How ‘Consistent Democracy’ Lost Its Verb, Gaining a Moralised Preference for Capitalism

Part 2 of 'The Drift"

The second in a series tracing the Shachtmanite drift in British Trotskyism, from the 1939–40 split in the American Socialist Workers Party to the operational politics of Ideas for Freedom 2025. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’, published April 2026.

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TL;DR

The phrase ‘consistent democracy’ carries weight in Britain’s far left because it sounds like Lenin, and because the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has built four decades of programmatic identity around it. The genealogy will not bear the weight. Lenin used the formulation tactically, in 1905 and 1918, to describe the specific historical task of the proletariat in a bourgeois revolution where the bourgeoisie had betrayed its own democratic banner. The phrase named a verb: the work of the working class to drive the revolution past the limits the bourgeoisie tries to set. The AWL’s contemporary deployment names a noun: an abstract preference for the political shell of bourgeois democracy over the political shell of authoritarianism. The verb has been removed. What remains is a moral preference dressed in Leninist vocabulary.

This drift was diagnosed inside the Trotskyist tradition itself, twice. Trotsky diagnosed it in 1939–40, when Max Shachtman’s faction in the American Socialist Workers Party broke with the defence of the USSR’s class character under wartime pressure. Trotsky’s prediction that abandonment of the dialectical apparatus would drive the faction toward the camp of bourgeois democracy was vindicated by 1965, when Shachtman supported US military intervention in the Dominican Republic on explicitly anti-Stalinist grounds. The Revolutionary Workers’ League diagnosed the drift again in 1981–82, when John O’Mahoney’s Socialist Organiser series ‘Socialism and Democracy’ attempted to reground Trotskyism in the inheritance of bourgeois-democratic rights. The Falklands War of April 1982 was the operational test, and O’Mahoney’s faction failed it: refusing to call for British defeat, focusing instead on the ‘fascistic’ character of the Argentine junta. The faction split from the Workers’ Socialist League, founded the Socialist Organiser Alliance, and in September 1988 formally discarded the workers’-state framework in an editorial that conceded, in passing, that ‘There are positive things to learn from Shachtman’.

Part One of this series documented what the apparatus produces in operation. Part Two asks the prior question: where does the apparatus come from? It traces the genealogy from Lenin’s tactical formulation, through Trotsky’s polemic against Shachtman, through Hal Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism as the bridge text, through O’Mahoney’s 1982 Socialist Organiser series and the RWL response, to the AWL’s 1988 formal break with the workers’-state framework. Part Three will engage the materialist counter-argument: what the FI tradition has on its own resources to do anti-campist work without producing the political outcomes the AWL apparatus has been licensing for forty years.

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I. Conway’s line

The first article in this series, ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’, traced what the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s ‘consistent democracy’ framework produces in operation: a December 2023 statement whose silences were filled in by an AWL co-author with a programme on Israel-Palestine the signatories had not been asked to underwrite, a Responses page that ran for two years without engaging a single Palestinian or Arab voice, and a November 2025 event at the Highbury Roundhouse where an AWL-platformed Palestinian told his own people their resistance had caused their genocide. This article asks the prior question. Where does the framework that produces these outcomes come from, and how did a phrase Lenin used as a tactical category for proletarian leadership in the bourgeois revolution become a static preference for bourgeois democracy over authoritarian alternatives?

In November I sat in the Highbury Roundhouse and listened to a panel of the AWL debate Geraldine of Socialismo o Barbarie on whether the Stalinist states were progressive. Neither side defended the proposition. The whole debate was structured around its rejection. What stayed with me was a line Liam Conway delivered from the floor, more or less in passing: ‘I believe that a capitalist system that has democratic features is a better situation than any form of authoritarian regime where there are no democratic rights.’

The statement is reasonable enough that you could nod and move on. The capitalist system Conway prefers is the one we live in. The authoritarian regime he opposes is the one that, in actually existing form, killed millions and produced the Hitler-Stalin pact, the show trials, the terror. Conway is not proposing to break a strike. He is articulating, in 2025 and to a room of British socialists, what he thinks the metric for political assessment is.

But pause on the structure of the move. Conway does not say ‘a capitalist system with democratic features is a better terrain for the working class to fight on.’ He does not say ‘the existence of democratic rights inside a capitalist state expresses class concessions the working class wrenched out and can defend through further struggle.’ He says one situation is better than another. The grammar is comparative and static. There is no verb the proletariat is doing in this sentence. There is only a preference between two political shells, weighed on a scale neither has constructed.

This is what ‘consistent democracy’ has come to mean in the AWL tradition. It is the line through which the apparatus the AWL has built for forty years can be heard articulating itself. Mark Osborn, closing the same panel, gave the same metric a more sophisticated formulation: ‘the metric for socialism is to what extent in any given society the working class has freedom, the right to organize, the right to struggle, the right to control’. The shift from Conway’s blunt preference to Osborn’s measured criterion is real. But the deeper structure is identical. Both formulations strip the political question down to which form of state best permits working-class activity, and then make that question the foundation of socialist judgement.

That is a defensible left position. It is the position Hal Draper articulated in 1966 in The Two Souls of Socialism. It is the position Max Shachtman moved towards through the 1940s and 1950s. It is what the AWL has consistently developed since its formal break with the workers’-state framework in Socialist Organiser 371 in September 1988.

It is also not what Lenin meant by ‘consistent democracy’, and the gap between Lenin’s deployment and the AWL’s has political consequences.

II. What Lenin actually said

Lenin used the formulation ‘consistent democracy’ principally in 1905, in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The context was specific: the failed Russian revolution of that year, the Mensheviks’ argument that the bourgeoisie should be allowed to lead the democratic revolution because it was a bourgeois revolution, and Lenin’s counter-argument that the bourgeoisie had already shown it would betray democracy whenever democracy threatened its property.

Lenin’s category is not a moral preference for democratic forms. It is a class analysis of who is doing the democratic work and who is sabotaging it. From chapter 6:

A bourgeois revolution expresses the need for the development of capitalism, and far from destroying the foundations of capitalism, it does the opposite, it broadens and deepens them.

The point is that the bourgeoisie, having a material interest in capitalism’s development, ought logically to be the consistent democrat in the bourgeois revolution. But it is not. It betrays its own historical task, because democracy threatens to bring the proletariat into politics. Lenin’s argument turns on this: the proletariat alone can be ‘consistently democratic’ in the bourgeois revolution, because the proletariat alone has nothing to fear from the democratic process going further than the bourgeoisie can tolerate.

The verb is in the proletariat. The ‘consistency’ is a quality of revolutionary action, not a quality of the state form. And the goal of the consistency is not to defend bourgeois democracy as such but to drive the bourgeois revolution to its limit, which Lenin defines as the threshold of the proletarian revolution.

The 1918 deployment, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, sharpens the same point. Kautsky was defending what he called ‘pure democracy’ against the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s reply:

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and a deception for the exploited, for the poor.

And further:

If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of ‘pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. ‘Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers.

The argument is consistent across the thirteen years between Two Tactics and Renegade Kautsky. Bourgeois democracy is a class form. Its features serve a function in the reproduction of capitalist rule. The proletariat’s task is not to choose between bourgeois democracy and authoritarianism as if these were freestanding political conditions. The task is to recognise that every state form under capitalism organises class rule, and that the proletarian programme cannot be the defence of one bourgeois state form against another but the conquest of state power by the working class itself.

In State and Revolution, written in the summer of 1917, Lenin develops this with a passage the AWL has more than once cited as if it supported their preference. The democratic republic, Lenin says, is ‘the best possible political shell for capitalism’. Conway and Osborn paraphrase: the democratic republic is the best terrain for the workers. But Lenin’s reason is the opposite of theirs. The democratic republic is best for capitalism because it allows capital to rule with less coercion and therefore more durably. It is best for the proletariat because it accelerates the contradictions and exposes the necessity of going beyond the democratic republic to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin’s full sentence, which the partial quotations bury:

For such a republic... does not by any means do away with the rule of capital... but it inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding and intensification of this struggle that... the possibility of satisfying the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses is realized inevitably and solely in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Read the passage entire and the AWL deployment falls apart. Lenin is not saying the democratic republic is preferable as a terrain. He is saying it is a transitional form that produces the conditions for its own supersession. The dialectical structure is intrinsic to the analysis. Strip it out and the sentence becomes a defence of the bourgeois state.

This is the structural reframing. Lenin’s ‘consistent democracy’ is a verb the proletariat performs, and its goal is the proletarian dictatorship. The AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ is a noun, a political form, and its goal is the defence of that form against worse alternatives. The same words have been made to do opposite work.

III. Trotsky on Shachtman, December 1939

The drift Lenin’s reframing represents has a specific historical name in the Marxist tradition: Shachtmanism. It also has a specific point of origin. In late 1939 and early 1940, under the pressure of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, a faction in the American Socialist Workers Party led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Martin Abern argued that the USSR’s class character could no longer be defended. The Trotskyist position required the unconditional defence of the workers’ state against imperialist attack, however degenerated the bureaucratic regime. Shachtman’s faction said this position was unsustainable in the face of Soviet aggression and Stalinist crimes. They argued that the Marxist position should be neutrality between the camps: neither Washington nor Moscow.

Trotsky’s response, written across the eight months between his first major polemic in December 1939 and his assassination in August 1940, is the founding document of the orthodox Trotskyist position on what Shachtman represented. In Defence of Marxism, the collection that gathered these polemics in 1942, is the text the AWL has read selectively for forty years and that the Fourth International tradition has continued to absorb whole.

Trotsky’s diagnosis runs at three levels. First, the class basis: the Shachtman opposition was a petty-bourgeois reaction to the war crisis. From ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party’, dated 15 December 1939:

It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency. Like any petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal ‘independence’ at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility toward it; and finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationships for party discipline.

Second, the theoretical level: Shachtman and Burnham were rejecting the dialectical method in favour of pragmatic empiricism, which is precisely what made them lose their bearings under wartime pressure:

Comrades Burnham and Shachtman represent the same tendency within our own party. They don’t think that dialectical materialism is a necessary part of our doctrine. They find that it is possible to arrive at a correct political conclusion without the dialectic.... But to the extent they fail to check, to polish, and to sharpen theoretically their tools of thought—dialectics—they are easily lost and relapse again into petty-bourgeois ways of thinking. When they are confronted with great events, they begin to substitute for a class analysis a psychological analysis, or a technical analysis, or an ‘organizational’ analysis.

Third, the political consequence. Trotsky predicted that abandonment of the defence of the USSR would not stop at neutrality. It would, under wartime pressure, drive the Shachtman faction toward the camp of bourgeois democracy. The substitution he names, class analysis replaced by psychological, technical, organisational analysis, is exactly the substitution the AWL apparatus performs eight decades later when it weighs Western democracy against authoritarian states without asking the prior class question. From the December 1939 ‘Letter to Sherman Stanley’:

What we object to about the Kremlin gang is not the expansion and not the geographical direction of the expansion but the bureaucratic, counter-revolutionary methods of the expansion. But at the same time because we as Marxists ‘look objectively’ upon historic happenings we recognize that neither the Czar, nor Hitler, nor Chamberlain had or have the custom of abolishing, in the occupied countries, capitalist property, and this fact, a very progressive one, depends upon another fact; namely, that the October Revolution is not yet dead.

The class analysis remains: what matters is the property form, not the regime’s manners. From the December 1939 letter to Shachtman himself:

I believe that you are on the wrong side of the barricades, my dear friend. By your position you give courage to all the petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist elements to fight our doctrine, our program, and our tradition.

Shachtman’s group split in April 1940 and founded the Workers Party. Burnham left within months, drifting through the Cold War to a position on the right of the American political spectrum. Shachtman’s trajectory was longer and more revealing. By the late 1950s he was advising the State Department on socialist responses to Soviet expansion. In 1965 he supported the American military intervention in the Dominican Republic. Peter Drucker’s biography of Shachtman records the position: Shachtman argued, in the pages of New America, that ‘the U.S. presence was necessary to ensure that “democratic forces” were not overwhelmed by Castroite elements, placing the preservation of an anti-Stalinist “democratic center” above the principle of national self-determination’ (Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left, Humanities Press 1994, p. 282). The reframing was clean. The metric of progressiveness was no longer the property form, the class character, or the question of national sovereignty. It was the political character of the contending forces measured against an anti-Stalinist criterion. By Shachtman’s metric, US military intervention against Castroite influence was defensible because it preserved the political space in which ‘democratic forces’ could operate.

I labour the trajectory because the AWL’s reading of Shachtman is selective on this point. The AWL traces its lineage back through Hal Draper’s wing of the broader Shachtmanite tradition, the wing that broke with Shachtman precisely over Vietnam and the State Department turn. The distinction is real. Drucker’s biography documents the Draper-Shachtman split with care, and Draper’s late refusal to follow Shachtman into Cold War liberalism is to his credit. But the analytical apparatus that produced both trajectories was the same apparatus, and the structural logic Trotsky identified in 1939 explains both outcomes. The apparatus that lets you read the Stalinist regime’s character without reference to the property form will, under pressure, let you read any regime’s character without reference to property. What looks like principled neutrality in 1940 becomes Cold War social democracy by 1965. The version that broke with Shachtman over Vietnam still inherits the apparatus. The version that licensed support for US intervention in the Dominican Republic and the version that became the analytical scaffolding of the AWL’s contemporary politics share an analytical origin point.

Trotsky was right in December 1939 about what would happen. He died in August 1940 without seeing the prediction confirmed. By 1965, Shachtman had confirmed it himself, in the pages of New America, by supporting US military intervention against a Caribbean state on the explicit grounds that Stalinist influence had to be checked. The analytical resource that would have resisted that drift was the dialectical apparatus Trotsky was defending. It had been abandoned in 1940.

IV. Draper as the bridge

The text that carries the Shachtmanite analytical apparatus forward into post-1960s left politics is Hal Draper’s The Two Souls of Socialism, published as a pamphlet by the International Socialists in 1966 from a longer essay in New Politics the same year, itself developed from a 1960 article in Anvil. The AWL cites it constantly. Workers’ Liberty study guides treat it as foundational. The argument deserves engagement.

Draper’s central move is to divide socialism into two souls or two tendencies. Socialism from Above is the tradition of socialism imposed by enlightened minorities, by parliamentary parties acting on behalf of the masses, by state bureaucracies, by Stalinist parties claiming to represent the working class without being accountable to it. Socialism from Below is the tradition of working-class self-emancipation, the tradition Draper traces through the Communards, the early Bolsheviks, the works councils movement, the rank-and-file unionism of the 1930s. The argument is that socialism is intrinsically about the form of agency, not the form of property. Whatever class wins state power is irrelevant if the form of that winning is from above.

Read in 1966, the argument has real force. It captures something the Stalinist tradition genuinely got wrong: the substitution of party rule for working-class rule, the cult of nationalised property regardless of its administrative form, the elevation of state ownership over working-class self-organisation. Draper’s polemic does work in the same period that the New Left in its various forms was doing similar work, and it inherits something of the early Marx that the orthodox Trotskyist tradition had let go cold.

But Draper’s framework is not, structurally, what Trotsky was defending against Shachtman. Trotsky’s analysis was dialectical: the Soviet state was a contradictory formation, with a planned economy as its base and a Stalinist apparatus as its superstructure, and the political revolution Trotskyists called for was the revolution that would overthrow the apparatus while preserving the base. The dialectic between base and superstructure was the analytical core. Draper’s framework collapses the dialectic. The question of property form drops away. What matters is the form of agency. If the working class is not in power, by Draper’s metric, the question of property form is irrelevant.

This collapse is the bridge. Draper’s framework lets you read Stalinist regimes as ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ or ‘state capitalism’ or any third-camp formulation, because the property question has been disqualified as the criterion. Once disqualified, the way is open to read every regime’s character through its political form. That is the analytical move the AWL has been making for forty years. Draper provides the theoretical permission. The AWL provides the political application.

The cost of the move is not visible in 1966. It becomes visible only when the framework is asked to do political work in conditions Draper himself did not face. Draper wrote in a period when the great political questions were the Cold War as Soviet expansion versus Western containment, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. The analytical question of property form was, in those conditions, a relatively easy question to bracket. The political content of the period seemed to organise itself around questions of agency: who gets to participate, who has rights, whose self-organisation is recognised.

But the framework cannot bear the political weight of conditions in which the question of property form is back at the centre. In Israel-Palestine, where the existence of a Jewish state structured around the systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population is precisely a question about who owns what land. In Ukraine, where a war is being fought over which imperial power gets to determine the property regime. In Britain itself, where the AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ framing of Israel-Palestine produces an ‘equal national rights’ position that treats the Israeli state and the Palestinian people as symmetrical political forms rather than as colonial structure and colonised population.

The framework that worked, for what it was worth, in 1966, does not work in 2025. The political content of the present demands the analytical resource that Draper’s framework discards.

V. The 1982 acid test, the 1988 self-reckoning

In 1982, the same drift Trotsky identified in 1939 was diagnosed inside British Trotskyism, by people working from the same analytical tradition the AWL claimed to represent. Sean Matgamna, writing under the pseudonym John O’Mahoney, published a series in Socialist Organiser titled ‘Socialism and Democracy’, a response to Michael Foot’s claim that Leninism was inherently authoritarian. O’Mahoney’s reply argued that socialism was the development and deepening of bourgeois-democratic rights, that revolutionary Marxists should act as ‘super-democrats’, that the inheritance from the Levellers and the Chartists was the legitimate analytical ground for Trotskyist intervention in the British labour movement.

The Revolutionary Workers’ League, the United States affiliate of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee in which O’Mahoney’s organisation also sat, replied in Workers Struggle through 1981 and 1982. Their charge was ‘super-democratism’, and their analysis was that O’Mahoney was reproducing the structure of Kautsky’s ‘pure democracy’ position that Lenin had dismantled in Renegade Kautsky. The polemic accused O’Mahoney of obscuring the class character of the bourgeois state, of treating bourgeois-democratic rights as a ‘heritage’ rather than as concessions wrung from the bourgeoisie under specific conditions of class struggle, and of preparing the analytical ground for a ‘Third Camp’ position that would, when tested, side with imperial democracy against any authoritarian opponent.

The test came in April 1982 with the Falklands War. The orthodox Trotskyist position on imperialist war is unambiguous: revolutionaries in an imperialist country call for the defeat of their own ruling class in a war against an oppressed nation. Argentina was a semi-colony under a fascistic junta. Britain was an imperialist power dispatching a task force to retake territory the junta had occupied. The Trotskyist response was to call for British defeat. The Argentine junta was a separate question; revolutionaries in Britain do not first take a position on the junta and then derive their position on the war. They take a position on the war their own ruling class is fighting, and they work out the rest.

O’Mahoney’s Socialist Organiser did not call for British defeat. The position, articulated through the war, was ‘dual defeatism’, or focus on the Falkland Islanders’ right to self-determination, or focus on the fascistic character of Galtieri’s regime. The Workers’ Socialist League leadership refused to commit to the orthodox position because the orthodox position was incompatible with the analytical framework O’Mahoney had been developing in Socialist Organiser through the prior year. If bourgeois-democratic rights are the heritage to be defended, and if the Argentine regime denies those rights more thoroughly than the British state does, then the Trotskyist position cannot, on this framework, simply be defeat for the imperialist power. The framework requires that something be said about the relative democratic credentials of the combatants. And once that something is said, the orthodox position becomes unsustainable.

The RWL’s polemic predicted exactly this and was vindicated by the war itself. The WSL split. The Internationalist Faction, supporters of the TILC’s orthodox line, were expelled. The Matgamna majority took Socialist Organiser with them, became the Socialist Organiser Alliance, and through the late 1980s became the AWL. The Thornett minority moved towards the Fourth International majority. The TILC itself split, with its successor International Trotskyist Committee founding a new theoretical journal in January 1985 which described its own position as ‘consistent Trotskyism’ against the various drifts that had broken up the previous formation.

Worth pausing on the formulation. The ITC’s ‘consistent Trotskyism’ is a deliberate echo of Lenin’s ‘consistent democracy’, and the echo carries the right structural meaning. The ‘consistency’ is a quality of revolutionary practice in fidelity to the dialectical method, not a quality of any particular state form. The ‘consistent Trotskyists’ are those who maintain the analytical apparatus Trotsky defended against Shachtman in 1939, against the various petty-bourgeois pressures that have driven sections of the tradition off course since. The ITC’s formulation gets the verb back where Lenin had put it. Whether the ITC succeeded as a political project is a separate question; the formulation was correct.

The AWL’s trajectory after the 1982 split is the trajectory the RWL predicted. By September 1988 the formal break came. Socialist Organiser 371, dated 15 September 1988, carried the editorial ‘Reassessing the Eastern Bloc’, which announced the discarding of the workers’-state framework. The opening was direct: ‘By now, most supporters of Socialist Organiser no longer believe that the designation “workers’ state”, degenerated, deformed, or whatever, makes any sort of sense.’ What replaced it was the framework the AWL has used since: a ‘state-monopoly bureaucracy’ whose nationalised economy, far from constituting the basis of a workers’ state contradicted by a Stalinist apparatus, was now itself the property of a ruling elite.

The 1988 editorial is unusually self-aware on the question of its lineage. It anticipates, and tries to defuse in advance, the charge of Shachtmanism. ‘And what of “Shachtmanism”?’, the editorial asks, before noting that Shachtman split with Trotsky in 1940, developed a theory of bureaucratic collectivism, and in old age supported the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the bombing of North Vietnam. ‘Clearly we do not want to follow Shachtman in those respects. But that is not all there was to Shachtman.... There are positive things to learn from Shachtman.’

The concession is the article’s evidence. The AWL knew, in 1988, that what it was doing carried the genealogy this article traces. It knew that the framework it was discarding, Trotsky’s ‘degenerated workers’ state’, was the framework Trotsky had defended in 1939 precisely against Shachtman. It tried to manage the inheritance by distinguishing the early Shachtman (the bureaucratic collectivism analysis, useful) from the late Shachtman (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam War bombing, useless). The distinction is the AWL’s. It is not the dialectical apparatus’s. The apparatus that produced bureaucratic collectivism in 1940 also produced the 1965 Dominican Republic position, because the analytical move that disqualified property form as the criterion was the move that left the apparatus with no resources to resist the 1965 reframing. You cannot inherit Shachtman’s 1940 framework while disowning the trajectory it produced by 1965. The AWL tried, in 1988, to perform exactly that operation. The history of the AWL since is the history of why that operation does not hold.

The 1988 break completed the trajectory the RWL had predicted in 1982. The drift Trotsky had diagnosed in 1939, that Shachtman had completed in 1965, that the RWL had diagnosed in 1981–82, completed its trajectory inside British Trotskyism with the September 1988 editorial. The property-form question was discarded. The political-form question became the whole question.

This is the apparatus the AWL has been refining for the thirty-seven years since. It is the apparatus that produced the ‘Two States’ framework on Israel-Palestine, the ‘consistent democracy’ framing of Ukraine and Iran, the December 2023 statement ‘For a Consistently Democratic and Internationalist Left’ and the body of work the Left Renewal blog has built around it. The Conway line at IFF 2025 is the apparatus articulating itself plainly. Conway is not innovating. He is repeating, in 2025, what the apparatus has been licensing for decades.

VI. Where this leaves the FI tradition

The FI tradition has never required the AWL apparatus to do its anti-campist work. It has its own resources, developed across the same decades, and applied with more analytical rigour than the apparatus the AWL inherited from O’Mahoney. The critique of campism, of Stalinist apologism, of the various forms of left support for reactionary regimes claiming anti-imperial credentials: this work has been done in International Viewpoint, in the writings of Ernest Mandel, Gilbert Achcar, Joseph Daher, in the Bureau statements and Congress resolutions of the FI itself. The work has been done without abandoning the dialectical apparatus that the AWL discarded in 1988.

The question for FI signatories to documents that have been built around the AWL’s apparatus is whether the apparatus is doing the work they think it is doing. Pierre Rousset signed the December 2023 statement understanding it as a list for discussion to broaden unity. He withdrew when the framework began to be used in directions he had not authorised. The withdrawal is the test. A signatory who reads the apparatus carefully, traces what it permits and what it forbids, and recognises that what it produces in operation is not what the FI tradition produces from its own resources, has the same option Rousset took.

The question for the broader left is whether ‘consistent democracy’ as a programmatic phrase is what its users say it is. The phrase carries Lenin’s authority. The deployments do not carry Lenin’s structure. What is being defended under the phrase is a static preference between political forms, a metric of working-class freedom abstracted from the property relations that condition that freedom. Lenin’s ‘consistent democracy’ was a verb describing what the proletariat does to drive a bourgeois revolution past its limits. The contemporary AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ is a noun describing a state form whose features should be defended against worse alternatives. The first usage is dialectical and pushes towards proletarian power. The second is comparative and stops at the defence of bourgeois rights. These are not the same thing.

What the apparatus produces in operation, this series has already documented in Part One. What materialist analysis the apparatus has discarded along the way, and what the Fourth International tradition has on its own resources to do the same anti-campist work without producing the same political outcomes, is the third article in this series.

For now, the historical point: the drift was diagnosed in 1939. Shachtman vindicated the diagnosis in 1965. The RWL diagnosed it again in 1981–82. The AWL conceded the genealogy in 1988, while trying to manage the inheritance by distinguishing the useful Shachtman from the embarrassing Shachtman. The framework that has been refined in British Trotskyism for forty years to license the drift was identified, at each stage of its development, by participants in the tradition who saw what was happening and named it. The participants who named it were not always politically successful. The RWL never became the dominant force in British Trotskyism. The Internationalist Faction was expelled. The ITC’s ‘consistent Trotskyism’ did not displace the AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ as the more widely circulated phrase. But the analytical work was done, and it stands.

What the AWL inherits from O’Mahoney’s 1982 reframing, and confessed to inheriting in 1988, is the answer to a question Trotsky had already answered in 1939: what happens to the Trotskyist tradition when, under political pressure, it abandons the dialectical analysis of the workers’ states in favour of a moralised preference for bourgeois democracy. The answer was given. It has been given again. The apparatus has had forty years to demonstrate what it produces. The Highbury Roundhouse on a drizzly November afternoon is what it produces.

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This is the second article in The Drift, a Red Mole series tracing the Shachtmanite reframing of Trotskyist categories in British far-left politics, from the 1939–40 split in the American SWP to the contemporary politics of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’. Part Three will engage the materialist counter-argument and the deeper terrain of the Ideas for Freedom 2025 panel.