I remember one Trot recalled a few of his "Third Camp" brethren who later worked at low levels in the Reagan administration. Ol' Shachtman had become a social-democrat by the end.

What's funny is that the Yugoslav position on the USSR changed quite dramatically. For a short time their politics really did seem akin to "Third Camp" stuff:

"The climax of the CPY's anti-Stalinism was reached at its Sixth Congress (1952), when the party changed its name to League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY), a symbolic return to Marx's League of Communists. In a report to the congress, Tito assailed the Soviet Union: the USSR was responsible for creating international tensions; it had transformed the once independent East Central European countries into 'mere colonies in the heart of Europe'; Stalin was pushing North Korea into 'an aggressive war'; it was imperative to revise the 'imperialist division' of Poland and Germany, which 'favored' the Soviet Union; in the USSR, 'the condition of workers was worse than in even the most reactionary capitalist country'; Stalin's extermination of non-Russian nations 'would make Hitler envious.' Every speaker at the congress competed with Tito in hurling hostile epithets at Stalin. Kardelj accused the USSR of imperialist ambitions on a worldwide scale and stated that the 'Soviet government undoubtedly bears the largest part of responsibility for the condition of the permanent cold war.' He scorned 'various naive pacifists in the West,' advocated the unification of Germany on the basis of free elections in both parts of the country, and hinted that Yugoslavia might formally join an anti-Soviet defense pact."
(Milorad M. Drachkovitch (ed). East Central Europe: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Sanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. 1982. p. 355.)

After 1956 all that changed, Yugoslavia simply referred to the USSR as being under "bureaucratic socialism" while it otherwise commended Khrushchev and his successors for their fight against the "Stalin cult," and the Soviet revisionists likewise praised Yugoslavia as a "fraternal socialist country." Yugoslavia remained linked mainly with the West, but it found common aims with the Soviet revisionists in their joint friendship with Nasser, the Indian leaders, and other "socialists."

It somewhat reminds me of the line China under Mao took after 1972, that US imperialism had been weakened through anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggles, and that Soviet social-imperialism was the "main danger" facing the international proletariat whereas US imperialism had become "defensive." Pro-Chinese parties then proceeded to call for strengthening the US arms industry, opposing "useful idiots" and "appeasers" (i.e. bourgeois politicians who sought reconciliation with Soviet social-imperialism), etc.

The main difference, of course, being that the "Third Campists" were attacking the Marxist-Leninist course of the USSR under Stalin, going on about "Stalinist totalitarianism" and whatnot from that time onwards, whereas the Chinese, under the cover of opposing Soviet social-imperialism which had come into being with the restoration of capitalism in that country, were trying to ally with US imperialism under the cover of "anti-revisionist" rhetoric. The "Third Campists" and adherents to the Chinese line both slid towards the path of open anti-communism.

[Lucretia]

Adherents to the "Third Camp" more often than not went on defending the American invasion of Vietnam.

This is quite interesting, since the whole idea behind the third camp is not supporting either Stalinist or western bourgeois governments, especially when they are imperialistically invading other countries.

In other words I think you're full of it here.

[Ismail]

This is quite interesting, since the whole idea behind the third camp is not supporting either Stalinist or western bourgeois governments, especially when they are imperialistically invading other countries.You can talk about ideas all you'd like, since that's all you have. What matters is what logically (and which did in fact) come from such ideas in practice. The pro-Chinese parties claimed they weren't supporting US imperialism either and were merely making a "Leninist" analysis of global imperialism.

The fact is that Shachtman, the major figure of the "Third Camp," became an anti-communist and a number of his followers went on to "critically" support US imperialism. Just as the Chinese first talked of how the world was divided into three camps to justify the PRC's right-wing foreign policy, then eventually went on to openly declare that the USA was an integral part of the "United Front" against Soviet social-imperialism. The "Third Camp" and the "Three Worlds Theory" both led to anti-communism in practice.

One Trot relates (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1995/xx/shachtman.html):

Whatever the sociological insights the theory of bureaucratic collectivism may have given, it was something of a poisoned chalice for Shachtman and his co-thinkers. The brave slogan ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism’ eventually gave way to Washington before Moscow at all times, and International Socialism nowhere. In the bitter dregs of his days, he ended up supporting the viciously right wing Democratic Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a cold warrior of the nuclear persuasion.

It was a long day’s journey into night: from opposing Walter Reuther in the UAW to supporting him; from principled opposition to Social Democracy to complete assimilation into its bosom; from unremitting struggle against the labour fakirs to collaboration with George Meany and Jay Lovestone. And so on to solidarity with the swine who mounted the Bay of Pigs invasion. The anti-Vietnam War movement found Shachtman on the other side, the only man who was able to see a nascent bureaucratic collectivist in the underfed form of a chap in a lampshade hat and a pair of pyjamas.

[YugoslavSocialist]

Could you explain to those of us who may be unfamiliar with this "Third Camp" you speak of?

Are you talking about the non-aligned movement? Tito?
The third camp, also known as third camp socialism or third camp Trotskyism, is a branch of socialism which aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism (central planning and State Socialism)

[Lucretia]

You can talk about ideas all you'd like, since that's all you have. What matters is what logically (and which did in fact) come from such ideas in practice. The pro-Chinese parties claimed they weren't supporting US imperialism either and were merely making a "Leninist" analysis of global imperialism.

The fact is that Shachtman, the major figure of the "Third Camp," became an anti-communist and a number of his followers went on to "critically" support US imperialism. Just as the Chinese first talked of how the world was divided into three camps to justify the PRC's right-wing foreign policy, then eventually went on to openly declare that the USA was an integral part of the "United Front" against Soviet social-imperialism. The "Third Camp" and the "Three Worlds Theory" both led to anti-communism in practice.

One Trot relates (http://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1995/xx/shachtman.html):

I think it is very important for comrades to see what's going on in this thread. All this smoke being blown can be reduced to three simple facts.

1) Ismail claimed that "Adherents to the 'Third Camp' more often than not went on defending the American invasion of Vietnam."

2) I pointed out that the logic of Third Camp politics is not to take sides in an inter-imperialist conflict, while siding militarily with states that are attacked by imperialist states. In either case the position militates against siding with the US government during the Vietnam War.

3) Ismail attempted to refute this point, and presumably buttress his point about the majority of Third Campists supposedly rallying behind the US government during the Vietnam war, by citing literally ONE instance (Max Schachtman) of this happening.

Draw your own conclusions, folks.

[Ismail]

I think it is very important for comrades to see what's going on in this thread. All this smoke being blown can be reduced to three simple facts.

1) Ismail claimed that "Adherents to the 'Third Camp' more often than not went on defending the American invasion of Vietnam."

2) I pointed out that the logic of Third Camp politics is not to take sides in an inter-imperialist conflict, while siding militarily with states that are attacked by imperialist states. In either case the position militates against siding with the US government during the Vietnam War.

3) Ismail attempted to refute this point, and presumably buttress his point about the majority of Third Campists supposedly rallying behind the US government during the Vietnam war, by citing literally ONE instance (Max Schachtman) of this happening.

Draw your own conclusions, folks.What's actually occurring here is you defending ideas rather than their practice. The "logic of Third Camp politics" leads to the defense of US imperialism. Openly it does not do this, of course, since what follows from revisionism and opportunism tends to look a whole lot less "principled" than what was first pursued. Much as Gorbachev's calls for a "humane," "democratic socialism" against "Stalinism" (i.e. the Brezhnevite faction of the CPSU) logically led to the establishment of undisguised "free market" capitalism, waging a battle against "Stalinist totalitarianism" without even pretending to give "critical support" to the USSR under Stalin doubtlessly leads, as it did with the very founder of the "Third Camp" theory, into the swamp of anti-communism.

I cited "literally ONE instance" because I was unaware I had to cite many. I figured it was fairly obvious that Schachtman and Co., who didn't exactly lead some massive movement to begin with, went over to the side of open reaction. It's up to you to provide evidence to the contrary. It should also be reasonably obvious that Shachtman was alive when the Vietnam War was going on and that saying "Shachtman supported US imperialism" doesn't imply he went to the Himalayan mountains and proclaimed this in isolation from the world and his followers.

As another source notes (http://www.prisonplanet.com/trotskys_ghost_wandering_the_white_house.htm):

Yet as the Cold War wore on, Shachtman became increasingly convinced Soviet Communism was "the greater and more dangerous" enemy. "There was a way on the third camp left that anti-Stalinism was so deeply ingrained that it obscured everything else," says Christopher Phelps, whose introduction to the new book Race and Revolution details the Trotskyist debate on racial politics. Phelps is an eloquent advocate for the position that the best portion of Shachtman's legacy still belongs to the left.

By the early 1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the strongly anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson. Shachtman had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to the Trotskyism; their mentor was Albert Wohlstetter, a defence intellectual who had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s.

Shachtman died in 1972, but his followers rose in the ranks of the labour movement and government bureaucracy. Because of their long battles against Stalinism, Shachtmanites were perfect recruits for the renewed struggle against Soviet communism that started up again after the Vietnam War. Throughout the 1970s, intellectuals forged by the Shachtman tradition filled the pages of neo-conservative publications.Edit: Also, just to add, "the logic of Third Camp politics is not to take sides in an inter-imperialist conflict, while siding militarily with states that are attacked by imperialist states" sounds amazingly like the Marxist-Leninist (and, I suppose, Trotskyist) view on inter-imperialist war and on national liberation struggles! So much so, in fact, that it appears it is not what the essence of Third Campism is! Try again.

[Raúl Duke]

literally ONE instance (Max Schachtman) of this happening.

Well, are their other Trotskyists personas/groups who were part of the "third camp" independent from Max Schachtman and did not follow a similar road?

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

I think it is very important for comrades to see what's going on in this thread. All this smoke being blown can be reduced to three simple facts.

1) Ismail claimed that "Adherents to the 'Third Camp' more often than not went on defending the American invasion of Vietnam."

2) I pointed out that the logic of Third Camp politics is not to take sides in an inter-imperialist conflict, while siding militarily with states that are attacked by imperialist states. In either case the position militates against siding with the US government during the Vietnam War.

3) Ismail attempted to refute this point, and presumably buttress his point about the majority of Third Campists supposedly rallying behind the US government during the Vietnam war, by citing literally ONE instance (Max Schachtman) of this happening.

Draw your own conclusions, folks.
Well, Shachtman's organization also disintegrated in social democracy in the US. Some of his adherents did go on to become Trotskyists. A few others, I think continued with BC -- Hal Draper, maybe?

But here's the real shit. The theory of BC said "a pox on both your houses." But if there is no real difference between capitalism and BC in terms one being more historically progressive, then it is an easy slide to supporting western imperialism. After all, the workers in the US had more political freedoms and a higher standard of living than those in the USSR (or China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). That is the road that Shachtman followed. Albeit he meandered down it. After the split with the SWP, this was predicted by Trotsky and the Majority, but it did take a rather long time.

To the extent that program generates theory, this was a theory to justify abandonment of military defense of the USSR when it became unpopular among the rad/lib intelligentsia in the US.

[ВАЛТЕР]

Dobro nam dosao.

Welcome to the forum. I don't think we have any self-proclaimed Third Campers here.

[Lucretia]

What's actually occurring here is you defending ideas rather than their practice. The "logic of Third Camp politics" leads to the defense of US imperialism. Openly it does not do this, of course, since what follows from revisionism and opportunism tends to look a whole lot less "principled" than what was first pursued. Much as Gorbachev's calls for a "humane," "democratic socialism" against "Stalinism" (i.e. the Brezhnevite faction of the CPSU) logically led to the establishment of undisguised "free market" capitalism, waging a battle against "Stalinist totalitarianism" without even pretending to give "critical support" to the USSR under Stalin doubtlessly leads, as it did with the very founder of the "Third Camp" theory, into the swamp of anti-communism.

I cited "literally ONE instance" because I was unaware I had to cite many. I figured it was fairly obvious that Schachtman and Co., who didn't exactly lead some massive movement to begin with, went over to the side of open reaction. It's up to you to provide evidence to the contrary. It should also be reasonably obvious that Shachtman was alive when the Vietnam War was going on and that saying "Shachtman supported US imperialism" doesn't imply he went to the Himalayan mountains and proclaimed this in isolation from the world and his followers.

As another source notes (http://www.prisonplanet.com/trotskys_ghost_wandering_the_white_house.htm):
Edit: Also, just to add, "the logic of Third Camp politics is not to take sides in an inter-imperialist conflict, while siding militarily with states that are attacked by imperialist states" sounds amazingly like the Marxist-Leninist (and, I suppose, Trotskyist) view on inter-imperialist war and on national liberation struggles! So much so, in fact, that it appears it is not what the essence of Third Campism is! Try again.

You keep saying you want to talk about ideas put into practice, yet you are still only able to cite a single example of a third-camp Trotskyist siding with the US in the Vietnam War. That's a far cry from your hyperbolic and certainly false statement that the majority of third-camp Trotskyists were cheering the USA on. Now, instead of simply admitting your claim was bogus, you're citing a document that talks about -- wait for it -- a SECOND person who started off as a "Trotskyist" (note that it doesn't mention that Schwartz was a member of a third-camp group) then gravitated toward neo-conservatism.

All of this is a far cry from the kind of evidence you would need to substantiate your gossipy and slanderous claim about majority third-camp support for US imperialism in Vietnam.

[Lucretia]

Well, Shachtman's organization also disintegrated in social democracy in the US. Some of his adherents did go on to become Trotskyists. A few others, I think continued with BC -- Hal Draper, maybe?

But here's the real shit. The theory of BC said "a pox on both your houses." But if there is no real difference between capitalism and BC in terms one being more historically progressive, then it is an easy slide to supporting western imperialism. After all, the workers in the US had more political freedoms and a higher standard of living than those in the USSR (or China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc.). That is the road that Shachtman followed. Albeit he meandered down it. After the split with the SWP, this was predicted by Trotsky and the Majority, but it did take a rather long time.

To the extent that program generates theory, this was a theory to justify abandonment of military defense of the USSR when it became unpopular among the rad/lib intelligentsia in the US.

Actually, no, it's not an easy slide to go from viewing both the USSR and USA as capitalist societies dominated by an exploitative ruling class to cheering on US imperialism. An ABC of Trotskyism (including third-camp Trotskyism) is that the presence of cf more progressive characteristics in one capitalist society vis-a-vis another (e.g., a proletarian property form) does NOT justify taking the side of one capitalist state over another. Trotskyists do not support states premised on class exploitation. Even if one provides universal healthcare and the other doesn't, or one has old-age pension and another one doesn't. To do so would be to violate the principle of independence of the working class just as much as, say, voting for Ralph Nader and the Green Party would.

Now, you might be upset with people who identify the Stalinist state as a capitalist state, and you might disagree with it strongly (in fact, I know you do). It *is* a debatable point, however, and it should be debated in a principled way. Pretending that there is some internal logic to third-camp analysis that drives people into the throes of the state department is just, as I said above about Ismail's nonsense, gossipy slander. I know from previous exchanges with you that you believe that the problem isn't necessarily with the internal logic with third-camp politics, but rather with motivations activists have for adopting it -- the desire to appease the bourgeoisie -- which then manifests itself further in giving full-throated support for US imperialism. But now it seems you want to revert back to saying the problem is with the idea itself, rather than how it might be used or people's external motivations for adopting it.

This is simply and plainly false, and ignores the fact that some people might adopt accurate theories for bad reasons. Just as people might adopt inaccurate theories for good reasons.

[Ismail]

All of this is a far cry from the kind of evidence you would need to substantiate your gossipy and slanderous claim about majority third-camp support for US imperialism in Vietnam.You're free to point out any notable "Third Campers" outside of Shachtman and his followers, of course.


yet you are still only able to cite a single example of a third-camp Trotskyist siding with the US in the Vietnam War.First, this is no different from Maoists playing down the fact that ol' Mao himself originated the "theory of the three worlds." If the founder of "Third Campism" is able to turn to the most reactionary strata of social-democracy on the basis of this own theory then, although that itself is not fully sufficient to condemn it, it's a pretty good indication that something is wrong with the theory.

Second, the article clearly states:

Shachtman had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties with hard-nosed Cold War liberals...I've asked you to provide evidence that the majority of Shachtmanites broke with their master. I know "left-wing" Shachtmanites exist here and there, just as many Maoists (today no doubt the vast majority) opposed Mao's "Three Worlds Theory." Faced with an open break with Marxist verbiage and superficial commitment to its doctrines, they (and especially those who picked up "Third Campism" or Maoism after the fact) realized that their ideology was nonviable otherwise, so they pretended to disconnect theory from practice, as if the "Third Camp" ideology and Maoism did not lead to their respective ends.

[Lucretia]

You're free to point out any notable "Third Campers" outside of Shachtman and his followers, of course.

First, this is no different from Maoists playing down the fact that ol' Mao himself originated the "theory of the three worlds." If the founder of "Third Campism" is able to turn to the most reactionary strata of social-democracy on the basis of this own theory then, although that itself is not fully sufficient to condemn it, it's a pretty good indication that something is wrong with the theory.

Second, the article clearly states:
I've asked you to provide evidence that the majority of Shachtmanites broke with their master. I know "left-wing" Shachtmanites exist here and there, just as many Maoists (today no doubt the vast majority) opposed Mao's "Three Worlds Theory." Faced with an open break with Marxist verbiage and superficial commitment to its doctrines, they (and especially those who picked up "Third Campism" or Maoism after the fact) realized that their ideology was nonviable otherwise, so they pretended to disconnect theory from practice, as if the "Third Camp" ideology and Maoism did not lead to their respective ends.


So in other words, no, you don't have any evidence besides your flapping gums to substantiate your claim that the majority of third-camp Trotskyists supported the US in Vietnam. Instead, you're trying one of the oldest and sleaziest debate tricks in the book, and are trying to impose upon me the burden of disproving your claim -- which you've provided no compelling evidence to substantiate in the first place! What a piece of work!

Let's be perfectly clear for all the comrades reading this thread, Ismail, you have no evidence that the majority of third-camp Trotskyists supported the US in Vietnam, so when you made that claim, you were speculating in a way that was slanderous.

Since you have supported regimes -- like Stalinist Russia -- that have actively crushed workers' uprisings at every opportunity, I suppose you might not take umbrage at the suggestion that you supported a regime burning and pillaging a third-world country. But this "third-camp" Trotskyist certainly does.

(And by the way, Schachtman had a peculiar theory of the USSR as "bureaucratic collectivist," a theory that led him to believe that capitalism and what existed in the Soviet Union were qualitatively different types of exploitative class societies. His theory, which is far more likely to "slide" into pro-US chauvinism, is not representative of all third-camp theories. In fact the majority posit the USSR as capitalist.)

[Ismail]

(And by the way, Schachtman had a peculiar theory of the USSR as "bureaucratic collectivist," a theory that led him to believe that capitalism and what existed in the Soviet Union were qualitatively different types of exploitative class societies. His theory, which is far more likely to "slide" into pro-US chauvinism, is not representative of all third-camp theories. In fact the majority posit the USSR as capitalist.)Let's hear about these other "Third Campers" then, since the term almost always refers to Shachtman and Co. Are you going to bring out some 5-member study circle as evidence of some other, uncorrupted (because it does nothing) "Third Camp" tendency?

As for the rest of your post, you're just repeating what you said earlier, and which I've already provided answers for.

[Lucretia]

Let's hear about these other "Third Campers" then, since the term almost always refers to Shachtman and Co. Are you going to bring out some 5-member study circle as evidence of some other, uncorrupted (because it does nothing) "Third Camp" tendency?

As for the rest of your post, you're just repeating what you said earlier, and which I've already provided answers for.

You haven't provided any answers, Ismail. At least not adequate ones. I asked you for evidence that the *majority* of third-campists supported the US invasion of Vietnam. Instead of providing evidence (which you don't have, apart from mentioning two people, only one of whom is a verifiable third-campist), you decided that the burden is on me to disprove a claim you've never provided evidence to prove in the first place. Yes, this is me repeating myself, which I'll continue to do until it sinks into your head that you're asking me to disprove a claim you've not proven. And that the burden is on YOU either to support your claim or to do the comradely thing and retract it.

And you aren't aware of any third-camp groups besides Shachtman's? How about the ISO, the LRP, and the RSL, among others?

The Stalinist school of falsification is calling you, Ismail. It wants you to enroll in remedial classes.

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

I thought Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, C.L.R. James and Tony Cliff; along with the whole ISO/SWP crowd all were a part of third- camp trotskyism; so it wasn´t just the pro- imperialist soc- dems such as Shachtman.

But Ismail, do please tell us what Hoxha had to say on the subject.:D

[ed miliband]

I thought Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, C.L.R. James and Tony Cliff; along with the whole ISO/SWP crowd all were a part of third- camp trotskyism; so it wasn´t just the pro- imperialist soc- dems such as Shachtman.

But Ismail, do please tell us what Hoxha had to say on the subject.

draper definitely was, dunayevskaya and james went from orthodox trotskyists to critical trotskyists, to rejecting trotskyism altogether. i don't think they were ever explicitly 'third campers'.

[Ismail]

I thought Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, C.L.R. James and Tony Cliff; along with the whole ISO/SWP crowd all were a part of third- camp trotskyism; so it wasn´t just the pro- imperialist soc- dems such as Shachtman.Dunayevskaya towards the end began to abandon the idea of the working-class having its own party, while James later abandoned Trotskyism in favor of bourgeois nationalist movements in Africa.

The ISO tails the Democrats so that's hardly encouraging either.


But Ismail, do please tell us what Hoxha had to say on the subject.I doubt Hoxha specifically cared about Trots who tailed Democrats or the likes of James and Dunayevskaya whose shrillness was their only distinguishing feature as polemicists of Trotskyism. What is important is the struggle "against all the lackeys of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, against Castroite, Khrushchevite, Trotskyite, 'three worlds', and other such views and practices." (Hoxha, Imperialism and the Revolution, 1979, p. 204.)

[ed miliband]

Dunayevskaya towards the end began to abandon the idea of the working-class having its own party, while James later abandoned Trotskyism in favor of bourgeois nationalist movements in Africa.


wrong on the part of james; his involvement with nationalist movements in africa coincided with his time as a trotskyist.

[Mass Grave Aesthetics]

Yeah, I´m not keen on Cliff/ISO/SWP either. That still leaves us Hal Draper and the LRP within 3rd- camp trotskyism though.

[Ismail]

wrong on the part of james; his involvement with nationalist movements in africa coincided with his time as a trotskyist.... and continued, of course, after he had left Trotskyism.

[ed miliband]

... and continued, of course, after he had left Trotskyism.

but there was far more to post-trotskyist james than african nationalism.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

What is the third-camp, if you don't mind my ignorance?

I'd always thought it was a term used by fash to describe their political affiliations.

[ed miliband]

What is the third-camp, if you don't mind my ignorance?

I'd always thought it was a term used by fash to describe their political affiliations.

that's third positionism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Position

[Red Banana]

socialism which aims to oppose both capitalism and Stalinism

There is no other type of socialism my friend, welcome to the forum.

[YugoslavSocialist]

that's third positionism:


Third Camp has NOTHING to do with Third Position type up Third Camp on wikipedia to know what it is.

[Ismail]

What's with the Yugoslav avatar and username if you're such a "Third Camper"? Yugoslavia tried to annex Albania and treated it as a neo-colony. Yugoslavia's gigantic debts to the West played a significant role in the breakup of the Federation into wars and genocide. Nor was Yugoslavia against "defense pacts" operating under US imperialism. He certainly wasn't a Trotskyist (although he and Fidel were seriously labeled as "unconscious Trotskyists" by some Trots.)

If it's just "Tito hated Stalin" and "there was workers' self-management" (i.e. workers learned how to operate as capitalists, the dream of various 1960's-80's social-democrats who not coincidentally praised Yugoslavia in this regard) then that's pretty shallow. Of course for a time many Trotskyists were infatuated with Yugosalvia, causing Trotsky's own wife, sympathetic to Shachtman, to criticize this.

[YugoslavSocialist]

What's with the Yugoslav avatar and username if you're such a "Third Camper"?

Yugoslavia and Tito was a Third Campist country.



Yugoslavia tried to annex Albania and treated it as a neo-colony. Yugoslavia's gigantic debts to the West played a significant role in the breakup of the Federation into wars and genocide. Nor was Yugoslavia against "defense pacts" operating under US imperialism. He certainly wasn't a Trotskyist (although he and Fidel were seriously labeled as "unconscious Trotskyists" by some Trots.)

The Yugoslav debt in 1988 was $14 billion. In 2010 the debt of all post Yugoslav republics combined was 184 billion. Second the Yugoslav debt was a lot less compared to other European countries.



If it's just "Tito hated Stalin" and "there was workers' self-management" (i.e. workers learned how to operate as capitalists, the dream of various 1960's-80's social-democrats who not coincidentally praised Yugoslavia in this regard) then that's pretty shallow.
How is that "shallow" and what is wrong with workers' self-management.

[Ismail]

Yugoslavia and Tito was a Third Campist country.No it wasn't, Tito was an opportunist. In the early 50's he sought to not join NATO while still having his country be "integrated" into US imperialism and its offensive system, hence the Balkan Pact of 1953 with Greece and Turkey. After 1956 he patched up relations with the USSR and over time would establish friendships with other criticizers of "dogmatism" such as Kim Il Sung and Ceaușescu, who likewise pursued opportunistic foreign policy courses.

As you are no doubt aware, he had some interesting conceptions of "socialism." For example:

"We Jugoslavs have discarded classic deviations between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism. History has erased such a distinction. Life now pushes toward the evolutionary progress... I think that even in the United States there is a tendency toward socialism. A big change began with your New Deal and your economy retains many of its features. For example, state intervention in the economy is much larger."
(Tito, quoted in Cyrus Leo Sulzberger. The Last of the Giants. New York: Macmillan. 1970. p. 270.)

"For, from its 7th congress of April 1958, the Yugoslav party held that Communists 'should no longer be concerned primarily with questions relating to the overthrow of capitalism', that it was possible to achieve socialism without a revolution and that Communist parties need not enjoy a power monopoly in pursuit of socialism."
(Geoffrey Stern. The Rise and Decline of International Communism. Aldershot: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. 1990. p. 177.)

Yugoslavia's right-wing foreign policy was consistent with its economics. In 1979 Yugoslavia joined the rest of the West (and the DPRK) in backing Pol Pot's "government in exile" at the United Nations. Pol Pot himself had praise for Tito and his "non-aligned" foreign policy.


The Yugoslav debt in 1988 was $14 billion. In 2010 the debt of all post Yugoslav republics combined was 184 billion. Second the Yugoslav debt was a lot less compared to other European countries.Whether it was a "lot less compared to other European countries" isn't the point. The fact is that it existed, was recognized by Tito himself as quite excessive, and the Yugoslav state responded through austerity measures (just as Ceaușescu's regime did, albeit the Yugoslavs handled it more competently.)

To quote an older post of mine:

By the 80's it was clearly recognized by everyone as a major contributing factor to ethnic tensions since the Republics were all scapegoating each other.

"In just the first 5 months of this year the deficit was 2 billion dollars. At the 11th Congress of the League of 'Communists' of Yugoslavia, Tito declared, 'the deficit with the Western market has become almost intolerable'. Nearly three months after this congress, he declared again in Slovenia, 'We have especially great difficulties in trade exchanges with the European Common Market member countries. There the imbalance to our disadvantage is very great and constantly increasing. We must talk with them very seriously about this. Many of them promise us that these things will be put in order, that imports from Yugoslavia will increase, but up to now we have had very little benefit from all this. Each is putting the blame on the other'. And the deficit in foreign trade, which Tito does not mention in this speech of his, exceeded 4 billion dollars in 1977. This is a catastrophe for Yugoslavia."
(Enver Hoxha. Yugoslav "Self-Administration": A Capitalist Theory and Practice. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1978. pp. 39-40.)

"The loans it has received amount to over 11 billion dollars. From the United States of America alone Yugoslavia has received over 7 billion dollars in credits."
(Ibid. pp. 25-26.)

Compare with Albania: "the new 1976 Constitution was enacted which prohibited foreign debt and foreign aid" and subsequently "Albania had little, if any foreign debt. This fact is astounding for any country but it is especially so for an East European country which traditionally has very high foreign debt. The Central Intelligence Agency's publication, The World Factbook, showed that in 1983, Albania imported goods worth $280 million but exported goods worth $290 million, which produced a trade surplus of $10 million. The 1984 state budget showed expenditures of $1.28 billion and revenues of $1.29 billion."
(James S. O'Donnell. A Coming of Age: Albania under Enver Hoxha. New York: Columbia University Press. 1999. p. 65, 88.)

Hoxha noted that Yugoslavia wasn't alone.

"The best evidence of the grave situation in the 'socialist community' and of the deep contradictions eroding it are the recent events in Poland, which have led that country to the brink of economic catastrophe and to major social and political upheavals. These are consequences of the line pursued by the Polish revisionist party for the re-establishment of capitalism, of the all-round subjugation of the country to the Soviet Union, of opening the doors to Western capital and the consequence of the large debts of Poland, which amount to the colossal sum of 27 billion dollars. Herein lies the source of the revolts of the working class and working people of Poland."
(Enver Hoxha. Selected Works Vol. VI. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1987. p. 392.)

Just a few more quotes from non-communist sources:

"Dr Spasoje Medenica, a Federal Minister, calculated that the internal debt (including the outstanding bills, the overruns of investment costs and the credit obligations to the National Bank arising from the devaluation of the dinar) amounted in 1983, to 2,000 billion dinars: a figure representing one half of Yugoslavia's national income. According to Branko Ćolanović, the Chairman of Jugobanka of Belgrade in 1983, 'Yugoslav enterprises are indebted to the banks and the banks to each other, and everyone is indebted to everyone else. We are excessively preoccupied with foreign currency and have neglected dinar insolvency.' In these circumstances the persistent IMF clamour for 'a positive rate of interest' i.e. one that is higher than the current rate of inflation, has predictably fallen on deaf ears.

To prevent a financial breakdown, massive rescue operations worth several billion dollars each had to be put together in 1983 and again in 1984, by international institutions, capitalist governments and commercial banks, under the sponsorship of the US administration, relieving the Yugoslavs of the immediate obligation to repay the capital."
(Nora Beloff. Tito's Flawed Legacy: Yugoslavia and the West since 1939. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 1986. p. 235.)

And a 1984 article:

"In actual reality, of course, self-management – after a long period of increasing suffocation by the bureaucratic cancer – has already effectively been terminated. Reflecting on the circumstances of its demise, it is instructive to note that it was the West rather than the East which dealt the final blow...

In a recent survey of Yugoslavia by the Financial Times, it was noted that 'Yugoslavia's protracted economic crisis, now in its fourth or fifth year, is beginning to change the political system.' ... as the commentaries in both The Times and the Financial Times noted last June, the country's acceptance of capitalist economic principles – exclusive reliance on monetary mechanisms – is seen as implying that 'the West is ahead ideologically' of the Soviet Union. This year, furthermore, Yugoslavia has agreed to move away from the barter trade with Comecon towards greater exchange with the West. Current agreements with the IMF and the World Bank show Yugoslavia's commitment to liberalize controls, which still cover over 80 per cent of all imports, to relax the terms under which foreign capital can invest, and to open (for the first time) the service sector to it as well. In return, the banks are promising patience and tolerance.

However, it is obvious that this addiction to foreign loans, which the LCY leadership has acquired over the past decade or two, will have to be paid for by the Yugoslav working class."
(Branka Magaš. The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980-92. London: Verso. 1993. p. 97.)

"The papers give – in all the Yugoslav languages – advance notice of new wage cuts and price increases. I read with interest that shipyard workers in Split will have their wages lowered by 40 per cent. Average wage cuts: 20-40 per cent. Average price increases: 30-100+ per cent. The prices of black bread, milk and cooking oil will be protected. The IMF has demanded a drastic cut in domestic consumption and the closure of loss-making enterprises. Hundreds of telexes arrive daily at the door of the Federal government in Belgrade protesting against wage cuts."
(Ibid. p. 131.)

Compare with Albania in 1982 as reported by the Communist Party of Ireland (Marxist-Leninist): "On June 5, the day before the opening of the 9th Congress of the Albanian Trade Unions, the Council of Ministers of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania announced reductions in the price of various mass commodity goods and of many public services. The prices of certain items, including meat, clothing, shoes, televisions, radios, washing machines, bicycles, prams, kitchen utensils, watches, etc., were reduced by amounts ranging from 7-35%, whilst the price of various public services fell by 8-15½%. There is no inflation in Socialist Albania. The only changes in prices which have taken place since liberation in 1944 are reductions in prices. This is in stark contrast to the serious and ever-growing burden on the people caused by the continually soaring prices in the capitalist and revisionist countries."
(Red Patriot. Vol. 6, No. 3/4. Aug. 1st 1982. p. 11.)


How is that "shallow" and what is wrong with workers' self-management.Nothings wrong with it if you're a social-democrat. As I said, social-democrats across Europe praised Yugoslavia. The LCY maintained fraternal relations with such militant parties as the Swedish Social-Democrats, for example, who had similar "profit sharing" and other schemes.

Likewise the Chinese revisionists praised Yugoslavia's system:

"We firmly believe that the heroic Yugoslav peoples will carry out Comrade Tito's behests, unite closely and forge victoriously ahead along the road of socialism, self-management and non-alignment, and that the friendship between our parties, countries and people will grow in strength and develop steadily."
(Hua Guofeng, quoted in Beijing Review No. 19 Vol. 21, p. 11.)

That same issue had as the banner of Hua's speech "Eternal Glory to Comrade Tito, a Great Marxist And an Outstanding Proletarian Revolutionary!" The Soviets after 1956 said similar things.

"A comparison of the policies of the Deng regime up to 1992 with those implemented by the Tito regime in Yugoslavia after 1948, when it broke with Stalin, shows many similarities. Indeed, the similarities are not coincidental. In 1981 the Deng regime began avidly studying Yugoslavia's bureaucratically-controlled system of atomised 'workers' self-management' and its post-1965 combination of state planning and markets. By 1984, the Deng regime had begun implementing a whole range of Titoist-style policies. These included allowing state industrial enterprises to keep up to 70% of their investment funds under their own control and to make their own decisions abut the bulk of what they would produce. Like the Tito regime, the Deng regime also allowed... the setting up of joint ventures between state-owned enterprises and foreign capitalist investors.

Limited forms of workers' participation in enterprise management were also introduced. These took two forms. The first was annual workers' congresses (which were to review enterprise budgets and production plans, welfare and bonus funds, safety issues, wage systems and management structures and make recommandations on these to the higher levels of economic administration). The second was the authorisation of the election of factory managers by work collectives. However, as under the Titoist system of 'workers' self-management' such elections were not by secret ballot... such elections could easily be controlled by the bureaucracy."
(Doug Lorimer. The Class Nature of the People's Republic of China. Chippendale: Resistance Books. 2004. pp. 19-20.)

As for communists, though...

"What self-respecting Communist country would admit the unpalatable truth of widespread unemployment—which is by definition impossible under a socialist system—or allow 300,000 of its experts and workers to seek employment abroad and even organize their temporary migration? With public ownership of the means of production, banks, commerce, etc. workers should not strike against themselves; but this allegedly socialist country reports some two hundred work stoppages per annum... can peasants not only own their land but privately import and operate tractors; can individuals run trading businesses, restaurants, and motels? Can a Communist country ever contemplate allowing foreign investments of risk capital and setting up partnership projects? Can a ruling Communist party admit that it has turned into a brake on social development instead of remaining the infallible vanguard and motor of advance toward full communism? Whatever the answers, all this has already happened or is happening in Yugoslavia."
(Paul Lendvai. Eagles and Cobwebs: Nationalism and Communism in the Balkans. New York: Doubleday & Company, INC. 1969. p. 52, 54.)

"But how to explain the case of the Union Bank of Belgrade, one of the largest banks in the country, which holds one-fifth of the aggressive savings deposits? ... the governor of the Central Bank explained that... his proposal that a system of special reserves be held in securities of the Central Bank had been rejected by the bankers for fear of a 'disguised centralization of funds.' Another amusing and highly revealing story was reported in the same period. From this small Balkan country no fewer than two hundred firms submitted competitive bids to build a factory for Libya. Only one-third of those enterprises would suffice to carry out such construction in Yugoslavia itself.

A few weeks later, many Yugoslav households and industries felt tangibly what J.K. Galbraith has called the 'natural inclination' of the modern corporation toward 'a brutal and anti-social egotism,' even under the conditions of socialist self-management. From one day to the next, the Electric Power Community, representing power companies in the different republics, cut off power for four hours, blaming shortages on the weather. An angry government hastened to make it clear, however, that the companies had given no advance warning and that for a considerable time the thermoelectric (coal using) plans had been working below optimal capacities. The power companies had deliberately kept the output of thermoelectric plants at low levels and overused hydroelectric power. Why? Simply because of prices and costs. Since water-generated electricity costs one-third to one-fifth as much to produce as thermal power, and since the rates charged to the customers are nevertheless the same, this meant a large—and unauthorized—profit for the electric companies. Furthermore the electric power system is not truly unified. As Borba, the leading Belgrade daily, pointedly remarked: 'Certain power communities behave in this field as if they owned it. Poor connections among the various regions, mutual bargaining and relations, which have nothing to do with real business relations, explain the curious fact that in some republics power supply has often been cut while at the same time there has been plenty of power in other republics.'"
(Ibid. pp. 89-90.)

"The real changover actually started in 1954, when state financing was abolished and investment funds were separated from the state budget. Starting with the meager concession of being able to elect or dismiss the workers' councils, by the end of the fifties the enterprises planned their production independently, marketed their products, bought raw materials, decided on employment, made their own arrangements with foreign firms, and enjoyed increasing freedom in investing their capital and distributing their profits. Though projected bold reforms in 1961 were temporarily frustrated by bureaucracy, the enterprises could henceforth divide their net earnings independently once they had paid their federal and local taxes.

Parallel reforms in 1953 to 1964 gradually introduced a working market mechanism with government control maintained through price and investment, fiscal and monetary policies. State administration was drastically reduced; the six republics and the communes (there are at present 517 such local administrative districts) were given increased powers in political and economic decisions. Ministries were abolished and only a few administrative state secretariats remain. Enterprises are no longer in any way subordinate to the central institutions; they form their own branch associations and set up business chambers to represent their interests.

The constitutional reform of 1953 established a bicameral basis in local self-government and also at republican and federal levels, and the new Constitution of 1963 made the entire system even more complicated, with a corporate structure resembling in some ways Mussolini's Italy.... [with] a so-called Council of Producers elected on a vocational basis in enterprises, thus excluding self-employed peasants and artisans..."
(Ibid. pp. 98-99.)

"In short, the cooperatives that are based on voluntary association in the form of contracts with peasants resemble the cooperative ventures one would expect to find in the Scandinavian countries and have hardly anything in common with the collective farms of the Soviet Union or elsewhere in Eastern Europe."
(Ibid. pp. 112-113.)

"It was evident from the beginning that if workers' councils were to have unlimited authority in each individual production unit the result would be a system of free competition differing from the nineteenth-century model only in the ascription of ownership to particular concerns; no economic planning would be possible. Accordingly, the state reserved to itself various basic functions concerning the investment rate and the distribution of the accumulation fund. The reforms of 1964-65 further reduced the powers of the state without abandoning the idea of planning; the state was to regulate the economy chiefly through the nationalized banking system.

... The gap between more and less economically developed parts of the country tended to grow wider instead of narrowing; pressures on wages threatened to push down the investment rate below what was socially desirable; competitive conditions led to the appearance of a class of rich industrial managers whose privileges excited popular discontent; the market and competition caused an increase in inflation and unemployment."
(Lezsek Kolakowski. [I]Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origin, Growth, and Dissolution Vol. III. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1978. pp. 475-476.)
It is no surprise that Yugoslav theorists expressed interest in people like Proudhon and other petty-bourgeois "socialists."

[ed miliband]

Third Camp has NOTHING to do with Third Position type up Third Camp on wikipedia to know what it is.

god almighty, i was answering somebody's question.

[Alfonso Capriles]

This is not a very decent discussion about Third Camp Socialism. I might not be able to give you comrades a good discussion, since it's been a while since I've read my literature (the 'busy with uni' excuse).

Hal Draper was an example of a communist who never capitulated to either imperialist system and criticised and fought the bureacratic state capitalist systems.

The USSR had no workers management or control in industry in the Stalinist period and Orthodox Trotskyists rest their logic on the weak claim that the bureaucracy represented the 'locum' of proletarian victory or was the 'gate keeper' of the gains of the October Revolution.

How can this in any sense be meaningful? What kind of socialist revolution needs a firm of bought-and-paid-for state functionaries to preserve the emancipation of the working class and the material gains this necessarily entails?

Also, the degeneration of the fourth international and it's subsequent maniacal and madly ambitious millenarianism is a caricature of socialism.

Consider this quote from Ernest Mandel:

January 1951: “The worldwide revolutionary upsurge continues to expand and deepen, even if between 1948 and 1950 it saw a temporary retreat in Europe: today it pulls all Asia in its wake, tomorrow it will cross the Atlantic and attack Capital in its last bastion. The development of this upsurge is the almost automatic product of the extreme decomposition of capitalism. It is in the absence of a sufficiently powerful revolutionary leadership that this revolutionary upsurge temporarily takes new and transitional forms, like those we have seen in Yugoslavia and we see now blooming in Asia.”



Total unscientific madness, I'm sure most of you would agree.


One core argument Orthodox Trotkyism uses is that the USSR bureaucracy was an extremely unstable freak of history, destined to be washed away in the tides of proletarian revolution. How could it be that it lasted from 1927-1991 - (64 years and conquered more than a third of the globe with its franchise regimes - not to mention its continued existence in many unfortunate countries today).

[Alfonso Capriles]

Discussion Bulletin: Stalinism and Third Camp Socialism


'The attempt of the bourgeoisie during its internecine conflict to oblige humanity to divide up into only two camps is motivated by a desire to prohibit the proletariat from having its own independent ideas. This method is as old as bourgeois society, or more exactly, as class society in general. No one is obliged to become a Marxist; no one is obliged to swear by Lenin's name. But the whole of the politics of these two titans of revolutionary thought was directed towards this, that the fetishism of two camps would give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends.' 1



Trotsky, 1938




In responding to *name removed* discussion bulletin “21st Century Stalinism and Anti-Stalinism” in which he heavily references Ernest Mandel, I realised that I could not adequately explain what I thought was wrong with Mandel without an exposition of the politics I was schooled in, “Third Camp Socialism”.



In outlining the latter body of work, I also hope to provide a necessary counterbalance to the largely positive view of James P Cannon that I gave in my bulletin on “The Fighting Propaganda Group”.




Third Camp Socialism is probably best known for its Cold War era slogan: “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism”.



Its origins are most commonly identified with Max Shachtman, one of Cannon’s first comrades in the foundation of US Trotskyism who became a leading writer of the Trotskyist movement. In 1940 Shachtman’s group were expelled from Cannon’s SWP, going on to form the Workers Party (renamed the Independent Socialist League in early 1949).



What kind of state was the USSR?



The WP/ISL produced some of the best writing in defence of the October Revolution, as well as critique of its betrayal. Shachtman wrote that “Political action... cannot rationally be appraised by itself, but only in terms of its alternative. The alternative to the ‘risky’ seizure of power by the working class under Bolshevik leadership was not the painless flowering of ‘democracy’ but the triumph of savage counter-revolution and the partitioning and colonialization of the country.” 2



The incredibly harsh conditions of the civil war forced the Bolsheviks to roll back many of the democratic gains of the revolution. Some degree of state repression was inevitable under such circumstances. The problem arose when revolutionary leaders made a virtue, and then a principle out of a temporary necessity. (Tomsky stated that “There is room for all kinds of parties in Russia, but only one of them in power and all the rest in prison”.) Shachtman concluded: “From the grandeur of the Russian Revolution, we have learned something: the superiority of proletarian democracy to bourgeois democracy. From the decay of the Russian Revolution we have learned something: that proletarian democracy cannot exist for long if it is confined to one faction or one party, even if it be the revolutionary party, that it must be shared equally by all other working-class and even - under favourable circumstances - bourgeois parties and groups, for without it the proletarian party and the proletarian democracy both die and with them die the prospects of socialism.”3




Lenin described Russia as “a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations” as early as December 1920.



The fledgling workers’ state inherited large elements of the Tsarist bureaucracy which continually threatened to overwhelm it. “It was therefore the rising of the state bureaucracy — the industrial managers, military specialists and state functionaries — fusing, combining, amalgamating and interpenetrating with the Stalin apparatus that had grown up within the party, which constituted the new ruling elite.”4


Trotsky changed his position on the USSR from “reform” to “political revolution” in 1936. In “The Revolution Betrayed”, Trotsky concluded: “Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity.” Yet in his theoretical framework, Trotsky insisted that the USSR was in extreme crisis - a radically unstable, momentary combination of incompatibles, soon to be swept away by either a victorious proletarian “political revolution” or a capitalist counterrevolution. By characterising Stalinism as a fleeting phenomenon, a moment of flux between its past and its future, Trotsky dissolved being into becoming.




For Trotsky, the fact that the Stalinised USSR had retained nationalised property justified the qualified “workers’ state” label. In the 1930s, Russia showed great industrial growth compared with a huge slump in the West. Trotsky attributed this to the inherent merits of nationalised property. And while he declared that the bureaucracy had all the vices of a ruling class, he still acknowledged the state hierarchy as the “locum” or the “gatekeeper of the social conquests of the proletarian revolution.”



In the end, Trotsky’s argument become circular - the nationalised property defined the class character of the state — and the state in turn gave the nationalised property its class character.
The only possible point of contact between Marxian socialist norms and USSR reality is the nationalised property forms. (fig. 1) Nationalised property eventually becomes fetishised in what can only be called “totalitarian economism”.



Trotsky, clinging to the description of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state” maintained that the bureaucracy was not a class, but a parasitic caste. In 1939 he posed the question as: “Might we not place ourselves in a ludicrous position if we affixed to the Bonapartist oligarchy the nomenclature of a new ruling class just a few years or even a few months prior to its inglorious downfall?”5



He therefore argued for a political, but not a social revolution against the bureaucracy, since the fundamental class relations did not need to change. Shachtman countered that such an analysis ignored the fundamental difference between a proletarian revolution, and revolutions made by every other class in history: ''Whatever the political form capitalist society may take, be it a constitutional monarchy, a democratic republic, a Bonapartist military or fascist dictatorship, the state has as its fundamental task the preservation and extension of capitalist property and of the social relations based upon it

When the proletariat takes state power, however, all this is altered in one fundamentally important respect. The proletariat wipes out the private ownership of the means of production and exchange by nationalizing them. They become state property. The proletariat does not own the property in the sense that the capitalists own theirs, or the feudal lords owned theirs or the slave-holders theirs. It "owns” social property only by virtue of the fact that the state, which is the repository of the means of production and exchange, is in its hands, is its state; that is, only because the state represents a dictatorship of the working class, because the state is the proletariat organized politically as the ruling class. That is the only way the proletariat can own the means of production and exchange.''6



Thus for Shachtman, political expropriation meant the end of working class rule in Russia. The WP/ISL developed a theory that Stalinsim was a new form of class society, neither capitalist nor proletarian, but “bureaucratic collectivist”. It represented a historical dead end, not any kind of advance from capitalism.



The two souls of Trotskyism



Trotsky’s “workers’ state” formula was put to the test at the outbreak of World War 2. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 pact aligned Moscow with the Berlin-Rome axis. The fascist and Stalinist powers would invade and partition Poland and Scandinavia between themselves. On 30 November the USSR invaded Finland.



Shachtman and his allies denounced the invasion as reactionary and imperialist. Trotsky replied with a long polemic “From a Scratch — to the Danger of Gangrene” (24 January 1940). “Charging that ‘the petty-bourgeois tendency reveals its confusion in its attempt to reduce the programme of the party to the small coin of “concrete” questions’, Trotsky excises Finnish national self-determination and the right to life of the Finnish labour movement from his programme in deference to Russian nationalised property — that is, he counterposes the supposed dead residue of the Russian workers’ revolution to the living workers’ movement of Finland.”7




Cannon stated in 1940: “Stalin could take the path of Napoleonic conquest not merely against small border states, but against the greatest imperialist powers, only on one condition: that the Soviet bureaucracy in reality represents a new triumphant class which is in harmony with its economic system and secure in its position at home, etc. That if such is really the case, we certainly must revise everything we have said on the subject of the bureaucracy up to now...”8 Yet when Stalin did go on to conquer a large part of Germany, Cannon made no such revision.




Millenarianism



Instead, the SWP became passionate upfront public defenders of the USSR, but only after the tide of the war had turned in Stalin’s favour at Stalingrad late in 1942. This marked the beginning of millenarianism in the neo-Trotskyist movement, which saw the advance of the Russian Army through Europe as bringing a deformed socialist revolution through the imposition of Stalinist nationalised property forms. They hailed “Trotsky’s Red Army” as a superhuman force of history that would maintain and make workers’ states without requiring any action by the workers.



After Tito declared the USSR to be “state capitalist” in July 1948, the Fourth International began a critical, but positive, reassessment of Stalinism. Its secretary, Michel Pablo, referring to the near universally held perspective of a Third World War, argued that the epoch of the “War-Revolution” had arrived, in which the bureaucracy replaced the proletariat as the prime agency of change. He denounced Trotskyists who fled to Hong Kong to escape Maoist persecution as “refugees from a revolution.”



As Mandel put it in January 1951: “The worldwide revolutionary upsurge continues to expand and deepen, even if between 1948 and 1950 it saw a temporary retreat in Europe: today it pulls all Asia in its wake, tomorrow it will cross the Atlantic and attack Capital in its last bastion. The development of this upsurge is the almost automatic product of the extreme decomposition of capitalism. It is in the absence of a sufficiently powerful revolutionary leadership that this revolutionary upsurge temporarily takes new and transitional forms, like those we have seen in Yugoslavia and we see now blooming in Asia.”9



The perspective amounted to an inversion of Marxism. The idea that the Stalinist states were “in transition to socialism”, following in the tracks of Stalin’s “socialism in one country”, turned elementary Marxism on its head. The “movement” was from the periphery to the centre. With capitalism presumed to be at its historical end the neo-Trotskyists seized on these “workers’ states” as being a “locum” for proletarian revolution. All that was previously considered essential in making such a revolution - from democracy to an organised, conscious revolutionary party - was dumped.


Natalia Sedova was unsparing in her denunciation of this turn when she broke with the Fourth International in 1951:



''In 1932 and 1933, the Stalinists, in order to justify their shameless capitulation to Hitlerism, declared that it would matter little if the Fascists came to power because socialism would come after and through the rule of Fascism.


Only dehumanized brutes without a shred of socialist thought or spirit could have argued this way. Now, notwithstanding the revolutionary aims which animate you, you maintain that the despotic Stalinist reaction which has triumphed in Eastern Europe is one of the roads through which socialism will eventually come.


This view marks an irredeemable break with the profoundest convictions always held by our movement and which I continue to share...
Most insupportable of all is the position on the war to which you have committed yourselves.


The third world war which threatens humanity confronts the revolutionary movement with the most difficult problems, the most complex situations, the gravest decisions. Our position can be taken only after the most earnest and freest discussions. But in the face of all the events of recent years, you continue to advocate, and to pledge the entire movement, to the defense of the Stalinist state. You are even now supporting the armies of Stalinism in the war which is being endured by the anguished Korean people. I cannot and will not follow you in this...


I know very well how often you repeat that you are criticizing Stalinism and fighting it. But the fact is that your criticism and your fight lost their value and can yield no results because they are determined by and subordinated to your position of defense of the Stalinist state. Whoever defends this regime of barbarous oppression, regardless of the motives, abandons the principles of socialism and internationalism.''10


Stalinism’s place in history



The Third Camp socialists were polemicised by the official Trotskyist movement as being “unmarxist” for the theory of bureaucratic collectivism, based on a reading of Marx that capitalism was the last antagonistic form of the social process of production. “In broad outlines,” wrote Marx in the Critique of Political Economy, “we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs n the progress of the economic formation of society.” - Note the caveat “in broad outlines”!



Shachtman answered:




''Marx knew that there were stages in the development of communities, peoples and nations which could not be fitted into any pattern of iron succession. Where, in such a pattern, would we fit those “highly developed but historically unripe forms of society in which the highest economic forms are to be found, such as cooperation, advanced division of labor, etc., and yet there is no money in existence, e.g. Peru,” about which Marx wrote? Where, in this iron pattern, would we fit the regime of Mehmet Ali, the viceroy of Egypt in the early nineteenth century who was the sole owner of the land and the sole “industrialist,” from whom all had to buy - a regime referred to in one of the works of Karl Kautsky? Where in this iron pattern would we fit any one of dozen of the antique Oriental regimes

which Marx himself placed in a special, exceptional category?...
By studying each of these evolutions separately, and then comparing them, one will easily find the key to these phenomena, but one will never succeed with the master-key of a historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical."11



Or as Engels put it “The materialistic method is transformed into its opposite when it is employed not as a guide to the study of history but as a finished stencil in accordance with which one accurately cuts the historical facts.” Hence dialectics by no means determines that when analysing Stalinism there is room only for either a capitalist state or a workers’ state. A Marxist analysis must allow for intermediate stages, leaps over stages, retrogressions into previous stages or any bastard formations distinguished from what Marx identified as the “principle epochs in the economic formation of society.”




Whither the Third Camp?




The received wisdom of much of the left today is that the entire WP/ISL tradition should be junked due to the fact that Shachtman, in his old age, became a supporter (albeit “critically”) of US imperialism. In this, he paralleled the trajectory of the “other Trotskyists” who became “critical” supporters of various Stalinist regimes. He abandoned his earlier Third Camp principles in order to support what appeared to him the “lesser evil”.

However, we do not repudiate the early revolutionary works of, for instance, Kautsky or Plekhanov, despite their later apostasy. And the notion that such a rightward tendency is inherent within Third Camp politics is refuted by those comrades of the WP/ISL who remained faithful to the politics of their youth, such as Hal Draper and Julie and Phyllis Jacobson.

But what is the relevance of Third Camp Socialism to us in Aotearoa in 2012? Aren’t obscure debates in the Trotskyist movement in the 1940s and 50s just a Cold War relic? I would argue that much of what shapes the left today predates the falling of the Iron Curtain.

Groups such as the British SWP have superimposed the template of Cold War “my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend”-ism onto the modern world and see such forces as political Islam as progressive potential allies against the dominant (US) imperialism. A local remnant of Trotskyist millenarianism can be seen in the ravings of Grant Morgan (an SWP nutcase) . Our debates around the Foreshore and Seabed controversy showed that nationalisation is not always inherently progressive. The debate about the shape of history, of non-dogmatic application of dialectic rather than using a “finished stencil” is of relevance to our discussions about the nature of pre-European Māori society. Third Camp Socialism’s emphasis of the importance of democratic as well as economic questions in determining the course of struggle is also of continuing relevance.

But above all, the prime importance of the reaffirmation of the old rallying cry that the “emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class” itself has undiminished value, even those epochs - then, as now - when seemingly larger and more powerful forces hold sway.



- A Loyal Comrade, Auckland April 2012


Footnotes:


1 Matgamna(Ed.), p. 85 2 Matgamna (Ed.), p.170 3 Matgamna (Ed.) pp. 207-8



4 Hampton (2012) 5 Trotsky (1939)



6 Shachtman (1943), Chap. 10 7 Matgamna (Ed.), p.97 8 Cannon (1940), Chap. 12



9 Matgamna (Ed.), p.136 10 Sedova (1951)



11 Matgamna (Ed.), p.533-4


Sources: Contact me, I can't post links.

[Popular Front of Judea]

I am enjoying the history lesson but it would be interesting to bring this conversation into the present day. There is of course no Soviet Union and China is a weird form of authoritarian capitalism -- capitalism with Chinese characteristics. So what is the new lay of the land when it comes to the revolutionary left?

I had a brief flirtation with the ISO back in the early '90s. (No I wasn't in college at the time.) They were out there doing something and they had connections in labor with groupings such as the TDU. I liked their Third Camp stance then, I liked the fact that they weren't out there looking back at the Soviet Union or singing the praises of various repressive third world regimes. I had the hope that with the fall of the Soviet Union it would be like the fall of a large dead tree in the middle of a forest, opening space for sunlight and new growth.

My hope as it turned out was misplaced. Without a socialist bloc to compete against the developed capitalist nations continued to swing ever rightward. We are now at a point here in the States where the very gains of the New Deal are at risk. The Soviet Union turned out to be the anchor stake that was holding the postwar welfare state in place. There is a USSR shaped hole in our domestic politics. The absence of the Soviet Union also of course gave us the green light to get our war on in regions we wouldn't have dared before.

I am forced to contemplate the possibility that Trotsky was right when it came to the defense of the Soviet Union -- based on 20/20 hindsight of course.

[Alfonso Capriles]

The SU was holding back what seemed to be inevitable. With degenerated socialist consciousness, it was indefensible.

When it finally imploded under the weight of it's own corruption, the worldwide labour market was flooded with desperate workers seeking work.

That was what held up the price of labour in the west (at least that was the biggest factor).

As for the ISO, they are an unashamedly opportunist organisation. Flirting (putting it mildly) with Hugo Chavez who has (after 14 years in power and with the 4th biggest oil reserves in the world) presided over slum conditions for the working class, critical housing shortages and gang violence. WTF?

And then they got keen on George 'Bashar' Galloway until they realised he was too crazy and reactionary. Perhaps they thought their tight bureaucratic centralism could contain him, maybe in the same way anti-psychotic medicine allows the patient to work without harming society.

[Alfonso Capriles]

The SU was holding back what seemed to be inevitable. With degenerated socialist consciousness, it was indefensible.


When it finally imploded under the weight of it's own corruption, the worldwide labour market was flooded with desperate workers seeking work.
That was what held up the price of labour in the west (at least that was the biggest factor).


As for the ISO, they are an unashamedly opportunist organisation. Flirting (putting it mildly) with Hugo Chavez who has (after 14 years in power and with the 4th biggest oil reserves in the world) presided over slum conditions for the working class, critical housing shortages and gang violence. WTF?


And then they got keen on George 'Bashar' Galloway until they realised he was too crazy and reactionary. Perhaps they thought their tight bureaucratic centralism could contain him, maybe in the same way anti-psychotic medicine allows the patient to work without harming society.

[Popular Front of Judea]

The SU was holding back what seemed to be inevitable. With degenerated socialist consciousness, it was indefensible.


When it finally imploded under the weight of it's own corruption, the worldwide labour market was flooded with desperate workers seeking work.
That was what held up the price of labour in the west (at least that was the biggest factor).


As for the ISO, they are an unashamedly opportunist organisation. Flirting (putting it mildly) with Hugo Chavez who has (after 14 years in power and with the 4th biggest oil reserves in the world) presided over slum conditions for the working class, critical housing shortages and gang violence. WTF?


And then they got keen on George 'Bashar' Galloway until they realised he was too crazy and reactionary. Perhaps they thought their tight bureaucratic centralism could contain him, maybe in the same way anti-psychotic medicine allows the patient to work without harming society.
You may well be right. But nonetheless with the SU out of the picture here in the States neoliberalism went into overdrive. No more need to maintain appearances or co-opt opposition.

[Let's Get Free]

Stalinism is merely a less efficient form of capitalism.

[Ismail]

Stalinism is merely a less efficient form of capitalism.It's probably worth noting that even into the 80's (until Gorbachev's forthrightly market reforms) the Soviet Union still surpassed the USA in the production of a number of goods, in various fields of quality of life, etc. This was no thanks to the new Soviet bourgeoisie whose policies had a detrimental effect everywhere.

It became hard to centrally plan things when, as occurred after Stalin's death, profit was declared the main criterion of success, wide autonomy was given to industrial enterprises and collectives, the law of value was declared integral to socialism and worthy of expansion (as opposed to the view of Lenin and Stalin that the law of value had to be continuously limited, commodity production replaced with products-exchange, etc.), and the all-round restoration of capitalism accomplished. "Central planning" became impossible under such circumstances, for the state itself became the representative of monopoly capitalism.

[Popular Front of Judea]

It's probably worth noting that even into the 80's (until Gorbachev's forthrightly market reforms) the Soviet Union still surpassed the USA in the production of a number of goods.

The problem often wasn't the number of goods -- it was that the goods weren't particularly good. They're were a number of Brezhnev era factories that were net sinks, the goods they produced were worth less than the resources they consumed.

Have you read Spufford's 'Red Plenty'?