Blanquism refers to a conception of revolution generally attributed to Louis Auguste Blanqui which holds that socialist revolution should be carried out by a relatively small group of highly organised and secretive conspirators. Having seized power, the revolutionaries would then use the power of the state to introduce socialism. It is considered a particular sort of "putschism"—that is, the view that political revolution should take the form of a putsch or coup d'état. Blanquism is distinguished from other socialist currents in various ways: on the one hand, contrary to Marx, Blanqui did not believe in the predominant role of the working class, nor did he believe in popular movements—instead he believed that revolution should be carried out by a small group of professional, dedicated revolutionaries, who would establish a temporary dictatorship by force. This dictatorship would permit the implementation of the basis of a new order, after which power would then be handed to the people. In another respect, Blanqui was more concerned with the revolution itself rather than the future society that would result from it—if his thought was based on precise socialist principles, it rarely goes so far as to imagine a purely socialist society. For Blanquists, the overturning of the bourgeoissocial order and the revolution are ends sufficient in themselves, at least for their immediate purposes.
The term "Blanquism" has often been used polemically to accuse some revolutionaries of failing to sufficiently meld their praxis with the massworking class. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were keen to distinguish their conception of revolution from Blanquism. As Engels put it in a short fragment, The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune:
and Eduard Bernstein have criticised Vladimir Lenin that his conception of revolution was elitist and essentially Blanquist. For instance, as part of a longer section on Blanquism in her "Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy", Luxemburg writes: It is worth noting that by "social democracy" Luxemburg has in mind the original use of the term derived from Marx and synonymous with "socialism;" she conceived of the social democratic party as a mass based organisation of working class struggle. However, Lenin dismissed as meaningless rhetoric the conflation of Blanquism with Bolshevism: Lenin himself denied any accusations of Blanquism in The State and Revolution and accused Bernstein of "opportunism".