- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse
- main
- cross-posted to:
- chapotraphouse
- main
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.
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how much of the anarchist/intermediate statist split do you think is pathology related to our experience of being born necessarily subordinate to a social authority?
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.
I think Engels make reasonable points about not ALL authority or authoritarianism being a bad thing. However, there needs to be a discussion on the dangers of unchecked authoritarianism. So what are the options that the engineers have if the head engineer chooses to leave the cotton mills rusting and catching on fire every single shift? What are the workers to do in a world where there was a "Social revolution" but the authorities view strikes as against the "common interests of society". Whose will subordinates whose?
Think of the Captain example. The Exxon Valdez was run by a drunkard. The third mate ended up being in charge of directing the ship. The authority was negligent in both the corporation and within the ship themselves. But could the ship have mutinied? Would this mutiny be allowed in a socialist country, or would they be called outside agitators or traitors?
Engels indicates that the revolution would need to be maintained through terror on the reactionaries. But then who decides who the reactionaries are? That's why in the process of abolishing the political state. There needs to be a total cultural shift. An overhaul of political philosophy, cultural beliefs, open critique has to be allowed, and action has to be taken on an immediate basis. And that's something that humans however principled can sometimes fail at.
I definitely think that those contradictions and problems would be resolved, however imperfectly. These concepts are ever-shifting. And I would definitely prefer to live in a socialist state, however authoritarian.
Reading this now, you can see which states succeeded (Cuba) and failed (Chile) because of their hesitation to be authoritarian. Also, lol at Anarchists sounding the same in the year of our lord 2020.
I feel like your comment contains pretty much the whole discussion on unchecked authority — like a gun, it's a tool, and like a killing, it can be a tall order to prove that you (as the authority or the subordinate) were justified.