"The masses had to be led; but the leaders could lead only in accordance with their own necessities. The need for leadership of the kind practiced by bolshevism finally indicates nothing else than the need to discipline and terrorize the masses, so that they may work and live in harmony with the plans of the ruling social group. This kind of leadership in itself demonstrates the existence of class relations, class politics and economics, and an irreconcilable opposition between the leaders and the led. The over-towering personality of Leon Trotsky reveals the non-proletarian character of the Bolshevik Revolution just as well as the mummified and deified Lenin in the Moscow Mausoleum."
The above is an excerpt from the article on the political legacy of Leon Trotsky that the German Council Communist, Paul Mattick, wrote in the wake of Trotsky's murder in 1940. It has been recently added to the Marxist Internet Archive through the good work of a comrade who has been transcribing many of Mattick's forgotten texts and book reviews from Mattick's own political journals, New Essays and Living Marxism, as well as from the sadly now defunct World Socialist Party of the United States journal, The Western Socialist.
Well worth checking out.
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