war and the state (was milton, etc.)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 8:09 PM -0700 8/21/02, Brian O. Sheppard x349393 wrote:
>  > "But the anti-authoritarians demand that the authoritarian 
>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;
>
>Engels' apology for authority is well known and there have been countless
>essays about his erroneous use of the term here. It's not authoritarian to
>remedy what is unjustly authoritarian. The Right likes to go
>on about the "authoritarianism" of workers or unions or community activists
>who attempt to make corporations more democratically accountable, i.e. to
>make them less autocratic and authoritarian. Doing this can only be called
>"authoritarian" by someone who has a unique definition of the term. If the
>working class were to go on the offensive to root out wage slavery, the State,
>capitalism, etc. , they would not br acting "authoritarian." They 
>would be remedying
>the problems of authoritarianism.
>
>The imagery of rifles, bayonet, and cannon - things that we
>cannot predict would actually ever be used in a revolutionary situation -
>is unwarranted. This is all like saying that if someone attacks you and you
>manage to stab him in sef-defense, you are "authoritarian."
>
>In short, it's not authoritarian to remedy the problem of unjustified
>authority. That is exactly the opposite of authoritarianism.

It seems you are not so much opposing what Engels says as quibbling 
with his use of the word "authoritarian," since you don't oppose the 
use of force in self-defense or to "root out wage slavery."
-- 
Yoshie

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