Help with Leninism vs Blanquism?

[JPSartre12]

I've heard the term "Blanquist" thrown around at Leninists before, and I've heard that some have called Lenin a Blanquist.

I've read several pieces of Lenin's works and liked them, so I feel as if I have a vague understanding of what Leninist theory preaches, as a whole. But what is Blanquism, and how are the two related? Is calling a Leninist a Blanquist pejorative, or is it a valid statement? What are the tenants/ideas of Blanquism?

[jookyle]

It is not accurate to call Lenin or Leninism, Blanquist. Blanquism means having a small conspirator group that takes power from behind the scenes. Although the Bolshevik line was discretionary for membership it was not a secret group of conspiracy, it was a vanguard party for the masses which lead the masses in revolution. It's quite the opposite of a Blanquist group.

[Let's Get Free]

I'd say "Focoism" is the purest example of Blanquism. Instead of forming a relatively mass vanguard party like Lenin's, focoism believes in a revolution by a small group of guerrilla fighters, that somehow requires basically no ideological preparation of the populace, who are just supposed to follow their lead.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

This was dealt with before.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/charge-blanquism-against-t171367/index.html?t=171367

[Art Vandelay]

I'd say "Focoism" is the purest example of Blanquism. Instead of forming a relatively mass vanguard party like Lenin's, focoism believes in a revolution by a small group of guerrilla fighters, that somehow requires basically no ideological preparation of the populace, who are just supposed to follow their lead.

Untrue; While I'm no "focoist" I don't think anyone is these days, focoism calls for a guerrilla movement to work with a mass movement in places where the populace is already angered with the present regime.

[Manic Impressive]

The difference between Lenin & Blanqui

Blanqui wanted to inspire a mass movement by creating a band of professional revolutionaries to preform a coup d'etat on behalf of the unconscious proletariat, in order to create a workers state over a long period of time.

Lenin did it

[Art Vandelay]

The difference between Lenin & Blanqui

Blanqui wanted to inspire a mass movement by creating a band of professional revolutionaries to preform a coup d'etat on behalf of the unconscious proletariat, in order to create a workers state over a long period of time.

Lenin did it

Imagine that, Manic is back and is regurgitating his anti-Leninist rhetoric; what else is new, oh yeah Ismail is posting Enver Hoxha quotes.

[Manic Impressive]

That's because I'm still right and you're still a fool

[Art Vandelay]

That's because I'm still right and you're still a fool

Yawn, your entire "theory" (for lack of a better word) is propped up by out of context quotes from years before the revolution. I don't know how many times I've seen you post that trade union consciousness quote; you'd think after seeing it so many times that you'd maybe begin to understand it. I guess not.

Edit: Why don't you put periods at the ends of sentences?

[The Idler]

What Lenin thought or said matters less than what actually happened which was rule by a minority. An improvement on Tsarism certainly but calling it democratic let alone socialist stretches things a bit. If this is considered anti-Leninist then so was the entire socialist movement.

[Jimmie Higgins]

What Lenin thought or said matters less than what actually happened which was rule by a minority. An improvement on Tsarism certainly but calling it democratic let alone socialist stretches things a bit. If this is considered anti-Leninist then so was the entire socialist movement.

This is just lazy. An equivalent level of historical crudeness would argue that people revolted in Egypt in 2011 to help the Muslim Brotherhood cut a deal with Israel. That's what happened after-all.

[Grenzer]

What Lenin thought or said matters less than what actually happened which was rule by a minority. An improvement on Tsarism certainly but calling it democratic let alone socialist stretches things a bit. If this is considered anti-Leninist then so was the entire socialist movement.

The working class was a minority, so it's a bit absurd to thing that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be majoritarian when 80% of the population are peasants.

You could consider yourself a democrat, but that is not always going to be compatible with proletarian dictatorship.

[l'Enfermé]

Is it "focoism" or just "foco" in English?

Anyway, those that go around accusing others of being "Blanquists" are using the word as a pejorative. The "evolutionary socialists" accused the "dogmatic" Marxists of Blanquism, the economists accused the Russian revolutionary Social-Democrats before the split of Blanquism and Plekhanov accused the Bolsheviks of Blanquism after the split(but Luxemburg defended Lenin and the Bolsheviks from Plekhanov's bitter slander (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html)), and so on and so on. What they mean by Blanquism is conspiratorial tactics and revolution made(made, not "lead) by tiny minority and dictatorship over the people by this tiny, but "enlightened" minority. But this has little to do with Blanqui himself, or the Blanquists of the 1860s or the Blanquists of the 1880s.

But of course, neither the Marxists(Bernstein even accused Marx and Engels of this imaginary Blanquism!, and him and Vollmar accused Kautsky and Bebel of Blanquism also, and in France shits like Millerand and more respectable opportunists like Jaures accused Lafargue and Guesde of Blanquism), nor the Russian Social-Democrats, before or after split, were followers of this deformed Blanquism which exists only in the heads of some 20th and 21st century socialists. Neither were they Blanquists in the real sense.

Louis-Auguste Blanqui was originally a French Republican of Italian ancestry(his father was Girondist during the Revolution, he was elected to the National Convention by a department around Nice, arrested in 1793, released after Robespierre fell, elected to the Council of the Five Hundred under the Directory, supported Napoleon's coup and served as a prefect of a Commune until Napoleon's fall). After the Bourbon restoration, Blanqui was sent to Paris to study and live with his brother(a famous liberal economist), where he was a pretty brilliant student and actually enrolled in both the School of Law and the School of Medicine in the University of Paris. In the early 20s, he was radicalized when witnessing the execution of 4 officers for their anti-Bourbon views and was affiliated with the "charbonnerie" movement(which included mostly Republicans but also some Bonopartists and other types of anti-Bourbonists). Throughout the 1820s he was affiliated with practically ever Republican movement and conspiracy and by the late 1820s he began to work as a journalist for a Saint-Simonian's newspaper. In 1830 he was an influential participant of the July Revolution and fought on the barricades(he fought in the 1820s with the police also and received a few injuries including a shot to the neck once), but he quickly disowned the "bourgeois Monarchy" and from then on he was probably the most prominent leader of the proletarian revolutionary underground. In May 1839 he lead around 500 armed insurrectionists and captured the Paris City Hall, hoping to rouse the proletarian masses to revolution, but the Orleanists recaptured the building after 2 days of fighting and Blanqui was sentenced to life imprisonment. Due to the bad conditions of his imprisonment his health deteriorated and he was diagnosed as terminally ill in the mid-40s and pardoned, but he told the Orleanists to fuck themselves and voluntarily remained in prison until he was freed by the 1848 revolution. After his release, he was the leading figure of the far-left in Paris and became famed for his oratory. Before the constituent assembly, he lead a demonstration of 100,000 in front of the City Hall. In May, he and other Parisian radicals tried to set up an anti-bourgeois provisional government, but they were imprisoned and Blanqui spent another 10 years in prison. He was released in 1859 but in 1861 he was arrested again but escaped in 1865 and didn't return to France until the general amnesty in 1869. He tried to organize more insurrections in 1870 and was sent back to prison until 1879 when the Communards were pardoned and those that weren't butchered in 1871 returned to France.

Anyway, there wasn't one "Blanquist" movement but two. The first one was mostly a youth movement in the 1860s, it was founded by proletarian French revolutionaries who visited Blanqui in his prison in Paris where he spent this entire decade in and were inspired by him. Only a handful of them actually maintained constant contact with Blanqui though. These Blanquists of the 1860s considered themselves as upholders of the true values of the French Revolution(and not the deformed values upheld by the bourgeoisie) and the successors of the far-left Enragés, the sans-cullotes based Hébertists and the "founder of Communism" Babeuf. In 1871, the Blanquists were a majority of the genuinely revolutionary Communards, certainly they were behind all the truly revolutionary acts of the Commune and they absolutely dominated the armed wing of the Commune and the judiciary(Blanqui himself was elected honorary President of the council, as well as being elected to the council itself, even though he was being held in a dungeon by Thiers - the Communards tried to exchange 74 of their prisoners only for Blanqui's freedom, but Thiers refused, even though one of the the Archbishop of Paris and the Communards bluffed they would execute him) . Some of noblest names of the Commune were Blanquists, from Ferré, Pillot, Vaillant, Rigault, Humbert, and Protot to Duval, Mortier, Flourens, Granger, Da Costa, Tridon, Jaclard, and Arnaud. But this fact is all but unknown outside of France and in France itself the historians just love to de-revolutionize the Commune.

After the Commune, the Blanquists that weren't executed or imprisoned fled to London where they participated in the First International, though they began to leave starting in 1872 because they deemed the International too meek and moderate. Engels wrote on this. (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm)

In the 1879, the Communards were pardoned and many veteran Blanquists returned to France. There they founded a new Blanquist movement, not one based on conspiracy and insurrection, but one based on mass agitation and mass organization. This one was far less radical and collapsed by the 1890s.

So I wonder, why is Blanquism such a dirty word among Marxists and Anarchists both even though one of the few things that unite us both is our praise for the Paris Commune, the Paris Commune which was an alliance between a majority of Blanquists and a minority of Proudhonians(as Engels said).

Blanqui did not believe that the socialist revolution should be carried out by a conspiracy organized by a well-trained small group of armed workers. Blanqui believed that under the repressive monarchy of Louis Phillipe and the repressive Empire of Napoleon II, a revolutionary worker's movement can only operate underground and in strict secrecy lest it be discovered and dismantled by the State. In this, history has proven him absolutely correct. Blanqui was neither an elitist nor believed in strict dictatorial management of the movement, though he is often accused of this - Blanqui identified only with the French proletariat(read his famous defense speech in court from 1832, for example (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/1832/defence-speech.htm)) and believed that leadership should not be exercised through commands and orders but through example.

Yes, Blanqui whom Marx called the "noble martyr of revolutionary communism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/02/10.htm)"(and of Blanquism he said this in the Class Struggles in France, "“While the Utopians and doctrinaire Socialism (i.e., the Socialism of Louis Blanc and his kind – D.R.[D.R is David Riazanov]) subordinate the whole movement to one factor within it, put the ruminations of a single pedant before common social production, and above all charm away the revolutionary class struggle and its requirements with petty tricks or big sentimentalities ... the proletariat is turning more and more to revolutionary Socialism, to that Communism to which the bourgeoisie itself has given the name of Blanquism”), is slandered and likened to an elitist wannabe-dictator, and a putschist. Shame, comrades.

tl;dr The hysterical charge of "Blanquism!!!" thrown at the Bolsheviks is very stupid and in its original form, was the charge thrown by fucks like Bernstein, Vollmar(a right-wing Social-Democrat who invented "Socialism in One Country" like 30 years before Stalin and Bukharin, and Vollmar's SIOC was no less reactionary than Stalin's), Millerand and Jaures against Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Bebel long before it was thrown against Bolsheviks. It was no more valid when used against Marx and Engels than when it was used against Lenin. Socialists that plagiarize opportunists are clearly doing something wrong.

[l'Enfermé]

The difference between Lenin & Blanqui

Blanqui wanted to inspire a mass movement by creating a band of professional revolutionaries to preform a coup d'etat on behalf of the unconscious proletariat, in order to create a workers state over a long period of time.

Lenin did it
Your posts are stupid and misinformed and not grounded in reality at all. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Please, stop.

[l'Enfermé]

The working class was a minority, so it's a bit absurd to thing that the dictatorship of the proletariat could be majoritarian when 80% of the population are peasants.

You could consider yourself a democrat, but that is not always going to be compatible with proletarian dictatorship.
It's not worth arguing with a Chomskyan liberal. The Idler is a follower of a guy that says that fascism, Bolshevism and corporate power all stem from one source: Hegel. It's interesting how Chomsky conveniently doesn't mention that the starting point of Marxism is Hegel also. Maybe because Chomsky is aware that attacking the Bolsheviks is considered cool but Marx isn't that bad among liberals, he had good intentions but was misguided, you know, but the Bolsheviks were just evil.

[Let's Get Free]

I think some anarchists and Libertarian socialists tend to oversimplify the problem and see the Bolsheviks as setting out from day one to become an elite group of privileged rulers. Was the whole Bolshevik party only interested in making a revolution for the sole purpose of getting their grubby hands on state power so that they could make themselves into a new ruling class?
The briefest look at what they suffered in the Tsarist prisons, in Siberia, in exile and later in Stalin's purges suggests that such a notion is highly suspect. We must accept that most of them were courageous men and women with high ideals. But no matter how honest their intentions, their politics still lead them to be objectively opposed to the interests of the working class and a socialist society.

[Drosophila]

Does anyone else think it's hilarious that Manic/Ratty is part of the "Respectful Discussion Activists" group? :lol:

Anyway, Lenin is not Leninism. The two are quite different. A lot of self-described Leninists will adhere to forms of Blanquism, but if one looks at what Lenin actually supported, one will find that he was supportive of a mass Marxist revolutionary party (which the Bolsheviks were) and not some conspiratorial sect. It wasn't until Lenin's final years that "Leninism" as a term even rose into prominence.