Spartacist League (US)
Encyclopedia
The Spartacist League/ US is a Trotskyist organization in the United States. It was the original Spartacist group that helped to inspire and organize similarly oriented groups around the world. These groups eventually formed an international
Political international
A political international is a trans-national organisation of political parties or activists. The international works together on points of agreement to co-ordinate activity....

, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist)
The International Communist League , earlier known as the international Spartacist tendency is a Trotskyist international. Its largest constituent party is the Spartacist League...

.

Background

The origins of the Spartacist League can be traced back to a left wing tendency within the Young Socialist League
Socialist Youth League (US)
The Socialist Youth League was the youth group affiliated with the Workers Party, a splinter Trotskyist party led by Max Shachtman. The parent group changed its name to the Independent Socialist League in 1950. In February 1954, the Socialist Youth League merged with the a faction of the Young...

, which was linked to the Independent Socialist League led by Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman
Max Shachtman was an American Marxist theorist. He evolved from being an associate of Leon Trotsky to a social democrat and mentor of senior assistants to AFL-CIO President George Meany.-Beginnings:...

, in the 1950s. This group objected to Shachtmans plans to merge the ISL into the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation and the YSL into the Young People's Socialist League
Young People's Socialist League (1907)
The Young People's Socialist League , founded in 1907, was the official youth arm of the Socialist Party of America. Its political activities tend to concentrate on increasing the voter turnout of young democratic socialists and affecting the issues impacting that demographic group.- Foundation and...

. This "left wing caucus" was then persuaded to join the Socialist Workers Partys youth group, American Youth for Socialism into a larger, theoretically independent, Young Socialist Alliance
Young Socialist Alliance
The Young Socialist Alliance was a Trotskyist youth group of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States of America. It was founded in 1960, although it had roots going back several years earlier. It was dissolved in 1992...

 in 1960.

A central influence in the recruitment of the former Shachtmanite youth leaders to the SWP was Murray Weiss who, together with Myra Tanner Weiss, would be among the few older members of the SWP to speak up when they newly recruited youth were later expelled. Another important influence on the emerging tendency was Dick Fraser who developed the theory of revolutionary integrationism, later adopted by the Spartacist League, which argued that Blacks in the USA constituted a color-caste who could only be fully integrated into society as a result of a social revolution overthrowing capitalism. Like the Weisses, Fraser would exit the SWP in the mid-1960s, going on to lead the Freedom Socialist Party
Freedom Socialist Party
The Freedom Socialist Party is a socialist political party with a unique program of revolutionary feminism that emerged from a split in the United States Socialist Workers Party in 1966. It is currently a working class organization that works towards creating social justice and order for all...

. Also important in the early days were Shane Mage and Geoff White who had a background in the Communist Party.

Although the Spartacist League stresses its Trotskyist orthodoxy, claims the heritage of that movement in the USA, and places a great deal of importance on being Cannonites, they retain some positions from their origins within the Shachtmanite tendency. Thus they reject to this day the Proletarian Military Policy associated with Leon Trotsky and James Cannon in the early years of the Second World War and forthrightly argue that it was wrong. This is best summarised in the Prometheus Research Library's 1989 publication Documents on the "Proletarian Military Policy"

By 1960 this grouping, mostly active in the youth group associated with the SWP, had become worried by what they saw as the opportunism of the leadership of the SWP headed by Farrell Dobbs
Farrell Dobbs
Farrell Dobbs was an American Trotskyist and trade unionist.He was born in Queen City, Missouri where his father was a worker in a coal mine. They moved to Minneapolis, and he graduated from North High School in 1925. In 1926, he left for North Dakota to find work, but returned the following fall...

 and by overtures by the SWP to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. Particular issues in the dispute included the character of the Cuban revolution, characterized by the majority as a "healthy workers' state," and proper orientation towards the Civil Rights Movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...

, where the majority attitude was that of uncritical support from afar.

Rather than continue as leadership of the youth group, faction leader James Robertson and the others formed an opposition caucus named the Revolutionary Tendency and made clear their loyalty to the International Committee of the Fourth International
International Committee of the Fourth International
The International Committee of the Fourth International is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain.-Foundation:The International...

 in 1962. Differences developed in the Revolutionary Tendency as to how to characterise the SWP, leading to a split within the caucus. A minority closer to the ICFI left to form the Reorganised Minority Tendency (RMT), led by Tim Wohlforth, just as the Robertson-led grouping was being expelled from the SWP. The RMT played a role in the expulsion of the Robertson grouping, on grounds of "party disloyalty."

Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon LaRouche
Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. is an American political activist and founder of a network of political committees, parties, and publications known collectively as the LaRouche movement...

 was briefly a member of the Revolutionary Tendency and then the American Committee for the Fourth International (ultimately, opposed to the Spartacist League) as he circulated through various groupings on the Left in the 1960s.

Having been expelled in 1964 the Robertson group were swift to publish a theoretical journal entitled Spartacist from which they would later take their name. They still stressed their loyalty to the International Committee for the Fourth International, and attended that body's conference held in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, in 1966, only to find themselves shut out from the conference's ranks.

Setbacks

Following founding of the Spartacist League the small group found itself isolated and failed to recruit new members. This resulted in a degree of demoralisation on the part of some members including the groups leading West Coast figure Geoff White who resigned in 1968. By this time another leading figure, Shane Mage, had also quit the group.

Meanwhile the New York branch was developing work in the unions through the Militant Labor Civil Rights Committee. This work being advocated by Harry Turner, real name Tanzer, and Rose Jersawitz, aka Kay Ellens, who had spent a year working with Voix Ouvrière in France. Robertson opposed the MLCRC and a faction fight developed which ended when a most of the minority, that is those who supported Ellens, resigned from the League in time founding The Spark group
Spark (U.S. organization)
The Spark group is a US Trotskyist organization. It is aligned internationally with the Lutte Ouvrière tendency.Spark began as a faction within the Spartacist League that was attracted to the French group Voix Ouvrière method of propagandizing in the factories...

. Harry Turner tried to forestall this split and briefly remained in the Spartacists and formed a faction. Turner and his remaining two supporters split off within a few months and began publishing Vanguard Newsletter
Turnerites
Under a variety of names and within a number of organizations over at least 17 years, the group around Harry Turner, or Turnerites was a presence within Trotskyism in the United States.- History :...

. By the end of this split, James Robertson was the only leader of the former Revolutionary Tendency to remain central to the League.

Another group, many veterans of the SL "Revolutionary Contingent" and active in the Coalition for an Anti-Imperialist Movement, split to form the Revolutionary Communist League in 1968. Sympathetic to the idea of "armed self defense" and "unconditional defense of the workers states" the RCP merged with the Workers World Party
Workers World Party
Workers World Party is a far-left political party in the United States, founded in 1959 by a group led by Sam Marcy. Marcy and his followers split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1958 over a series of long-standing differences, among them Marcy's group's support for Henry A...

 later that year. They left the WWP in 1971, and reconstituted themselves as the Revolutionary Communist League (Internationalist)
Revolutionary Communist League (Internationalist)
The Revolutionary Communist League- was a small Trotskyist group which existed in various forms between 1968 and the late 1980s.- Organizational history :...

.

Early Activities and Expansion

Initially the Spartacists sought to intervene in the Civil Rights protests, on the basis of their support for the idea of revolutionary integrationism, but as small as they were, this activity foundered. They also developed a small presence in the Students for a Democratic Society
Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)
Students for a Democratic Society was a student activist movement in the United States that was one of the main iconic representations of the country's New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969...

; within the SDS they opposed all the major factions that developed from that body as these factions turned more and more towards Maoist ideas by 1969.

As the student and anti-Vietnam war movements passed their late 1960s peak the Spartacists did begin to recruit from the then large milieu of radicalised students. This led to substantial growth and the development of a national presence as they expanded from their initial branches in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...

. In part this process involved the recruitment of former students who had formed local Maoist collectives which had then come across Trotskyist ideas, including the Communist Working Collective, led by Marv Treiger, in southern California and Buffalo Marxist Collective, led by Jan Norden, in Buffalo, New York.

Some years time later they recruited a not dissimilar "Gay Left" group based in the Bay area called the Red Flag Union. Throughout the 1970s the Spartacists did develop a series of what they described as exemplary interventions in industry and the trade unions. For example, there were supporters involved with the ILWU in the Bay Area, the automotive industry in California, the telephone industry and others.

Modest growth continued through the early to mid-1970s. In 1975, the Spartacist League founded the Partisan Defense Committee
Partisan Defense Committee
The Partisan Defense Committee describes itself as a "a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people." The PDC works in accordance with the political orientation of the Spartacist League...

 as ""a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization that champions cases and causes in the interests of the whole of the working people" working in accordance with the political positions of the Spartacist League and working in the tradition of the International Labor Defense
International Labor Defense
The International Labor Defense was a legal defense organization in the United States, headed by William L. Patterson. It was a US section of International Red Aid organisation, and associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and...

 organization established by the Communist Party in the 1920s.

Fragmentation

The late 1970s saw the growth of the league stalled as the radical tide of the 1960s began to ebb. Major internal factional struggles in the group have developed from time to time. These tended to lead to the departure of the dissenting minority.

In 1972, the life of the organization was punctuated by the loss of several leading cadres. Dissatisfied with the group's regime, some senior members gathered around Moore, Stewart, Dave Cunningham, and Marv Treiger. They challenged Robertson only to find themselves expelled from the SL. They then formed a short-lived organization, the International Group
International Group
The International Group was the name taken by two groups of British supporters of the Fourth International.In both cases, the Group was formed as a public faction by members loyal to the International who felt that the then-current leadership of the British section of the Fourth International had...

, which issued a single pamphlet and then dissolved. Curiously the SL reissued the dissidents' pamphlet as part of their series Hate Trotskyism, Hate the Spartacist League. That split did not interrupt the growth of the League. Critics have argued that the unchallenged domination of Jim Robertson dates from the 1972 purge. In 1976 another group left to form the Revolutionary Workers League .

In 1978 a number of leading young male members were targeted by Robertson, who nicknamed them "clones" because they were supposedly of the same ilk as longtime SL "theoretician" Joseph Seymour (real name Mark Tishman). There were no political issues in dispute, but Robertson viewed the group, of which the most prominent member was Young Spartacus editor Sam Issacharoff (now an NYU law professor), as a group of petty bourgeois intellectuals who might eventually become a dissident faction. Issacharoff and other "clones" quit the organization. This episode was later referred to by the International Bolshevik Tendency as "the Clone Purge" http://www.bolshevik.org/ETB/Rtj.html.

For the Spartacist League these were years of retrenchment in the face of what it saw as a worldwide offensive on the part of the capitalist class. While it maintained its (sometimes intensive) polemical efforts directed at the members of what they described as Ostensibly Revolutionary Organisations, ORO's for short, it began to withdraw its members from union work. In time the union fractions, once the most boasted of element of the SL's work, were dismantled as detailed by the IBT in their second bulletin Stop the Liquidation of the Trade Union Work in 1983.

This withdrawal from work within the unions eventually led to a number of former members who had quit the SL regrouping to found the External Tendency of the SL. Initially based in the San Francisco Bay area and Toronto the ET was to define itself as a public faction of the SL and sought to be readmitted to the ranks of the parent organisation. Said efforts were rebuffed by the SL who have since waged a polemical war with the ET and its successor groups the BT and IBT.

Later splits

In 1996, Workers Vanguard editor Jan Norden and other founders of the League for the Fourth International
League for the Fourth International
The League for the Fourth International is a Trotskyist international organisation, whose most noteworthy section is the Internationalist Group/Grupo Internacionalista in the United States. It has other affiliates in Mexico, Brazil and France. All of these are very small and based in at most one...

 were expelled, allegedly for maneuvering with a group from Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

 involved in bringing court suit against a trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...

.http://www.internationalist.org/igbrazila98.html

Publications

  • Spartacist on the anti-war movement: a compilation of leaflets New York : Spartacist Pub., 1971
  • Toward a communist women's movement by Les Kagan [L.A. (i.e., Los Angeles) : Spartacist League, 1973
  • Marxist theory and deformed workers states New York : Spartacist Pub., 1971
  • Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam by John Sharpe
    John Sharpe
    John Sharpe may refer to:*John Sharpe , English test cricketer*John Sharpe , Australian tennis tour player from the 1960s*John Sharpe , Canadian Davis Cup player from the early 1970s...

     New York : Spartacist Pub., 1976
  • Lenin & the vanguard party. by John Sharpe
    John Sharpe
    John Sharpe may refer to:*John Sharpe , English test cricketer*John Sharpe , Australian tennis tour player from the 1960s*John Sharpe , Canadian Davis Cup player from the early 1970s...

     New York : Spartacist Pub., 1978
  • The Great coal strike of 1978 New York : Spartacist Pub., 1978
  • Solidarnosc: Polish company union for CIA and bankers New York : Spartacist Pub., 1981
  • El Salvador: Military Victory to Leftist Insurgents! New York : Spartacist Pub., 1982
  • You can't fight Reagan with Democrats: for mass strike action to bring down Reagan! : build a workers party! : vote Richard Bradley, vote Diana Coleman, Spartacist candidates for S.F. Supervisors San Francisco, CA: Spartacist Party Campaign Committee, 1982
  • American Workers Revolution Needs Black Leadership New York : Spartacist Pub., 1982
  • KAL 007: U.S. War Provocation New York : Spartacist Pub., 1983
  • The Socialist Workers Party: An Obituary New York : Spartacist Pub., 1984
  • Lutte Ouvrière and Spark: workerism and national narrowness. New York : Spartacist Pub., 1988
  • Trotskyism: What It Isn't and What It Is! New York : Spartacist Pub., 1990

Marxist Bulletin


Black History and the Class Struggle

  • Black History and the Class Struggle New York : Spartacist Pub., 1983 #1
  • On the Civil Rights Movement New York : Spartacist Pub., 1985 #2
  • Massacre of Philly MOVE New York : Spartacist Pub., 1986 #3
  • Black Soldiers in the Jim Crow Military New York : Spartacist Pub., 1987 #4
  • Finish the Civil War! New York : Spartacist Pub., 1988 #5
  • Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution New York : Spartacist Pub., 1989 #6
  • Black Soldiers Fight for Freedom: "Glory" New York : Spartacist Pub., 1990 #7
  • South Africa and Permanent Revolution New York : Spartacist Pub., 1991 #8
  • Los Angeles Explodes—There Is No Justice In Capitalist America New York : Spartacist Pub., 1993 #9
  • Malcolm X: The Man, the Myth, the Struggle New York : Spartacist Pub., 1993 #10
  • Stop the Klan! For a Workers America! New York : Spartacist Pub., 1994 #11
  • South Africa Powder Keg New York : Spartacist Pub., 1995 #12
  • Fight for Black Freedom, Fight for a Socialist Future! New York : Spartacist Pub., 1996 #13
  • Capitalist Rulers Wage War on Blacks, Immigrants New York : Spartacist Pub., 1997 #14
  • Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Abolish the Racist Death Penalty! New York : Spartacist Pub., 1998 #15
  • South African Workers Battle ANC Neo-Apartheid Rule New York : Spartacist Pub., 2001 #16
  • [No title] New York : Spartacist Pub., 2003 #17
  • [No title] New York : Spartacist Pub., 2005 #18
  • [No title] New York : Spartacist Pub., 2006 #19
  • [No title] New York : Spartacist Pub., 2007#20

External links

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