James Robertson

1928-2019

The following tribute was distributed at memorials held by our comrades of the Spartacist League/U.S. in October and November last year. An extensive obituary was published in Workers Vanguard No. 1162, 4 October 2019.

Our comrade James Robertson, a founding leader of the Spartacist League/U.S. and its longtime National Chairman, died at his home in Northern California on April 7, at the age of 90. Although in self-described semi-retirement for many years, comrade Robertson remained an essential component of the leadership of the SL/U.S. and the International Communist League until the last weeks of his life.

A member of the workers movement for more than 70 years, Jim’s political history took him from the Communist Party to Max Shachtman’s Workers Party/Independent Socialist League to James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP). He was one of the central leaders of the Revolutionary Tendency (RT), which fought the political degeneration of the SWP. Expelled in 1963-64, cadre of the RT went on to found the Spartacist League.

Jim especially valued the experience and the knowledge he gained from Cannon and other veteran cadre of the SWP. They represented real revolutionary continuity, however slender, extending back to Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party and the first four congresses of the Communist International. It was this heritage that Jim fought to pass on to a new generation of communist leaders in building the SL/U.S. and most importantly in the struggle for our international extension and consolidation. Devoted to the collection and preservation of the works and documentation of the international workers movement, Jim developed a personal library that became the basis for the Prometheus Research Library, the central archive of the SL/U.S. Central Committee and a working facility for Marxist and related studies.

Jim was the founding editor of Spartacist, which would become our international theoretical journal. The cadre collective that he forged in the early years of the SL/U.S. allowed us, after a series of regroupments, to realize our perspective of being a fighting propaganda group with the launching of Workers Vanguard as well as Women and Revolution in the early 1970s. He remained a critical component of the English-language Spartacist editorial board until the end as well as a key collaborator in shaping our other propaganda. Above all he was essential to the political struggles that helped forge a new generation of ICL leaders.

A child of the Great Depression, from a young age Jim was impacted by labor battles like the 1936-37 West Coast maritime strike and a personal horror at witnessing the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and had an abiding hatred for the brutal racial oppression of black people in this country. Throughout his life, he would maintain a commitment to knowledge, probity and a keen appreciation of monetary matters inculcated by his Calvinist upbringing. He also possessed great audacity, initiating many of our boldest and most defiant actions and propaganda.

Jim committed his life to the struggle for the socialist emancipation of humanity, what he once called “the absurdly simple idea that the material requirements of life ought to be produced and distributed upon the basis of the need for them rather than according to profitability to the owners of industry”. His death is a tremendous loss to the ICL. We extend our condolences to his wife and comrade, Martha; his sons, Kenneth and Douglas; his two stepdaughters, Rachel and Sarah; and his grandchildren.