It seems like people mostly use trotskyist as a stand in for "anti-communist leftism" or "ultra," but what are the actual thoughts he contributed? Is there anything that is useful today and can be separated from anti-communism and the legacy of trots?
No newspaper memes please. I genuinely want to know.
(Ice pick memes are acceptable)
Edit: thanks for the info everyone. I'm proud of you all.
It's good to hear this from someone who knows more about this than me. I've had enough IRL run-ins with tedious Trots, so I've gone and read some of the more vitriolic critiques of Trotsky from an ML perspective. Even when I've been full of malice towards Trotsky, these articles always seemed to erase Trotsky's contributions to the revolution and overplayed drama that happened before the revolution.
Edit: to not be a sectarian dick, I'll point out that I know many good and comradely Trotskyists who I consider friends.
There are definitely alot of tedious trots who give off more a scent of mormonism than working class materialism, for sure. But I think this is a more common perception of Marxists in the West, in general, than many non-trots are willing to admit. Just check the memes about the local maoist confiscating your phone and gutting you for ordering a pizza. Also, I think some of this criticisms of them are superficial because, at the least, I think there are many genuine marxists who are serious about trying to organize the embryo of a future revolutionary party, and because I can forgive them for others interpreting them as preachy, atheistic versions of jehovah's witnesses (I've met marxists of other traditions who equally give off that impression)., because even if it does say something about how they're lacking in the aesthetics department (we do need more trap and drip), it also says something about the general cynicism of a population in a neoliberal world, although at the end of the day the a good deal of the responsability for people's alientation from radical politics is always ours.
You're definitely correct that there are alot of good, very serious, militant trotskyists out there.
In any case, the western left is at such a low level of development by historical standards that wasting our time on debates about, e.g. trotskyism vs maoist are, for practical purposes, like debating how many angels can dance on the hammer and sickle.