Campism

Origin of the term Socialists have long held sharply divergent views on major international crises. For example, the internationalist–defencist schism during World War I led to the split of the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) from the pro-war Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the split of the pro-war Social Democratic League of America (SDLA) from the anti-war Socialist Party of America (SPA). These divisions were also present in the 1930s, after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. All Trotskyists opposed Stalinism, but differed on why and how. Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state. Although a small ruling class had taken control, the Soviet Union had made (social revolutionary) gains for workers and should be defended from outside aggression. Instead of outside invasion, the Soviet working class should lead a political revolution to seize back control. From 1929 to 1933 (the Third Period), the Soviet Union attacked unaligned socialists and social democrats as social fascists. In a sharp reversal after Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the Soviet Union pursued a popular front strategy from 1934 to 1939 and again from 1941 to 1945, in which communists attempted to build broad anti-fascist alliances. In this view, the world was divided into fascist and anti-fascist camps: In contrast, other Trotskyists (such as Sam Marcy of the Workers World Party After World War II During decolonization, billions of people won freedom from imperialism in Africa and Asia. Most of these countries did not pick a "side" in the Cold War. These divisions led to Alfred Sauvy's three-world model in 1952: • First world: Capitalist countries, led by the United States • Second world: Communist countries, led by the Soviet Union • Third world: All other countries Both the United States and Soviet Union supported the identification of the first camp with capitalism and second camp with communism, in order to orient their allies away from infighting and toward fighting the "other" camp. NAM represented an alternative to the two-camp order of the Cold War. The NAM is sometimes associated with Third-worldism, which promoted Global South governments (as representatives of peasants and workers and people of color) against Global North governments (as representatives of capitalist imperialism). Third Worldism identifies imperialism as the "primary contradiction" in the world, and some Third Worldists sort the world into two camps: Imperialist countries and imperialized countries. and again after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In the modern self proclaimed "anti-imperialist" second-campist view, there are two real camps: • First camp: "Imperialist" countries, led by the United States; similar to imperial core, to Global North, or to Western world • Second camp: "Anti-imperialist" countries, possibly led by China, Venezuela, or Russia; similar to the Global South, or peripheral countries, or to non-West but often simply defined as any nation that stands in opposition to the first camp. • Third (non-)camp: Unaligned countries == Criticism ==

Critics of modern campism argue that it creates an inaccurate one-dimensional view of each camp, such as a "monolithic Global North" against a "monolithic Global South", whereas each camp is a heterogenous bundle of alliances. In this view, second-campism will often "boil down to the simple procedure of determining which side the US is on in any given conflict and automatically taking the opposite position". In addition, campist logic encourages a simplified, "Manichean" (purely good or purely bad) analysis of social movements. For example, pro-Russia campists often claim that the 2014 Ukrainian revolution was a West-orchestrated fascist coup, while anti-Russia campists often deny any far-right presence. (such as George W. Bush's "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"). More broadly, "support" for a camp usually amounts to rhetoric and protest that yield no "concrete gains", because few campists hold political power and each "camp" is a massive entity. A "preoccupation" with "abstract" questions of foreign policy "has been historically corrosive for the left, leading to bitter fights over precisely those issues which we are least able to affect". Because campism encourages people to support some countries over others, campism can discourage people from supporting truly international egalitarian institutions, such as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) or democratizing the United Nations. Some second-campists support "multipolarity", in which several great powers compete for power, and argue that the United States should not have unipolarity. Critics argue that, while multipolarity has limited US ability to control societies around the world, it has expanded the ability of other countries to pursue their own imperialist agendas. == See also ==