Two camps.
That's not a map.

The horizontal axis is the one campism keeps. It runs from aligned with the Western bloc — the United States, NATO, the states and economies inside that order — on the left, to aligned against it on the right. This is a real axis. Empire is real, and the US-led one is the largest. Nothing here pretends otherwise.

The vertical axis is the one campism throws away. It runs from power held over people at the top — secret police, jailed dissidents, crushed strikes, disappeared journalists — to power devolved to people at the bottom: assemblies, councils, federations, liberation movements that answer to the populations they come from. It asks a single question of any government or movement: what does this power do to the people under it?

Those two questions are independent. A regime can be anti-Western and a prison. A regime can be Western-aligned and a prison. Knowing the alignment tells you almost nothing about the cell. Campism is the belief that the first axis can stand in for the second. It cannot — for the same reason the left/right line cannot stand in for a 2×2.

Campism is the habit of dividing the whole planet into two opposing camps — a Western, capitalist, US-led bloc on one side, and an “anti-imperialist” bloc of states opposing it on the other — and then picking a camp and defending it. It is geopolitics played as team sports.

Once the camp is picked, the camp does the thinking. Whatever your side does is contextualised; whatever the other side does is the headline. An atrocity stops being an atrocity and becomes a debate about who benefits from you mentioning it. The campist does not start from the prison and ask who built it. They start from the flag over the prison and decide whether the prison is allowed to bother them.

The reflex has a tidy slogan — the enemy of my enemy is my friend — and it is how an avowed opponent of authoritarianism ends up defending a secret police, so long as that secret police reports to a government Washington dislikes.

To an anarchist, the campist map has the same defect as the left/right line this site was built to retire: it is one axis pretending to be the whole space. The anarchist objection is not that imperialism is fine. It is that opposing it cannot mean signing up as a fan of a rival empire.

Collapse the chart and most of the dots simply lose their height. Four of them do something worse: they get conscripted — dragged sideways onto whichever team campism assigns them by process of elimination. These are the cases where the camps stop being a simplification and start being a lie.

Positions are approximate and editorial — this is an argument, not an index. The horizontal axis estimates an actor's material alignment with or against the US-led order. The vertical axis estimates how much power it concentrates over the people under it versus devolves to them.

Iran appears twice on purpose: once as the Islamic Republic near the top, once as the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising near the bottom. Same country, opposite ends of the vertical axis — which is the entire point. Collapse the grid and the two dots get painted into opposing jerseys, because campism cannot hold “a people” and “their state” as different things.

When you collapse the chart, each actor slides to its campist coordinate — states roughly keep their alignment, but the unaligned liberation movements get dragged to whichever side campism conscripts them onto. The grid is two axes. The line is one. Everything lost in the fall is the second question: what does this power do to its people?