At the conclusion of the First World War in 1919, an openly communist group calling itself the
Spartacist League, which drew its inspiration from the Bolshevik Revolution that had established a communist dictatorship in Russia, made a bold effort to impose a communist regime in Bavaria.
The first: in Sydney and Melbourne, general meetings of Women's Liberation were frequently subjected to long-winded hectoring addresses by young women from the
Spartacist League about participating in class struggle being the only way to achieve the liberation of women.
My stepfather's best friend, Jeff, who lived in a cottage behind ours, was a member of the
Spartacist League, a rival Trotskyist organization that was less shy about the violent implications of its rhetoric.
At the end of that year, with Rosa Luxemburg and others, he founded what became the
Spartacist League, named after the gladiator Spartacus, leader of the slave rebellion that threatened the Roman government in the first century BC.
Luxemburg and fellow radical Karl Liebknecht publicly broke with the SPD after its vote in 1914 to support the kaiser's entry into World War I; her left-wing splinter group, the
Spartacist League, would subsequently emerge to chastise even further the SPD for its nationalist, promilitary position.
Eventually I joined the
Spartacist League (SL), a bolshevik Trotskyist organization, and sold their paper, Workers Vanguard, to students, longshoremen and the general public.
"The attack on the World Trade Centre was an indiscriminate act of terror and the people who perpetrated it share the same mindset as the British and American imperialist rulers, because they equated the US imperialist rulers with the American people" - Mick Connor of the Trotskyite
Spartacist League.
An interesting clue to the willful media misperception of widespread antiwar feeling lies in the persistent suggestion that the town meeting protesters were members of the famously sectarian and pugnacious
Spartacist League. No one I spoke to from Columbus had seen a single Spart.
These characters certainly sounded frightening, though it remains an open question how many of them actually exist outside, say, the
Spartacist League. Most disturbing was Brown's use of "left conservatism" to characterize the positions of anyone who "refused" the insights of her favorite postmodern theorists--anyone, it turned out, who still wants to talk about truth, reality, materiality, oppressive social systems, revolutionary social transformation or the need for a united radical movement (anyone, in other words, who disagrees with Brown about these things).
The Partisan Defense Committee, an organization associated with the
Spartacist League, has mounted a high-level campaign in his behalf, attracting an array of supporters such as Maggie Kuhn, Ron Dellums, Percy Sutton, Howard Fast, Ramsey Clark and Ed Asner.