Blanquism

Origins and Core Doctrine

Blanquism emerged from the practice and writings of French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881). Blanqui devoted his life to armed insurrection, participating in the July Revolution of 1830, the Revolution of 1848, and the Paris Commune of 1871, and spent a total of 37 years in prison, earning the epithet 'the Enclosed One' (l'Enfermé).

The core tenets of Blanquism are:

1. A small elite secret society: revolution is to be achieved not through spontaneous mass uprising but through the conspiracy and surprise armed action of a rigorously trained minority of professional revolutionaries.
2. Revolutionary dictatorship: after seizing power, the revolutionaries establish a temporary dictatorship to lay the foundations of a new order, thereafter handing power to the people.
3. The self-sufficiency of revolution: for Blanqui, the revolutionary act itself was the end; he was relatively indifferent to detailed blueprints of the society to follow.

The 1839 Paris insurrection led by Blanqui's Society of Seasons ended in catastrophic failure. Several hundred armed members attempted to seize the town hall, but the Parisian population looked on in confusion and took no part; the rising was suppressed within hours. This failure dramatically exposed Blanquism's fundamental flaw: that the masses played no role in liberating themselves.

Relationship with Marxism

Marx and Engels clearly distinguished their conception of revolution from Blanquism. In The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune (1874), Engels described Blanqui as 'essentially a political revolutionist' and 'a socialist only through sentiment.'

Yet Blanquism was not wholly severed from Marxism. Blanqui's followers (Blanquists) played a significant role in the Paris Commune and subsequently competed and fused with Marxism within the French socialist movement. In Russia, Pyotr Tkachev absorbed Blanquism to form the Jacobin current of the Narodnik movement, which is considered a precursor to Bolshevism.

The 'Is Leninism Blanquism?' Debate

Whether the Bolshevik theory of the vanguard party was a modern reincarnation of Blanquism became one of the central debates of 20th-century Marxism.

• Rosa Luxemburg, in 'Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy' (1906), argued that Lenin's party concept rested on the Blanquist notion of revolution prepared by a small group of conspirators. She charged that Lenin had merely substituted a class-conscious proletariat for the conspirators without grasping the essence of Marxism: the revolutionary autonomy of the masses.
• Eduard Bernstein likewise criticized the Blanquist character of Bolshevism from a revisionist standpoint.
• Lenin denied the charge of Blanquism in The State and Revolution (1917), countering that the Bolshevik revolutionary government directly expressed the will of the majority of workers and peasants.

Soviet historiography officially defined Blanquism as 'petty-bourgeois conspiratorialism that failed to understand the class consciousness and mass struggle of the proletariat,' while partially acknowledging a lineage to Bolshevism through Tkachev. Among Western Marxist scholars, the question remained a fiercely contested subject throughout the Cold War and remains unresolved to this day.