On Authority
www.marxists.org

Hi all, and welcome to another entry of the Short Attention Span Reading Group.

This statement from Engels is very short (~650 words) and argues against the idea that authority is inherently evil.

After many years of living in liberal and anarchist ideologies that prize individuality above all else, and being unable to reconcile that individualism with the situation we now face, reading On Authority is a breath of fresh air.

It makes it much easier to reason about my place in an organization. What happens when I submit to a capitalist boss's authority? I begrudgingly accept the threat of homelessness and starvation that's held over all our heads.

What would happen if I were to submit to an authority that, in capitalist terms, maximizes positive externalities? That's worth dreaming about.

All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.

But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed.

  • vertexarray [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I would estimate a shitload, at least when it comes to young anglosphere leftists. It's easy to misdiagnose societal problems out of inexperience and idealism.

    I think there's promise in the future, though. The current generation of anglosphere radicals — myself included — are growing up as political orphans, and have a lot of mistakes to make before we figure out the bulk of what works and what doesn't. With any luck we'll get far enough by the time the contradictions in the imperial core become untenable.

    We also have a long history to learn from. Simple stuff like not crippling your movement with mass purges and rationally deploying vital tools like hierarchical organisation I think goes a long way towards kickstarting a more coherent leftism.