https://iclfi.org/pubs/slus/2026-jim-robertson
Editorial Note
This Prometheus Research Series bulletin commemorates Jim Robertson, a lifelong fighter for communism and founding leader of the Spartacist League/U.S. and International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). As a collection, these writings document the key positions Jim fought for that shaped the ICL as a distinct political tendency on the left internationally and are testimony to his leadership in key class battles and struggles against all forms of oppression.
It is well known that the ICL has critically reviewed and repudiated many of its past positions. This in itself is a tribute to Jim Robertson. He forged a party that proved capable of coming back from collapse, stronger and with the revolutionary appetite and program to intervene in urgent struggles today. Against the notion of infallible leaders and eternal truths, Trotsky wrote: “Marxism is a theory of movement, not stagnation” (“Stalinism and Bolshevism,” 1937).
Some on the left have accused the ICL of “throwing Jim Robertson under the bus.” This bulletin gives readers the opportunity to judge for themselves. The Marxist method of evaluating a revolutionary party requires study of how it sought to advance the working class at a specific time and place in history. Lessons drawn from Jim’s lifetime of party building have enduring value for us today. To understand why the ICL has returned to the Comintern’s positions on the national question, permanent revolution and electoral tactics, and has corrected our previous approach to age of consent laws, we encourage readers to study the last three issues of Spartacist (English edition Nos. 68, 69, 70) and Women & Revolution No. 47 alongside this bulletin.
History does not stand still and neither can a revolutionary party. Unlike the bourgeois revolutions that were primarily driven by economic forces, proletarian revolutions require great political consciousness, ceaseless inquiry and correction. As Marx said: “Proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts…” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). Or, as Jim Robertson said often and succinctly: “Show me a finished program and I’ll show you a finished party.”
Unfortunately, Jim did not live to see the ICL’s qualitative turn. We sorely wish that he had and that he could inform our vigorous debates on how to intervene in a genuinely new period in world history. Trump has ripped apart the old liberal world order in a desperate attempt to reverse U.S. imperialism’s economic decline with unbridled military force and by bludgeoning allies and foes alike. To fight U.S. imperialism today, we are currently looking into how and why every tendency in the Trotskyist movement, including our own, underestimated the centrality of opposing U.S. imperialist hegemony at the end of World War II. Instead of vying for leadership of national liberation struggles as levers for socialist revolutions, the Spartacist tendency viewed them as obstacles to get past, while other tendencies capitulated to bourgeois nationalists, Stalinism or guerrillaism.
The obituary for Jim Robertson published in Workers Vanguard was chosen as the introduction to this bulletin because it gives a good sense of the man, the history that shaped him, and how he intervened to change history. Jim’s own writings are then presented in chronological order, beginning with his defense of the Bolshevik Revolution and his break from the “third camp” to Trotskyism. A few selections were not written by Jim alone. He worked in collaboration with others on many key programmatic documents. Documents are reproduced here without changes except for typographical errors. Anthologies are partial by definition, so we chose to conclude this bulletin with an extensive bibliography of Jim’s writings, which are available from the Prometheus Research Library upon request.
—Prometheus Research Library, June 2026
