From #Un-Occupied Boston (#Un-Tomemonos Boston)-What Happens When We Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History- The Pre-1848 Socialist Movement-"Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage" (“Young Spartacus”-February 1976)

Click on the headline to link to the Occupy Boston General Assembly Minutes website. Occupy Boston started at 6:00 PM, September 30, 2011.

Markin comment:

I will post any updates from that Occupy Boston site if there are any serious discussions of the way forward for the Occupy movement or, more importantly, any analysis of the now atrophied and dysfunctional General Assembly concept. In the meantime I will continue with the “Lessons From History ’’series started in the fall of 2011 with Karl Marx’s The Civil War In France-1871 (The defense of the Paris Commune). Right now this series is focused on the European socialist movement before the Revolutions of 1848.
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An Injury To One Is An Injury To All!-Defend The Occupy Movement And All Occupiers! Drop All Charges Against All Occupy Protesters Everywhere!

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Fight-Don’t Starve-We Created The Wealth, Let's Take It Back! Labor And The Oppressed Must Rule!
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A Five-Point Program As Talking Points

*Jobs For All Now!-“30 For 40”- A historic demand of the labor movement. Thirty hours work for forty hours pay to spread the available work around. Organize the unorganized- Organize the South- Organize Wal-Mart- Defend the right for public and private workers to unionize.

* Defend the working classes! No union dues for Democratic (or the stray Republican) candidates. Spent the dough instead on organizing the unorganized and on other labor-specific causes (good example, the November, 2011 anti-union recall referendum in Ohio, bad example the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall race in June 2012).

*End the endless wars!- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops (And Mercenaries) From Afghanistan! Hands Off Pakistan! Hands Off Iran! U.S. Hands Off The World!

*Fight for a social agenda for working people!. Quality Healthcare For All! Nationalize the colleges and universities under student-teacher-campus worker control! Forgive student debt! Stop housing foreclosures!

*We created the wealth, let’s take it back. Take the struggle for our daily bread off the historic agenda. Build a workers party that fights for a workers government to unite all the oppressed.

Emblazon on our red banner-Labor and the oppressed must rule!

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Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part One- Buonarroti and Babouvist Heritage (“Young Spartacus”-February 1976)

By Joseph Seymour

EDITOR'S NOTE: Over the weekend of 17-19 January in Berkeley more than 100 supporters of the Spartacus Youth League and the Spartacist League par­ticipated in a SYL West Coast educa­tional conference. The program fea­tured presentations on the Soviet econ­omy, the Right Opposition in the Bol­shevik Party during the 1920's, and the heritage of Jacobin communism. Be­ginning with this issue Young Spartacus is publishing the contribution "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition" by Joseph Seymour, a member of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League. To preserve the character of the verbal presentation we have intro­duced only stylistic alterations and deletions.

I am in the process of giving a seven-part [SYL class] series, titled "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition." This talk constitutes a compression of the first three parts: it is an attempt to analyze the main European revolutionary movement from the French Revolution until the time that Marx as a left-of-center bourgeois democrat arrived in France and Engels as a Utopian socialist, bohemian hell rake from the University of Berlin arrived in England, where they were transformed into communists.

In the general conception of the origins and background of Marxism there is the tendency toward idealiza­tion and individualization which sees Marx as a genius who assimilated Heg­el, Ricardo and Adam Smith and who read history and then synthesized these intellectual traditions into Marxism. Now, this is simply not true. In 1847 Marx joined an organization which had a twelve year revolutionary history. He did not join as a member; he joined at the top after he had come to agree­ment with the leadership. But it was not his organization, and he was a leader not because these people were followers of Marx but because his own ideas were in congruence with theirs.

Objectively, there has been the sup­pression of the influence of the Jacobin communist tradition and the living organizational links, not simply the ideological and intellectual effects, of the French Revolution through two generations of revolutionary commu­nists who, in the broad sense, educated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. There are, I think, several reasons as to why there is this false view.

First, since World War II, particu­larly, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, virtually all of the literature on Marxist historiography has been done by academics who have no knowledge of or interest in revolutionary organization, so that there has been a systematic idealization of Marx. Second, the Sta­linists, who have done much of the historical study of the pre-1848 left, are very much aware of the revolu­tionary movement, but introduce an­other kind of falsification, namely, the cult of personality projected back- wards. When Marx walks on the his­toric stage of 1843 in the Stalinist writings, he is presented as standing head and shoulders above the people who taught him things which he did not know and could not have figured out for himself. Within the Stalinist historiography of this period there is a strong tendency to deny Marx's as­sertion that the educator too must be educated. Finally, there is what could be called the obscurity of the obvious. Marx's debt to German philosophical traditions was in many ways unique. But Marx shared with almost all of his contemporaries a profound debt to the Jacobin communist tradition. In 1861 Marx wrote, in effect, "Well, of course, before 1848 everybody was a Babouvist." At that time all communists basically identified with the left wing of the French Revolution.

So, a main purpose of this series, of which the talk is a part, is to restore to the consciousness of our comrades our real debt to Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Julian Harney and Karl Schapper. Without them, both as individuals and as tendencies', Marx would have been nothing other than a German academic, just another version of Bruno Bauer.

Shaping impact of Great French Revolution

The great British historian, William Maitland, said that the most difficult thing about history is to remember that events which happened long ago were once in the future. Indeed, one of the most difficult things is to be able to put yourself into the political context of the 1820's and the 1830's. But there are two things that stand out, and they are interrelated.

First, one cannot overestimate the degree to which the consciousness of the revolutionaries and communists of those days was shaped by the French Revolution. The Jacobin dictatorship which lasted one year represented for any revolutionary democrat or com­munist—and the line between them was very thin—the only thing that they had to look back on, the only historic ex­perience that they could build on. The period from the overthrow of Robes­pierre at least to the revolution of 1830 in France and the Reform Act of 1832 in Britain, but really to the revo­lution of 1848, was a period of deep reaction, in which the possibility of a radical bourgeois-democratic republic seemed almost Utopian. The historic experiences on which to build a com­munist theory were very meager and were concentrated in one great event— the French Revolution, specifically, the Jacobin dictatorship.

Second, on the basis of the French Revolution and the attitudes of the ruling class, communism was generally identified with democracy. As Metternich remarked, "There is no difference between a liberal and a communist.” For Metternich there was no difference: if you had universal suf­frage, if you overthrew the govern­ment and instituted a bourgeois democ­racy, then the collectivization of property—the expropriation of the bourgeoisie—was relatively easy. Only the experience of the revolution, of 1848 allowed for a general re-evalua­tion of that premise. But before 1848, from Metternich through Marx, it was assumed that universal suffrage, at least in a country like England, would be associated with the massive econom­ic reorganization in the interests of the proletariat—the proletariat then
being not the industrial working class, but basically the plebeian masses, those who own nothing but their labor or who did not employ labor.

The French Revolution shares with the Bolshevik Revolution the fact that the revolutionaries had a strong doc­trinal pre-history. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Babeuf and Marat were no less committed to carrying out the doctrines of Rousseau, Diderot and the other French philosophes than Lenin and Trotsky were to Marx. Therefore, one cannot understand the French Revolu­tion, particularly Jacobin communism, without some knowledge of the left wing of the French Enlightenment.

The dominant philosopher who shaped the French revolutionary move­ment was Jean Jacques Rousseau. I will simply make the following point about Rousseau: unlike the other philos­ophers of the bourgeois-democratic movement, such as the Englishman Locke, Rousseau did not regard prop­erty as a natural right but as a social convention. He believed that as a social convention, property was serviceable in the interests of democracy and indivi­dual freedom. While having as an ideal a society of small property owners, Rousseau never regarded property as a natural right; therefore, one could indeed be a follower of Rousseau and be a communist, simply by differing with Rousseau not on the question of principle, but rather on the question of his empirical evaluation of property as the best convention to guarantee individual liberty.

There were also contemporaries of Rousseau, notably a Catholic priest named Mably and an atheist named Morelly, who disagreed with Rousseau. They contended that only under a collectivist system, only when there is equality of consumption and some kind of general collective organization of labor, can there arise a genuinely democratic society. There existed, therefore, in a doctrinal form, con­cepts of communism which arose out of the ideological preparation for the greatest of bourgeois-democratic revolutions.

Jacobin dictatorship

The Jacobin dictatorship, the reign of terror, the rule of Robespierre, represented an episode in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie, facing over­whelming international reaction and not yet having established its own strong state apparatus, had to make certain concessions to the masses, particularly the masses of Paris, which tended to be the seat of social power in France. In particular, the need to finance a revolutionary war could be done through either unrestrained inflationary fi­nance, in which the living standards of the population would decline, or some kind of economic controls. Fur­thermore, the revolutionary bourgeoi­sie also faced the question of the expropriation of the reactionaries and disposition of their property. Thus, the Robespierre dictatorship, under the direct military pressure of the so-called sans-culottes of Paris, insti­tuted elements of economic control in conflict with the basic bourgeois ideology of laissez faire, the unlimited expansion of incomes and the historic interests of the bourgeoisie.

However, Robespierre genuinely be­lieved that his policies represented a trans-class national interest. In 1793 Robespierre rewrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man, since the ori­ginal Declaration, representing an earlier phase, was too liberal. Inci­dentally, the rewritten Declaration of the Rights of Man is substantially • to the left of [Socialist Workers Party candidate] Peter Camejo's electoral campaign. The 1793 Declaration de­manded that every able-bodied French­man be guaranteed a job or that the
state provide support; that the state provide free education; that every foreign citizen resident in France for more than six months and not a coun­terrevolutionary be automatically granted French citizenship; and that when the government violates the rights of the people the people have the sacred right and duty to insurrect.

Now, when the French Revolution had beaten back the external military threat, the conservative bourgeoisie, whose social base was mainly the peasantry, overthrew Robespierre; the conservative bourgeoisie formed a
parliamentary majority which had an element of a right-left bloc, because Robespierre had also tended to sup­press elements of the Paris prole­tariat who were going too far. And that was Thermidor, the ninth of Thermidor. So the Robespierre heri­tage was therefore ambiguous. But, nonetheless, it was extremely important that the Jacobin dictatorship was assimilated in the communist tradition even by a certain kind of distortion of history—which saw Robespierre as really a communist—a distortion which certainly did not represent any malice, but rather a kind of false consciousness.

The Thermidorian reaction did not lead to a stable regime; only the overthrow of all elements of repre­sentative civilian government by Napoleon Bonaparte five years later stabilized that regime. So in the inter­im, the Jacobins, although suppressed and dispersed, continued to be a politi­cally organized force and a potential contender for power.

Conspiracy of Equals

In 1796 there was a regroupment of the left-wing revolutionaries headed by Babeuf which on the basis of their experience had gone over to commu­nism. Now, in some aspects, the Ba­beuf Conspiracy of Equals represen­ted a genuine, fundamental program­matic shift toward communism. But around the Babeuf Conspiracy of Equals, which was not a small group of fanatics by any means, there were also followers of Robespierre, so they constituted basically a unified left oppo­sition subscribing to two programs which were not really consistent with one another. One was a program simply calling for a return to the democratic constitution of 1793, which was acceptable to the Jacobins and had the historical authority of Robespierre. The other was the doctrine of Babouvists proper, which was that of a com­munistic regime.

The Conspiracy of Equals suffered from over-confidence; they simply passed out bills saying, "We are the secret committee of insurrection and we're going to insurrect." This agita­tion actually intersected considerable discontent. Thus, the army mutinied before they got around to organizing it, so that the rebellion was suppress­ed and the soldiers shipped out, and
the Conspiracy was infiltrated and suppressed. But it is worth noting that simply as an insurrection the Con­spiracy of Equals could have suc­ceeded. But the Conspiracy could not have carried out its program, and Babeuf personally would have been displaced by the right wing of his own movement. Nevertheless, one could have had a second reign of terror in 1796.

There was another important duali­ty in Babouvism. On the one hand, it had its popular program for re­turn to universal suffrage. On the other hand, the experience of the reign of terror, in which a conservative majority had ousted Robespierre, com­bined with the recognition that Robes­pierre had only stayed in power by calling upon the Paris population every once and awhile to invade the Convention and silence the representatives who had been elected by the peasants, convinced the Babouvists that they would need in the initial stages a dic­tatorship of revolutionaries. Filippo Buonarroti, who carried this tradition forward, described their ideas,

"To found a Republic belongs only to such disinterested friends of humanity and of their country whose reason and courage have shot above the rea­son and courage of their contempo­raries. The spirit of the Republic when established forms that of the citizens and of the magistrates, but at the commencement it is only the wisest and most ardent instigators of reform who can create the popular repub­lican spirit. It was therefore a point resolutely agreed upon by committee [the Babouvist committee] that the magistrates, imposed at first and ex­clusively of the best revolutionaries, should not be subsequently renewed by the full application of the constitutional laws at once, but only generally and partially as the proportion of progress of national regeneration."

One has here the germs of the concept of the dictatorship of the pro­letariat, albeit deformed through a certain objectively determined false
consciousness. The Babouvists empiri­cally recognized that, had there been a free election in 1796, the communist Jacobins or even the radical Jacobins would not have been a majority; they were a majority in Paris but not in the country. This was not transformed into an understanding of the class dif­ferences between the peasantry, which had already gotten what they wanted, namely the land and the abolition of feudal taxes and obligations, and a pre-industrial working class; rather, this recognition was translated into the notion of the difference between the enlightened revolutionists and the back­ward masses.

So the revolutionary regime was seen as the dictatorship of a revolu­tionary party, selected on-the basis of individual political morality. In this sense, the Babouvists did not and could not transcend the ideological premises of the bourgeois-democratic revolu­tion. Babeuf and Darthe were executed; but before his death, Babeuf wrote to one of his collaborators—he said, "Here are my notes, here are my ideas. Save these for posterity."

That collaborator for the next forty years worked to realize the Babouvist program. He was an Italian by the name of Filippo Michele Buonarroti. The most important work of his life, I would argue, was in the last five years, when the man was in his seven­ties. Because, he was an Italian, he did not participate as a politician during the Jacobin dictatorship but rather as a revolutionary administra­tor. He was a troubleshooter and a terrorist. So he began his career as the Jacobin equivalent of the Cheka. Then he was imprisoned for a while, but following Thermidor he was re­leased, in this regroupment he joined the Babouvists. He was an orthodox follower of Robespierre; he convinced Babeuf for tactical reasons to claim the traditions of Robespierre rather than Hebert, who had less historical prestige with the masses.

Thinking about Buonarroti's career, the parallels with Trotsky are so great as to be overwhelming. They simply force themselves upon one's conscious­ness, although there is a difference, and it is a difference which appears superficial but is in fact fundamental, the difference between the bourgeois-democratic and the proletarian revolution.

Buonarroti was the only one of his revolutionary generation to carry on against overwhelming historical odds, and in greater isolation than Trotsky faced, the traditions of the French Revolution and its most radical ex­pression. He did this in two forms. In the year 1828, as an old man, he published a book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of Equals], which both in effect and in purpose was The Revolution Betrayed of its day. In fact, the main theme was the original Thermidor, the one in 1794, not the one in 1924. In its day the book actually had a greater mass impact than The Revolution Betrayed, and was known as the Bible of revolutionaries. It was the book that educated the generation that educated Karl Marx. However, Buonarroti was not content, being a man of action, to limit himself simply to the literary expression of doctrine as important as that was. He also attempted to establish international revolutionary organizations.

Reaction and conspiratorial strategy

Yet there is a difference with Trotsky which is fundamental. In a certain sense it encapsulates the whole purpose of this class series. The French counterrevolution, and French Bonapartism, was forced by over­whelming historical objective circum­stances. Thus, the entire generation of Jacobins, including many Babouvists, capitulated to Bonapartism, so that throughout the Napoleonic era the bureaucracy and the army contained ex-Jacobins, ex-Hebertists, ex-Babouvists and ex-partisans of Robes­pierre. Even Napoleon himself could declare, "I was never a dictator; I was never an oppressor. I was a true son of the French Revolution. I'm here because I fought to liberate the people against the tyrants." Read some of Napoleon's last letters; he sounds very radical.

Buonarroti's ex-Jacobin comrades tended to abound within the interstices of the French bureaucracy. In fact, one of the reasons Buonarroti survived was that he skillfully exploited the Jacobin "old boys club." This fact conditioned his conception of strategy, which was not the organization of a revolution from the ground up but rather from the top of society, from communist sym­pathizers within the state bureaucracy, within the army, within these very re­stricted parliaments. Therefore, the Buonarroti organizations were con­spiratorial organizations in several different senses. They were not merely a means of hiding from the authorities, the absolutely reactionary authorities; they were a means of the conspiratorial infiltration and manipulation of the lib­eral opposition.

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Guidelines for recruitment to the first international communist (Babouvist) organization, the Sublimes Maitres Parfaits led by Filippo Buonarroti.

*Devotion to the principles of the order and willingness to sacrifice to them personal interest and pleasure.

*Courage, that is to say, scorn of danger of work and hardship. *Patience and perseverance.

*Moderation in the use of intoxicating liquors.

*The habit of speaking little and to the point.

*No wish to make an impression, to shine, and to impose oneself.

*Caution in gambling, in love, in anger, and in the opening of one's
heart.

*Exquisite sensibility concerning the wrongs that weigh on humanity.
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Buonarroti's strategy was to attempt to achieve through conspiratorial manipulation the organic radicalization of the French Revolution. You begin with a constitutional monarch, then you go to the liberal bourgeoisie, then the radical bourgeoisie, and then commu­nism. The Buonarroti secret societies would have their members join some­thing like the Society for Freedom of the Press or the semi-legal, liberal nationalistic oppositions in Metternich-ean Europe. So, you were electing somebody you thought was a good liberal; but he was really a communist on the hotline to Geneva, where Buonarroti was running the operation.

Thus, Buonarroti's strategy, which was in a certain sense realistically
conditioned by the existence of an era of bourgeois-democratic revolution, was the conspiratorial manipulation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the service of communism. For that reason these were hierarchical organ­izations whose ultimate program was not known to its lower ranks. Only Buonarroti and the Central Committee knew the real program. You joined if you were a liberal and believed in universal suffrage. If you were a revo¬lutionary democrat, you reached the second level; and you only got to know the final program after you had been coopted onto the Central Committee. Ultimately, Buonarroti's conception, of course, was Utopian. However, in the year 1821, Buonarroti's followers were involved in—even leading—partially successful, simultaneous insurrections in Spain, Naples and Rome. For one man, that is not bad!

In one talk I can only give some index of the importance of Buonarroti. If you read a biography of Marx, you will find under this period just names: he collaborated with this person here and that person there. Well, in almost every case, all of Marx's collabor¬ators in the 1840’s were either in­directly or directly influenced or re­cruited by Buonarroti! To give you just two examples, which could be multi¬plied ad infinitum. In 1847 the front group for the Communist League in Belgium was called the Democratic Association, of which Marx was the vice-president and a man named Lucien Jottrand was the president. In 1828 Buonarroti was in Belgium and he recruited a small circle of Belgian followers, one of whom was Lucien Jottrand. Another example: Marx's leading non-German collaborator throughout this period was the left-wing leader of British Chartism, Julian Harney, a very important figure in his own right. Barney’s mentor was an earlier left-wing leader of British Chartism named James Bronterre O'Brien. In 1836, Buonarroti's book on Babeuf was translated into English by -James Bronterre O'Brien.

So, I’ll conclude with an anecdote indicating what Buonarroti contributed to the communist movement. James Bronterre O'Brien, after he translated the book [History of Babeuf s Conspiracy of EquaIs], began a corres­pondence with Buonarroti the year be­fore Buonarroti died. At that time O'Brien was an Owenite, or had been an Owenite, Owenite socialism being pacifist and cooperativist. O'Brien translated Owen's writings into French and sent them to Buonarroti and asked him for his ideas on Owenite socialism. Buonarroti wrote back, in effect, "You know, it's remarkable that Owen, inde­pendent of Babeuf and I, has the same conception of what society should look like, what we are working for. But he seems to believe that you can get this while keeping the existing British gov­ernment, while keeping the monarchy.

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradtion-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American for Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view.

As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but just not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose for educational purposes only:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Marxism And The Jacobin Communist Tradition-Part Two -"Blanquism" ("Young Spartacus" March 1976)

EDITOR'S NOTE: With this series Young Spartacus makes available for our readers a contribution presented by Joseph Seymour, a Spartacist League Central Committee member, at the mid-January Spartacus Youth League West Coast educational conference held in Berkeley. "Marxism and the Jacobin Communist Tradition," reproduced from the verbal presentation with a minimum of editorial abridgement, seeks to debunk the academic/New Left view of Marxism as a self-contained derivation from Hegelian philosophy by reaffirming the shaping influence of the experiences, programs and world-views of two generations of revolution­ary militants who sought to fuse the bourgeois-democratic revolution with an egalitarian collectivist social order. The first part, featured in our Febru­ary issue, discussed the Great French Revolution and the legacy of its in­surrectionary and most radical wing, upheld by the revolutionaries Babeuf and Buonarroti.
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The history of the French revolu­tionary movement after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the history of the polarization of the left opposition to royal absolutism into its bourgeois conservative, revolutionary democrat­ic and communist component of revo­lutionary democracy, which simultane­ously was transformed through proletarianization.
The two key dividing lines were the successful revolution of 1830 and the Lyons silk weavers’ insurrection of 1834.

Now, at the beginning of this period, 1815, the left opposition to the Bourbon Restoration had three main tendencies. First, the liberal bourgeoisie, whose economic policy was laissez faire, whose power base was the very re­stricted parliament based on a limited franchise, whose political program advocated not democracy but rather an extended franchise and certain rights, and whose main leadership was the wealthy nobleman Lafayette.

Second, there were the Bonapartists, who were mainly centered in the army and whose program was roughly na­tional populism. Until Bonaparte died in 1821, they stood for the restoration of Bonaparte: "Let's kick these for­eigners and their lackeys out of France." Revolutionary nationalism. But they were not committed to eco­nomic laissez faire; they could make certain populist appeals to peasant economic protectionism, and in that sense were even demagogically to the left of the liberals.

Then there were the revolutionary democrats, who in this period (1815-1820) were almost exclusively limited to the student population of Paris. And the vanguard was a small group of revolutionary democrats who, being il­legal, took over a masonic order and named it the Friends of Truth, whose leader was a rather reputable and important figure named Saint Amand Bazard.

These three forces united in their mass on two occasions: the Carbonari Conspiracy of 1821-23, where they were defeated, and the revolution of 1830, where they were in a military sense victorious. But that victory split those component parts asunder.

Carbonari Conspiracy

I will just say a few words about the Carbonari Conspiracy, which was important. First, it had a genuinely mass character, encompassing at its height probably 80,000 activists. In France every revolutionist who was mature, and even some who were not mature, was a member of the Carbonari. It provided the first revolution­ary experience for that generation. The 17-year-old Louis Auguste Blanqui had his first revolutionary experience in the Carbonari and his later secret organizations were modeled on the Carbonari—only cells of three and only one person in the three knew anyone in the cell above, so one had a hier­archy which sealed off the leadership from the base.

In 1821, in response to the gains of the liberals in parliament, the Bourbons moved to the right and rewrote the parliamentary laws. The liberal bour­geois opposition in effect said, "Well, we have no choice but to engage in insurrection." They contacted the radi­cal students and the disgruntled Bonapartists and even democrats in the army, organizing a conspiracy whose main strategy was the subversion of the army. The Carbonari Conspiracy, thus, was a democratic mutiny in the army, financed and organized by the liberal bourgeoisie, utilizing the stu­dent radicals, each seeking to manipu­late and utilize the other.

But the army, in the absence of a general social crisis, was isolated and sufficiently loyal to the regime that the Conspiracy did not work. When someone would say, "Psst, you want to join?," he would get turned in and would be executed. So there was a whole series of executions and abortive mutinies.

The suppression of the Carbonari had a significant effect but, interesting­ly enough, the various forces involved maintained a kind of good will toward each other. They drifted apart. The liberal bourgeoisie went back to parlia­mentary game-playing. The student-based revolutionary democrats, how­ever, did something interesting. They decided to do some fundamental re­thinking of political doctrine, and they soon discovered an eccentric nobleman named Saint-Simon, who actually died about the time they began reading his works.

Discovery of Saint-Simon

Saint-Simon was not a socialist, he was not associated with the revolution­ary movement, but rather he was a technocrat who believed in state eco­nomic planning. He inherited the En­lightenment tradition. He said, "Capi­talism is obviously irrational, production is obviously ungoverned, and I can think of fourteen different ways to improve the economy, but there has to be some kind of centralization."

So Saint Amand Hazard and his cir­cle for a couple of years read this material and came out as the first socialist organization with a revolu­tionary democratic tradition. They were not an odd sect; they actually had experience in revolutionary poli­tics and a real sense for political power.

Saint-Simonism, therefore, was the first politically significant socialist tendency, although Owenism in Britain, by a very different process, was also achieving a semi-mass character. Saint-Simonism also spread through Germany—one of Marx's high-school teachers was a Saint-Simonian social­ist—and was the first basic socialist doctrine to penetrate the continent.

While one tends to think of early socialist movements as being very primitive, in fact Saint-Simonism was the most technocratic of any socialist doctrine, not the most primitive. And it reflected the close organic ties between the radical democrats-cum-socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie, which at that time was very alienated from the state apparatus held by the Bourbons, who believed that they were living in the seventeenth century. So, certain elements of bourgeois techno­cratic socialism tended to penetrate these circles and became quite faddish. Only in a later period, with mass agitation, were the traditions of Jacobin communism rediscovered.

Revolution of 1830

Now, the next time the left opposi­tion to the Bourbon regime unified for insurrectionary action they were suc­cessful ... much to their surprise. In the limited parliament, despite the various laws, the liberals were still gaining and finally won a majority. Then the king decided to pull a coup
d’état and declared, "We are dissolving parliament, and we are having total censorship of the press."

Some journalists, among them Louis Auguste Blanqui, although he was not a leader, said, "We refuse.' We protest.'" Some of them were arrested, and the cops knocked on the doors.

It was the spark that was needed to set off the Parisian masses. Among them were all these Bonapartist army officers, who were much better than the French army of the day, which had been purged to make it impossible for France to conquer the other countries anymore. After three days of street fighting, the French army was defeated, decisively driven out of Paris.

Now this should have been, as the radicals and the Saint-Simonians ex-pected the beginning of the second French Revolution. Hazard, the leader of the Saint-Simonians, went to his old friend Lafayette. As the historic leader of the liberal opposition Lafayette was now head of the de facto state power, the so-called National Guard, which was the military arm of the bourgeoisie in Paris. And he said, "Look Lafayette, this is my program, it's a communist program. You be a communist dictator, and we'll support you." And Lafayette stared at him.

Then the liberal pretender—the king's cousin—visited Lafayette along with a banker named Lafitte; Lafayette says, “I am a republican"; the liberal pretender exclaims, "So am I"; and the banker says, "Look, you don't want a lot of trouble." So Lafayette says, "Okay," and they went out—there's a famous kiss of reconciliation in front of the masses of -Paris. When the republicans cried "Betrayal!," they were beaten up and suppressed.

So the French Revolution simply led from an attempted absolutist mon­archy to a somewhat more liberal one, although becoming increasingly re­pressive, in which the Parisian masses and particularly the left—the left wing of the left wing being Saint-Simonian socialists—rightly felt themselves betrayed. It took approximately five years for the new regime to consolidate itself, and the period between the revolution of 1830 and the great repression of 1835 was a continued series of attempts, some of them having a mass character, to carry the revolution of 1830 to a successful conclusion.

The first phase of the struggle, spearheaded by the organization called the Society of the Friends of the People, was simply leftist insurrections in Paris. They felt that the masses would never accept this king, and every couple of months they would rally the students, whatever artisans they could collect, and some disgruntled soldiers and simply attack the state. Blanqui was the vice president of the Society of the Friends of the People and was arrested for student agitation. This is for the SYL: in case anybody puts down agitating on campus, you can point to Blanqui, who never thought that agitating on campus was beneath his dignity.

Buonarroti and the Continuity of Revolutionary Jacobinism

Now, by 1832 the revolutionary democrats had gotten a little bloodied, and they formed another organization with a somewhat longer range and propagandistic purpose, called the So­ciety of the Rights of Man. This was the first mass democratic organization in which revolutionary communists were a serious contender for factional power and the first revolutionary or­ganization which intersected and in a certain sense led the mass organiza­tions of the pre-industrial proletariat.

During 1832-34 in the Society of the Rights of Man there were two factions. The orthodox Jacobin faction republished Robespierre's writings, Robespierre's "Rights of Man," and could be called revolutionary bourgeois democrats anticipating social democ­racy. And the other faction, the out­right Jacobin communist faction organized by Buonarroti, also claimed the same historic tradition. The 1833 program of the agents of Buonarroti within the Society of the Rights of Man declared:

"All property, movable or immovable, contained within the national territory, or anywhere possessed by its citizens, belongs to the people, who alone can regulate its distribution. Labor is a debt which every healthy citizen owes to society, idleness ought to be branded as a robbery and as a perpetual source of immorality."

[—Louis Blanc, History of Ten Years, 1830-1840}

And it was through the Society of the Rights of Man that Buonarroti in the last four or five years of his life was able to intersect a new revolutionary • generation and win them to the tradi­tions of Jacobin communism.

Class Battles at Lyons

Now, after 1832, the scene of the major revolutionary battles in France shifts to the provincial industrial city of Lyons, which was the main concen­tration of the pre-industrial French working class concentrated in the silk industry, which was producing for the world market. In 1831, as a result of a wage struggle, they had a demonstra­tion, the bourgeois National Guard attacked them, and they attacked back. The army vacillated, because after the revolution of 1830 the army was a little wary of going against the people—they had gone against it and lost. The weavers took over the city, but they had no ulterior political motives. They said, "Here, we don't want the city, you can have it back." So then, of course, the army came in and smashed them.

The silk weavers, however, were or­ganized in a pre-industrial union known as the Mutualists. At the same time there were these burgeoning bourgeois-democratic-cum-communist propa­ganda groups in Lyons which sought to intersect the Mutualists. The leadership of the first unions were not socialists or revolutionary democrats but rather traditionalists heavily influenced by the clergy. It was only through a long period of struggle that the revo­lutionary democrats and the commu­nists among them were able to pene­trate the organizations of the pre-industrial working class and to win the masses.

The relationship between the So­ciety of the Rights of Man and the silkweavers1 union has been described by Louis Blanc, the leading socialist historian writing in the 1840's in his History of Ten Years:

"We have said that a considerable num­ber of Mutualists had entered the Society [the Society of the Rights of M an] but they had done so as individuals, for as the Mutualists societies con­sidered collectively and in its tendency, it is certain that in the period in ques­tion, it was governed by a narrow corporate spirit. Above all, it was bent on preserving its industrial physiog­nomy, its originality, and all that con­stituted for it a situation apart amongst the working classes. No doubt, there were amongst it men exalted above their feelings. But these men did not constitute the majority, all whose in­terests might be summed up in in­creased wages for silk weavers. The influence of the clergy, moreover, over the class of silk weavers in Lyons has always been rather considerable. Now the following was the spirit in which was exercised this influence, of which women were the inconspicuous but ef­ficient agents. The clergy, beholding in the manufacturers but liberals and skeptics, had felt no inclination to damp a disposition to revolt which animated the workmen against them. But at the same time it urged the latter to distrust the republican party but taking advantage of its sympathies. Now this was in fact precisely the conduct to­wards the Society by the leaders of Mutualism; for while they suffered themselves to be charged with repub­licanism, and availed themselves against the manufacturers in the popu­lar diatribes of the Glaneusse [the republican press] they spared nothing to deaden the republican propaganda in the lodges."

Communist Ideology and Proletarian Struggles

The famous dictum of Lenin [in What Is To Be Done?] that socialist ideology must be brought to the proletariat from without is not a programmatic statement. It is not even a theoretical statement. It is an in­disputable historical fact.

The communist movement has a prehistory, and the mass economic organizations of the proletariat have different prehistories. The communist movement arose out of the left wing of the bourgeois-democratic movement and, in its earliest phases, its mass base was essentially the young intel­lectuals concentrated among students. The mass economic organizations of the working class go back to the earli­est mercantilist period, and their earli­est natural leaders tended to be the clergy. The communist movement" arising out of the democratic movement and the trade unions emerging out of the artisan guilds intersect, and the workers movement is shaped by that intersection. But at every point there is a deep ideological struggle between the revolutionary democrats or social­ists and the Catholic priests in France, or the Russian Orthodox priests in Russia, or the Methodists in England.

As a result of their experiences the leaders of the Mutualists, who were traditionalists and monarchists, appealed to the king and sought reforms, but at every point they were thwarted. Then in 1834 the Orleans monarchy attempted to totally suppress the left opposition, mainly the political opposition, with the so-called Law of Associations, which banned all associations. While these laws were mainly directed at political associations, they also affected the economic organizations of the workers.

So the Lyons silk weavers said, "You attempt to ban our organizations and we will fight." And they fought. There was a mass meeting, jointly called by the Society of the Rights of Man and the silk weavers' union and appealing to
other workers organizations in Lyons; they called a mass demonstration in April, 1834. When the army attempted to suppress the demonstration, the greatest revolutionary violence in France between the revolution of 1830 and those of 1848 occurred in Lyons-six days of fighting, in which hundreds, mainly silk weavers, were killed.

The leaders were repressed in a so-called "Monster Trial," in which both the political left opposition, including virtually all the leaders of the Society of the Rights of Man, and the leaders of the silk weavers were charged with conspiracy and insurrection and were imprisoned. After 1834 Lyons was a Red City for three decades; every com­munist tendency, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Cabet, had an organic base among the silk weavers in Lyons—until the in­dustry essentially disintegrated in the 1860's. But it didn't begin that way.

Blanqui-Insurrectionary Communism

Blanquism as an identifiable doc­trine is a product of the suppression of open insurrectionary activity culmi­nating in the so-called "Monster Trial" of 1835. Blanqui had been a revolu­tionary activist since the age of 17. He had fought in all the street battles and had been decorated for his role in the revolution of 1830 by the new king. Until 1833-34, however, he was simply one of the boys, in no sense distinguish­able, except by his personal courage, from three or four dozen other revo­lutionary democrats.

In prison between 1832 and 1834 he became a communist, but without par­ticular doctrinal sophistication. He al­ways pooh-poohed attempts to describe the nature of communist society. In prison he developed not the goal of communism, which as I said always had a very general characteristic, but strategic conceptions which were so radically different than those of his contemporaries that they constituted a new and distinct political tendency.

Blanqui asked himself two questions. First, why have all of the insurrections since 1830 failed? And second, why did the revolution of 1830, which succeeded in a military sense, also fail, bringing into power a regime which was at best only quantitatively less reactionary than the regime the masses had replaced?

Blanqui rejected the French revolutionary model which had inspired
Buonarroti: you begin with a bloc with the liberals or even the constitutional monarchists, and then you have the gradual radicalization of the revolu­tion. Historical experience had proven impossible the replication of the ex­perience of the French revolution, that is, the gradual radicalization begin­ning with a broad unity of all the op­ponents of the existing regime and then narrowing it down.

Instead, Blanqui insisted that com­munists must overthrow the government and directly rule. So he created what was in fact a secret army: the army was secret from the authorities, and the leadership of the army was secret from the ranks. He organized secret societies, such as the Society of Fam­ilies and later, in the late 1830's, the Society of the Seasons.
In order to enter one of these so­cieties, you were asked questions and you had to give the right answers, the revolutionary catechism. This is the catechism of the Society of the Families, 1836:

"What is the people? The people is the mass of citizens who work. What is the fate of the proletariat under the govern­ment of the rich? Its fate is the same as that of the serf and the Negro. It is clearly a long tale of hardship, fatigue and suffering. Must one make a political or social revolution? One must make a social revolution."

[—Samuel H. Bernstein, Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection]

You answer those three things correct­ly, and three years later you'll be fighting it out with the army in the streets of Paris.

The Society of the Seasons was not only a French organization; it had a German appendage, which for the his­tory of Marxism is important. There was a large German population in Paris in the 1830's, heavily artisan. In Paris there was the so-called German Re­publican Party which contained all of the democrats. A man named Theodore Schuster, who by some curious coincidence was a friend of Buonarroti, formed a faction in the German Republican Party, split the party and from that split arose an organization called the League of the Just. When Buonarroti died in 1837, Blanqui inherited his con­stituency and formed a military bloc with the League of the Just, at that time a handful of communist intellectuals and a base of German artisans.

So, one nice spring day in 1839, a thousand Frenchmen and Germans, largely artisan, met for their routine military exercise in downtown Paris. But this time Blanqui and his lieutenant Barbes walked up and said, "Gentlemen, we are your leadership, and this is it!" They broke into a gun­smith shop, and for the next couple of days they were fighting a very surprised French army.

How did Blanqui recruit this relatively large number of people willing to just walk into the streets of Paris and start shooting? In a certain sense, he didn't. Blanqui rallied the militant wing of the broader revolutionary democratic opposition, which in general tended to be of the plebeian social background. At his trial Blanqui was the only one who was a bourgeois. Everyone else, there were 30 some odd, were all either artisans or shopkeepers. They had nothing to lose.

This indicates an essential aspect of Blanquism which in a certain sense is the key to this talk. Blanquism was the intersection of two currents. On one hand, Blanquism represented the extreme militarist wing of the bourgeois-democratic revolution whose tactics, concepts and whose method of recruit­ment were conditioned by the existence of a broader bourgeois-democratic movement. On the other hand it also represented the nascent collectivist instincts and impulse of the plebeian and particularly urban artisan masses. If one liquidates that dialectical tension, one cannot understand Blanquism. And if one fails to understand Blanquism, then one cannot comprehend this entire period.

To be sure, the Blanqui/Barbes uprising of 1839 was a pure putsch. But Blanqui remained tied to the bourgeois-democratic revolution; he proposed a revolutionary provisional government which contained himself and his lieu­tenants, but also one of the leading democratic oppositionists who knew nothing about the putsch. He said, "This is the government, we take power, you're the president." Blanqui assumed that if he overthrew the state, then the more cautious, conservative bourgeois democrats would go along with him, and, moreover, would also be easily won to communism.

In a certain sense Blanqui was right. The king really wanted to execute Barbes, the Blanquist leader who was captured first; it was only fear of a mass insurrection and mass violence if Barbes and Blanqui were executed that prevented it. So that even though this was a pure putsch, it was pro­foundly popular, and the execution of these two revolutionaries would have been not only in the mass unpopular but also not in the interest of the liberal bourgeoisie: the Blanquists had the protection of the bourgeois democrats on the grounds that the revolutionary communists can be used, as in 1830. One is not talking about the Weather-
men. - One is talking about an insur­rectionary act under conditions of severe repression.

Blanqui spent the 1840's in jail. Blanquism as an organized phenomenon disappeared. If you knew the right Paris cafes in the 1840's, you could walk in and somebody would come up to you, start talking, ask for money to buy guns and say, "Well, do you want to come to a meeting?" Dispersed revolutionary activity.

Marx had great respect for Blanqui. He certainly is the only figure in the 19th century who stands comparable to Marx. He was, however, critical and in some ways contemptuous of Blanqui's conceptions of organization.

In the early 1850's Marx wrote a scathing attack on the typical Parisian revolutionary conspirator in the form of a book review ["Review of A. Chenu's 'Les Conspirateurs'," in Saul K. Pad-over, Marx on Revolution]. And Marx said, "Oh, you're a bunch of Bohemians, declassed intellectuals, declassed pro­letarians, easily penetrated by the cops, tending to lead a dissolute life-style." Marx was very prudish, a very straight guy.

What distinguished Marx was his in­sistence that the communists must be tied to the workers—not simply the ex­ceptional workers who were prepared to become professional revolutionaries —the mass of the workers through their established organizations. So that's the negative aspect of Blanquism which quite early on Marx rejected. But in the only two revolutionary situations in which Marx was involved during his lifetime—the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune—Marx and Blanqui were forced together, and Marx on both occasions had to break with right-wing allies.

So, whatever his failing Blanqui insisted, again and again, on certain fundamental truths: namely, that one cannot build communism simply through cooperative bootstrap opera­tions, which were very popular in that period; that you cannot establish com­munism unless the communists wield state power; and that the bourgeoisie is not going to establish a stable par­liamentary democracy in which the communists could establish their con­stituency and by that means take over the government.

Engels, in a much later critique of the Blanquists, observed that Blanqui was a man of the pre-1848 period. But in some ways he was also a man of the post-1914 period—Blanqui above all grasped the centrality of the revolu­tionary overthrow of the state.

*HONOR LOUIS AUGUSTE BLANQUI-19TH CENTURY REVOLUTIONARY MAN OF ACTION

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the great European revolutionary man of action, Louis Auguste Blanqui.

COMMENTARY

If you are familiar with left terminology or if you ever wondered where the terms Blanquist or Blanquism came from Louis Auguste Blanqui is the 19th century man of revolutionary socialist action from which the terms derive. The terms connote a particular notion of revolutionary strategy- essentially the belief that a small cohesive vanguard of kindred revolutionary soldiers acting under cover of a conspiracy was all that was necessary to overthrow the existing regime and usher in a better, more just society. Marxists basing themselves on historical materialism and massive transformations to create historical change have always fought against such a strategy admiring the fortitude of Blanqui as a revolutionary. Basically, Blanquism represents a pre-industrial theory more suitable to an artisan and peasant based society. The theory’s history stretches back to the defeat of the Conspiracy of Equals led by Babeuf after the Themidorian Reaction of 1794 had signaled the degeneration of the French Revolution. While rejecting Blanqui’s theory one should note that such devoted militants are all too rare in the history of the left and therefore one must honor such an exemplary revolutionary.

Although the Marxist movement, beginning with Marx himself, has mercilessly fought against the substitution list notion that a small band of well-armed revolutionaries can overturn the old regime and bring a more just society the charge of Blanquism has always hovered around the surface of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Many historians and political commentators have declared the Bolshevik seizure of power in October a coup d’etat. That is facile commentary. If one wants to do harm to the notion of a coup d’etat in the classic sense of a closed military conspiracy a la Blanqui this cannot stand up to examination.

First, the Bolsheviks were an urban civilian party with at best tenuous ties to military knowledge and resources. Even simple military operations like the famous bank expropriations after the 1905 Revolution were mainly botched and gave them nothing but headaches with the leadership of pre-World War I international social democracy. Secondly, and decisively, Bolshevik influence over the garrison in Petrograd and eventually elsewhere precluded such a necessity. Although, as Trotsky noted, conspiracy is an element of any insurrection this was in fact an ‘open’ conspiracy that even the Kerensky government had to realize was taking place. The Bosheviks relied on the masses just as we should.


The following is a thumbnail sketch of the trials and tribulations of Blanqui throughout his revolutionary career. Just to detail the number of insurrections and revolutionary actions Blanqui was involved in, as well as the amount of time he spent in prison shows why he, justifiably, was considered a dangerous man when on the loose by every bourgeois government.

Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was a French revoluionary socialist famous for his devotion to the cause despite repeated imprisonments and for his tactic of the revolutionary seizure of power by a well-trained body of armed men. He joined an unsuccessful Paris insurrection in 1827 and was thereafter connected with every revolutionary attempt until his death. He played an active role in the July Revolution of 1830; he was sentenced to prison for articles in the paper he edited; he was sentenced again in 1836, but pardoned in 1837.

He was condemned to death for leading an unsuccessful insurrec­tion in 1839, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment; he was freed by the February Revolution of 1848, but given a ten-year sentence in 1849 as reaction gained the upper hand. Amnestied in 1859, he was reimprisoned in 1861 but escaped in 1865 and continued his propaganda against the Second Empire government from exile. Returning to France under the general amnesty of 1869, he led two armed demonstrations against the government of Louis Napoleon in Paris in 1870 and temporarily seized power on October 31, 1870. He was condemned to death on March 17, 1871.

The Paris Commune broke out a few days later. Blanqui was elected a member of the revolutionary government, but he was unable to take his seat since he was in the prison of the counterrevolutionary Versailles regime, which had a well-grounded fear that, with his energy and military ability, he might lead the Commune to military victory. He was kept in prison until 1879, when he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies by the workers of Bordeaux. Although the government declared his election invalid, it released him from prison, broken in health. He immediately resumed his agitation. At the end of 1880, he had a stroke after giving a speech at a meeting in Paris, and he died New Year's Day, 1881.