personally i dont get the fucking point of self-identifying as a trot anymore

stop relitigating a fucking century-old personal spat

oh wait now i get it its just communists who are too cowardly to associate themselves with stalin

There is a lot of controversy around “Lenin’s last testament” which you mention. Besides, as much as I enjoy Lenin why should he get to arbitrarily pick his successor in between having strokes lol.

Their ideological differences aside, by all accounts Trotsky was and always had been a huge asshole with a superiority complex (not to say he wasn’t actually a very intelligent guy, but y’know how some people are assholes about it?), and Stalin was just better at schmoozing people. So when it came down to it, he was better at politicking his way into power, while Trotsky would alienate people.

Now, after Trotsky was no longer involved in running the USSR, my personal thought are that he basically just became dogmatically against whatever was happening in Russia under Stalin, because of personal grievance. And keep in mind that it’s much easier to sit on the sidelines, criticising everything, than to be involved in the actual running of a nation trying to establish socialism for the first time.

There’s also a materialist argument to be made that if the power struggle had gone the other way, and Stalin got exiled, things in the USSR would have gone pretty similarly under Trotsky - or that someone else would have taken over earlier than 1953, because, again, everyone personally thought Trotsky was an asshole who was annoying to work with, lol.

This isn’t to say everything Trotsky ever did is poison, and that he should be completely disregarded. He has some good writings, and we’re talking about a guy who led the Petrograd Soviet and then the Red Army during the civil war. He was definitely smart and a true revolutionary. But I think after his ousting from power he became very embittered (perhaps understandably), and became the kind of socialist we criticise today, sitting on the sidelines in a capitalist country and constantly attacking AES.

TROTSKYISTS on the other hand are pretty insufferable lmao, because you can pretty much discard the first half of my previous paragraph, and just apply the second half to them.