Louis-Auguste Blanqui

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/index.htm

http://www.notbored.org/blanqui-preface.html

http://www.notbored.org/blanqui.html "To judge from the current disposition of people's minds, communism isn't exactly knocking on the door. But nothing is as deceptive as the situation, because nothing is so changeable." (Blanqui)

Thus, 'inhuman' is the one who devotes herself to the highest intensity she has encountered like a truth. The one who does not oppose herself to the shock, to the motion of experience, the hesitations of bad faith, skepticism and comfort. She becomes a force in her turn. A little discipline, and this force -- the force that attaches her to this intensity -- will successfully organize the maelstrom of attractions that compose all of us and imprint upon them a unique direction. What spectators stupidly call "will" is instead an unreserved abandon. For Blanqui, the intensity was insurrection. It was insurrection that, from the first days of July [1830], polarized his existence.

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Blanqui addressed himself to justice and determination; he addressed himself to his equals. Unlike a leader, he neither flattered nor snubbed anyone, and he preferred to keep people at a distance than to take the risk of [mutual] seduction. By his very existence, he contradicted all the bourgeoisie's propaganda, which -- before turning insurgent Parisian proletarians into piles of cadavers as tall as barricades -- began by painting them as a shapeless mass, as a brainless Plebian class of thieves, drunks, prison-escapees, headless devils, creatures that were unintelligible, monstrous and foreign to all humanity. And so: there is a logic of revolt. There is a science of insurrection. There is an intelligence in the riot, an idea of upheaval. It is necessary to have all the class-hatred of de Tocqueville to fail to recognize it.

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Never wait; operate with those who are there. Learn oneself, learn [other] beings and situations, not as entities, but as intersections [parcourus] of lines and planes, traversed by misfortunes [fatalites]. No afterlife, reveries, recriminations or explications. "One only consoles oneself too much." To renounce the idea of chaos, the simple mental transcription of renunciation -- "The shadow of chaos never existed, it will never exist, anywhere." Once what is there is accounted for, get organized. Do not recoil from any logical consequence. Those who speak of revolution without concerning themselves with the questions of arms and supplies already have cadavers in their hands.[13] Leave the questions of origin and finality to the metaphysicians; the here-and-now is our only starting point, and what we can do practically is our only serious goal. If the state of things is untenable, it is not because of this or that, but because I am powerless within it. Never oppose the necessities of thought and action. Remain firm in moments of ebb, when one must start again, alone, from the beginning: one is never alone with the truth. Such a way of being can find no excuse in the eyes of those for whom life is only a scholarly collection of justifications. Faced with this Blanquist way of being, resentment hurls invectives; it denounces "the taking of power" and "megalomania"; it erects its security corridors of bad faith, stupidity and contentment; it announces the banning of the monster that seems to be in the process of extricating itself from the human herd.

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The alternative is not between waiting and activism, between participating in "social movements" and forming an avant-garde army; it is between being resigned or organized. A force can grow in an underground [sous-jacente] manner, according to its own rhythm, and can seize the time at the opportune moment.

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Lacambre, Tridon, Eudes, Granger, Flotte and the majority of Blanqui's co-conspirators were at first only friends who did not repress their latent politics. Conversely, all friendships have a conspiratorial kernel. In 1833, Vidocq[18] deplored the fact that there were more than a hundred secret societies in Paris. Any history of the revolutionary movement in France between 1830 and 1870 carries the trace of the societies that -- clubs as far as the regime would permit -- changed into hotbeds of clandestine propaganda or conspiracies when repression came and once again became clubs the moment that the regime vacillated. In 1848, there were no less than 600 [secret societies] in Paris, including -- to mention only one -- the club of l'Emeute revolutionnaire, located at 69 rue Mouffetard and presided over by Palanchan, an old accomplice of Blanqui. The official history of the workers movement has it that the conspiratorial tradition -- with its oaths, admission rituals and secret decorum -- succumbed during the development of the workers movement, though it had been its crucible. Did not the members of the League of the Just, ancestor of the League of the Communists, participate in the aborted insurrection of 1839, launched by the Society of the Seasons? Wasn't it Buonarroti who delivered the precious message of Babeuf to the modern world? Certainly one wasn't admitted to the so-called Revolutionary Communist League as one was admitted to the Association of Egalitarian Workers in 1839.

Listen with confidence and without fear: you are with communist republicans and consequently you now begin to live in the era of equality. They will be your brothers if you are loyal to your oath, but you will be forever lost if you betray it. They have all sworn to it just as you have sworn to it. Always listen with the greatest attention: the community is the veritable republic: work in common, communal education, property and pleasure; it is the symbolic sun of equality, it is the new faith for which we have all sworn to die! We know no borders, boundaries, or homeland; all communists are our brothers; the aristocrats [are] our enemies. Today, if you fear prison, torture or death; if you find your courage to be weak; you should withdraw. To enter our ranks, one must confront all that: once the oath has been taken, your life belongs to us; you have risked your neck [19] and that of the one who will lead you for the rest of your days. Reflect and respond.

With the end of the era of conspiracies, the workers movement supposedly passed from its infantile to its adult phase, from night to light. At least according to Marxist historiography. The public organizations of Social Democracy took up the slack from shapeless proletarian politics. From the League of the Communists one proceeds by degrees to the International Association of Workers and the existence of Social Democrat Parties in all countries [of Europe], while the anarchists [supposedly] sank stupidly into terrorism and syndicalism. The truth is that conspiratorial politics never ended. [Supposedly] all the traditional links, all the familiarities based on trade and neighborhood -- the village, in short -- on which proletarian politics rested until the Commune have been irreversibly destroyed. And that the organizations that have substituted themselves for a thenceforth missing "people" have only demoted [repousser] the conspiratorial to "the informal" and have consequently de-ritualized all that depends upon friendship. At bottom, the conflict between Marx and Bakunin concerning the International and its alleged infiltration by an obscure International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (founded by Bakunin) came down to this: on the one side, a politics based on programs and, on the other, a politics founded on friendship.

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Bakunin, who could not in the course of his incessant transcontinental peripatetics encounter a being whom he liked without unloading upon him the statutes of his most recently formed secret society, hoping that he would adhere to what the Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organization of the International Brothers calls a "kind of revolutionary [general] staff composed of individuals who are devoted, intelligent and sincere friends, especially; neither ambitious nor vain; of the people; capable of serving as the intermediary between the revolutionary idea[l] and working-class instincts. The number of these individuals thus most not be large. For the international organization in all of Europe, one hundred strongly and seriously allied revolutionaries would suffice."

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In his preface to Histoire des Treize, Balzac[22] expresses as no one else the ambivalence of this power, which can return as aristocratic secession just as it can give birth to a revolutionary force.

It happened that, under the Empire and in Paris, thirteen men equally struck by the same feeling, all endowed with a very great energy for being loyal to the same thought; quite honest amongst themselves due to never betraying each other; quite profoundly political so as to dissimulate the sacred links that unite them; strong enough to be above the law; bold enough to undertake anything; very happy for having almost always succeeded in their designs; having run the greatest dangers, but keeping quiet about their defeats; insusceptible to fear, and having never trembled before the prince, the executioner or innocence; having accepted each other, such as each was, without minding social prejudices (. . .) This world apart from the world, hostile to the world, accepted none of the ideas of the world, and recognized no law in it (. . .) This intimate union of superior people, cold and teasing, smiling and cursing in the midst of a false and petty society (. . .) Thus there were in Paris thirteen brothers who were their own masters and yet under-estimated in the world (. . .) There were no leaders nor followers; no one could arrogate power to himself; only the most vivid passion, only the most demanding circumstance, was the best. There were thirteen unknown kings, but real kings, and, more than kings, they were judges and executioners who -- organized into flanks that could traverse the entire country -- deigned to be something else, because they could be everything.

https://non.copyriot.com/specters-of-blanquism-interview-with-the-invisible-committee/

While at Mont-Saint-Michel, Blanqui and the other prisoners formed close bonds of solidarity. It was very clear to Blanqui and his comrades, that if they didn’t stand together, then they would remain at the mercy of the guards. These bonds were so strong that when Blanqui was offered a royal pardon by King Louis-Philippe, that he refused. Blanqui said that he preferred the solidarity of his comrades to an odious royal pardon.

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However, Blanqui’s resort to conspiracy was forced on him by circumstances. It’s true that Blanqui did not organize mass or democratic proletarian parties like those of the later French Marxists. The simple reason is that the working class was still in embryo in France and those type of organizations were only forming at the end of his life. He grew up during the First Empire and the Restoration when open republican and revolutionary agitation was not possible. Anyone who organized openly for political change would either end up in jail or be killed. In fact, Blanqui was politicized in 1822 at the age of 17 after watching the public execution of four republican soldiers. The only form of organization open to Blanqui’s generation were underground conspiracies such as the Carbonari (the first group he joined). Naturally, Blanqui turned to the only means of agitation available to him and perfected it throughout his life. Blanqui did engage in open agitation whenever possible, such as the early days of the July Monarchy, but in general that was only for brief periods since it invited arrest.

If Blanqui wanted to be a political activist, he had to operate underground if only to ensure organizational survival. Blanqui did not establish links with the people because doing so could have fatally compromised the movement by allowing the police to identify and round up revolutionaries. In Blanqui’s mind, it was better for revolutionaries to stay hidden until the day came to strike.

It is important to remember that Blanqui was 43 years old the first time he experienced a republic. That was in 1848 during the Second Republic. He did organize a political party with open meetings, a newspaper, demonstrations, running candidates, etc. However, he never forgot that even a republican state existed to protect the interests of the ruling class. Blanqui did not forget that even a republic, unless it was controlled by the workers, served only the bourgeoisie and all freedoms gained remained under threat. In 1848, he warned the people of the threat of counterrevolution. He turned out to be right about that considering that the workers of Paris were massacred during the infamous June Days, followed by the rise of Louis-Napoleon and the Second Empire.

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There is a common reading of Blanqui encouraged by the radical critic Walter Benjamin that he was opposed to ideas of progress and adopted a metaphysical outlook with affinities to Nietzsche. The evidence of this comes from his 1872 work, Eternity by the Stars. In this work, Blanqui advances a multiverse theory and rejects progress. Benjamin says that Eternity by the Stars is Blanqui’s surrender to bourgeois society. If we were to accept Benjamin’s interpretation of Blanqui than he should be cast among the romantics.

A number of objections can be made to Benjamin. One: Blanqui’s rejection of progress is open to dispute. Blanqui’s work hastened to hold the door open for hope and action, despite everything. As he says: “For tomorrow, the events and the people will follow their course. For now on, only the unknown is before us. Like the earth’s past, its future will change direction a million times…the future shall come to an end only when the globe dies. Until then, every second will bring its new bifurcation, the road taken and the road that could have been taken.” In other words, our own choices mean progress and action are still possible for the future. While the objective conditions are overwhelmingly stacked against revolutionaries, this does not mean that there is no space to be created for action. Rather, the revolutionary effort, the will to fight and to win against insurmountable odds can unveil the roads to communism. These roads are not given to anyone in advance, but are revealed in the course of struggle. That is something comforting for Blanqui, who wrote this work in the darkest days of repression after the defeat of the Paris Commune.

Secondly, there is no connection between Nietzsche and Blanqui. There is no evidence that Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return was influenced by Blanqui’s work. In fact, Nietzsche was an aristocratic rebel who detested democracy and socialism. On the other hand, Blanqui’s last public speech was in defense of the red flag and the socialist revolution it represented.

Thirdly, Blanqui did not surrender. He wrote Eternity by the Stars in 1872. Nearly a decade of political activity remained to Blanqui and he kept fighting to his last breath.

https://non.copyriot.com/the-first-words-of-common-sense-a-closer-look-at-blanquism/