Trotsky's method, in that respect, is clearly set out in The Action Programme for France. That is to march alongside the masses who have not yet broken from those bourgeois—democratic illusions, and, in doing so, struggling with them, for those limited goals, but by revolutionary, proletarian means – soviets, workers' militia etc. - to break them away from those illusions, and to build an alternative based upon workers' self-government, and workers' democracy. He spells it out, in summary, here.
“1. The Party must have in mind and must explain that in comparison with its principal aim, the conquest of power with arms in hand, the democratic slogans have only an auxiliary, a provisional, an episodic character. Their fundamental importance consists of the fact that they permit us to debouch on the revolutionary road.” (p 206)
That is the same idea as developed by Lenin, more than a decade before. Whether it is the demand for a Constituent Assembly, or for national independence/self-determination, these are bourgeois goals, not those of Socialism. We seek the proletarian democracy of a soviet government, not that of a bourgeois parliament; we seek the self-determination of workers not nations, indeed, we seek the destruction of nation states, and borders, not the creation of new nation states, and borders. If we engage in struggles for bourgeois-democracy or national independence, it is only on condition that, there exists, and in order to take, the revolutionary masses from their current struggle for those things, beyond them, and for a struggle against them, and for Socialism.
“2. In the process of the struggle for these slogans of democracy, the Party must shatter the constitutional and democratic illusions of the petty bourgeoisie and of the reformists who express their opinions, by explaining that power in the state is not obtained by the democratic forms of the vote, but by property and by the monopoly of information and armaments.” (p 206)
In this short point, Trotsky shatters the “stagist” arguments of the Menshevists and Stalinists of his time, and, also, of those petty-bourgeois nationalists of today, who claim to be socialists, but who would limit their sights to simply supporting bourgeois-democratic/national independence struggles, in their own right.
“3. While making full use of the differences of views existing within the petty and the big bourgeoisie on the subject of constitutional questions; while opening up every possible road towards an openly exercised field of activity; while fighting for the legal existence of the trade unions, the workers’ clubs, the labour press; while creating, whenever and wherever possible, legal political organizations of the proletariat under the direct influence of the Party; while trying as soon as possible to legalize more or less the various fields of activity of the Party; the latter must above all assure the existence of its illegal, centralized, well-built apparatus, directing all the branches of the Party’s activity, legal as well as illegal.” (p 206)
This “above all”, puts in their place all those who would turn Trotsky into a supporter of bourgeois-democracy, solely in order to gain the “breathing space” it might provide, as again advocated by the stages theory. Trotsky, like Marx, Engels and Lenin, had no illusion that bourgeois-democracy would allow any such breathing space, if an actual revolutionary situation existed, in which the workers might effectively use it to proceed against the interests of the bourgeoisie. It is precisely in such conditions, in which the ruling class attempts to utilise the formal democracy and the state against the proletariat, as well as using paramilitary forces to institute counter-revolution. Its precisely under such conditions that the workers need not the supposed protections, institutions and methods of bourgeois-democracy, of the capitalist police, courts and so on, but their own organs of power and democracy, the soviet, workers' militia and so on.
And, emphasising that class nature of the state and its bodies of armed men, and the need to, as best neutralise them,
“4. The Party must develop systematic revolutionary work among the troops of the bourgeoisie.” (p 206)
And, finally, emphasising that our goal is not that of the reformist or bourgeois-liberal, seeking bourgeois-democracy or national independence,
“5. The leadership of the Party must implacably unmask all the opportunist hesitations seeking a reformist solution of the problems confronting the proletariat of China and must cut off all the elements who consciously pull towards the subordination of the Party to bourgeois legalism.
It is only by taking these conditions into account that the Party will preserve the necessary proportions in the various branches of its activity, will not let pass a new turn in the situation which leads towards a revolutionary advance, so that its first steps proceed along the road of the creation of soviets, of mobilizing the masses around them and of opposing them to the bourgeois state, with all its parliamentary and democratic camouflage, should this happen to be realized.” (p 207)
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