Campism is the tendency on the left to treat world politics as a contest between two great "camps" and to derive one's political positions from that geopolitical map rather than from class analysis. In its classic Cold War form, the camps were the US-led imperialist bloc and the Soviet-led "socialist" bloc; in its contemporary form, the imperialist camp (the US, NATO, their allies) faces an "anti-imperialist" camp usually taken to include China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and whatever other states happen to be in conflict with Washington.
The core logic works like this: imperialism is defined essentially as the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. Any state that opposes or is targeted by the US is therefore objectively anti-imperialist, and the duty of socialists is to defend that state against imperialism. From this follows the characteristic campist package of positions: opposition to criticizing (or at least publicly criticizing) the targeted states, treating internal opposition movements in those states as suspect, likely instruments of US regime-change operations, and evaluating every conflict by asking, "Which side is Washington on?" and taking the other one. Several features are worth pulling apart: *The unit of analysis is the state, not the class.* Campism assigns progressive or reactionary character to states as such. Once a state is placed in the anti-imperialist camp, its internal class relations become secondary or invisible. Workers striking in Iran, protesters in Cuba, or Uyghurs in Xinjiang get read through the geopolitical lens: either they don't matter, or they're cats' paws of empire. The question "what is the working class of this country doing, and what does it need?" gets replaced by "what does this state's government need in its confrontation with the US?" *Anti-imperialism becomes a single-axis concept.* Rather than treating imperialism as a structural feature of the capitalist world system in which multiple states can be imperialist or sub-imperialist actors, campism reduces it to one pole. Russian annexations or Chinese capital export don't register as imperialism because imperialism has been defined in advance as something only the Western camp does. This is why campists so often end up in the awkward position of describing manifestly capitalist, sometimes brutally authoritarian, states as somehow progressive. *"The enemy of my enemy" substitutes for a positive program.* The campist position on any given conflict can be predicted without knowing anything about the conflict itself. You don't need to know what Ukrainian workers or Syrian revolutionaries actually want; you only need to know NATO's position, which you then invert. The historical lineage matters. Campism crystallized in the Stalinized Communist movement, where "defense of the Soviet Union" became the axis of world politics and every national Communist party's line was subordinated to Soviet state interests. The critique of campism comes largely out of the third-camp tradition—Shachtman's and later Draper's "Neither Washington nor Moscow"—which insisted that the working class constitutes its own camp, independent of both blocs, and that socialists side with workers and the oppressed against their own rulers everywhere. The third-camp position isn't neutrality or abstention; it's the claim that the relevant division in world politics runs through every society (exploiters versus exploited), not between blocs of states. The standard defenses of campism deserve to be stated fairly. Campists argue that in a world of radically unequal power, refusing to prioritize opposition to the strongest imperialism amounts to objectively assisting it; that "plague on both houses" positions collapse in practice into acquiescence to US policy; and that Western leftists' criticisms of targeted states get weaponized by their own governments regardless of intent. There's a real problem lurking here—a socialist in the US does have a particular responsibility to oppose US wars and sanctions—and the third-camp answer is that you can and must do that without becoming an apologist for the regime on the receiving end. The campist answer is that this distinction is a luxury; the anti-campist answer is that abandoning it liquidates the socialist project into support for one wing of the world's ruling classes. The recurring failure mode is that campism keeps forcing its adherents to explain away things socialists should straightforwardly oppose: the crushing of independent unions, the suppression of national minorities, invasions of neighboring countries, and the enrichment of state-connected capitalist classes. Each of these becomes either deniable, justifiable, or someone else's fabrication, because admitting to them would complicate the two-camp map. The analytical cost is that class disappears from the analysis of half the world; the political cost is that solidarity gets extended to states rather than to the people living under them -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42262): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42262 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119987077/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
