The Petty-Bourgeois Third Camp
When Trotsky, in the Program of Peace, talks about the independent third camp of the proletariat, he is talking about the situation in which there is a war between two bourgeois camps, such as existed in WWI, or as exists today in relation to NATO(Ukraine)-Russia. In such wars, the position of socialists is “The Main Enemy Is At Home”, and we give no support to either camp. As Lenin and Trotsky set out, using the argument of “self-determination”, for any of the combatant nation states, in such conditions, is necessarily, just a liberal deception to justify a policy of “defence of the fatherland”, or social patriotism. Its why the Bolsheviks dropped the formulation even of support for the right of self-determination, and put in its place support for the right of free secession.
Making clear that, in the case of the small states, such as Belgium, the issue could not be addressed via wars between bourgeois states, but only via socialist revolution, Trotsky notes,
“The independence of the Belgians, Serbians, Poles, Armenians and others is regarded by us not as part of the Allied war program (as treated by Guesde, Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Henderson and others), but belongs to the program of the international proletarian struggle against imperialism.”
(The Program For Peace)
When it came to WWI, of course, the position of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was to adopt the position of revolutionary defeatism. It is only after the February Revolution, that the Mensheviks changed their position, to one of bourgeois-defencism, a position that was supported by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, using arguments that are today copied by the social-patriots/social imperialists such as Paul Mason and the USC. Lenin fumed at these positions, and threatened to split the party unless this social-patriotic position was dropped. Trotsky notes,
“On the 17th of March, through friends in Stockholm, he wrote a letter filled with alarm. “Our party would disgrace itself for ever, kill itself politically, if it took part in such deceit ... I would choose an immediate split with no matter whom in our party rather than surrender to social patriotism ...” After this apparently impersonal threat – having definite people in mind however – Lenin adjures: “Kamenev must understand that a world historic responsibility rests upon him.” Kamenev is named here because it is a question of political principle. If Lenin had had a practical militant problem in mind, he would have been more likely to mention Stalin. But in just those hours Lenin was striving to communicate the intensity of his will to Petrograd across smoking Europe, Kamenev with the co-operation of Stalin was turning sharply toward social patriotism."
(Trotsky - History of The Russian Revolution, Chapter 15)
So, even though Lenin and Trotsky knew that backward Russia faced a similar situation as China that had been carved up by various imperialist powers, and was facing defeat at the hands of Germany, the most advanced industrial power of the time, they continued to argue a policy of revolutionary defeatism, that “The Main Enemy Is At Home”. And, of course, they were right. The policy of bourgeois defencism of the Mensheviks, and of Kerensky, led quickly to them losing support amongst the workers and peasants. The revolutionary programme of the Bolsheviks turned them from being a small minority into being the leading political force, winning majorities in the soviets in all the main industrial areas.
It enabled them to carry through the October Revolution, and create the world's first workers' state, albeit a workers state, in Lenin's words “with bureaucratic distortions”, as a consequence of the material conditions in which it was established. Now, the old formulation was no longer applicable. The main enemy is at home only when the ruling class is the bourgeoisie, and the state is a bourgeois state. Once the workers are the ruling class, and the state is a workers' state, even a bureaucratically deformed workers state, that is no longer true. The responsibility of the revolutionary proletariat is now to defend that state, in any war between it and bourgeois states.
But, for the petty-bourgeois moralists, it was precisely the superficial political regime that was significant, and not the underlying material reality of class relations, and class nature of the state. In the same way that they identified with “democratic imperialism” as against “fascist imperialism” so they set up a non-existent, perfect workers' state as the alternative to the reality of the workers' state existing in the USSR, much as the Narodniks had contrasted the reality of Russian capitalism, to the non-reality of some other, future, non-capitalist path of development, or against the fantasy of some previous golden age of the Russian peasantry. Comparing reality to some ideal fantasy will always result in the reality being rejected, and so it was for the petty-bourgeois moralists of the Third Camp led by Burnham and Shachtman.
They argued that, because the USSR did not measure up to their ideal of what a Workers' State should look like, it was not a Workers' State, not deserving of defence against imperialism. It did not take long before, that position led them not only to argue against defence of the USSR, but to argue that the “democratic” nature of western imperialism made it a lesser-evil than the dictatorship of Stalinism, and so to become open advocates for “democratic imperialism”. From there it was but a short step for Burnham to become a right-wing, neo-con warmonger, and for Shachtman to become a right-wing social democrat who supported the US invasion of Cuba and the Vietnam War.
The supporters of Burnham-Shacthman tried to claim that their petty-bourgeois Third Camp was a continuation of that Third Camp described above by Trotsky. But, those claims, typical of this trend, are founded upon bowdlerisation and the most egregious text and logic chopping. Trotsky himself certainly denied any such continuation.
“The very first “programmatic” articles of the purloined organ already reveal completely the light-mindedness and hollowness of this new anti-Marxist grouping which appears under the label of the “Third Camp.” What is this animal? There is the camp of capitalism; there is the camp of the proletariat. But is there perhaps a “third camp” – a petty-bourgeois sanctuary? In the nature of things, it is nothing else. But, as always, the petty bourgeois camouflages his “camp” with the paper flowers of rhetoric. Let us lend our ears! Here is one camp: France and England. There’s another camp: Hitler and Stalin. And a third camp: Burnham, with Shachtman. The Fourth International turns out for them to be in Hitler’s camp (Stalin made this discovery long ago). And so, a new great slogan: Muddlers and pacifists of the world, all ye suffering from the pin-pricks of fate, rally to the “third” camp!
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