What is Zig Forums's opinion on Louis-Auguste Blanqui?
Also is Blanquism a feasible strategy for communist revolution?
Blanqui and Blanquism
Jeremiah Parker
Other urls found in this thread:
marxists.org
marxists.org
blanqui.kingston.ac.uk
marxists.org
marxists.org
twitter.com
Chase Butler
Blanquism is trash and anyone who believes a tiny conspiratorial group can take over state power and hold it without the masses and establish a communist dictatorship is deluded
Julian Ross
Probably the best critique you'll find on Blanqui and Blanquism is this short article by Engels
marxists.org
and tangentially this by Marx
marxists.org
To touch on this and elaborate, the main problem with Blanquism is that it attempts to usurp the current system with a conspiracy (actual literal meaning here) of a few knowing actors, something which comes with its own inherent problems. In Blanqui's case it was a conspiracy which, by the merit of being a conspiracy, collapsed in on itself due to its failure to have the patience to build up proletariat support for socialism and instead just vouching for "blowing it" all in one go. This differs very greatly from something like vanguardism which is intended to build up large public proletariat support before taking action, with the party merely being an apparatus to do so. By doing so the party guarantees its long term success to a greater degree, as a revolution by the workers is more likely to succeed against the full force of the capitalist state as opposed to a small inconsequential group of revolutionaries. It is also in this fashion that even if the party disappeared the next day before the revolution even began, the ideas and sentiments that the party espoused would continue in the minds of a newly class conscious people and thus the potential for revolution and possibly another party would continue as well.
This isn't to say things can't be learned from Blanqui himself, as Marx thought him to be the man the french commune had been missing as a leader and Engels thought him to have profound revolutionary instinct and decisiveness. His complete singleness of purpose, total commitment to the revolution, and belief in the need for action are things to be admired and maybe even emulated. But unfortunately his ideas were antiquated and were mostly a holdover from revolutions and coups prior. He's a man of his conditions, and an excellent study of a revolutionary figure, but his ideas fall short of what actually needed to be done.
Jace Allen
Do you not remember Occupy?
Owen Brooks
Pol Pot was arguably a Blanquist.
Logan Brooks
How? Pol Pot led a communist party and organised guerrilla peasant resistance engaging in people's war until the government forces were defeated. It wasn't Blanquist at all.
Michael Nguyen
October Revolution proved the correctness of Blanqui and BTFO Marx.
Lincoln Hughes
Objectively false and to the contrary lmao.
Oliver Peterson
I guess you believe it was like October by Eisenstein lmao
Alexander Gray
newsflash: it was only thanks to vast popular support and socialist agitation conducted over decades and the deepening crisis and radicalisation of the masses which led to the spontaneous collectivising of land by peasants and the formation of soviets of workers and soldiers, as well as the conscious organisation of these into frameworks of dual power by the bolsheviks that allowed them to depose the government and, it is only this popular support and movement of the revolutionary masses that permitted the success of the reds in the ensuing civil war.
October wasn't blanquist in the slightest and the idea that the October revolution was some coup by a small minority of professional revolutionaries is anti-communist slander repeated by the bourgeois propagandists ever since to misrepresent the revolution and downplay its socialist nature.