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Thursday, April 30, 2015

Engels on Authoritarianism and Revolution

In 1872, Friedrich Engels waged a campaign against the anarchist thought and followers of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), and later he published an essay called “On Authority” (1874) in the Italian paper Almanacco Republicano (Hunt 2009: 259). The essay has a remarkable admission at the end, as follows:
“A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.

On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of individuals. ….

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let us see.

Let us take by way if example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

Let us take another example — the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.
We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? 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. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.”
Friedrich Engels, “On Authority,” 1874
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
If nothing else, Engels was brutally frank in the words highlighted in yellow. You couldn’t have a clearer statement of how Engels envisaged the Communist revolution: authoritarianism, violence, and terror. This is like a playbook for 20th century communist regimes, and – is it really any surprise? – Lenin was a great admirer of his essay of Engels (Hunt 2009: 259).

It is quite outrageous to hear modern apologists for Marx and Engels trying to desperately explain away the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” as not signifying an authoritarian regime. Also disgusting is the way that apologists say that Marx and Engels would never have approved of the violence and crimes of, say, the Soviet Union. How the hell would they know? Did they ever read this passage by Engels? And it is amply clear from reading any go0d biography of Marx’s life that he – until the end of his life – was an advocate of violent revolution, and even endorsed the violence of the Russian socialist revolutionaries in his last years, even when they assassinated the Tsar (Sperber 2014: 537).

In short, Marxism was an authoritarian ideology and attempts to deny this are absurd and shameful.

In my view, the alternative progressive liberal political tradition of the late 19th century, which maintained a support for all the best aspects of classical liberalism while discarding its commitment to economic laissez faire, is the true ideological ancestor of modern social democracy. Of course, one could add to this non-Marxist trade union movements, the British Fabian Society (which rejected revolutionary socialism), and, finally, in economic thought the ideas of John Maynard Keynes as developed in the modern school of Post Keynesian economics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Engels, Friedrich. “On Authority,” 1874
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

Hunt, Tristram. 2009.The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. Allen Lane, London.

Sperber, Jonathan. 2014. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York.

12 comments:

  1. This is crossposted in significant part from the last of LK's ever-expanding mass of rapid-fire sophistry:

    To modern sensibilities "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a striking phrase, but bear in mind that by the same analysis, we were then and still are now living under a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." It's a question of which class is dominant, not rank authoritarianism.

    Some illustrations:

    Wikipedia entry!

    "Both Marx and Engels argued that the short-lived Paris Commune, which ran the French capital for over two months before being repressed, was an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

    "According to Marxist theory, the existence of any government implies the dictatorship of a social class over another. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is thus used as an antonym of the dictatorship of the proletariat.[4]
    "

    Three back-to-back entries in the marxists.org glossary: Dictatorship, Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie, Dictatorship of the Proletariat!

    "It was only gradually, during the 1880s, that ‘dictatorship’ came to be routinely used to mean a form of government in contrast to ‘democracy’ and by the 1890s was generally used in that way. Prior to that time, throughout the life-time of Karl Marx for example, it was never associated with any particular form of government, everyone understanding that popular suffrage was as much an instrument of dictatorship as martial law."

    Here's an essay on the subject!

    "The first question is: when it appeared in print in the spring of 1850, what did the phrase mean to Marx and to his contemporaneous readers?

    "The key fact, which was going to bedevil the history of the term, is this: in the middle of the nineteenth century the old word ‘dictatorship’ still meant what it had meant for centuries, and in this meaning it was not a synonym for despotism, tyranny, absolutism, or autocracy, and above all it was not counterposed to democracy."


    Bonus: The word "totalitarian" did not even exist yet, only being coined in the early 20th century.

    As for Engels's passage, he's absolutely correct. The French and American revolutions, for instance, were absolutely authoritarian affairs. But revolutions are also transitory. Once they give way to a stable social order, society can become a looser affair. See, for example, when the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie replaced the dictatorship of the aristocracy, as above.

    None of this is controversial.

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    Replies
    1. For those unconvinced by lazy citations of marxists.org and the ramblings of Marxist True Believers, let Engels speak for himself:

      "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?"

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    2. Continue to hurl your abuse if you must; it's balm to my weary soul to see you so achingly bereft of substance. You call ten seconds on google lazy, so what does it say about you that you couldn't even muster that much effort? And I am indeed a True Believer in a little thing called "intellectual honesty," in this case represented by performing even bare-bones contextual due diligence. You should give it a try some time.

      As I said before: Talking about revolution is very different from talking about a stable social order. But you should totally paste that passage a third time, just to make sure. Keep at it; if you believe hard enough, maybe one day it'll finally make the point you want it to.

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    3. Since we're all copying and pasting here:

      Draper was wrong.

      "Dictator"

      Online etymology dictionary:

      "late 14c., from Latin dictator, agent noun from dictare (see dictate (v.)). Transferred sense of "one who has absolute power or authority" *in any sphere is from c. 1600.* In Latin use, a dictator was a judge in the Roman republic temporarily invested with absolute power."

      http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dictator&allowed_in_frame=0

      Oxford English Dictionary:

      example from 1874, from J. Morley's 'On Compromise': "Our people..have long ago superseded the barbarous device of dictator and Cæsar by the great art of self-government."

      To quote 'The Princess Bride' on your and Draper's defense: "You keep using that word...I don't think it means what you think it means."

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    4. And re: "Talking about revolution is very different from talking about a stable social order."

      If Engels was arguing that what was required for his ideal society was a revolution in which democratic rule was suspended for a transitory period, and then later somehow willingly re-instated by those who had been handed the reins of absolute power, it is a pretty big indictment of this portion of his philosophy.

      History has almost no instances of a person or group of people relinquishing absolute power over a society once they have acquired it. The old adage "absolute power corrupts absolutely" is still popular because it has stood the test of time since it was first coined, and conforms to the history that preceded its invention.

      Only another revolution can wrest the reins of power from absolutist rulers and forms of government. Engels was unwittingly asking for an unending series of revolutions. We've seen how poorly that works out throughout history.

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    5. To quote 'The Princess Bride'...

      Von Minsky, both of those quotes actually support the arguments you claim they rebut; one references the emergency powers of the Roman republic (also mentioned in Draper), and the other illustrates the gradual shift in colloquial usage at the end of the 19th century referenced in both Draper and the glossary entry I quoted. Please read more carefully!

      History has almost no instances of a person or group of people relinquishing absolute power over a society once they have acquired it.

      Those are some excellent vague appeals to "history" ("you keep using that word..."). However, it appears you're arguing that revolutions as a rule do not resolve or otherwise end. You may want to revisit that, perhaps walk it back a tad.

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    6. "It was only gradually, during the 1880s, that ‘dictatorship’ came to be routinely used to mean a form of government in contrast to ‘democracy’ and by the 1890s was generally used in that way. "

      According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn.; s.v. "dictator," sense 1b), the word "dictator" had the regular sense of "An absolute ruler of a state, esp. one whose rule displaces that of a democratic government" from at least the 17th century.

      Some examples:

      (1) used by Robert Southey of Robespierre

      (2) 1824 used in the Times of the Bolivar as dictator of Peru

      (3) used in Birmingham Daily Post 1863 of General Langiewicz "Dictator of Poland."

      Who are you going to believe? The Oxford English Dictionary (backed up with hard evidence) or some Marxist hacks?

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    7. Who are you going to believe? The Oxford English Dictionary (backed up with hard evidence) or some Marxist hacks?

      First off, Draper references literally dozens of sources, just scroll on down. Secondly, you can believe both because, as I just told Minsky, the sources in question don't disagree! There was never a question that "dictator" (though really we ought to be discussing its -ship) was something powerful; the claim is rather that it didn't become something with an inherently abusive or evil connotation until later.

      To paraphrase another well-known film: discerning scholars such as yourselves "should try reading books instead of burning them."

      Of course, even if the false were suddenly true and people of the 1870's would immediately call to mind Adolf Hitler or Mobutu Sese Seko, it does not change the insuperable fact that the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" corresponds to the relationship of economic class to politics, rather than describing a particular political order. The very fact that life under Hitler, Seko, Hollande or Obama all equally fall under the banner of "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" makes your determined misreading unavoidably blatant.

      So throw around the word "hack" with caution; you might shatter one of the walls of that glass house you've been polishing.

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    8. "the claim is rather that it didn't become something with an inherently abusive or evil connotation until later."

      Wrong again. According to the Oxford English Dictionary in sense 1b "dictator" had a negative or abusive connotation from the 17th century.

      Furthermore, Engels doesn't even use the word dictator in the passage above, but says:

      "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?""

      First you tried to argue that the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" was not meant to be an authoritarian regime but that nonsense is exploded by the text of Engels right before your eyes.

      Now you're trying to shift the argument to the meaning of "dictator" or " dictatorship", but simple consultation of Oxford English Dictionary shows you are wrong there too.

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    9. Wrong again. According to the Oxford English Dictionary in sense 1b "dictator" had a negative or abusive connotation from the 17th century.

      Provide the passage in question. The one you shared did not include such a claim.

      First you tried to argue that the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" was not meant to be an authoritarian regime but that nonsense is exploded by the text of Engels right before your eyes.

      I've already pointed out the distinction between a stable social order and the process of fighting and defending a revolution (three comments back), and the only way you can miss that Engels was referring to the latter is if you are deliberately suspending your literacy.

      Now you're trying to shift the argument to the meaning of "dictator" or " dictatorship", but simple consultation of Oxford English Dictionary shows you are wrong there too.

      "Look at this Marxist nerd, trying to actually determine what words refer to before evaluating them!"

      Please take a moment to engage your "reading" circuits, and then apply them to my last comment, where I responded specifically to your invocation of Oxford. The result may surprise you!

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  2. It was the development of capitalism and the rise of the capitalist classes that led to the rise of Parliaments and Congresses. The Parliaments and Congresses were developed as a way to check kings, monarchs, and other autocrats who were usually supported by the people. The Parliaments and Congresses were the ones who designed the Constitutions.

    This brings me to the problem of social democracy, which is incentive structures. The best way to achieve social democracy, as ironic as it may seem, is with monarchy. A mass populace without a leader is like a body without a head--completely useless. Otherwise, you get a system whereby it's impossible to hold people accountable. Social democracy allows people sitting on the sidelines to talk about how a society should be, claim moral superiority, and if something goes wrong, they don't suffer any downside. There's no way to hold people accountable. Combine that with the will of the people and social democracy devolves into monarchy. We've seen this before in history and we'll see it again. Just give it time.

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  3. Marxism advocates authoritarianism in the sense that it advocates a revolutionary (democratic) 'dictatorship of the proletariat' to overthrow the preceding 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie'. After the revolution, the state is supposed to set the stage for its own demise, eventually resulting in the stateless communist utopia. (note that the term 'communism' only refers to this ultimate stateless society, whereas the previous state society is 'socialism'). However that whole concept is deeply problematic, which is why the anarchist communists (and other types of anarchists) always argued that you had to go directly to anarchist communism, otherwise you would simply be replacing one form of of hierarchal authoritarian control with another.

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