Comment by suggestion
4 years ago
"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."
- Engels, On Authority 1872
Thanks for this incredibly insightful and completely on-topic quote. From this i can clearly see that the very dream of a more equitable and less late-stage-capitalist future is inevitably doomed, and all forms of communism must be rejected. While the landed gentry obviously have our best interests at heart, and it surely is best to try and pry our futures from their grips by words alone! No drastic action, no revolutions.
As Engels said, any form of revolution is a oxymoron and thus always fails!
All I read from the quote is "all revolutions are authoritarian and people saying otherwise are either useful idiots or active supporters of our enemies." Nothing about them always failing. Nothing about communism being bad or capitalism being good. Just a candid statement, unsavory to some, including yourself it would seem.
It’s unsavory to me insofar that it completely ignores the comment being replied to which doesn’t mention revolutions at all, doesn’t refute or even acknowledge any of the points, and the lack of anything other than the quote comes across as very smarmy with a touch of “destroying X with facts and logic”/“lol gottem!”.
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