Editing Blanquism (section)

==History==
Comrade Plekhanov published a detailed account in Kurjer, entitled Where is the right?, in which he accuses the so-called Bolsheviks of being “Blanquist”.

Our aim is not to defend the Russian comrades, against whom Comrade Plekhanov aims the batteries of his wisdom and dialectics, as they certainly can do that themselves. But it is true that the question deserves some attention, and may also be of interest to our readers, which is why we have opened a space for it now.

In order to characterize Blanquism, comrade Plekhanov quotes Engels about Blanqui, a French revolutionary of the 1840s whose name ended up baptizing the entire movement. “In your political activity,” says Engels, “[Blanqui] was basically a ‘man of action. He believed that a well-organized minority, which, at the right moment, attempts a revolutionary sleight of hand, is already able to drag the popular mass along with the first successes and thus make a successful revolution. […] From the fact that Blanqui conceives any revolution as a coup d'état of a small revolutionary minority, the necessity of dictatorship follows after the success – of course, not of the entire revolutionary class of the proletariat, but of the small number of those who carried it out. the coup and which, beforehand, will once again be organized under the dictatorship of one or a few”.

Friedrich Engels, a collaborator of Karl Marx, is undoubtedly a great authority, but whether or not this characterization of Blanqui applies remains an open question. For in 1848 Blanqui need not necessarily assume that his club would remain a “small minority”; on the contrary, in that epoch of a great revolutionary movement he certainly counted on the whole working people – if not in France, at least in Paris – to follow his call to fight against the sneaky and shameful policy of the bourgeois ministry, which tried to “ wrest their conquests away from the people'. But this is not the case, it is the fact that Plekhanov tries to prove that Engels' characterization of Blanqui could be applied to the so-called Bolsheviks (which Comrade Plekhanov now calls a minority, because during the party's unification congress they turned out to be a minority).

Literally he puts it this way: "The whole of this characterization may be fully applied to our present minority." He then confirms his own words this way: “The relationship between Blanquists and the masses was utopian in the sense that they did not understand how important their revolutionary autonomy is. In his plans, in fact, only conspirators participated, the mass appeared only when it was dragged along by the well-organized minority”.

Therefore, Comrade Plekhanov thinks that the Russian Bolshevik comrades (let us stick to the usual expression) are hostages to this “original sin of Blanquism”. In our opinion, Comrade Plekhanov has not substantiated his accusation. Comparison with the Populists, who were actually Blanquists, proves nothing, and the malicious remark that Sheljabov, hero and leader of Narodnaya Volya, would have had a keener political instinct than Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, is too bad. I like that we dwell on it.

We believe that it is enough to put the questions in this way so that everyone who is even a little familiar with the current revolution and who has come into contact with it directly can answer in the negative. Therein lies the whole difference between conditions in the year 1848 in France and those in the Russian state today, because the proportion between the “organized minority” – that is, the party of the proletariat – and the mass has fundamentally changed. In the year 1848, self-styled socialist revolutionaries were making desperate efforts to inoculate these masses with socialist ideas, in order to draw them away from the support of empty bourgeois socialism. Socialism itself was ill-defined, utopian, petty-bourgeois. In Russia, the matter today presents itself differently: neither our putrid progressive democracy, nor the cadet society, nor the tsarist constitutionalists in Russia, nor any other bourgeois “progressive” party in other parts of the state has managed to win over the broad masses. workers. Today, these masses are uniting themselves around the banner of socialism: since the outbreak of the revolution, they have spontaneously and by their own motto followed the red flag. Our own party offers the best proof.

===Alleged Connections to Lenin and Leninism===
[[File:Orthlen.png]] [[Leninism]] has been accused of Blanquism, usually by left-wing critics of it. The comparison was first made by Lenin's contemporaries, for example the german revisionist marxist [[File:Bernstein.png]] Eduard Bernstein and [[File:Menshevik.png]] Mensheviks like [[File:Plekhanov.png]] Georgi Plekhanov.

[[File:Luxem.png]] Rosa Luxemburg was also initially among those who made the accusation in her 1904 work "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy".<ref>https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm</ref> However she went on to change her view and defended the bolsheviks from accusations of blanquism in her 1906 work "Blanquism and Social Democracy".<ref name="blanquism and social democracy">https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/06/blanquism.html</ref> She said:

{{Quote|
quote="We would dispute comrade Plekhanov’s reproach to the Russian comrades of the current “majority” [Bolsheviks] that they have committed Blanquist errors during the revolution. It is possible that there were hints of them in the organisational draft that comrade Lenin drew up in 1902, but that belongs to the past – a distant past, since today life is proceeding at a dizzying speed."<ref name="blanquism and social democracy" />
}}
{{Quote|
quote="If today the Bolshevik comrades speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have never given it the old Blanquist meaning; neither have they ever made the mistake of Narodnaya Volya, which dreamt of “taking power for itself” (zachvat vlasti). On the contrary, they have affirmed that the present revolution will succeed when the proletariat – all the revolutionary class – takes possession of the state machine."<ref name="blanquism and social democracy" />
}}

[[File:Councom.png]] [[Council Communism|Council communists]], [[File:Libsoc.png]] [[Libertarian Socialism|libertarian socialists]] and [[File:Ancom.png]] [[Anarcho-Communism|anarcho-communists]] have also criticized Leninism as being similar to Blanquism.

Lenin himself rejected this comparison, and was heavily critical of Blanquism, as he said, "We have always heard a chorus of accusation that we were too inflexible and ossified, too adamant. And yet our opponents call us “Blanquists”, “anarchists” and “true socialists”. The Blanquists are conspirators (they have never been in favour of the general strike), they exaggerate the importance of revolutionary government"<ref>https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/may/26.htm</ref> and "To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side. ''As long as no'' violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blanquists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority. We are Marxists, we stand for proletarian class struggle against petty-bourgeois intoxication, against chauvinism-defencism, phrase-mongering and dependence on the bourgeoisie"<ref>https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm</ref>.