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

AT THE DOOR OF HISTORY 91
'J acobinism and Social Democracy' . 1 At the congress, Trotsky
refuted the charge of J acobinism when the Economists levelled
it against Iskra as a whole. Now he turned the charge against
Lenin. Lenin faced it almost with pride: 'A revolutionary Social
Democrat', he rejoined, 'is precisely a Jacobin, but one who is
inseparably connected with the organization of the proletariat
and aware of its class interests.' Trotsky elaborated the charge
in the light, as the pamphlet shows, of his recent detailed study
of the French Revolution; and he pointed towards the future
drama of the Russian Revolution. The characters of the Jacobin
and of the Social Democrat, he stated, arc mutually exclusive.
The French Revolution, because of the limitations of its epoch,
could establish only a bourgeois society with bourgeois property
as its basis. J acobinism (that 'maximum of radicalism of which
bourgeois society has been capable') strove to perpetuate a
fleeting, quasi-egalitarian climax of the revolution, which was
incompatible with the fundamental trend of the time. This wall
a foredoomed Utopia: history would have had to stop in its
course in order to save Jacobinism. The conflict between
Jacobinism and its age explains the Jacobin mentality and
method of action. Robespierre and his friends had their metaphysical
idea of Truth, their Veritl; but they could not trust
that their Veriti would win the hearts and the minds of the
people. With morbid suspicion they looked round and saw
enemies creeping from every crevice. They had to draw a sharp
dividing line between themselves and the rest of the world, and
they drew it with the edge of the guillotine. 'Every attempt
to blur [this division] between J acobinism and the rest of the
world threatened to release inner centrifugal forces .... ' His
political instinct suggested to Robespierre that only through a
permanent state of siege could he prolong the ephemeral climax
of the revolution. 'They spared no human hecatomb to build
the pedestal for their Truth .... The counterpart to their
absolute faith in a metaphysical idea was their absolute distrust
ofliving people.'
From the Jacobin, Trotsky went on, the Social Democrat
differed in his optimism, for he was in harmony with the trend
of his age. At the threshold of the twentieth century, with the
growth of modern industry and of the working classes, socialism
1
Ibid., pp. 97-107.