Ask Lemmygrad

The Trotskyism I've encountered irl, on a theoretical level, tries to differentiate itself by strawmanning ideas they deem "Stalinist" such as socialism in one country, essentially.

They have an idealistic conception of the proletariat as the revolutionary class always, and any class collaboration is Stalinism. So their version of internationalism is vaguely hoping the working class of Israel and the working class of Palestine unite, the working class of China overthrows its government, etc. Profoundly undialectical. Brag about having secret trot organizers trying to overthrow China lol

A lot of it comes down to the fact that while Trotsky was intelligent, educated, and driven, he was deeply intellectually dishonest. He's basically the guy that would win all of his arguments-- after the fact in the shower. Except he's not venting to himself, he's bitterly writing and speaking, actively organizing counterrevolutionaries both inside and outside the USSR.

So if your only exposure to Soviet history and Marxist theory is uncritically reading Trotsky (or second/third hand since he formed the foundation of Western sovietology), of course he's going to seem like the guy with all the right ideas that just unfortunately somehow lost every single time to people who were much stupider.

What's interesting is I noticed a trend of a handful of trotskyists essentially being MLs without knowing, having reconstructed decent theory through first principals, just without any of the scary terminology of Stalinism. Some sort of theory speciation under the evolutionary pressures of material reality mediated by anticommunism lol