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(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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If you do that you definitely aren't, authoritarianism and far-left are mutually exclusive.
Council communists and Anarchists generally qualify for far-left status. (Or, differently put, council communism is methadone therapy for Marxists who don't yet dare make the jump to syndicalism).
I've never seen that diagram before. I like it.
It's even worse than horseshoe. Stop trying to assign point values to tyranny.
I award you one tyranny point for telling people what to do.
That's it, you're going to the reeducation camp.
I just need to trade in some of my Good Boy Points, good thing I've been saving up.
The first use of authoritarian is in 1852, in the writings of AJ Davis apparently. Here's the quote:
Authoritarian was also increasing in usage well before the cold war, beginning around 1910 or so. An example from Nationalism and Culture by Rudolf Rocker, written in 1933:
That's a thoroughly modern use of the word authoritarian, written almost 15 years before the start of the cold war. Authoritarian is used to describe those who support hierarchial systems of government. That's the short and sweet of it, perhaps not a perfect dictionary definition but it illustrates the distinctive bit. Auth-left ideologies get equivocated with fascism because there's an undeniable ideological throughline between the two, no matter how much they hate each other.
Trotsky wrote that. It may not be 1:1 but the similarities between his ideas and those.of fascists are pretty obvious.
All of this, written before the cold war. Tell me again how authoritarian is a made up word that serves only to slander "communists"?
Is it possible to have organisation without authority?
On Authority - F. Engels, 1872
On Authority is one of my absolute favourites because it's so ludicrously bourgeois. "Oh, you Anarchists", quoth Engels, "All you amount to is saying that a stone falls down when let go, and that having to hold it up so that it doesn't fall down, to have to bow to that authority, is oppressive".
Maybe, Friedrich, your workers don't mind dealing with the necessities and physical processes of yarn and cloth manufacture, what they mind is not being able to fire your ass for saying excessively over-reductive shit like that.
Are you really saying "Engels was bourgeois, therefore the argument he's making is bourgeois"? lol
Tell me how you haven't read it even more. Because he's actually concluding:
Read the paragraphs directly before: Engels refers to "arguments as these", so we can safely assume that the example he gives there is representative. What's his example? Safety in railway operations.
That, indeed, is not a job for a delegate, a person chosen by council to represent the council in a bigger council, a political position which comes with no authority, but one of a safety commissioner, a person who was entrusted with, granted authority, by a council to enact necessary safety procedures for the common good. The railway safety commissioner would be choosen by the railway workers. Someone they trust to be a stickler to details and procedure.
Both, btw, are recallable on the spot should they abuse their positions, or turn out to not be suitable for other reasons.
This is not a mere "changing of names", the tasks are completely different in character and the levels of authority could not be any more different. What Engels seems to be incapable of conceiving is that an e.g. city council doesn't have authority over a neighbourhood council. That the delegates the neighbourhood councils choose come together in a city council and then precisely not dictate to the neighbourhood councils what they're supposed to do. That's your brain on hierarchy.
So, yes, Engels concludes that he's right. And thereby proves that he either a) didn't understand what the anti-auths were telling him or b) didn't care, as authoritarians are prone to do when challenged on the necessity of there being rulers.
As to "labour cannot be organised without hierarchy" in general: It's long been proven false. There's a gazillion of examples in which it has done. There are, right now, armies out there operating without hierarchy that are fighting both Cartels and ISIS, very successfully so. If armies can be organised like that, surely it does work for ice cream factories. Stick to materialism, please, your idealist claim doesn't become true by repeating it.
?
So how can you organize anything if noone tells anyone what to do? People just suddenly know? How is that supposed to work? Who decides the level of authority? Another authority?
Literally changing the name of "authority" to "granted authority". You only changed the name of things. Engels is making the argument on the materiality of authority. That even if the authority is granted, it's an authority. He is referring to whatever makes the organization happen as authority (even when granted).
And says that without this (authority) organization is impossible. Which makes sense.
pls expand
You talk to other people and agree on a plan of action? Have you ever, in your life, interacted with people?
One example doesn't even grant any authority: A delegate has no authority.
If you OTOH now try to pull semantics and say "but by being convinced by other people of a joint plan of action, they have authority over you", or "A delegate has the authority to do as they're told by their council" then you're doing the "holding up a stone thing": You make authority such a broad term that not just organisation, but physics itself is impossible without it. Or, in different words: It's playing dumb. You hear what Anarchists are saying, including their definitions of authority, of distinguishing power-to against power-over, and say "but the stone has authority over you that's silly"!
Just now walking in now, and, oh, this is still going on? Christ these memes are a PITA.
Wasn't sure if that was a legitimate question or just another example.of the usage of authoritarian. But if it was a question, I'll leave this video. It's an anarchist critique of on authority. Short answer, yes. It is possible to have organization without an authoritarian structure
This is so dumb i don't want to continue and its so long wtf Pure ideology, that video was such a waste of time
The entire point of the video is Engles misunderstood what constitutes "authority" in a libertarian framework. He created an overly broad conception of authority and proceeded to (poorly) attack that. If you're going to critique an ideology you should at the very least have an understanding of what the core concept your criticizing means. Engles made some shit up, put that in the mouths of anarchists and acted like a little piss baby about it. How on earth did you get 15 minutes into the video and not pick up on that very obvious point?
Pure ideology? You're hilarious. Like y'all haven't been sucking at the teat of Marx well past the point of his half baked ideas being useful. It never occured to you geniuses that maybe there was a bit more at play than capitalism and anachronistic conceptions of class warfare? Marx's ideas of power and complex systems are overly simplistic at best, and Engles is a bourgeois pig that somehow deluded your big "scientific socialist" brains into thinking he was one of the good ones. But go ahead and tell me how childish authoritarian conceptions of authority are righ and how I'm a big dumb guy for thinking otherwise
He's not misunderstanding what constitutes authority. He is giving a broad definition and proves the existence of authority after abolition of capitalism by referring to the organization of labour.
Because the "obvious points" are made with strawmen (see comments above)
What no theory does to a mf
in a libertarian framework.
Can you read?
He's proving the existence of authority (with a definition thats wide/encompasses the libertarian framework).
Are you dense?
He's not using that definition anywhere in his article.
If you know think about going for the "but Engel's definition is broader, therefore, his argument is still valid" boy oh boy I suggest you study logic. That's not how widening and narrowing works.
Say, cooks. They say: "These things are fruits, and with them we can make fruit salads". Botanists say "These things are fruit, our category is wider, it includes tomatoes, therefore, you can make fruit salad with tomatoes".
Ok I can see where the problem is. You don't know how narrowing and widening works.
Fruit in fruit salads describes the salad. It's the qualifier. The proper application would be:
Botanist says:" These things are fruits. We have tomatoes, etc. I can make fruit salad". Cooks ways:"A fruit salad is a type of salad. I have noodles I can make noodle salad. I use a wider definition of salad which encompasses fruit salads, noodle salads and a bunch of others"
Indeed, it is a qualifier. A qualifier that the botanists widened. When they said "you can make a fruit salad with tomatoes" they used their definition of fruits, but the narrower definition of cooks for "fruit salad" (there's no botanical definition of "fruit salad", it's a purely culinary term). Thus, we have a category error.
On the narrowing side that category error is generally not present, say, you can narrow down "fruit" to "tropical fruit" or "temperate fruit" and still get perfectly valid fruit salads made from those narrower categories. Heck you can narrow it down to "banana" and get a fruit salad, even if it may be a bit bland.
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Thank you for sharing this….I really enjoyed it.
First time I read it I couldn't believe how short and easy read it is, and what a powerful argument Engels is making
Thank you for the detailed background on that. People often resort to No True Scotsman claims to disavow bad elements from the group they support, or better yet toss them to their rivals. But honestly the more an entity is pulled away from center along the authoritarian/liberal axis, the less meaningful any left/right distinction becomes.
I just wanted to clarify, I'm not an authoritarian. I'm an anarchist. And the left/right distinction still does matter very much along the authoritarian/libertarian axis. I don't think much of auth-left ideologies but I hold them in much better regard than fascists. There are similarities, but they are no where near the same. And liberalism is a center right authoritarian ideology
While I would say that graph is more correct than the two-dimensional ones, many of us are fed in the west. (As a social libertarian/anarcho communist) I make the point that I don't believe authoritarians actually qualify significantly for any form of left or right. They are all about their authority primarily and doing what they wish to do. They will resort to any rhetoric or means to achieve their goals they think will serve them. Whether it is left or right.
Case in point Hitler, who is closely associated with fascism which is considered nominally right-wing. Absolutely aped the terminology and rhetoric of early 20th century socialism. Till it didn't serve him anymore. China who is more or less The Golden child of ml activists is more state capitalist than they are State communist. Because it suits those in power.
The graph more accurately might look like a deformed Dorito. Authoritarians being fluid and centrist. Not committed to being left or right. On the right side gradually sloping down through libertarians into capitalists/liberals on the far right. Somewhere neutral between authoritarian and actual libertarian. But the more true libertarian you trend the more left you absolutely trend. That's for sure.