My favourite thing about Trotsky and Trotskyism, is he was meme’d into oblivion in the USSR. So much so, that if you found a trotskyist in an Ex-SR state, odds are they didn’t live during the union.

Trotsky is only remembered in popular culture because he symbolizes opposition to Stalin, that’s the only reason would-be-communists end up reading him. They want to be able to call themselves communist, and claim to be Marxists, but they don’t want to divorce anti-communist propaganda from their lexicon and would rather distance themselves from the Stalin era. Outside of the west, Trotsky’s theories have only really seemed to take root in central and south America. But, those comrades - other than the ones in Mexico - don’t distance themselves from the Stalin era, and instead uphold Trotsky’s theories on revolution and organizing (or, to my understanding, I still need to do a deeper dive on their version of Trotskyism).

Trots in the west really do just come out and tell you they’re anti-communist too, by puppetting conservative lines on AES. There’s a really good reason Trotskyism is referred to as a ‘communist to conservative pipeline’.