Third Camp Marxism

One of the greatest figures of the
international socialist movement and yet one of the least
known, is James Connolly, who was, until his execution, the
organizer and leader of the Irish socialist movement. The
lives and works of the Continental and American socialist
leaders and thinkers are rather well known to the old and
new generations of revolutionary socialists. This is indeed a
paradox, for James Connolly was one of the most talented
of the socialist theoreticians of the new century. Unlike so

• Revolution in the Russian Empire: For Socialist Freedom and Democracy
• A Lesson of the Revolution: The Working Class vs The Totalitarian Myth
• Reform or Revolution in East Europe?

Between the 1930s and the 1950s the revolutionary socialist press in the USA had talented cartoonists such as “Carlo” (Jesse Cohen).

A new collection of their work gives a snapshot history of the times — the rise of the mass trade union movement in the USA, the great strike wave of 1945-6, the fight against "Jim Crow" racism, World War Two, the imposition of Stalinism on Eastern Europe...

It puts socialist policy proposals — opening the books of the corporations, organising workers' defence guards... — in vivid form.

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.”

A new political species has come into existence in our own day.
The existence of different species of plants and animals was recognized long before scientific analysis decided upon the differentiating characteristics which classified them. Since then, however, science has decided that the onion belongs to the very same family as the lily, but that the Douglas fir tree is not truly a fir tree at all; and the common name bellflower is used not for one genus but seven different ones.

Herman Benson was a founding member, along with Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, and others, of the Workers Party, which broke from the US Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the British group of the same name) in 1940 following a debate about how to understand the Stalinist state in Russia.

A leaflet produced by the small Irish Trotskyist group in the mid 1940s, after nationalists split the Irish trade union movement.

This is a leaflet produced by the Revolutionary Socialist Party, which was then the (small) Irish section of the Fourth International, some time soon after the splitting of the Irish trade union movement (Irish TUC) by Irish Transport and General Workers' Union leader William O'Brien and his allies.

An indispensable contribution to the understanding of the role of the Negro in American history is a study of the period between 1830 and 1865. In this article we treat the subject up to 1860.

Marx analysed the problem of a free press thoroughly in two long essays which are to be found in the first volume of the collected edition of his works.

For Marx “the right to think and speak the truth” was an elementary human right and freedom of the press — as he said — merely “human freedom in practice”. Marx recognized that human freedom is made up of a complex of interdependent freedoms.

The following report by Irving Howe of a debate on the record of Bolshevism is taken from the US Trotskyist Labor Action, the paper of the Workers’ Party. The debate between Max Shachtman of the Workers’ Party and Liston Oak, managing editor of the New Leader, took place in New York on 8 November 1946. The New Leader was a right-wing social-democratic journal. Liston Oak had been a member of the Communist Party of America.