[lbo-talk] Re: A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side

[B.]

Yoshie Furuhashi quoted a famously dumb passage of
Engels:
> "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?" --
> Frederick Engels, "On Authority," 1872

Okay, Yoshie, so if someone points a gun at me, and I
defend myself by knocking it out of his hand, am I
being "authoritarian"? No. I am remedying the problem
of his authoritarianism (by using force in this case).

Statist capitalism is authoritarian. It is not
authoritarian to oppose it, or to have a revolution to
eliminate it. That is remedying authoritarianism. That
is not being authoritarian.

Now, some revolutions may indeed be authoritarian; the
kind I want isn't. Not all force is authoritarian; it
can be self-defense against violence, which capitalism
is. Engels was wrong above. 

Semantically yours,

-B.