Talk:Campism

Removed section

• Telesur
• The Grayzone
• Workers World Party
• Party for Socialism and Liberation

This section lacked references highlighting modern first-campist organizations. SocDoneLeft (talk) 21:15, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Sources

As this is being worked on, I add this as a comment rather than a notice etc, but it would be really helpful to have some sources cited in the sections after the lead; they currently only appear near the end of the article. Jim Killock (talk) 20:32, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Potential Political Bias

Most of this article, with the exception of the lede, is seemingly politically biased towards a Trotskyist viewpoint.

While most of the sourcing is adequate, the article heavily relies on a single source, an article from New Politics, which contains the aforementioned political POV. The other sources are less clearly biased, but their contents are carefully selected (and excluded) to validate the Trotskyist prospective of this article. For example, in a referenced article by Negation Magazine, there is only a brief mention of the Trotskyist/third-campist position, yet the entire section presents this viewpoint as the dominate one.

Further, the entire "criticism" section is more written in the manner of an essay or polemic as opposed to being encyclopedic. According to independent sources on "campism," the term's history is really only applicable to the people who supported the Soviet Union (and later Russia) after the mid-1950s. The concept of a "first," "second," and "third" camp are more Trotskyist inventions which are not widely considered. SociusMono1976 (talk) 00:33, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

@SociusMono1976 I not only agree, I think in some ways you're even being a little too soft on it as it currently stands.

For one, I'm not that keen on the sourcing, really—a lot of it is either from relatively-obscure and openly partisan news blogs or op-eds from well-known magazines. This kind of material is pretty primary in sourcing terms; we would be much better off with more secondary sources that could do the job of publishing studies or overviews of this material characterizing the overall use of the term "campism" over time, which we could then summarize from. If we take on that task ourselves, we're arguably performing original research and it's not that surprising if it doesn't go well. If working from those kinds of sources is the best we can muster, and we're satisfied that the topic at least passes the notability bar (which I think the existing sources show it does), I think we at least need to be very cautious and "source-oriented", just summarizing, being very careful not to synthesize (something the existing article text arguably suffers from rather extensively), and being picky with what sources we do use (e.g. avoiding things that are effectively self-published).

Also, I don't really see the purpose of a "Criticism" section here as written speaking in general—i.e., covering criticism of the politics of "campists"—since the term is intrinsically pejorative; if anything I would expect such a section to cover criticism of the term itself, like from those who don't think it's a fair or reasonable critique, if any such writing of sufficient reliability and notability even exists. I don't think anyone is a self-proclaimed "campist"; the Wiktionary entry has it right in saying that it's similar to the term "tankie".

I'm looking around right now for better sources but they're pretty hard to find; just about everyone who uses the term "campism" seems to use it as part of an opinion piece, although some authors at least stop to give a definition of the term as they see it. One thing I am noticing, that the current article doesn't really appear to get into, is that the term "neo-campist" is used fairly widely, in order to differentiate "contemporary, post-USSR campism" from the more "traditional" Trotskyist version. This article does show a fairly obvious slant towards the more old-school Trotskyist definition, and I think it's fair to say that it gets a little wandering and confused when it tries to characterize the post-USSR world, which widening the source pool and focusing more intently on the strict content of the sources would probably ameliorate.

In any case, I'm having DNS issues right now that I've pinned down to my local machine, but I won't be in a good position to do anything about them until tomorrow; as things currently stand I can't reach like half of the Web which limits my ability to do research. Once I get that sorted out, maybe I'll come back here and see if I can improve the article. ^('"_'⁾ (Mesocarp) (talk) _(@) 04:13, 25 July 2026 (UTC)