isaac-deutscher-the-prophet-armed-trotsky-1879-1921

92 THE PROPHET ARMED
was no longer Utopia. The Social Democrat and the Jacobin
stand for 'two opposed worlds, doctrines, tactics, mentalities .
. . . They were Utopians; we aspire to express the objective
trend. They were idealists ... we are materialists ... they were
rationalists, we are dialcctitians .... They chopped off heads,
we enlighten them with class consciousness.'
Trotsky did not deny that there were similarities between the
Jacobin and the Social Democrat. Both were irreconcilable: the
Jacobin fought against moderantisme; the Socialist is opposed to
reformist opportunism. But the Social Democrat had no use
for the guillotine. 'A Jacobin tribunal would have tried under
the charge of moderation the whole international Labour movement,
and Marx's lion head would have been the first to roll
under the guillotinc.' 1 'Robespierre used to say: "I know only
two parties, the good and the evil citizens"; and this aphorism
is engraved on the heart of Maximilian Lenin', whose 'malicious
and morally repulsive suspiciousness is a flat caricature of.
the tragic Jacobin intolerance ... .' (In the same passage
he described Lenin' as 'an adroit statistician and slovenly
attorney'.)
A dear-cut choice-this was Trotsky's conclusion-must be
made between Jacobinism and Marxism. In trying to combine
them, Lenin was virtually abandoning socialism and setting
himself up as the leader of a revolutionary wing of bourgeois
democracy. This was the gravamen of Trotsky's accusation that
Lenin was changing from a Socialist into a radical bourgeois
politician, because only a bourgeois politician could distrust the
working classes as intensely as Lenin did. 2 Lenin's followers
went even farther and frankly envisaged their 'dictatorship over
the proletariat' and when one read how some Bolsheviks (here
Trotsky quoted their leaflets published in the Urals) were
advocating the need for an absolutely uniform party, 'one felt
a shiver running down one's spine'.
He wound up his argument with the following plea against
uniformity:
The tasks of the llC\\ n'gimc will be su complex that they cannot Le
1
N. Trotsky, Narhi Politichu~1·e