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.
I think these are all good points, though having interacted with a lot of American trotskyists, just in terms of parties, most parties have engaged with electoralism, some even trying to get Dems elected. There is a strange strain of vanguardiam that is like a 3-layer levela of obfuscation where they think they can't just say commie things, they instead want to piggyback on socdem popularity. But because they're not good at acting, everyone quickly sees that they're trying to manipulate you. So you get yet another way to have distrust.
I've also seen different parties try to make connections to unions, and there is a tendency for these parties to attemot entryism even there, which ends up usually failing and just pissing people off.
It is a frustrating combination of somewhat effective strategies with outright counterproductive execution, and I think the sticking point really is one of control: not feeling comfortabke building a coalition, insteas the attempt is to get everyone else on the party line, whether the proles realize it or not.
I'll take your word for it, as I've heard it elsewhere from other yankie comrades. It sounds like that applies more to the US context. The European and South American trotskyists are, I think, far less in electoralism mode.
The combination of 'effective strategies and ineffective execution' I think hits much of the nail of the head. When I discuss politics with Trotskyists, avoiding explicit theoretical issues where differences would become pronounced, I'm often in complete agreement as regards strategy, and even tactics and operations, but the executionc can certainly be lacking. It's worth bearing in mind, though, imo, that we're often speaking about deeply ideologically convinced people (like ourselves) who also see no other way of even trying to engage in genuinely radical politics, but where there isn't really much of an institutional structure to normalize effective political praxis, or when there are institutions, they are reformist and anti-revolutionary. I'm not surprised that then when they try to preach the immortal science it can come across as alienating.
For what it's worth, I've noticed a shift in trotskyist strategies where they will not adverstise themselves as hardcore as such as before, without broader far left party frameworks, while building a fraction of hardcore trotskyists within said broader org (in preparation, naturally, for the aforementioned day of revelation and judgement). Their strategy then seems to be nnot such trying to explicitly communicate a party line as to show the contradictions and shortcomings of less radical or unified orgs from within. So it's basically an evolution of entryism, as far as I can tell.