Who are The Spartacist League?

[communist_lefist]

Recently I heard a socialist on another website talking about The Spartacist League. He didn't explain who the were or what the stand for, only the he felt they were some kind of front organization, and the they supported NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) and the abolishing of age of consent laws, and other such things. So my question is who is the Spartacist League, what to they stand for, and are this criticisms serious or just extreme attacks?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Bollocks. There is nothing insane or pseudo-Trotskyist about recognising the DPR Korea as a deformed workers' state - this was the position of every orthodox Trotskyist group, though most of them were reluctant to actually apply this position consistently. Is the ICL insane or pseudo-Trotskyist for not dreaming about "new classes", for not deflecting the permanent revolution into a parody of itself, for not tailing Chavez, for not rallying behind Solidarity and cheering the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I don't think so.

Issues concerning the age of consent can't be debated on this forum, unlike Zionism apparently, but if the Spartacists wanted to rape anyone, they would probably join some Healyite grouping. Actually, the ICL, while far from perfect, is comparatively clean. There was one problematic section leader, who was summarily questioned in front of the international Control Commission and expelled (he even voted for his own expulsion "in a fit of near-Stalinism" as one commentator put it). The Spartacists don't have secretive committees covering up abuses, they don't function as advisors to bourgeois governments, they don't send intelligence about other communists to murderous dictators.

The Spartacists have, almost from the beginning, stood for sexual libertarianism. Hence their support of NAMBLA - and you do realise that raping children doesn't simply violate age of consent laws, do you? - but hence also their progressive line on LGBT liberation when avowed Bolsheviks-Leninists were foaming about how "the working class hates hippies, gays and womens-libbers (sic)", and so do they.

Also, their opposition to age-of-consent laws is a very minor part of the Spartacist line. Soviet defencism, a firm adherence to the theory of the degenerated workers' state, and so on, are much more important.

[Nevsky]

Is there any particular reason why they use the name of the old german revolutionary marxist organization lead by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? The WW1 "spartacists" were the left opposition to the social-democrats, true enemies of imperialist warfare and martyrs of the world revolution.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The Spartacist League started as the Spartacist tendency in the US SWP; I don't know why they chose that particular name, but they certainly saw themselves as opposed to both the right (Shachtman) and to the centre (Pablo and Mandel) of the Trotskyist movement. So, maybe the name was a reference to the Spartakusbund, opposed to both the centrists around Kautsky and to the right-wing maniacs like Ebert and Noske.