Eric Blanc

Revolutionary social democracy: Working-class politics across the Russian empire
Revolutionary social democracy: Working-class politics across the Russian empire — A review
Peter Hudis reviews Eric Blanc’s “Revolutionary Social Democracy” and its key insights for socialists today.
What are the ‘right lessons’ for socialists? A reply to Eric Blanc
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By Mike Taber

November 14, 2021 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist Essays and Commentary via World-Outlook — Eric Blanc is a serious and dedicated socialist historian and activist who doesn’t hesitate to jump into the fray and take positions he knows are controversial. Such an attitude is commendable, even if I disagree with his conclusions. His latest article, “Socialists Should Take the Right Lessons from the Russian Revolution” — published in Jacobin and reprinted on John Riddell’s website — is no exception and merits careful examination.

In his article Blanc aims to set the record straight on V. I. Lenin and the Russian Revolution, and to demolish the “myth of Bolshevik exceptionalism,” which he asserts is “wrong for our own time.” Instead, he seeks to establish the “right lessons” socialists should take from the history of the fight for “socialist transformation.”

Socialists should take the right lessons from the Russian Revolution
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Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary party revisited
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By Eric Blanc March 10, 2018 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from John Riddell's Marxist essays and commentary  — This article re-examines Rosa Luxemburg’s approach to the party question by analysing the overlooked experience of her political intervention and organisation in Poland. In particular, I challenge the myth that Rosa Luxemburg advocated a ‘party of the whole class’, ‘spontaneism’ or consistent party democracy. The perspectives and practices of her party – the  Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) – demonstrate that there were no steady strategic differences between Luxemburg and V.I. Lenin on the role of a revolutionary party. In practice, the most consequential divergence between their parties was that the Bolsheviks, unlike the SDKPiL, became more effective in mass workers’ struggles during and following the 1905 revolution.
Rosa Luxemburg’s bloc with the SPD bureaucracy
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October 1917 and its relevance: A discussion with China Miéville
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Finland’s forgotten revolution
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Crowds during the general strike in Helsinki, Finland, 1905. By Eric Blanc June 4, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Jacobin with the author's permission — In the past century, histories of the 1917 revolution have usually focused on Petrograd and Russian socialists. But the Russian empire was predominantly made up of non-Russians — and the upheavals in the imperial periphery were often just as explosive as in the center. Tsarism’s overthrow in February 1917 unleashed a revolutionary wave that immediately engulfed all of Russia. Perhaps the most exceptional of these insurgencies was the Finnish Revolution, which one scholar has called “Europe’s most clear-cut class war in the twentieth century.”
A revolutionary line of march: ‘Old Bolshevism’ in early 1917 re-examined
 
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Before Lenin: Bolshevik theory and practice in February 1917 revisited
 
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Petrograd protesters on 23 February
 

By Eric Blanc

March 1, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Historical Materialism — Assessing Bolshevik policy before Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 has long been one of the most heated historiographic controversies in the socialist movement.