1960s and 70s American "third camp" socialist archives now online

Submitted by AWL on 8 December, 2013 - 10:37

The Marxists Internet Archive has uploaded the journals of the Independent Socialist Clubs and the International Socialists, organisations which continued the revolutionary "third camp" socialism of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper.

In the late 1930s and early 40s, the Trotskyist movement (particularly in America) was split by a debate about whether the Soviet Union could be characterised as some form of "workers' state", or whether its society was based on exploitative class rule (variously characterised as "bureaucratic collectivist" or "state capitalist"). The "third camp" socialists were those Trotskyists who had reached the latter conclusion, and refused to support Stalinist Russia and its satellites as a progressive camp against the camp of western imperialism. The slogan "neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism" came to summarise their perspective: support for a third, independent "camp" of international movements of workers and oppressed peoples against both the western-capitalist and Stalinist blocs.

The Berkeley Independent Socialist Club (ISC) was founded in 1964 by a small group of comrades around Hal Draper. It was the result of a bitter struggle to defend the political legacy of revolutionary "third camp" socialism against Max Shachtman and his supporters. Although Shachtman had been the leading theoretician, writer, and organiser of third camp politics, by the 1960s he had swung rapidly rightwards and had led the former Independent Socialist League into the left social-democratic Socialist Party. He would later lead what remained of it into the Democratic Party.

The ISC later spawned the national Independent Socialist Clubs of America network and then became the International Socialists. Its members and their paper, Workers' Power, played important roles in anti-racist and LGBT liberation struggles, as well as in key rank-and-file industrial struggles such as Teamsters for a Democratic Union.

We can't endorse all they did, even "for their time": in fact the IS-USA would be drawn into the orbit of the British IS/SWP, and scatter into fragments in 1976-7 as the British SWP got a tighter grip.

Some of the individuals will be familiar to British socialists - Kim Moody, who edited Workers' Power in 1977 and went on to found the rank-and-file journal Labor Notes, is now based in Britain with his partner Sheila Cohen.

The archives represent a valuable resource for anyone who believes that the Shachtman-Draper thread of "post-Trotsky Trotskyism" represents the most authentic continuation of radically-democratic, class-struggle-based revolutionary socialist politics — not just as a historical artefact, but as experiences to learn from and build upon.

Read the archive here.

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