James Robertson (Trotskyist)

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James Robertson is the National Chairman of the Spartacist League in the United States and leader of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), an international organization of small Trotskyist groups.

Of Scottish descent, Robertson studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in his youth.

He was a member of the youth wing of Max Shachtman's International Socialist League in the 1950s. He became disillusioned as that group moved away from what he perceived of as Marxism to merge into the Socialist Party of America. As leaders of the Socialist Youth League he jointly organized an opposition to these moves with Tim Wohlforth and in 1957 they fused the SYL with youth supporters of the Socialist Workers Party (US); Robertson also became a member of the SWP at this time. In 1959, he published a statement in support of the Chinese suppression of the Tibetan resistance movement, and more generally took a defensist position with regard to existing Communist states, which he saw as being essentially workers' states, albeit degenerated and deformed ones.

In 1963 he and Wohlforth led the Revolutionary Tendency within the SWP which disagreed with the party's analysis of the Cuban Revolution and with plans by the SWP to unify with the International Secretariat of the Fourth International from which it had split in 1953 (see Fourth International) and which Robertson and Wohlforth characterized as "Pabloite". The merger took place forming the new United Secretariat of the Fourth International and the Revolutionary Tendency was expelled in 1964, the year after the USFI's creation.

The RT initially joined with the International Committee of the Fourth International (which the SWP had left) and came under the influence of Gerry Healy of Britain's Socialist Labour League but disagreements emerged between Robertson and Wohlforth (and their followers) and Robertson and his group were expelled and formed the Spartacist League.