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I can excuse authoritarianism, but I draw the line at sexism in my advertising!
education is the first step towards becoming a better person https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
I'm probably just too smooth brained to understand, but is the argument that without authoritarianism we can't push back against capitalistic exploitation?
Is it authoritarian to redistribute land and goods equitably?
I don't think so? Maybe I'm off-base, but I was literally just trying (and failing) to understand the article yogthos had sent me.
What part of that short article are you struggling with in particular?
I just threw it into chatgpt, I think I understand now. It's basically saying that some level of authority is necessary for society to function (which I wouldn't have argued against otherwise).
Regardless, I admit my original comment was pretty ignorant as I assumed a majority of them were from Stalinist Russia and the dates are clearly after that. I can take my original comment down or just leave it up for posterity sake.
I think people jump to "Read On Authority" to quickly, a behavior that amounts to scripture-quoting, but
I just threw it into chatgpt, I think I understand now. It's basically saying that some level of authority is necessary for society to function (which I wouldn't have argued against otherwise).
chatgpt sucks and has demonstrated that again here. On Authority essentially argues that a socialist revolution 1: is itself a monumental exercise of authority and 2: requires authority to be protected when it exists in a world fundamentally hostile to it. There are some ancillary arguments about command structures, but overall it is written in opposition to anarchist dogmatism about "Authority" being an evil thing that must be discarded.
I'll let someone else unpack the "Stalinist Russia" part
Did you know that Stalin tried to resign on multiple occasions but was pressured to continue serving his office?
I have plenty of critiques of the USSR but people that assume it was some sort of dictatorship of Stalin and not a dictatorship of the proletariat are gravely miseducated.
It's not your fault though we in the west are born into an ocean of anticommunist propaganda.
The essential concept is that overthrowing the current order is the most authoritarian thing you can do. It is imposing your ideas on the overall system and it will require coercion. Mutual liberation requires the imposition of a political program that runs counter to the behaviors and interests of the current ruling class. The class with the cops, the armies, the money, the trade. You will have to oppress them or they will kill your movement in its infancy. They will invade you and kill all of your friends. So you will fight them or die and you will have to institute policies against them or die. We do not have the privilege of living in a world where the material forces against us will give fairly give in to popular will or do what is right or not bomb is and our children.
I would add that "authoritarian" is a label that is applied so selectively that is it actively misleading. It is usually a means by which to spread anticommunist thought that ends up reinforcing the far more authoritarian status quo. If one does their best to excise this selective use from themselves, we then end up talking about he first point of brass tacks of what choices are offered to us when we have our own anti-capitalist nation-states. They are, unfortunately, limited given the relentless violence and maximum pressure from imperialist nations. Nuclear Armageddon was only prevented by a far more humanistic socialist bloc on several occasions. The imperialists were ready to go and pushed right up to the limit. There are many examples of this tendency, but Korea is a salient example. They bombed every single population center in the north. Genocidal. It wasn't even their country. It was just to "contain" the Korean left, which was otherwise going to win without US imposition because it was, organically, more powerful.
What is more authoritarian than a bombing campaign that destroys your entire village?
Its moreso that “anti-authoritarianism is stupid because steam doesn’t care, and the machines of the factory I own must be operated during these hours because thats when the despotic steam engines are running”
Its a really silly argument, but I’m also taking the worst bits out of the essay because that point is stupid and funny.
To be more fair, Engels is trying to critique libertarian socialists and anarchists and he is doing a bad job about it because the language used by him, and the language used by anarchists did not line up. Engels expanded authority to be broad and impossible to escape, where the anarchists and other anti-authoritarians were talking about a specific type of authority, hierarchic authority.
His argument for most of the essay is essentially “collective activity means cooperation, and in order to cooperate you must, at some point submit to the will of the others.”
That argument is stupid because it lacks any nuance on authority. The authority of a police officer, able to violently impose their will on someone with a badge and a gun is different than the authority of a group of friends coming to an agreement on where to get lunch even when one doesn’t want to get food at that restaurant, which is different to the authority of a slave-master demanding that his slaves must work the loom in a particular fashion to maximize productivity.
He did address individual hierarchy with respect to production, the more you scale it the more you will need to have a unifying will in one person or a committee. Engels even throws in the ship example, where it is dangerous to not have everyone accept the words of the Captain.
Additionally, he goes on to explain the difference between administrative functions of a worker state and the bourgeois oppressive state, and that Anarchists seek to skip straight past Socialism without building the material conditions for it.
His argument for most of the essay is essentially “collective activity means cooperation, and in order to cooperate you must, at some point submit to the will of the others.”
What he actually says is that any complex activity requires coordination, and central coordination mechanisms are necessary to accomplish that. This is the same reason why large animals evolve things like nervous systems and brains. The fact that people have trouble understanding the need for coordination is depressing beyond belief.
Appreciate you, this is great
I appreciate you for being open minded and the people that expanded on the questions I asked you. Self criticism is one of the most important qualities of a communist.
Thanks 🙏
What's authoritarianism? I've never heard the word in any work of theory