Johnson/Third Camp Socialism
The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts of Critical Marxism Vol. 1 Edited by Sean Matgamna London: Phoenix Press, 1998 Neither Capitalism Nor Socialism: Theories of Bureaucratic Collectivism Edited by Ernest E. Haberkern and Arthur Lipow Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996
Reviewed by Alan Johnson
In April 1940, the national convention of the American Socialist Workers' Party, the most important Trotskyist group in the world, split in two over the 'Russian Qyestion'. Albert Goldman, Trotsky's attorney during the 1937 Dewey Commission into the Moscow Trials, was the spokesman for the majority faction.
Private property has been nationalised in 1/8th of the world. It is the only thing concrete left in the camp of the proletariat. We are not giving up nationalised property for some abstraction of the world revolution.
Another majority supporter, Richardson, from Oakland, said: 'Just imagine if Stalin did set up a bureaucracy in India, what a tremendous advance it would be over the present democracy'. Goldman defended Richardson's speech with the argument that 'between the slavery of a degenerated workers' state and the slavery of capitalism, we prefer the slavery of a degenerated workers' state'. Convention minutes taken by the minority indicate that, at this point, there broke out 'applause from the majority side, hissing from the minority side'.1 These two edited collections make easily accessible for the first time the viewpoint of that minority who went on to form the Workers' Party-Independent Socialist League (WP-ISL) from 1940 to 1958. These were revolutionary democratic socialists whose politics were summed up in the slogan, 'Neither Washington Nor Moscow but the Third Camp of Independent Socialism!' Writing in 1963, Hal Draper made a wide-ranging claim for the political significance of the WP- ISL within the revolutionary Marxist tradition. While noting its origins in the 'Russian question' of 1939-40, he went on to claim that the ISL had subsequently achieved nothing less than the preservation and development of the • 1 Minority faction minutes, Socialist Workers' Party National Convention,S April 1940, R Saunders, Secretary.
301 Historical Materialism idea of socialism from below in the post-war world, forging a 'revolutionary democratic socialism for our time'.
The political character of the ISL quickly broadened from this war position to a wide reinterpretation of the meaning of revolutionary socialism for our day. Reacting sharply against the bureaucratic concepts of both official Stalinism and official Trotskyism, it swung to a deepgoing emphasis on the integration of socialism and democracy in all aspects of politics. What was distinctive, however, was that this was accompanied by equally sharp opposition to the American establishment, to American imperialism, to capitalism and its political representatives here. What resulted was a unique combination of revolutionary opposition to both capitalism and Communism.2
The arguments of the third camp tradition remain largely unknown to contemporary Marxists. The WP-ISL tradition has been paid scant attention. Interest has concentrated almost exclusively on the luminaries who passed through it, from the various New York intellectuals associated with Partisan Review, to figures such as James Burnham, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Dwight Macdonald, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. The glare given off by such stars has blinded commentators to the core of the tradition around Max Shachtman and Hal Draper. Peter Drucker's recent study of Max Shachtman is the first serious attempt from within the Trotskyist tradition to reassess the WP-ISL.3 It is now joined by these two important collections of reprints. The Fate of the Russian Revolution: Lost Texts in Critical Marxism collects many of the writings of Max Shachtman, a founder of American Trotskyism, an International Executive Committee member of the Fourth International, and the most important theoretician it possessed after Trotsky. Alongside 37 articles by Shachtman are four from James Burnham, three from Trotsky, and two each by Hal Draper and C.L.R. James. Matgamna also offers a superb book-length analysis of Trotsky's own evolving position, from his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929 to his murder by Stalin's agent in Mexico in 1940, and of the development of Trotskyism after the Second World War.4 Neither Capitalism Nor
2 Draper 1963a, pp. 7-8. 3 Drucker 1994. See alsoJohnson 1999. 4 The Matgamna collection presents a somewhat airbrushed Max Shachtman. In a book of over 600 pages of close type, Matgamna has cut
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