Read on Twitter
So, I read the Open Labour-sponsored pamphlet on foreign policy which some folks on Left Twitter appear to be losing their minds over. Some thoughts follow. https://openlabour.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/A-Progressive-Foreign-Policy-for-New-Times.pdf?mc_cid=6261efad24&mc_eid=08f2555f98.
Producing pamphlets and discussion documents is good, actually. I hope people write serious responses/critiques (i.e., of what it actually says). More direct polemical exchange between - and, indeed, within - factions would be a big step forward in terms of political culture.
Politically, the pamphlet represents a kind of quasi-Third Campism emptied of class-struggle socialist content and reduced to liberal geopolitical positioning and diplomacy.
I share many the authors’ criticisms of “Two Camps” anti-imperialism, which confers progressive status on opponents of western imperialism which are in fact reactionary (and, often, are themselves imperialist). But I don’t think a British capitalist state, even one with a >
< would-be “ethical foreign policy”, can be an agency that constructs an alternative to that. If you want to break from the “Two Camps” approach, which some have called “campism”, you have to break from seeing states themselves as the primary agents of social change.
The authors reference this article by me from @NewPoliticsMag: https://newpol.org/issue_post/third-camp-socialism-below-and-first-principle-revolutionary-socialism/. The message of the Third Camp tradition is that the working class must constitute itself as an independent political actor; a capitalist state can’t have a “Third Camp” foreign policy.
Finally, a note to say that some of the criticism I’ve seen of OL over this is typical of the uncharitable bad faith that characterises much intra-left “debate”. As a Trot, I hold no brief for OL or the impossible-to-define “soft left”, but attacking a factional opponent merely >
< for publishing a discussion document is frankly vulgar anti-politics. If an opposing faction says/does something you disagree with, respond, by all means, as sharply as you deem necessary — but to what‘s actually been written, not to the caricature you’ve drawn up in your head.
