In the United States, the group is small but very vocal, and its activities within leftist-activist coalitions and wide-scale social justice protest movements usually focus on presenting a pole for regroupment and recruitment of subjective revolutionaries on the basis of an internationalist, Bolshevik-Leninist program.
Another important influence on the emerging tendency was Dick Fraser, who developed the theory of revolutionary integrationism, later adopted by the Spartacist League, which argued that blacks in the USA constituted a color-caste who could be fully integrated into society only as a result of a social revolution overthrowing capitalism.
Under the party name "Lyn Marcus," Lyndon LaRouche was briefly a member of the Revolutionary Tendency and then of the American Committee for the Fourth International (ultimately, opposed to the Spartacist League) as he circulated through various groupings on the Left in the 1960s.
These Shachtmanisms included a disagreement with the SWP's (and Leon Trotsky's) "Proletarian Military Policy" (a World War II call for workers control of the American military)[4] and a disagreement about the political legitimacy of supporting Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalists against the Japanese given Chiang's alliance with American imperialism.
[5] Robertson's long-held view that the "interpenetrated peoples" of Israel/Palestine have equal rights to national self-determination is also far closer to the stance taken toward the foundation of Israel by Shachtman's WP than that of Cannon's SWP.
In the summer of 2017, the ICL questioned its past, believing that it had been, in the person of "a number of American cadres", penetrated by "the chauvinist Hydra" since 1974.
This resulted in a degree of demoralisation on the part of some members including the group's leading West Coast figure, Geoff White, who resigned in 1968.
Robertson opposed the MLCRC and a faction fight developed which ended when a most of the minority, that is those who supported Ellens, resigned from the League in time founding The Spark group.
[9] Initially the Spartacists sought to intervene in the Civil Rights protests, on the basis of their support for the idea of revolutionary integrationism, but as small as they were, this activity floundered.
This led to substantial growth and the development of a national presence as they expanded from their initial branches in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dissatisfied with the group's regime, some senior members gathered around Moore, Stewart, Dave Cunningham, and Marv Treiger.
Initially based in the San Francisco Bay area and Toronto, the ET was to define itself as a public faction of the SL and sought to be readmitted to the ranks of the parent organisation.
These efforts were rebuffed by the SL who have since waged a polemical war with the ET and its successor groups the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT).
[11] In 1996, Workers Vanguard editor Jan Norden and other founders of the League for the Fourth International were expelled, allegedly for maneuvering with a group from Brazil involved in bringing lawsuit against a trade union.