James Robertson (1928–2019) was the long-time and founding National Chairman of the Spartacist League (US), the original national section of the International Communist League. In his later years, Robertson was consultative member of the ICL's international executive committee. Biography 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 what had become the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation. Under the impact of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, members of the Left Wing Caucus became convinced that the Stalinist bureaucracy was not a new ruling “bureaucratic collectivist” class, as Shachtman had insisted, but instead a brittle and unstable caste, as Trotsky had argued. Wohlforth, Mage and Robertson launched the Young Socialist in October 1957 and founded the associated Young Socialist Clubs; they joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In response to the formation of a Tibetan Brigade at the University of California at Berkeley in 1959, Robertson wrote a leaflet enthusiastically supporting the Chinese state’s suppression of what he considered to be a CIA-backed uprising in Tibet, reflecting the Young Socialist Clubs’ adoption of unconditional military defense of China, which they regarded as a deformed workers state, qualitatively similar to the USSR after it underwent its bureaucratic degeneration. Robertson was a leader of the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, when it was founded in 1960. Robertson, Mage