On authority is used to justify the fact that many communist movements of the past turned into brutal dictatorships and that “it’s fine actually that mao starved half of China because you can’t have a revolution without being authoritarian”.
The actual paper is short and kind of stupid. What Engels was arguing in that short essay with a ridiculously outsized influence was that he was technically correct (the best kind) that anarchists are silly because any type of government someone could propose inevitably involves one person imposing their will on another like your quote says.
Really what Engels (who was a prominent communist thinker) was doing was fucking up any attempts at communist organization because now 1/3 of communists think that brutal authoritarianism is based and necessary for a revolution.
This is the kind of analysis you get when you have no understanding how organizations work. Mao was not some lone actor who miraculously acquired supreme power, and then starved “half of China” for shits and giggles apparently.
Anyone familiar with the way that Mao operated knows that he made frequent use of the mass line and mass mobilisation. He also made use of the collective leadership of the party, and was often frustrated by their lack of cooperation with him (at one point even threatening to launch a revolution against the party). Even anti-communists who have at least studied China in detail know that the lone dictator nonsense is well, nonsense. It is just great man theory of history. A society is made of many moving parts.
As to the failures of the glf, they were entirely technical. The rush to industrialise in a decentralised manner left agricultural production vulnerable to poor weather conditions. This was compounded with the fact that much of the country at the time had poor transportation and communications, and ruled by corrupt cardie, leading to a disastrous lack of effective coordination across the nation. It is only with higher level organization today that countries can mount effective disaster responses. The glf proves the opposite of your point.
Engels conflates authority with basically everything: necessity, organization, processes, violence, self-defense, etc.
He literally just cites abridged arguments from “The problems with on authority”
Read "A Marxist Response to “The problems with on authority” ": https://hexbear.net/post/2141265
Also yeah, I watched it so everyone else doesn’t have to waste time
Ok, I’ve read it and I’m not impressed. The post on hexbear tries to act as if they were seriously considering the anarchist point of view, they are constantly being disingenuous.
The biggest point of critique againstEngels is that he is effectively strawmanning anti-authoritarians, by using a definition of authority that differs from the anarchist definition in a fundamental way. While the hexbear author acknowledges that fact in the beginning and seems to take the (IMHO flawed) definition of the anarchist’s critique at face value, he repeats the same mistake that Engels did and takes Engels’ definition as the only logical one.
An anticommunist breadtuber (but I repeat myself) debunks Engels 😂 Anarchism, unlike Marxism-Leninism, has yet to succeed in the real world for more than a few months. We will welcome anarchists’ lectures once they’ve proven their theory in praxis.
Anything else than ad-hominem attacks and wishful thinking? Like actually engaging with the actual critique, tankie?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This video thoroughly debunks the essay
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