James Robertson (Trotskyist)

James Robertson (born 1928) is National Chairman (consultative) of the Spartacist League of the United States, which is a section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), an international organization of small Trotskyist groups. Robertson is a consultative member of the ICL's international executive committee.

Born in 1928, Robertson joined the Communist Party in Richmond, California, in December 1946. He was active in its youth organization the American Youth for Democracy. While studying chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, he left the CP to join Max Shachtman’s Workers Party shortly before it changed to the Independent Socialist League in May 1949. He was active in the WP/ISL’s youth organization, the Socialist Youth League, and its successor, the Young Socialist League (YSL).

Max Shachtman and his supporters then considered themselves Trotskyists, though they had broken with Trotsky’s Fourth International in 1940, abandoning the Trotskyist program of unconditional military defense of the USSR as World War II began. According to Robertson, the Workers Party gave up any perspective of reuniting with the Fourth International in 1948 and moved to the right under the pressure of the Cold War. Robertson fought what he considered this rightward course, co-authoring his first oppositional document in 1951. Along with Tim Wohlforth and Shane Mage, he was a leader of the Left Wing Caucus which developed in the YSL in early 1957 in opposition to Shachtman's plan to liquidate the ISL into the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation.

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