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Supporting one geopolitical side against all others

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Campism is the belief that the world is divided into large, competing political groups of countries ("camps") and that people with left-wing politics should support one camp over the other camps. Unlike nationalists, campists do not support any countries for reasons such as ethnicity or national identity. Instead, campists support their camp for ideological reasons, because they believe their camp promotes their ideology, such as socialism or anti-imperialism.

In general, a first-campist is someone who sides with the United States and its allies; a second-campist is someone who sides with the bloc of countries opposing the USA (such as with the Soviet Union and its allies, with communist countries in general, or with Russia and its allies); and a third-campist is someone who takes neither side and instead hopes to organize the global working class into a third bloc.

Campism is an application of lesser of two evils to global power politics: A first-campist or second-campist believes their camp, for all its flaws, is better than its opposition.

History

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:

First bloc: Fascist powers, including Germany, Italy, Japan, and their allies
Second bloc: Anti-fascist powers, including the Soviet Union and its allies

In contrast, and especially after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, Third camp Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman argued that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic collectivist regime which had joined one of two great imperialist camps that wanted to conquer the world. Third-campists believed the world was divided into three camps:

First bloc: Imperialist powers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France
Second bloc: Imperialist powers in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union
Third bloc: Yet to be created, which would unite working class and colonized people in revolutionary, anti-imperialist struggle

In World War II, the United Nations defeated the fascist Rome–Berlin Axis. Afterwards, third-campists believed the new camps were those of the Cold War:

First bloc: Capitalist imperialists, led by the United States
Second bloc: Social imperialists, led by the Soviet Union
Third bloc: Yet to be created, which would unite working and colonized people

In this context, a "campist" was someone (especially a socialist) who supported the first or second camp instead of participating in building the third camp. For example, some Trotskyists and members of the Socialist Party of America became "first campists", and later neoconservatives. In contrast, other Trotskyists (such as Sam Marcy of the Workers World Party) became "second campists" who supported the Soviet Union, such as during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Second campists are sometimes called tankies.

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.

The "bloc" system became increasingly complex after World War II. After the 1948 Tito–Stalin split and 1960s Sino-Soviet split, the socialist "second camp" was increasingly fractured into many competing ideologies (such as Maoism and Hoxhaism) and countries. As a result, many "second camp" socialist organizations split, based on their support for specific socialist governments. For example, the pro-Soviet Communist Party USA (CPUSA) expelled the pro-China Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in 1961.

After the 1955 Bandung Conference, many post-imperialized countries joined the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which was opposed to both "blocs" in the Cold War. This NAM was ideologically heterogenous, and member countries received support from both American and Soviet benefactors, but the movement leaned toward socialism. Many nominally socialist countries, such as Egypt (led by Nasser), Yugoslavia (Tito), Indonesia (Sukarno), and Cuba (Castro), took leading roles. In Castro's Havana Declaration of 1979, he summarized the NAM's purpose as "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics." 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 also led to pan-Arabism, pan-Africanism, pan-Americanism and pan-Asianism. 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.

All of these developments — the fragmentation of the socialist "camp", the rise of non-Communist socialist countries, and a new way to divide the world into "camps" — created new types of campism.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union

Modern first-worldist organizations, especially neoconservative organizations, reoriented their worldview around democracy promotion by the United States and Islamofascism. In the modern first-worldist view, there are two real camps:

First camp: Democratic countries, led by the United States
Second camp: Undemocratic countries, chiefly Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran
Third (non-)camp: Unaligned countries

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, the "second camp" mostly disappeared, and with it, most second-campism. (See List of communist states.) Modern communist second-campists adhering to Marxism–Leninism usually support only Cuba and/or North Korea as "actually existing socialism" ("AES"). Others also support China, Vietnam, Laos, and Venezuela, despite their adoption of socialist market economy-type policies. In the modern communist second-campist view, there are two real camps:

First camp: Capitalist countries, led by the United States
Second camp: Anti-capitalist countries, possibly including:
- Restrictive view: Cuba, North Korea
- Expansive view: China, Vietnam, Laos, and Venezuela
Third (non-)camp: Unaligned countries

Other socialist organizations, especially those inspired by Maoism, shifted toward Third-worldism or Maoism–Third Worldism and labor aristocracy theory. This view became substantially stronger after the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 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. For another example, supporters of the War on Terror describe their opponents as terrorists or sympathizers (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".

For example, during the Cold War, first-campist capitalists who adopted Domino theory supported late European imperial projects, as in the First Indochina War, and autocrats, as in South Korea (Rhee), South Vietnam (Diem), Indonesia (Suharto), and China (Chiang). Second-campist socialists similarly supported autocrats, as in the Soviet Union (Stalin), China (Mao), and North Korea (Kim), and expansions of state socialist power, as in the Eastern Bloc takeovers and invasions (Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968).

Modern "anti-imperialist" second-campists often support undemocratic, interventionist, and non-socialist countries, including Russia (Putin), Iran (Khamenei), and Syria (Assad).

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 expended the ability of other countries to pursue their own imperialist agendas.

References

^ Camfield, David (2021-10-22). "Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?". The Breach.
^ Sculos, Bryant William (Summer 2020). ""Campism" and the "New" (Anti-) Imperialisms". New Politics. XVIII (1). ny approach to (anti-)imperialism that reproduces the idea that there is a monolithic Global North, developed world, first world, the West, core, and so on that exists in an imperialistic relationship with a similarly monolithic (but not necessarily homogenous) Global South, developing world, third world, the East or non-West, periphery, and so on, ensures that socialists will continually be compelled to embrace human-rights violating, anti-democratic, pro-capitalist, and indeed imperialistic regimes, so long as they are from the Global South, periphery, non-West, developing world, third world, and so on. That is to say, a supposedly anti-imperialist reason becomes an imperialist reason.
^ Achcar, Gilbert (2021-04-06). "How to Avoid the Anti-Imperialism of Fools". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Retrieved 2024-02-06. Meanwhile, Cold War "campism" was reemerging under a new guise: No longer defined by alignment behind the USSR but by direct or indirect support for any regime or force that is the object of Washington's hostility. In other terms, there was a shift from a logic of "the enemy of my friend (the USSR) is my enemy" to one of "the enemy of my enemy (the USA) is my friend" (or someone I should spare from criticism at any rate). While the former led to some strange bedfellows, the latter logic is a recipe for empty cynicism: Focused exclusively on the hatred of the US government, it leads to knee-jerk opposition to whatever Washington undertakes in the global arena and to drifting into uncritical support for utterly reactionary and undemocratic regimes, such as Russia's thuggish capitalist and imperialist government (imperialist by every definition of the term) or Iran's theocratic regime, or the likes of Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.
^ La Botz, Dan (Winter 2022). "Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, And the Origins of Campism". New Politics. XVIII (4).
Messite, Josh (May 2021). "The Messiah's Arrival". Negation Magazine.
^ Afinogenov, Greg (Spring 2022). "Breaking Camp: The US Left and Foreign Policy after the War in Ukraine". Socialist Forum.
^ Samary, Catherine (April 2009). "The Social Stakes of the Great Capitalist Transformation in the East". Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. 17 (1): 5–39. doi:10.1080/09651560902778345. S2CID 154061478. The emergence of the "non-aligned" countries at the end of the 1950s, notably encouraged by leaders in Egypt (Gamal Abdel Nasser), India (Jawaharlal Nehru) and Yugoslavia (Josip Broz Tito), were the expression of heterogeneous resistance to this bipolar order.
"Fidel Castro speech to the UN in his position as chairman of the non-aligned countries movement 12 October 1979". Archived from the original on 11 May 2008.
Berger, Mark T. (February 2004). "After the Third World? History, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism". Third World Quarterly. 25 (1): 9–39. doi:10.1080/0143659042000185318. S2CID 145431458.
^ Bassi, Camila (2009). "'The Anti-Imperialism of Fools': A Cautionary Story on the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard of England's Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement". ACME: An International e-Journal for Critical Geographies. 9 (2): 113–138.
^ Bilous, Taras (February 25, 2022). "A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv". OpenDemocracy.
^ Samary, Catherine (2016-01-02). "What internationalism in the context of the Ukrainian crisis? Wide open eyes against one-eyed "campisms"". Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. 24 (1): 89–93. doi:10.1080/0965156X.2016.1170332. S2CID 131795419. This article argues against "campist" approaches in both contexts, because they lead to downsizing criticisms of real relations of dominations within the chosen supported "camp", preventing the establishment of real conditions for popular self-determination. Taking side against one single enemy cannot permit the analysis of real conflicting common interests and links between the different powers.
Sandle, Mark (June 1997). "Georgii Shakhnazarov and the Soviet Critique of Historical Materialism". Studies in East European Thought. 49 (2): 109–133. doi:10.1023/A:1017910911821. S2CID 141077859. Retrieved 2024-02-06. The reassessment of '2-campism' led to further reevaluations which went to the very heart of the understanding of "capitalism" and "socialism" in Soviet discourse. The rejection of the Stalinist thesis about the inimicable hostility of capitalism and socialism meant a move away from the view that everything which was Soviet was socialist and thus inherently "Good"; whilst everything in the West was capitalist and thus "Bad." The two systems were no longer seen in stark, diametric opposition. The picture painted by Soviet theorists was far more complex, diverse and multifaceted.
Parker, Ian (2017-12-08). Revolutionary Keywords for a New Left. Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-78535-643-8. Campism entails dividing the world into good and bad, allying with some dubious regimes to do that and, in the process, excluding the left. It is tempting to assume that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, but this is a very dangerous mistake to make, both in the realm of friendships and in the sphere of world politics. No less in the case of internal disagreements among anti-capitalists as to how to make sense of the balance of forces and how best to fight back.
"President Declares "Freedom at War with Fear"".

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