Trots are simply people who would be MLs but cannot get past the knowledge boundary required to confidently refute the claims that exist due to a century of propaganda pushed to tarnish the reputation of AES states.
It is the path of least resistance if you want communism, but also think there needs to be a state to protect a budding socialist project. This is common sense when you have anything better than a child’s understanding of geopolitics. However, to embrace normal MLism and AES, you have to refute such a massive volume of falsehoods and thought terminating clichés that you subconsciously avoid putting in the daunting work needed to debunk them and instead choose to denounce the actual projects and leaders as removed or revisionist.
If the average Trot was well informed enough to lay out their disagreements with MLs, they wouldn’t have become a Trot in the first place. Trots are simply cowardly MLs. They fear having to defend their positions from liberals and they fear having to commit to educating themselves.
Yes, but they want Trots to exist because they make us waste our time having to have discussions like this, rather than moving forward with organizational, theoretical, or operational endeavors.
Arguing what makes us different from Trots isn’t exactly what they want, since they will tend to want similar things. They want Trotskyism to serve as an off ramp for communist thought leading to support of AES states.
By giving an avenue where people on a radicalization path don’t have to refute the piles of rhetorical trash thrown at MLs who support AES, they neutralize threats to capital by getting them to support an ideology that cannot achieve their stated goals.