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There is a tendency to treat Schachtman's "third camp" followers as
opportunist sellouts in the sort of sectarian Trotskyist circles that
Lazare used to travel in. Their history is much more complex and
interesting. CLR James was closer to Schachtman on the class nature of the
USSR and there is little doubt that James was the outstanding Marxist of
the past half-century. His state-capitalism was a legitimate way of
interpreting the Soviet Union, even though I and many other Marxists
reject it.
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History is both simple and complex -- simple in that the classes forces at work are always apparent, complex because they manifest themselves in complicated, contradictory ways. Many of Schachtman's followers (as well as S. himself) were highly intelligent and some of their criticisms of the SWP were quite telling, i.e. their attacks on such utterly unrealistic proposals as the party's idea for a referendum on the war or its proposal to place military training under the control of the trade unions. Still and all, the state-capitalist theory was right wing, which is why so many people in this group emerged from WW2 as militant anti-Soviet cold warriors.
Dan Lazare