The Consistent Democrats are a Marxist trend in the Trotskyist tradition that are associated with the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International – we have close co-thinkers in South America – Brazil and Argentina – as well as looser associations with other like-minded groupings in the United States and Australia.
Our comrades in South America are obviously strongly affected by the imperialist offensive waged by the Trump administration in the Western Hemisphere: the attempt to starve Cuba and destroy the workers state there, the attack on Venezuela and the abduction of President Maduro and his wife, and the numerous other threats against countries such as Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, and more. As well as the pro-Zionist, far right government in Argentina that looks with favour on the 70s-80s military dictatorship.
The Anti-Fascist International is one strand of what we feel we should be involved in, given its formation as a campaign to fight against imperialist and fascist aggression in the Americas. It is obvious that the International does not concern itself solely with the Americas, as the recent discussion on slogans regarding Iran reveals. The slogan calling for an Iranian victory in the still-current war is a key dividing line against social-pacifism, although such matters are still subject to debate in the British Chapter.
Our strategic objective is international working-class revolution. Our model is the 1917 revolution and other (unfortunately defeated) revolutions that were part of the revolutionary wave that the followed the First World War, more than a century ago. We reject the capitulationism of many, if not most, of those who claim to be Trotskyists today, among whom a failure to take sides with workers states such as China and non-imperialist, former workers states such as Russia when they come under attack from imperialism, is all too common.
We are for defence of China as a deformed workers state against imperialism and any internal attempt to restore capitalism. We do not politically support the CPC bureaucracy, whose modus operandi resembles the programme of the Right Opposition in Russia in the 1920s, with considerable latitude for capitalism far beyond what was ever permitted in the USSR. We want to see the CPC bureaucracy replaced by a government of workers councils (soviets) like that in early Soviet Russia, and a programme of international socialist revolution.
Regarding Russia, we are not partisans of Russian nationalism, but the defence of the right to self-determination of Russian speakers in East Ukraine is a basic right, threatened by Nazi-like Ukrainian nationalism. Russia is threatened by NATO expansion, which is an existential imperialist threat. We do not see Russia as imperialist at all – in fact we consider its mixed economy and the considerable suppression of the oligarchs by Putin as remnants of the previous workers state, and there to be a degree of interpenetration of different modes of production embodied in today’s Russia, which explains its technological lead over US imperialism in some spheres.
As a model, we do not see guerilla warfare of the Chinese and Cuban model as something to be advocated as the road to the world revolution. Although they managed to overthrow capitalism in those countries through historic social revolutions, they were always limited in their aspirations and did not seek a world revolution. The proletariat does not rule directly in those countries but is deprived of political power by bureaucratic regimes that are somewhat akin to Bonapartism in the bourgeois revolution – a retreat, though on the foundation of social revolutions. They are a by-product of the Russian Revolution and should be defended tooth and nail against imperialism and internal capitalist restoration, but they are unlike the Bolshevik leaders of the Russian revolution who based themselves on the class-conscious working class.
We see the Anti-Fascist International as an important united front of some of the most advanced organisations of the left, and a possible bridge to a future international revolutionary party. It complements our work in International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), and our attempts to play a role in Your Party to encourage it to give birth to a real working- class party. We must collaborate in all these spheres with tendencies and individuals we have considerable differences with at times, which can be complex. But we encourage political debate and workers democracy as the way to resolve such differences. In such a way we consider the Anti-Fascist International can also grow and expand its influence.
(Submitted to the British Chapter of the Anti-Fascist International as an explanation and motivation of our involvement, 18-4-2026)
