Like many splits, the theoretical justifications came after the interpersonal ones. Trotsky lost out on the top job, and fled to the west. He and his tendency were broadly allowed to exist by the west, as they aligned with the US foreign policy line on everything.

Their tactics of selling newspapers is partly a survival mechanism. It doesn’t really threaten the bourgeoisie, it’s good for recruiting, and it gets them funds. They’re basically tiny NGOs with consistently bad takes on AES.

That said, their analysis of things that aren’t AES isn’t bad. Trotsky’s work on fascism is considered pretty stellar.

So, in my personal experience, a lot of it comes down to IRL Trotskyist orgs having a bizarrely cultist mindset. I have a friend who’s in the org that runs the world socialist website, and she is completely doctrinaire , she won’t deviate from the party line on anything.

This includes a lot of weird beliefs like “Stalin was poisoned by the CIA” even though he was a decrepit aging alcoholic by the time he finally but the dust.

That’s in addition to the other (largely valid) criticisms of Trotsky that come from tankies that point out that he ultimately functioned as a tool of western capital for the rest of his life after leaving the USSR.

With all that being said, “The Revolution Betrayed” is still a great read, and honestly I suspect things would have gone better for the USSR if he had been running the show, but with these historical hypotheticals it’s hard to know :back-to-me-shining:

I’m not a Trotskyist, or really any -ist beyond a Marxist, but I do know people who were in ISO before it dissolved.

Part of it is that the online left has tendency to overrepresent ML lines that are either from

1. A former Trotskyist group that turned on all the other Trotskyists and so is fervently anti-Trotskyist now (WWP, and it’s slightly better split PSL)

2. Remnants of old communist parties (that split just as badly as the Trotskyist parties did, and have the same problematic views of older Trotskyist groups like the people who run WSWS) which have historical baggage against Trotskyists (see Grover Furr twisting over every single thing published that somehow Trotsky was a Nazi collaborator which is in sync with some of the old british communist parties and the old CPUSA). This also gets discovered organically by people self radicalizing, because that literature and older Stalinist era anti-Trotskyist stuff will come up if you start googling and how are you a fledging leftist supposed to figure out if its accurate or not. For example I’ve seen people cite Trotsky the Traitor by Bittleman, which is a very old CPUSA publication written at the height of Stalinist influence and paranoia, and the author later repudiated all of it and was expelled from CPUSA for advocating reform.

3. Other non aligned left groups that mock Trotskyists for some of the more culty aspects of some of the sects (and this includes both ML and non ML groups), and turning the general anti Trotskyist rhetoric into speech where anything a group doesn’t like immediately gets derided as Trotskyist (or Trotskyite as -ite just cuts deeper I guess. This also happens with things getting called Stalinist willy nilly), no matter the relation what was done had anything derivable from Trotsky or Trotskyist writers. That or they will take real issues with a group that identified as Trotskyist and then changed, see Max Shachtman or the Marcyites, and then apply that to all Trotskyists from all time when in reality Trotskyism has a lot of different positions from different groups, including ones that broke with Trotsky and a lot of other Trotskyists. The Marxist Humanists for example, who I think have a lot of good insights and are more of a position to take in another group than form a group around, are a split from Trotskyism and calling it Trotskyist doesn’t make sense, and lumping it in with the cults makes even less.

Also, the Trotskyist tradition was always marginalized because of the conditions created by Stalinism, and so now it has a reputation of being marginal / sectarian / prone to splits etc. which is fair in some ways but it has nothing to do with anything inherent in the theoretical orientation itself and is entirely a product of the historical trajectory of socialist movements in the 20th century. and also overlooks some of the really important historical accomplishments of Trotskyists in the US like 1) the Minneapolis General Strike and 2) keeping the Marxist tradition alive in some sense at a time when it was all but dead in the U.S (International Socialist Review and later Haymarket books for example have proved indispensable for keeping socialist publishing going) . Abroad, Trotskyists due to opposition to the USSR found it very difficult to organize and were actively purged in certain countries but even then there were some large successes like in Bolivia in the 1950s or the Sri Lankan Lanka Sama Samaja Party which was instrumental in Sri Lanka getting its independence from Britain (though the party is today marginal, holding only 1 governorship).

Today, I don’t think it makes much sense to identify as a Trotskyist in a super formal way, as it’s a legacy of the USSR’s birth and 20th century communist movement, and also steeped in a bunch of cold war rationality. This does not mean that Trotskyist authors or Trotsky himself do not have important insights, but as a political movement it does not make much sense to me to harp on it in any way. That’s one reason why a lot of the remaining orgs seem culty, how else do you keep existing when there’s no clear reason to, that’s one reason ISO as one of the better orgs rightfully dissolved as it recognized its form of organization was not expedient anymore.

I also maintain that the 4th international logo looks like it’s from an anime.

The Trot to neoCon pipeline is real.

An org I’m a part of is currently dealing with a group of trots attempting to turn our organization into a newspaper publishing house. Never mind we’re a federally recognized organization and our turning into a newspaper publishing house would be in violation of our mission as an organization and would also violate a lot of laws.