Johnson-Forest Tendency (Marxist humanism)

This tendency developed in the 1940s out of “Third Camp” Trotskyism but increasingly shifted away from its roots.

Unlike Trotsky, the Johnson-Forest tendency did not view the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers’ state”, nor did it perceive it to be bureaucratic-collectivist, as claimed by the “Third Camp”; instead, it described the Soviet Union as “state capitalist”. In the post-war period, the US author Raya Dunayevskaya belonged to the pioneers of a humanistic understanding of Marxism and attempted to develop an emancipatory form of politics that went beyond claims of encompassing a Leninist vanguard.