The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist political grouping. They are the United States section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), formerly the International Spartacist Tendency. This Spartacist League named themselves after the original Spartacus League of Weimar Republic in Germany, but the current League has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.
In the United States, the group is small but very vocal, and its activities within leftist-activist coalitions and wide-scale social justice protest movements usually focus on presenting a pole for regroupment and recruitment of subjective revolutionaries on the basis of an internationalist, Bolshevik-Leninist program. Among the American left the Spartacist League is considered particularly notorious for its defense of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and Roman Polanski, and defending North Korea from capitalist restoration. The Spartacist League has also criticized the bombing of Islamic State targets by the US military.
The Spartacist League stresses its Trotskyist orthodoxy and takes great pride on being the revolutionary successors of James P. Cannon. However, reflecting the political background of its founder, James Robertson, the SL supports some of the criticisms from the left made by Max Shachtman against Cannon's SWP in the 1940s and early 1950s. For example, the SL rejects the Proletarian Military Policy associated with both Leon Trotsky and Cannon in the early years of the Second World War. That is best summarized in the Prometheus Research Library's 1989 publication Documents on the "Proletarian Military Policy." On some issues, notably the tactic of "critical support" for labor and socialist parties running in electoral blocs with bourgeois or petit-bourgeois parties, the SL retroactively criticizes the tactics of parties in Trotsky's Fourth International from the left.