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

186 THE PROPHET ARMED
Sttirgkh, in protest against world war. 1 Tics of friendship also
bound him to Rudolf Hilferding, the master mind of Austro­
Marxism. Just as Trotsky was settling down in the Viennese
suburb of Htitteldorf, Hilferding was writing, or completing,
his monumental Finanzkapital, virtually the only ambitious
attempt made since Marx's death to bring the theory of Das
Kapital up to date. (Hilferding's work was used by Lenin to
justify his revolutionary policy, while its author became
Minister of Finance in the Weimar republic.) It was Hilferding
who introduced Trotsky to Karl Renner, the future Chancellor
and President of the Austrian republic, to Otto Bauer, foremost
Austro-Marxist theorist and expert on national minorities, and
future Foreign Minister, and to nearly all the other Austro­
Marxist leaders. 'They were well educated people', writes
Trotsky, 'who knew about various subjects more than I did.
I listened with intense and, one might say, reverent interest to
their conversation when I first saw them at the Central Cafe.' 2
But Trotsky also grew aware of the difference between his
own Marxism and theirs; they were academic, over-sophisticated
sceptics, without mettle; and he sensed the politely concealed
condescension with which they met his own revolutionary
ardour. Behind the thinkers and leaders he saw 'a phalanx of
young Austrian politicians, who have joined the party in the
firm conviction that an approximate familiarity with Roman
law gives a man the inalienable right to direct the fate of the
working class' . 3 But he believed that in critical times the bold
spirit of socialism would overcome the scepticism of the leaders
and the opportunism of the party officials, and that the revolution,
when it came, would carry the Austro-Marxists with it,
as it would carry the Mcnshcviks. He obviously mistook his
friends for revolutionaries just as they liked to think of him as of
one who was at heart a mild reformist.•
1
During the war Trotsky described Friedrich Adler as his 'comrade in ideas
and friend' (Sochinmya, vol. viii, pp. 33-36). In 1919, Trotsky and Lenin nominated
F. Adler Honorary Secretary of the Third International, and they were greatly clisappoint