What of it? The centrality of oppression is a magical belief. Authority isn’t radiated by the elite, but handed over by us, more often than not, entirely consciously.
Engel's 'On Authority'
Jabberman wrote:
the response the FAQ gives is that revolution is an act of liberation which is true of course, but a liberatory act can also be an oppressive act depending on your perspective.
I think that the FAQs argument is that if someone is hitting you over the head with a club, it is hardly "authoritarian" to stop them. Yes, this is an "oppressive" act -- but only from the viewpoint of the person with the club. Rational people, of course, see it as ending oppression and authority...
Anarcho wrote:
Jabberman wrote:
the response the FAQ gives is that revolution is an act of liberation which is true of course, but a liberatory act can also be an oppressive act depending on your perspective.I think that the FAQs argument is that if someone is hitting you over the head with a club, it is hardly "authoritarian" to stop them. Yes, this is an "oppressive" act -- but only from the viewpoint of the person with the club. Rational people, of course, see it as ending oppression and authority...
so then whats your threshold for when oppresion becomes unjustified?
Carousel wrote:
They do no such thing, they look for advantage in the situation regardless of such notions. Indeed, being "against" this-or-that is a bio-chemically induced illusion.
I disagree with both these points.
eta i just mean that you go too far, and i don't see how you can eliminate 'belief'.
Actually Engels has a bit of a point, not a big point; more of a pin than a bayonet. You ever looked after kids and intervened to stop one kid from bullying another? You can easily end up being the bully yourself. Have you ever been on a blockade picket and had a scab berate you for interfering with their liberty? Or maybe not even a scab, maybe someone just trying to go about their business. Life is full of these merry contradictions and tensions between competing goods and so forth.
No-one will be susprised that fighting a war puts pressure on libertarian principles and insofar as carrying through a revolution may be similar to a war in some respects we can expect similar pressures. Engels is talking nonsense to the extent that he implies that accepting pressure on a principle, or even compromising it in an extreme situation, is the same as abondoning it. The best refutation of Engels is the use Lenin made of this article; the practice of Leninism showed what happens when one uses the necessity of occasional compromise with libertarian principle to become a charter for abandoning it.
So Engels' point can be used maybe as a pin to prick the balloon of excessive Anarchist bombast, the hot-air filled self-righteous absolutist idealism to which Anarchists sometimes fall prey....but thats about as far as it goes.
Every section of this essay has been effectively refuted in the FAQ except for this one:
"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;"
the response the FAQ gives is that revolution is an act of liberation which is true of course, but a liberatory act can also be an oppressive act depending on your perspective.