Ateş USLU
Original publication: Ateş USLU, “Dereyi Görmeden Paçaları Sıvamak: Blanqui“, Birgün Pazar, 27.11.2022.
AI-made translation, revised by the author.
[*The original title is a reference to a Turkish idiom: “dereyi görmeden paçayı sıvamak” (rolling up one’s trousers before seeing the stream), which is equivalent to the English expression “counting one’s chickens before they hatch.”]
Blanquism was one of the greatest accusations revolutionaries hurled at each other at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lenin accused the Narodniks, Rosa Luxemburg and Plekhanov accused Lenin, and Bernstein accused all revolutionary Marxists of “Blanquism.” A glance at Lenin’s writings reveals what was meant by Blanquism during this period: conspiratorialism, adventurism, a strategy based on the seizure of power by a minority… Yet, the ideas of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who was the source of inspiration for Blanquism through his actions, often remained in the shadows. And Blanqui himself was primarily responsible for this.
Immediately after finishing high school, Blanqui joined the Carbonari movement, which had emerged in Italy and was active against the Bourbon dynasty in France. In the late 1820s, he encountered the works of Fourier and the later writings of Saint-Simon, but he did not accept their and their followers’ dreams of peacefully forming utopian communities. Still, he developed his egalitarian ideas through inspiration from both revolutionary figures like Buonarroti and the utopian socialist literature. In contrast to the religious and mystical tendencies found in the works of utopian socialists (and later Etienne Cabet), he advocated a materialism influenced by Enlightenment thinkers like Helvétius and d’Holbach.
Throughout the July Monarchy, Blanqui was involved in leading revolutionary organizations. We follow his political thoughts through court defenses, brief writings, and letters. He spoke on behalf of France’s thirty million proletarians, demanding a wealth transfer from the rich to the poor via taxation. For him, the Republic was nothing other than a system established in favor of the poor through such arrangements. In a piece he wrote in 1834, titled “Those Who Cook the Soup Should Eat It,” after a strike by Lyon workers, he criticized those who had acquired land ownership and turned into parasitic idlers. At the same time, he harshly criticized the enslavement of Black people and reminded his readers that even in his own time, slavery existed on French soil. He also drew attention to the limitations of contemporary understandings of liberty: a person without means of production was not truly free; the only freedom most people had was the freedom to choose their master. Here, Blanqui exposed how labor power becomes a commodity under capitalist conditions and how freedom is limited to the existence of this “free” buying and selling. His social criticism echoed Saint-Simonian tones: in his ideal society, there was no place for idlers. Even eighteen years later, the egalitarianism of the Essene communities from the time of Jesus was to be taken as a model.
We can imagine how excited Blanqui must have been during the February 1848 revolution: his dream of twenty years had come true, the royal regime had collapsed, and the republic was reestablished. But this regime change was not enough for him: “The Republic,” he said, “is the emancipation of the workers, the end of the domination of exploitation, the arrival of a new order that will free labor from the tyranny of capital.” Precisely for this reason, he warned that a regime change that amounted to nothing more than a name change or the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” becoming a lie must be resisted. In the writings and letters he penned during his later years in prison, he would again warn against words that had lost their meaning — in other words, their social content: class analysis, class references, and the class content of political slogans… The crucial thing was to remember these.
Blanqui spent most of the 1850s and 1860s in the prisons of the Second Empire. People who had never even met him began to call themselves Blanquists. Blanquists would be quite influential during the Paris Commune. Engels’ lines from 1874 offer a glimpse of how Blanqui and his followers were perceived at the time: “Blanqui is essentially a political revolutionary. He is a socialist only by sentiment, out of sympathy with the sufferings of the people, but neither by theory nor by definite practical proposals for social reforms.” However, Engels was unaware of the theoretical work underlying Blanqui’s revolutionary struggle. During his long years in prison, Blanqui had the opportunity to read extensively, especially in the fields of economics and philosophy; according to those close to him, he “devoured books.” He entrusted to his sister the writings and fragments he penned during this period, especially those from the late 1860s, to be published. These notes, published four years after his death in 1885 in two volumes titled Social Criticism, include evaluations of the past and present, critiques of the utopian socialist literature, exposures of class contradictions, and reflections on the classless society of the future.
Blanqui’s visions of communism can be compared with those of Marx and Engels. He wrote against the utopian socialists that the future could not be foreseen, yet he still discussed some basic principles of the society to come. Education held great importance in his vision of a communist society: the generalization of education was an indispensable condition for collectivization. His stance on religion was uncompromising: he called for the abolition of all beliefs and the expulsion of the clergy. His earlier calls to fill fundamental political concepts, principles, and slogans — especially freedom — with real content found resonance again in Social Criticism: those who defend “freedom” and “the individual” against communism are actually defending the freedom to enslave, the freedom to exploit. For thousands of years, freedom and the individual have been murdered in the name of individualism. What will truly guarantee freedom and the individual is communism.
Although Blanqui is often seen as a thinker who de-emphasized theory and placed revolutionary action at the center, his true aim was to develop a revolutionary theory tested in practice. In Social Criticism, he answered communists and anarchists (“Proudhonists”) debating whether there was a cornfield or a wheat field across the stream with: “Let’s cross first, we’ll see when we get there.” In other words, instead of resolving problems theoretically first and then acting, he sought to keep action and theory inseparable. But this remained a wish: throughout his life, it is clear that he distorted the theory-action dialectic in favor of action. The seizure of power by a minority may not have been a strategy he could defend in theory, but his concern for the urgency of action pushed him toward conspirationism throughout his life. Blanqui’s problem was not the absence of theory but its relegation to the background.
The Blanqui Reader: Political Writings, 1830-1880, Philippe Le Goff & Peter Hallward (ed.), London: Verso, 2018.
Engels, Friedrich, “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune” [1874], transl. by Ernest Untermann, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/06/26.htm, accessed on May 28, 2026.