Spartacist League (US)

The Spartacist League (or, usually pejoratively, the Sparts) is a Trotskyist political grouping. They are officially called the United States section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), formerly the International Spartacist Tendency, but the term Spartacist League is popularly used by members as well as non-members. 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. Depending on the context, the League will often self-identify 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 trying to portray themselves as the most authentically communist group present at that activity. In response, most comparable far-left groupings specifically deride the "Sparts" by name as being a nuisance, an allegation not often repeated against other US Trotskyist groupings. They are also notable for their defense of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and Roman Polanski, and defending North Korea from capitalist restoration. They have also criticized the bombing of Islamic State targets by the US military: "Cynically launched in the name of 'humanitarian' assistance to Shiites, Kurds, Christians, Yazidis and others threatened by the ISIS cutthroats, the imperialist onslaught is aimed at reinforcing the U.S. hold over the Near East."

The Spartacist League stresses its Trotskyist orthodoxy and places a great deal of importance on being ideological adherents of James P. Cannon. However, reflecting the political background of its founder, James Robertson, the SL still supports the criticisms from the left made by Max Shachtman against Cannon's SWP in the 1940's and early 1950's. For example, it still openly 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.

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