I would clearly be considered a “campist” by Tony and most others on the list by virtue of my views on the Ukraine war, which I've expressed on many occasions.
In summary: 1. I consider it a war between two capitalist states and support neither side. The 20th century wars of national liberation aspired to independent statehood and were generally sympathetic to socialism and often led by Communist parties. Both Ukraine and Russia have been fully independent states since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Both sides have repudiated their Soviet past and rehabilitated reactionary icons - in the Ukrainian case, including the leadership of the genocidal pro-fascist nationalist organization which collaborated with the Nazis. 2. Ukraine has since become a de facto member of the Western imperialist alliance. Although Putin is said to long for the old Russian empire, the restoration of Tsarist imperialism is not seen as a possibility since its old satrapies have been formally absorbed into NATO. Russian military interventions have been limited to securing a buffer zone on its borders against further NATO encroachment. 3. Russia invaded Ukraine, but wars between capitalist states typically erupt when one side, believing itself to be the stronger, invades the other following a series of mutual provocations. Who invaded and who provoked the invasion is never a decisive consideration for me as is the class character of the contending sides, although I would favour the withdrawal of Russian forces as part of an overall peace settlement. 4. The Minsk and Istanbul accords provided a framework for the withdrawal of Russian troops by providing for a popular referendum in the disputed Donbas and Crimea regions but were sabotaged by Ukraine and NATO for fear the predominantly Russian-speaking population would opt for greater autonomy from Kiev and possibly integration with the Russian federation. That remains my preferred solution for a resolution of the conflict, though a frozen peace or the fall of one or the other regime is more likely to bring it to an end. I don’t want to re-litigate this issue (Michael Karadjis and Richard Fidler, please note) and raise it only in the context of Tony’s concept of the party. Tony’s criterion for membership would necessarily exclude me and many others from the common organization he envisages. In his pamphlet which he circulated to the list, Rebuilding the Party Backwards, he calls for agreement based on “anti-campism”. It is "not a foreign-policy preference tacked onto a domestic plan”, he says. “It is a criterion of what kind of organization this is. A party based on socialism from below and third-camp internationalism is a different organism than one that launders Russian or Chinese state power as anti-imperialism, where the line falls on Ukraine, on Iran, and on the character of the Chinese state, sorting out who can actually do common work from those who cannot. The filter is not sectarian. It is the distinction between the swamp and the center.” https://anthonyteso.substack.com/p/rebuilding-the-party-backwards?r=2sbdk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true Unfortunately, Tony's fllter is profoundly sectarian. His “swamp” encompasses a likely majority of the anticapitalist left which does not support Ukraine or accept that China is capitalist or that Russia is an imperialist state bent on the conquest of Europe. It includes.past and present Trotskyists, ML'ists, and CP’ers, and more numerous left social democratic groups and individuals. Tony would exclude from his regroupment project two of the strongest international Trotskyist tendencies led by Alan Woods and David North, the many supporters of the DSA’s International Committee, members of the Communist Party and PSL, the followers of Greg Godels’ Marxism-Leninism Today and John Bellamy Foster’s Monthly Review, as influential public intellectuals like Michael Roberts, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Yanis Varoufakis, and Richard Wolff, to name only those I can think of offhand. Consequently, I would not exclude them any more than I would exclude anyone from this list despite our differences so long as they were also willing to work collaboratively. I can tolerate disagreements about Ukraine, entry in the DP and left-centre parties and other issues whether on a mail list, study group or in an action-oriented Marxist coalition. I would leave those who wanted to take action on opposite sides of these divides to it, and would focus on collaborating on the issues which united us while promoting continuing discussion aimed at resolving those which divided us. If the differences persisted, as I expect many would, so be it. We're not engaged in a a struggle for power, after all, where disagreements over strategy and tactics were often life-and-death issues with catastrophic implications. This underlay the many splits and purges in and between the revolutionary and reformist wings of the Second and Third Internationals. If it should again come to that and I’m still around, I’ll revisit the question. Meantime, Tony is welcome to join my imagined party even if he excludes me from his. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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