The Flaws of On Authority

A shorter critique

A Relatively Shorter Critique

When I wrote Read On Authority, my aim was to meticulously analyze and demolish Engels’ essay On Authority. His paper is so often hurled at anarchists by Marxists, who despite this fact seem to frequently have not read it themselves. If they had, they would find that it is full of errors, not only presenting anarchist theory incorrectly, but even getting Marxist theory itself wrong. Fully explaining these errors contained in Engels’ four pages took me a hundred pages!

A considerable amount of the length of my paper came from a need to do a line-by-line analysis of Engels’ argument, since it is frequently misinterpreted by Marxists themselves, papering over its glaring errors. On top of that, I also needed to look at what anarchists themselves said to see how accurately Engels was presenting their case. Only then were we equipped to actually analyze his argument on merit.

While I am hardly the first person to critique On Authority, I believe I have provided the most extensive analysis to date thanks to all this. But a hundred pages can be hard for anyone to go through. To make my critique a bit more accessible, I’ve decided to present my key points here in a briefer form, leaving the full essay for those who want to see where I “show my work” to back up what I will assert here.

This reply will still be longer than four pages. It is easy to be wrong briefly. For people looking for other, perhaps briefer, replies to Engels, I recommend Section H.4 of the Anarchist FAQ, Piper Tompkin’s “‘On Authority’ Revisited,” or the London Anarchist Federation’s “The Problems With On Authority.”

What is the Historical Context of On Authority?

In Read On Authority, I covered some of the basic publication history of On Authority, which I can post here:

An Italian newspaper editor named Enrico Bignami planned on beginning a yearbook called the Almanacco Repubblicano. For this, he requested an article from Engels and Marx on July 31, 1872, and October 10, 1872, respectively. Both used the opportunity to write an attack on anarchism, Marx writing his essay “Political Indifferentism” while Engels wrote “On Authority.” On November 3, 1872, Bignami wrote to Engels that he had received the articles in October. However, due to police persecution, Bignami was arrested, and the manuscript was lost. Bignami informed Engels about this on March 2, 1873, requesting another copy or an alternative essay to publish, which Engels then provided. This would become the version known today and was published for the almanac for 1874 in December 1873. It would be printed for the first time in English in The New Review, No. 4, New York, 1914.¹

While this tells us the story about how On Authority was written, and some of the inconsistent dates attributed to it (Marxists.org incorrectly sets its publication date to 1874, when it was published in December 1873), it doesn’t tell us much of why Engels wrote it. To understand that, we need to understand the history of Marx and Engels’ fight with the anarchists of the First International.

I briefly covered this in Read On Authority, and fleshed out more of the details in my other paper How Engels Failed Italy. I will cover the main points here, and more detail can be found in these sources. For additional details, especially covering the Hague Congress, I refer the reader to Wolfgang Eckhardt’s The First Socialist Schism.

Founded in 1864, the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was a massive pluralist organization made up of several different worker and socialist organizations from, as the name implies, across the world. This included Saint-Simonists, mutualists, Blanquists, Lassallists, and so on. It was meant to be, as described in its General Rules, “a central medium of communication and co-operation between workingmen's societies existing in different countries and aiming at the same end; viz., the protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes.” It provided a real, practical sense to the slogan “workers of the world, unite!”

Marx and Engels were both in the General Council of the IWA, which was, according to the general rules, meant to be appointed annually at the IWA’s congress and established to help workers throughout the rest of the year remain “consistently informed of the movements of their class in every other country,” helping workers across the world to coordinate their actions.

The modern anarchist movement was also largely born out of the IWA. Among the various organizations and tendencies that made it up was the “Alliance of Socialist Democracy” set up by the Russian socialist Mikhail Bakunin. The Alliance was especially influential in Switzerland, Spain, and Italy, and advocated for an atheistic and revolutionary collectivist approach to socialism while rejecting participation in bourgeois political institutions, such as running candidates for state offices. They focused their strategy instead on building up independent bases of worker power outside of capital and the state, like in trade unions, to help preserve their revolutionary character.

Marx’s relationship with Bakunin was complex. They had a bad initial relationship when Marx falsely published in his paper an accusation claiming that Bakunin was a secret agent of the Russian tsar. When Marx’s supposed source, Georg Sand, publicly stated this was a lie and she had no such evidence, Marx was forced to make a retraction.²

Despite this initial setback, they seemed to have a good working relationship a few years later, with Marx especially approving of Bakunin’s work in Italy. He was seen as a key ally against other forces, like Giuseppe Mazzini.³

However, when Bakunin set up the Alliance, Marx seemed to fall back into his conspiracy theories around Bakunin, believing this to be an attempt by Bakunin to take over the International himself, bringing it under “Russian leadership,”⁴ and imposing his own ideas of political abstentionism, which Marx vehemently disagreed with. Bakunin had no such plot, and actually actively opposed any such attempt to destroy the pluralist nature of the IWA. However, Bakunin can hardly be said to be blameless in his reaction here, as he began developing his own anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Marx, seeing the actions being taken against him not as something Marx was doing individually, but the Jewish people as a whole.⁵

Things escalated, leading to Marx and Engels attempting to impose their own program on the International before they mistakenly believed Bakunin would try to do this himself. This also was in line with their view that the General Council of the IWA needed to be transformed into a “governing body” over the institution.⁶ This led them, through means Engels himself described as “an illegal mechanism,”⁷ to impose an anti-abstentionist position over the IWA away from its original pluralism.

The first major attempt was at the London Conference of 1871, a private conference Engels set up to replace the general congress mandated in the rules of the IWA. As a private conference, Engels and the Council were able to essentially create their own rules for how the conference would operate, giving themselves voting rights and appointing themselves as the delegates for various nations, with no mandate on how they should vote. For example, Engels was the General Council’s secretary to Italy, so he was selected as their delegate. Engels then used the resolutions passed at this conference, including several explicitly anti-anarchist resolutions, as a basis for attacking anarchism in Italy.⁸

This provoked a response from the Jura Federation in Switzerland to denounce the General Council in their Sonvilier Circular. This included their assertion that

When the International Worker’s Association was created, a General Council was set up whose function, according to the statutes, was that of serving as Central Bureau of correspondence between the Sections, but which was not delegated any authority whatsoever, which would have been contrary to the very essence of the International, which is only an immense protest against authority. [Emphasis added.]

This way of framing socialism as an “immense protest against authority” was popular among the anarchists of the time.

Bakunin had no hand in the Circular, although he certainly approved of it. But Marx and Engels saw this denouncement of their illegal tactics as further proof that Bakunin’s conspiracy was escalating its action.⁹

In the aftermath of the London Conference, many sections of the IWA were outraged, and not simply those aligned with anarchism. Engels continued to act as the General Council’s secretary to Italy, where anarchism was particularly strong, but struggled to maintain any relevancy or build up any good will for the General Council. Believing that the Alliance was all under Bakunin’s control, he blamed his own failure to connect to the Italian people on Bakunin’s supposed conspiracy, and continued to publish papers attacking Bakunin. The Italian workers, who knew little of this interpersonal conflict between Marx and Bakunin, only turned more and more against the General Council. This included Engels driving away Carlo Cafiero, who had been his biggest supporter in the area.¹⁰

In September 1872, the IWA held a proper congress in the Hague instead of a conference, but it too was largely manufactured by Marx and Engels to give themselves the majority they needed to attack anarchism, including requesting blank mandates from various sections of the International, without naming who their delegate was, and giving these mandates to supporters of the General Council. Several of these groups did not even exist as sections of the International, and were created specifically to facilitate Marx and Engels’ attack on anarchism by constructing their own majority. Marx and Engels had three main goals they wanted to achieve at the Hague Congress: (1) enshrining their political views explicitly in the IWA’s rules, (2) banishing their critics, and (3) putting the General Council out of reach of this growing opposition. To this end they used their constructed majority to commit the IWA to the strategy of forming working-class parties aimed at the conquest of state power, expelled Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume, and relocated the General Council from London to New York. Meanwhile, those opposed to the General Council’s actions formed their own congress in Saint-Imier, Switzerland to oppose everything passed by the Hague Congress. This formally split the socialist movement between the Marxists and the anarchists.¹¹

When we interpret On Authority, it should be understood in light of this split. The Hague Congress was held in September 1872, while Engels started writing On Authority in October 1872. He is also publishing it specifically in Italy, where anarchism had some of its most support, and where Engels had lost all support since December 1871.

On Authority is one of Engels’ weakest theoretical works, as I will make clear. He is careless, lacking the kind of rigorousness we see in his other works. He contradicts himself, equivocates, and in the process of attempting to refute anarchism seems to be arguing, if we take his argument seriously, against Marxism itself.

On Authority should be understood less as a serious work of theory and more as an angry polemic Engels threw together with little regard for accuracy to complain about his failures in Italy, his loss of his connection with Carlo Cafiero, and express his whole frustration with the split he and Marx orchestrated of the IWA. He is more concerned with throwing mud at his opponents than thinking through the issue critically or addressing areas of nuance.

This context also helps to explain why On Authority is used the way it is today. Any Marxist relying on it has, like Engels, little regard for what anarchist theory is actually claiming. His witty insults attract them more than anything else. Even his sloppiness can be an advantage here, since now that they are divorced from their original context, they can be read in completely different ways from what Engels intended while maintaining their anti-anarchist vitriol.

What is Engels’ argument?

An Overview of On Authority

I encourage anyone reading this to first read On Authority itself. As mentioned, it is extremely short, and seeing Engels present his case in his own words is important for understanding how I am interpreting things from here. My line-by-line analysis is available in Read On Authority.

Here is his argument in summary:

• The anti-authoritarian socialists, i.e. the anarchists, condemn all authority.

• Engels defines authority as “the imposition of the will of another upon ours,” subordinating the latter to the former. This definition is meant to be the same sense of authority used by the anti-authoritarians.

• Anarchists object to authority and subordination because the words “sound bad” and the relation is disagreeable to the subordinated party, and therefore are trying to find a way to get rid of authority altogether.

• Production tends more and more towards the use of complex machinery which requires many people to coordinate their actions together (i.e., combined action) to operate.

• With this greater need for combined action comes a greater need for organization and administration. For example, in a spinning mill there is a need for scheduling tasks that must be carried out by different people simultaneously.

• This system of administration, no matter what form it takes, is a form of authority. This might be a delegate elected by the workers imposing a schedule on them, or it might be the majority voting on a schedule and imposing that on the minority. Either way, there is an imposition of the will of one party on another.

• Because this system of administration is required by its very nature, it is not only the delegates or majority who act as authorities, but the automatic machinery itself which holds a “veritable despotism” over the workers “independent of all social organisation.”

• Engels asserts this same need for authority can be understood broadly among several different industries that require combined action, such as railways or a ship at sea.

• Some anarchists, while agreeing that they do use a system of delegation, deny that these delegates are authorities. Instead, the anarchists claim that they hold a different kind of social relation and merely have “a commission entrusted.”

• Engels scoffs at this objection, claiming that the anarchist thinks that “when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.” In other words, the anarchist is making a nominative distinction, but is unable to point to any kind of material distinction.

• Given this, Engels asserts that socialism will not abolish all authority, but will instead confine it to the limits made inevitable by the conditions of production. He allows that some forms of authority will be abolished though, such as the authority of the capitalist and even political authority itself, as seen in the State.

• The anarchists are correct that socialism will not have the political authority of the state, but are entirely wrong about how this comes about. Engels claims that anarchists believe the revolution can start with abolishing the state before destroying the conditions that gave rise to it, i.e. capitalism.

• The anarchists contradict themselves in calling for a revolution, which must necessarily be violent and therefore authoritarian.

• The errors and confusion spread by anarchism hinder the workers’ movement, either intentionally or unintentionally, and therefore serve its enemies.

As I mentioned, many modern Marxists who use On Authority, if they have read it at all, often understand Engels’ argument in a very different way from what I have described above. Hence the reason for the line-by-line analysis in Read On Authority. But here, I will just leave this overview as is.

It becomes more clear why Engels is presenting things this way though when we understand the structure of his full argument.

Engels’ Syllogism

Marx and Engels very famously tried to adopt a kind of Hegelian dialectic to their sociological analysis, like in Capital. On Authority however does not seem to be doing this, and can be better understood in an even simpler way. It can be summarized as a simple modus tollens syllogism.

A modus tollens syllogism takes the following form:

• Premise 1: If P, then Q.

• Premise 2: Not Q.

• Conclusion: Therefore, not P.

This is a completely valid logical argument, meaning that if both premises are true then the conclusion must necessarily be true as well. For example:

• Premise 1: If it is raining, then I would hear it falling on my tin roof.

• Premise 2: I do not hear rain on my tin roof.

• Conclusion: Therefore, it is not raining.

Engels’ argument in On Authority can be presented similarly:

• Premise 1: If the anarchists are correct, then socialists must reject all authority. (His evidence being the definition of authority presented.)

• Premise 2: Socialists must not reject all authority. (His evidence being the examples of necessary authority in production within a socialist future, and politically in our capitalist present.)

• Conclusion: Therefore, the anarchists are not correct.

I will be referring to this simply as “Engels’ syllogism” from here on. Presented like this, we can make sense of the overview of On Authority presented before.

To establish Premise 1, Engels needs to establish that anarchism implies a rejection of all authority, and must provide the relevant meaning of authority they are using. He doesn’t really cite any examples of anarchists doing this, but we can take it for granted, and we have already seen one such example from the Jura Federation anyway. Engels’ explanation for the anarchist position is especially weak though, presenting it essentially as a childish reaction to the words authority and subordination “sounding bad.” He not only fails to engage with the anarchist analysis and critique of authority, but basically denies that any such critique exists beyond this shallow gut reaction to terms.

To establish Premise 2, Engels argues this in two important ways.

Firstly, he argues that authority will be needed after the revolution, even in the highest phases of communist society. This is because authority is supposed to be a necessary feature of all combined action, like for people to follow an agreed-upon schedule.

Secondly, it is also necessary for socialists to wield authority in present-day society (although he grants that it is a temporary form of authority) by waging a revolution against the bourgeoisie. Revolutions require violence, and all violence is a kind of authority.

If all this follows, then we can see the necessity of authority for any successful socialist project, and the theoretical flaw at the heart of anarchism.

This also presents us the important ways we can challenge On Authority by attacking this argument. This can be done in three ways.

Firstly, we can challenge the truth of Premise 1. If anarchists don’t really reject all authority, or at least don’t reject all authority in the relevant way Engels is defining it, then the rest of his argument doesn’t follow.

Secondly, we can challenge the truth of Premise 2. This requires addressing Engels’ two points of supporting evidence around the supposed need for authority in the present, as seen in a revolution, or after the revolution for any and all forms of combined action.

Thirdly, we can challenge the structure of this argument itself. While a modus tollens argument is logically valid, Engels may be subtly making a different argument. For example, let’s say there are two different senses of the word authority, a and b. If Engels uses definition a in Premise 1, only to use definition b in Premise 2, then he’s not actually making a modus tollens argument at all.

For comparison, suppose someone made this argument against Engels:

• Premise 1: If Engels is correct, then socialism will be a classless society.

• Premise 2: Socialism will not be a classless society. Students will still need classes to learn things like math, history, art, music, etc.

• Conclusion: Therefore, Engels is not correct.

This appears to be a modus tollens argument, but we can immediately see its flaw. In Premise 1 we use the word “classless” to mean the absence of socio-economic classes, while in Premise 2 we use it to mean educational classes. No Marxist would ever be convinced by this kind of argument.

As I will prove, that is also why anarchists are not convinced by Engels.

Engels’ Vague and Contradictory Idea of Authority

For a work called “On Authority,” Engels spends shockingly little time telling us what authority actually is. It effectively breaks down to this sentence:

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination.

This is obviously inadequate as a definition, but this is a relatively minor issue and his intention is clear. Since Engels is not presenting this definition in a generalized format, we can rephrase Engels as meaning something like “the imposition of the will of one party upon another,” where the latter party is not subordinated to the authority of the former. He clearly meant it to be generalized this way, since later he talks about workers exercising authority over the capitalists, so “ours” should not just be interpreted as “the working class” or something.

The next issue is much more serious. What exactly does it mean to impose one’s will? Engels does not elaborate on its meaning at all to clarify things, leaving us with an extremely vague sense of what “authority” actually is.

Immediately we can think of several different senses of impose, which may be broader or narrower.

In the first and broadest sense, something might be imposed simply by being the case independently of our will which requires our actions to adapt to it. This sense would include personal forms of authority, like someone robbing you at gunpoint, but also impersonal ones, like rain “imposing” the need for us to find shelter, hunger the need to eat, danger to flee, sickness to rest, etc. In this sense, it is not only the laws of the State which hold authority over us, but the laws of nature.

At first glance, it seems like Engels rules out this sense of “impose” since he is saying it is the will of one party being imposed by another. Only a living being can have a will, and therefore only a living being, and not a raincloud, can act as an authority. Who imposes a law of nature? Unless the atheist Engels believed they are imposed by God, or has converted to some form of animism, this seems like it should be impossible.

Despite this, when we look at the rest of his argument, it seems like Engels is using this meaning of impose. His primary example of the need for authority is with the “veritable despotism” of automatic machinery. It is the factory itself which has authority over the workers. Engels is attributing authority to inanimate objects which lack a will, and apparently should not be able to count as an authority by his own definition.

Trying to explain how and why Engels might explain this obvious contradiction is one of the more difficult parts of interpreting On Authority, and we will cover this more later.

If we interpret “imposition of the will” in a second and slightly narrower way, we can take it to mean any time one party, through their own actions, gets a state of affairs which they desire, but which another party does not desire. Unless by some miraculous accident, the desires of every single person on Earth just so happen to perfectly align, it is certainly true that it is impossible to abolish “authority” of this kind.

Suppose there are two people in the same general area, one of which wants to play a musical instrument while the other wishes for things to be quiet. As the first person is getting ready to play, the second person politely asks if they would not, to which the first person agrees, only slightly disappointed. If we interpret Engels’ definition this broadly, then this qualifies as an example of a kind of authority of the second person on the first. That they achieved this “authority” non-violently is irrelevant. One party, through their actions, was able to get their desired result which required the other party to get a less favorable one.

It seems absurd to call this authority. Certainly no prominent anarchist has ever defined it to mean that. This is a problem for Engels because he is not merely trying to present his own definition of authority, but presenting a definition “in the sense in which the word is used here,” i.e. by the anti-authoritarian socialists.

If Engels is defining authority in a different way from the anarchists, then this undermines his entire argument against anarchism. Premise 1 of his syllogism would be false, since it would not follow from anarchism being correct that socialists must reject all authority in the broad meaning Engels is defining it. This would be a simple strawman of the anarchist position.

If Engels is defining authority in the same sense as the anarchists, as he intended, then it also seems like this undermines Premise 2 of his syllogism. Besides the authority of the machine, Engels also argues that the main way this authority manifests within socialism as people needing to work according to a shared schedule. Now it is obvious that a shared schedule can and frequently does involve conflicts, especially when we are dealing with a large number of people. But these matters can also be settled peacefully by agreement. That is, in fact, the normal way of doing things.

Consider the objection to this argument from an anarchist that Engels brings up within On Authority itself:

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

The anarchist here agrees with Engels that a delegate might need to be selected by the workers to put together a schedule, but denies that this makes the delegate an authority. They instead simply have a “commission entrusted.” Engels does not elaborate what the anarchist means by this, or which anarchist he was referring to.

But in light of everything else here, we actually get the sense that some “rabid” anarchist was desperately trying to explain this, frankly, very simple point to Engels, who because of his antagonism and pride completely missed it and refused to be corrected. Instead of realizing that the simplistic definition of authority he gave is actually woefully inadequate, he accuses the anarchist of thinking that “when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves,” not realizing he is looking at two different things!

While this line is very quippy and quotable, embarrassingly once even being used by J.K. Rowling to defend her transphobia, we can see that, for both Engels and Rowling, it is really just the slogan of obstinacy and willful ignorance. Engels is guilty of the reverse of his accusation against the anarchists. He thinks that he makes the different things identical by giving them the same name.

This leads us to a narrower third interpretation of “impose,” which must be based on certain methods or functions. This sense seems to be especially tied to coercive methods, in contrast to free agreement, and the use of violence.

If we use this definition of authority, we can make sense of Engels’ final comments on the revolution supposedly needing authority. It is certainly the case that, in a revolution, violence is used by the people rebelling against the rulers they are seeking to overthrow. Gunfire is exchanged, barricades are built, etc. But it is harder to make sense of the earlier parts of On Authority with this meaning of “impose.” The need for violence in a revolution is fairly obvious, but the need for violence to put together a schedule at a cotton mill factory is less obvious.

The association between authority and coercion is intuitively obvious to people, including to Marxists themselves. This seems to be why most Marxists actually drop the bulk of Engels’ argument to focus almost exclusively on violence in the revolution, and maybe including the two quips about “changing the names of things” or the final lines about “serving the reaction.” Everything about the need for authority in production is frequently dropped, precisely because it does seem to need to be coercive and is therefore the weakest part of his case.

This is a rather ironic reversal from Engels, who clearly saw his point about authority in production as his major and more decisive argument against anarchism. That is the major bulk of his argument, and one he tries to illustrate with three different examples. By contrast, when it comes to describing a socialist state, Engels hand-waves this away by saying “all Socialists” already know and agree with his own stance. Engels split the amount of time he was giving to each point because he actually agrees that political authority will disappear, so he finds that kind of opposition to authority far less objectionable. He laments that the anarchists are not confining themselves to “crying out against political authority, the state.” He claims that “we could understand each other” if they only did that.

Engels certainly did not intend his definition of authority to be so narrow that it only included acts of violence. But even if we did, the link between violence and authority does seem as intuitively obvious as Engels assumes. True, we might describe “impose” in terms of certain methods and tools used, like “rifles, bayonets and cannons.” But we also tend to define it in terms of the function we are using those tools for.

Suppose someone were to try to grab me off the street, kidnapping me. They would certainly be imposing themselves on me in the relevant sense here. But if I fight back to try to escape my kidnappers, am I imposing myself on them? If all violence is “imposing” ourselves, then yes we are. But it doesn’t seem like most people would say the kidnapped victim has “imposed” themselves on their kidnapper. Rather, the kidnapper is the one imposing themselves, the victim is simply resisting this imposition.

On what basis is this distinction between imposition and resistance made? Perhaps it is a merely illusory one, which would allow Engels’ point to stand.

For one thing, there is a clear legal difference between the two. Kidnapping people is typically illegal, while escaping your kidnapper is not. But this is clearly not the distinction anarchists tend to make though, since we object to many things that are considered legal.

For another, there is a clear moral difference between the two. Kidnapping is, generally speaking, bad. It is often assumed by Marxists that this is how anarchists are trying to divide things, simply calling “bad” violence they don’t like authority, while “good” violence they do like is anti-authoritarian. This distinction can then be dismissed as “unscientific,” allowing the superiority of “scientific socialism” to shine through, considering all violence as authoritarian.

While it is true that anarchists do generally consider authority to be immoral, it is not clear that the only distinction we can make between these kinds of violence is a legal or moral one. There is, in fact, another way which should be readily obvious to Marxists: a class distinction.

This is especially obvious in a revolution. While Engels presents a revolution as merely when “one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part,” he leaves out that these are not two random parts of the population but ones that are divided between rulers and ruled, oppressors and the oppressed, built around a system where the former dominate and exploit the later. This kind of social relation can be seen in individual interactions as well, or function with similar systems of oppression like racism, patriarchy, and so on.

Besides a legal or moral distinction, we can make a sociological one. To the extent, if at all, that these categories cannot be separated from one another, then that is as much an “issue” with Marxism as it would be for anarchism. Perhaps something being “imposed” requires a contrast to some other kind of social relation to compare to, but instead of using moral judgments we can simply compare it to one built on freedom, equality, and solidarity, as found in the common ownership of the means of production that is essential to socialism.¹²

Violence that serves a function of moving us away from that kind of social relation is imposed, creating a social relation based on inequality, whereas violence used to defend against that imposition serves an entirely different sociological function.

It is not merely unintuitive to look at a slave rebellion and describe it as the slaves “imposing” their authority on the masters. Nor is this merely a moral distinction. There is a real difference in social relations each side is coming from, and a real difference between what each side in the conflict is trying to achieve, even if both use violence to do so. Our language should not obscure this difference, especially if we are trying to speak with scientific precision.

This is perhaps why Marxists like Engels and Lenin, even while defending the need for a socialist state, always consider it an anomaly as far as states go, serving a very different purpose and ultimately intending to make itself obsolete in a way that no other state does. Engels at one point even suggested replacing the word state with “Gemeinwesen,” or “commonalty,”¹³ and Lenin took to referring to his transitional state as “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word.”¹⁴ They are making these distinctions because they recognize that there is an important difference in the very nature of these organizations, and therefore demanding a difference in jargon.

While Engels took his definition of authority to be self-evident, it is clear that it is anything but. This vagueness around the definition of terms turns out to be essential to his overall argument as well. If he really were to try and clarify and investigate the meaning of authority, as the title “On Authority” implies he should be doing, then this would also require him to seriously engage with anarchist theory. This would run counter to his actual rhetorical goals of dismissing anarchism out of hand with a bitter and uncharitable polemic.

The Authority of Delegates, Majorities, and Machinery

I argued above that Engels is attributing authority, not merely to delegates or authorities, but to the machinery of the factory itself. I have also pointed out how this immediately and obviously contradicts Engels’ own definition of authority, since a factory has no will to impose.

This can all be seen in this especially shocking passage from On Authority:

The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

Keep in mind that Engels here is not describing factories in our present capitalist society. Rather, this is a thoroughly post-revolutionary society, where capitalism has been entirely defeated and full socialism has been established. This is all meant to be true into the highest stage of communism, since it is true “independent of all social organisation.”

Given all this, it is astounding that Engels would invoke Dante’s Inferno of all things to describe life for the worker in this socialist paradise. The socialism of Engels promises that the workers will still be condemned to hell, the forces of nature continuing to avenge themselves against mankind. This is Engels’ defense of authority.

More relevant to our point, Engels is clearly describing the “automatic machinery” itself as an authority, one which is “more despotic” than small capitalists.¹⁵ Engels reemphasizes this by asserting it is the forces of nature itself, like the “authority of the steam” I suppose, which is subjecting the workers to a “veritable despotism.” What’s more, this is a despotism that exists “independent of all social organisation,” as an eternal law of history.

It is only fair to Engels that we consider several other possible interpretations of what he meant though (a courtesy he did not extend to anarchists). As I read it, if Engels is not directly attributing a will to the factory itself, there are two plausible interpretations to what he might mean.

The first interpretation is that what Engels means by the authority of the factory is that it has certain technical requirements for how it must be operated. It can only serve its function as a factory if we use it the right way. Thus it is by this “authority” that the factory dictates that the furnace must be kept so hot, that materials need to be taken out at such-and-such time, that these materials need to be mixed together, etc. This is especially what people often think when they first hear about the “authority of the steam.”

Having technical requirements in production is hardly unique to factories and combined labor though. Engels presents the alternative to the authority of the power loom to be “to return to the spinning wheel,” but a spinning wheel also has certain needs, like being fed cotton in the proper way, to be spun at such-and-such a constant speed, etc.

Let’s modify this interpretation slightly. Perhaps what Engels means is not merely that the factory has any technical requirements, but that part of these requirements is the existence of some social formation where one party has authority over the other, like with a delegate or a majority deciding schedules.

The argument would need to be something like this: Factories can only operate if multiple people coordinate their activity together as “combined action.” This requires them to follow a common schedule. But schedules for collective activities are inherently authoritarian. This is (presumably) because it is unlikely that any given schedule will be actively desired by everyone, especially with a large number of people. This mean a less desirable schedule will be “imposed” on some people. In socialism, we expect this to be done either by a majority vote or by the workers collectively delegating the task of making the schedule to some individual(s) for the group. The need for this interpersonal exercise of authority (by the majority or delegate over everyone else) is inherent to the nature of the factory itself, meaning we can also attribute this same authority to the factory itself, despite the fact that the factory does not have a will. This is how the forces of nature “avenge themselves” against mankind.

This all strikes me as theoretically dubious, and more of an attempt to sound poetic to questionable success, given how he ends up describing his position as hell on Earth. At the very least, if Engels thought that there was some kind of transitive property of authority here, that should have been elaborated on.

The second interpretation is to incorporate this discussion of the authority of the machine into other places Marx and Engels talk about it. They argue we are subjected to not only the authority of the bourgeois class, their state, the overlooker, and the individual bourgeois manufacturer, but are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine itself. This framing is typically connected in Marx and Engels to the ways in which the worker has become a “mere living appendage” of the machine.¹⁶

It is noteworthy that the authority of the machine is explicitly distinguished merely from the authority of the overlooker, who actually functions in capitalism to determine things like schedules. Hence the reason why, when Engels identifies the machine as an authority within On Authority, there is no reason to believe he is being merely poetic. There is an established precedent and developed theory for attributing authority directly to machinery.

Granted, this precedent is typically connected to machinery within capitalism, and for good reason. That Engels extends this misery into socialism, making labor in a socialist factory equivalent to being damned, is already astounding, especially in what is meant to be a defense of authority. One would think that, if Engels really believed what he was arguing, he would instead embrace something like anarcho-primitivism and reject factory work altogether.

We will discuss how consistent either of these interpretations are with the rest of Marxist thought later on, but for now it is enough to establish that Engels is attributing authority directly to the machine, and not merely to the delegates or majority, and, out of charity, presenting plausible readings that can make sense of why Engels is doing this, in spite of the fact that it flatly contradicts his definition of authority.

The Authority of Violence in a Revolution

We established some nuance above about whether all violence could be considered authoritarian. Between the violence used by slaves in a slave rebellion and the violence of the masters trying to reimpose slavery, there is not merely a moral difference, but a sociological one.

In modern arguments between anarchists and Marxists, this tends to be the major point of contention, especially when discussing On Authority. The anarchist typically defends that a slave rebellion is not only not authoritarian, but is actively anti-authoritarians, while the Marxist reemphasizes how all violence is authoritarian.

This is not the discussion Engels was having though because he believed anarchists reject all violence. He thoughts anarchists agree that all violence is authoritarian, and that they therefore had become proto-Tolstoyan pacifists.¹⁷

This might be surprising to some people, but look at this passage closely:

They [anarchists] 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 […]

If Engels acknowledged that anarchists call for a violent revolution, his reply would make no sense. He asks whether they have even seen a revolution because he thinks they are missing some obvious aspect about it, and then goes on to describe how it is violent, as if they didn’t know! Engels is not trying to establish that violence is inherently authoritarian. He’s taking that for granted. Rather, he is establishing that revolutions involve violence!

Perhaps some might think this is a bad-faith interpretation. It seems odd to think Engels could have thought that when anarchists are stereotyped today as especially violent, presented in caricature as a mustachioed bomb-thrower, lurking in the shadows with cloak and dagger. There is very little to go on, so why go with the interpretation that makes him sound sillier?

But we can establish this really is what Engels thought, that the anarchist was a kind of Christian monk preaching that we must turn the other cheek, when we look at what he and Marx wrote elsewhere. As I mentioned above, On Authority was published right alongside another essay by Karl Marx called Political Indifferentism, which was also an attack on anarchism. In it, Marx makes this caricature of anarchism clear. He begins the essay by pretending to speak in the voice of an anarchist, where he presents their position like this:

“If the political struggle of the working class assumes violent forms and if the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeois class with their own revolutionary dictatorship, then they are guilty of the terrible crime of lèse-principe; for, in order to satisfy their miserable profane daily needs and to crush the resistance of the bourgeois class, they, instead of laying down their arms and abolishing the state, give to the state a revolutionary and transitory form. Workers must not even form single unions for every trade, for by so doing they perpetuate the social division of labour as they find it in bourgeois society; this division, which fragments the working class, is the true basis of their present enslavement.

“In a word, the workers should cross their arms and stop wasting time in political and economic movements. These movements can never produce anything more than short-term results. As truly religious men they should scorn daily needs and cry out with voices full of faith: "May our class be crucified, may our race perish, but let the eternal principles remain immaculate! As pious Christians they must believe the words of their pastor, despise the good things of this world and think only of going to Paradise. In place of Paradise read the social liquidation which is going to take place one day in some or other corner of the globe, no one knows how, or through whom, and the mystification is identical in all respects.

[…]

It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc.

I quote this lengthy passage precisely because this essay from Marx is far less widely read, and provides extremely important context for On Authority on this point especially.

Marx essentially paints anarchism as an idealistic fantasy, particularly as a kind of pacifist Christian idealism, precisely because he believes it opposes taking any action. He argues that they not only reject all violence, but even reject non-violent forms of resistance like going on strike!

Marx is aware that how he is presenting the anarchist position is completely at odds with what the anarchists actually do and say. Centers of anarchism like the Jura Federation were largely built out of the workers of that area finding they had more success by using tactics of direct action, like strikes, rather than relying on political representatives.

He dismisses how the evidence contradicts his presentation by saying that he has divined the true anarchist position (the absurd one he is presenting), and thinks anarchists are just too cowardly to admit it. It has been revealed to him that the famously atheist anarchists (one of Marx and Engels’ chief complaints about Bakunin was that he supposedly wanted to impose atheism on the IWA¹⁸) are in reality “pious Christians” who reject all struggle and want to be slaughtered.

Marx can be found making the same point at the Hague Congress itself, where he excommunicated Bakunin and Guillaume, compared the anarchists again to Christians and pointing to the need for violence in the revolution as if the anarchists were unaware of this point.

Marx said the following:

“A group has been formed in our midst which advocates that the workers should abstain from political activity.

We regard it as our duty to stress how dangerous and fatal we considered those principles to be for our cause.

One day the worker will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organisation of labour; he will have to overthrow the old policy which supports the old institutions if he wants to escape the fate of the early Christians who, neglecting and despising politics, never saw their kingdom on earth.

But we by no means claimed that the means for achieving this goal were identical everywhere.

We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account; and we do not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and if I knew your institutions better I might add Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means. That being true we must also admit that in most countries on the Continent it is force which must be the lever of our revolution; it is force which will have to be resorted to for a time in order to establish the rule of the workers.”¹⁹

This is a strange passage for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Marx’s claim that socialism could be achieved peacefully in England and the United States, or the claim that early Christians didn’t take over the Roman Empire.

More importantly, we can see with the kind of line Marx and Engels wanted to go with at the time On Authority was written. The anarchists were dangerous because they advocated that workers “should abstain from political activity.” They interpreted this to mean, not that anarchists reject electoral politics, but that we should do nothing at all about the state. Hence they believed anarchists were “politically indifferent.” To counter the anarchist position, Marx and Engels argued that workers need to “overthrow the old policy” supporting capitalism, either through electoral methods or through violence. The anarchists, by wanting to abstain from political activity, reject both.

We will examine whether this is an accurate presentation of anarchism later.

How do people get Engels’ argument wrong?

Now that we’ve established the actual form of Engels’ argument, pointed out certain tensions and contradictions in his argument, and explored several points of nuance and context that modern readers might easily miss, we can address some of the most common misinterpretations I’ve seen.

It should be clear that these misinterpretations generally don’t come from serious Marxist academics or scholars. They don’t even necessarily come from most Marxists. Rather, I am highlighting them just because I see them commonly pop up on many online spaces, and not just by people arguing in bad faith. Hence it is worthwhile spending some time correcting them.

Myth #1: Engels isn’t talking about anarchism

At no point in On Authority does Engels use the words anarchy, anarchist, or anarchism. Instead he uses terms like “anti-authoritarian socialists” or “autonomists.” Further, as we’ve already started to get a sense of, the more closely you analyze how On Authority characterizes these people, the less they look like anarchists.

While I maintain that this is because Marx and Engels were deliberately misrepresenting anarchists, that answer isn't really acceptable for some people. These Marxists sometimes instead decide that Engels must have been talking about some other group of anti-authoritarians who actually believe all the absurd things Engels was talking about, which may or may not overlap with the anarchists. (And if any anarchist is upset with On Authority, even though it’s not about them, that just proves they must be one of the silly anti-authoritarians he is describing!)

This is a particularly frustrating rhetorical sleight of hand because it essentially gives someone full permission to strawman their opponent, and if their opponent is ever frustrated by being misrepresented then that proves the strawman was accurate. It’s the kind of argument someone would only ever make if their only engagement with radical politics comes from trying to win an argument on social media.

Firstly, Engels does not use the word “anarchist” in this essay because On Authority was written at a point where the anarchist movement was so new that the word “anarchist” itself wasn’t firmly established yet. While some identified themselves as anarchists, they also called themselves mutualists, collectivists, federalist, revolutionary socialists, libertarians, or a number of other terms.²⁰ Engels not using the word “anarchist” in On Authority does not prove that it is not about anarchists generally.

Secondly, while Engels does not use the word anarchy in On Authority, Marx does use the word in his companion essay Political Indifferentism. Their essays were clearly meant to compliment one another.

Thirdly, Engels wrote this a month after the Hague Congress of the IWA. Who else could he plausibly be talking about here? Who are these people denouncing the principle of authority, if not the anarchists?

It is telling that many of the Marxists who believe this myth about On Authority also believe that anarchists don’t reject all authority, which we have already seen that the anarchists do. Those in the Jura Federation directly characterized the essence of the IWA as “an immense protest against authority.” The idea that anarchism is against authority was, and remains, pretty widespread. How then have these Marxists convinced themselves otherwise?

I believe this misreading ultimately stems from another misreading from Bakunin. In his essay What is Authority (written prior to On Authority) Bakunin says this:

Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert.

This passage, especially taken in isolation, certainly sounds like Bakunin is endorsing some forms of authority while rejecting others. While this one quote is somewhat famous, many Marxists have not actually read much Bakunin at all (except perhaps looking for quotes highlighting his anti-Semitism), leading to them not really understanding his position or the context for this quote. For example, they miss that shortly after this passage he writes this:

In short, we reject all legislation, all authority, and every privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even that arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can only ever turn to the advantage of a dominant, exploiting minority and against the interests of the immense, subjugated majority.

It is in this sense that we are really Anarchists.

So clearly he does reject “all legislation, all authority,” and this is precisely what makes him an Anarchist! What gives? Why the contradiction?

The answer is simple: This whole essay is about Bakunin considering various meanings and senses given to authority. The recurring pattern of the essay is for Bakunin to propose one definition of authority, to explain how he accepts this “authority,” only to then explain how it is not really authority at all. For example, he earlier argued that, with regards to the laws of nature, we are “absolutely the slaves of these laws,” only to immediately follow this up by saying “But there is nothing humiliating in that slavery, or, rather, it is not slavery at all.”

While Engels assumed authority had a straightforward and obvious meaning, leading him to miss just how vague his definition really is, Bakunin directly engaged this nuance and was able to entertain that other people saying things he considered absurd were really just using terms differently from him.

Fourthly, and finally, we know Engels was talking about the anarchists when he wrote On Authority because he made the exact same argument, beat-for-beat, in earlier letters where he explicitly names Bakunin as the target of his criticism. On Authority was written in September 1872 and he includes a trio of examples meant to show the need for authority in production involving combined action: the cotton mill/factory, the railway, and the ship at sea.

In a letter to Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue on December 30th, 1871, Engels makes the exact same case, talking about the need for authority for factories, railways, and a ship at sea, but also names that he’s talking about “Bakuninists.”²¹ Likewise, in a letter to Theodore Cuno on January 24th, 1872, Engels again uses this same trifecta of examples as a way to criticize Bakunin directly.²²

Given how much of this misreading is based on people thinking “Engels can’t be talking about anarchists because he doesn’t name who he’s talking about except to say that they reject all authority, and we know from that bootmaker quote that Bakunin didn’t,” these letters are especially useful for debunking this position.

This does perhaps leave one caveat not usually addressed by this misreading. Granted that Engels is talking about anarchism, who is his criticism pointed at? Is it the mutualist followers of Proudhon? Or is it the collectivist followers of Bakunin?

Given these letters and the historical context, I think it is clear that Engels had the “Bakuninists” in mind. However, I also do not think Marx and Engels meaningfully distinguished Bakunin from Proudhon and believed they were following the same fundamental errors. Hence in Marx’s Political Indifferentism, he is much more explicit that he is targeting Proudhon. Engels explicitly connected Bakunin as an extension of Proudhonism in a letter to Cafiero.²³

Myth #2: Engels is showing that “authority” is a meaningless term

Many Marxists are annoyed with being labeled “authoritarian socialists.” Their response to this often follows one of two paths: (1) they either reject that the word “authoritarian” has any meaning at all, except as a smear, or (2) they accept the label and try to reframe authoritarianism as a good thing. Many try to eat their cake and have it too, arguing both positions simultaneously.²⁴

This myth is especially common among people who take the first option. It obviously pairs well with the charge that anarchists have a “moralistic” definition of authority, and are simply using the term authoritarian to identify they distinguish violence or organizations they don’t like from ones that they do, making it an inherently arbitrary term.

It is frequently simply assumed that, since this is the position they are arguing right now, that Marx and Engels must agree with them, so it is simply assumed that this On Authority must back up this argument.

This interpretation is obviously absurd though. Engels nowhere claims that authority or authoritarianism are meaningless. Quite the opposite, he is arguing that both are necessary. Why spend so much time showing how combined action requires authority if the concept is meaningless? Why claim that “a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is” if there is no such thing as authoritarianism?

Engels offers a definition of authority in the fourth sentence of On Authority. At no point does he ever dispute this definition or imply that it is “moralizing.” Of course he thinks it has a meaning.

Which brings us to our next point.

Myth #3: Engels is proving anarchists have defined authority incorrectly

If denying that authority means anything at all doesn’t work, what about the people who try to recast authoritarianism as a good thing, or at least morally neutral?

This at least is closer to what Engels is arguing, since he does want to argue against the anarchists who reject all authority by showing that it is sometimes necessary. But the issue here is thinking that this is a matter of definitions. This, again, ties into the perception that anarchists have defined authority in a “moralizing” way, and thinks Engels is coming in to correct his definition with a more neutral and scientific one.

But at no point does Engels ever charge anarchists with having defined authority incorrectly. On the contrary, he gives every indication that he agrees with how he thinks anarchists define authority. At the very start of the essay, when he gives his definition of authority, he indicates that it is being defined “in the sense in which the word is used here,” i.e. as it is used by the anti-authoritarian socialists he discusses in his opening paragraph. At no point does Engels ever even imply that this definition is incorrect or inadequate. In fact, we’ve already seen how a major issue with On Authority is how little time Engels gives to analyzing authority as a concept.

If Engels were challenging how anarchists define authority, the rest of his syllogism wouldn’t work. His examples of supposedly necessary authority only work if it is contradicting how anarchists define authority. If they only matched his own definition, he could, at best, only be making a semantic point.

Usually this misreading is based on the fact that, since anarchists have had 150 years to respond to On Authority, the overwhelming point that needs to be made again and again is “that is not what we mean by authority.” If that is true, and I maintain it is, then Engels’ syllogism falls apart. These Marxists, trying to maintain Engels’ relevance but not being overly familiar with anarchist theory, like to reply “We know you don’t, that’s why Engels is giving a better definition.” But Engels is doing no such thing. There is an immense gulf between what they want Engels to be doing and what he actually did.

Myth #4: Engels is calling out how anarchists aren’t consistent with their definition

This misinterpretation is related to the one above, but is a bit better and has a bit of actual textual basis. The idea is that anarchists generally do define authority in the same way as Engels, but when we are “caught” by him pointing out necessary examples of authority, we backtrack and try to say “that’s not what we mean by authority at all, we mean this other thing.”

Now Engels is making a similar, yet distinct, criticism of anarchists here with this line:

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

Note however that the “most rabid anti-authoritarian” does not offer any alternative definition of authority. Rather, they look at Engels’ case for supposedly necessary authority in the factory and simply say “Our delegates don’t have authority though, they just have been entrusted with this commission.” There isn’t a shift in definitions. There is just looking at what Engels considers to be a clear case of authority, and the anarchist goes “no it isn’t.”

Could the anarchist be doing this because they believe in a different definition of authority? Perhaps. Or maybe they agree with the original definition, and just don’t think it applies in this case. Engels seems to think they are doing the latter, because that is what he accuses them of thinking that “when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.” They continue to accept this original definition, but when they find an example of it are trying to change “the things themselves” by giving it a new name. If the “rabid” anarchist were to give a whole new definition, that would not simply be a change in names, but also identifying the features by which we can distinguish the things themselves. It would be giving a different name to different things.

Now, perhaps that definition is itself insufficient, or fails to point out anything material between what it is trying to distinguish. One could certainly argue that. But Engels specifically isn’t arguing that, because he never addresses any changes in definition, or really seriously reflected on the definition of authority at all.

There is a related argument here which I hesitate to call a myth, but is worth addressing. In this view, anarchists aren’t changing their definition mid-argument, but are trying to radically redefine authority in a way divorced from everyday usage.

This isn’t really related to anything in On Authority, and is more an appeal to our intuitions about language. I will grant that violence, considered on its own and divorced from any context, is easy to intuitively associate with authority. However, I would also say that referring to something like a slave revolt as authoritarian is deeply unintuitive to most people, unless they are part of some minority of the population very deliberately trying to rehabilitate the word authoritarian.²⁵

Myth #5: Engels is proving anarchists are anti-technology

According to this myth, when Engels is describing how factories need authority, he is accusing anarchists of being fundamentally anti-technology Luddites (ignoring for now whether that is actually an accurate description of the original Luddite movement).

This misreading of On Authority is interesting because it also has some textual basis, but also misses what Engels is saying. This mostly comes from this line:

Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

But Engels’ point here is not to actually accuse anarchists of being Luddites. Rather, he thinks they are hypocrites that would need to be Luddites to be consistent. Engels recognizes that anarchists intend to preserve factories within socialism, but thinks this just means they’re contradicting themselves because factories require authority. Hence the reason that Engels, before he describes the factory in socialism, says that he is going to “adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them.” This is also why the “rabid anti-authoritarian” does not say “Yes you are right, factories require authority, which is why we reject factories.” Instead, they say “our factories won’t have authority because our delegates have only been granted a commission entrusted.”

I believe this misreading of Engels stems from the fact that in the mid-20th century we saw a rise of anarcho-primitivists. These anarchists launched a critique against civilization itself and called for deindustrialization. In many ways, they do call for destroying the power loom so that we can return to the spinning wheel. For Marxists aware of this history, they may simply say that Engels predicted the rise of these anarchists, while recognizing this was not the dominant strand when Engels was writing.

However, Engels’ reasoning and the reasoning of anarcho-primitivists is quite different. For Engels, anarchists would need to object to factories essentially because it needs combined action to function. A rejection of factories would only be one instance of a general rejection of all combined action.

The anarcho-primitivist critique of factories is not based on this. Rather, the critique of factories tends to be rooted in environmental concerns around the ecological destruction associated with factories, as well as the social alienation they believe is inherent to factories. They believe that the kind of alternative society they are proposing, based on a more hunter-gatherer lifestyle, would still be reliant on combined action.

On Authority has nothing to do with anarcho-primitivism, and its argument only shares a superficial resemblance.

Myth #6: Engels is calling out anarchists hypocrisy by calling for violence

According to this reading, Engels is pointing out that when anarchists call for violence in a revolution, they are contradicting themselves because all violence is authoritarian, just like they contradicted themselves by calling for factories in socialism.

This reading is perhaps the most common misread of On Authority in general, and is usually paired with other misreadings, like thinking anarchists are redefining authority to make their own violence acceptable, and is often a product of Marxists treating On Authority if it were only what we mentioned before: two quips and paragraph on violence in the revolution.

We have already seen a major issue with this reading though: Engels thinks all anarchists are pacifists. While Engels does believe that all violence is authoritarian, he thinks anarchists agree with him on this point and therefore reject violence.

No doubt if Engels acknowledged that anarchists did this, he would have accused them of hypocrisy. But he didn’t.

What does Engels get wrong?

On Authority gets anarchism wrong

We have already highlighted several ways that Engels gets anarchism wrong in ways that would even surprise modern Marxists. The idea of anarchists being complete pacifists especially is so foreign to us that most Marxists miss that this is what Engels was saying.

It is worth noting that Marx and Engels knew that Bakunin participated in violent revolutions, so their whole game of pretend about anarchists being Christian pacifists was really just a way to slander them. For instance, Bakunin, the main subject of Engels’ critique, personally left to join the January Uprising in Poland in 1863, and in September 1870 launched a quickly defeated insurrection in Lyon.²⁶ When Engels asked “Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution,” he knew that the answer was yes. He knows that anarchists are calling for a social revolution, but needs to pretend like they are unaware that revolutions involve violence for the way Marx and Engels want to frame their calls for political abstentionism to work.

In Read On Authority, a lengthy section was dedicated to exploring a lot of the nuance in early anarchist positions, as well as surveying how they discussed and defined authority as a way to evaluate Engels’ own definition. Given that the purpose of this paper is meant to be a comparatively briefer summary, I will not go into this in as much detail, but a few especially relevant quotes are useful for grounding and expressing my basic points here.

For one, to show that Marx and Engels really were presenting anarchists as pacifists, we can see Bakunin directly call them out on doing this and address the accusation directly:

The Marxians accuse us of intentionally ignoring political struggles, thus representing us falsely as a species of Arcadian, Platonic, pacifistic socialists who are in no way revolutionary. In saying this of us, they lie deliberately, for they know better than anyone that we too urge the proletariat to engage with the political question, but that the politics that we preach, absolutely populist and internationalist, not nationalist and bourgeois, has as its goal not the foundation or transformation of states but their destruction. We say, and all that we witness today in Germany and Switzerland confirms this, that their politics aimed at the transformation of states in the so-called populist sense can only end up in a new subjugation of the proletariat to the profit of the bourgeois.²⁷

Marx and Engels actively misrepresented anarchism in many different ways, but a lot of these issues break down to incorrectly representing what anarchists mean by authority or incorrectly representing what they mean by political abstentionism.

The idea that anarchists are pacifists is kind of combining these misrepresentations. All violence is taken to be authoritarian, so in objecting to authority, anarchists must object to all violence. They also call for abstaining from politics, but politics is just the use of violence on behalf of any class, so they must want to do nothing about the state or class at all. They are “politically indifferent.”

This, again, is a characterization that Bakunin directly denied:

It is not true then to say that we completely ignore politics. We do not ignore it, for we definitely want to destroy it. And here we have the essential point separating us from political parties and bourgeois radical Socialists. Their politics consists in making use of, reforming, and transforming the politics of the State, whereas our politics, the only kind we admit, is the total abolition of the State, and of the politics which is its necessary manifestation.

And only because we frankly want the abolition of this politics do we believe that we have the right to call ourselves internationalists and revolutionary Socialists; for he who wants to pursue politics of a different kind, who does not aim with us at the total abolition of politics—he must accept the politics of the State, patriotic and bourgeois politics; and that is to deny in the name of his great or small national State the human solidarity of the nations beyond the pale of his particular State, as well as the economic and social emancipation of the masses within the State.²⁸

When anarchists called for political abstention, this is what they meant. They were not ignoring politics, as Marx presents things in Political Indifferentism. Rather, they see the state as fundamentally a bourgeois institution in its very structure, one that cannot be reformed towards socialist ends, and therefore call for socialists to organize outside of and opposed to the state and capital. They find a lot of this power, as even Marx needed to concede even if he wanted to present it as a cowardly compromise, in radical labor unions.

Compounding this is also some differences in jargon. Consider the Marxist call for a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx and Engels were always somewhat vague about how they believed the revolution should actually take place. They endorsed electoral strategies in places where capitalism was more developed and democratic elections allowed it, like they believed was true of England and the United States, but believed something more like a violent coup was needed in other places. When they talk about the “revolutionary dictatorship” workers need to set up in place of the bourgeois state, as Marx mentions in Political Indifferentism, they seem to be using it in a very broad way where it would include the kind of fighting forces anarchists are advocating be built up.

This was pointed out later in July 1919 by the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta in a letter to Luigi Fabbri during the Russian Revolution after some anarchists started using the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”:

But perhaps the truth is simply this, that our Bolshevized friends intend with the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” merely the revolutionary act of the workers in taking possession of the land and of the instruments of labor and trying to constitute a society for organizing a mode of life in which there would be no place for a class that exploited and oppressed the producers.

Understood so the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the effective power of all the workers intent on breaking down capitalist society, and it would become anarchy immediately upon the cessation of reactionary resistance, and no one would attempt by force to make the masses obey him and work for him.

And then our dissent would have to do only with words. Dictatorship of the proletariat should signify dictatorship of all which certainly does not mean dictatorship, as a government of all is no longer a government, in the authoritarian, historic, practical sense of the word.

This passage seems to perfectly address Engels’ own description of the “authoritarianism” of a socialist revolution, pointing out how the revolution must be won with “rifles, bayonets and cannon,” and how the victorious party must maintain their victory “by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.”

Contrary to Engels’ claim that the anarchist objection to authority was rooted in the word “sounding bad,” anarchists are able to see past mere semantics. They rejected a “revolutionary dictatorship” not because they were different, but because they believed that would be, besides just a terrible propagandistic choice, inaccurate to what the working class must build. This is because government for anarchists is used to mean the following, as described by the anarchist historian Zoe Baker:

Actual states are institutions that (i) perform the function of reproducing the power of the economic ruling classes; (ii) are hierarchically and centrally organized; (iii) are wielded by a minority political ruling class who sit at the top of the state hierarchy and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force.²⁹

When anarchists reject describing their own organized fighting forces or militias as states, it is because government, “in the authoritarian, historic, practical sense of the word,” means something like this.

With all of this context, we can just see how woefully underdeveloped Marx and Engels critique of the anarchist strategy of political abstentionism really was, and how it was frequently deliberately misleading. Their approach to anarchism more generally, and On Authority is a good example of this, was not to address its criticisms in a serious, measured, or balanced way, but to simply slander it and its criticisms of the General Council’s actions, which Engels himself admitted were “illegal” according to the IWA’s own rules.

Given all this, what can we make of the rest of Engels’ argument in On Authority?

Unsurprisingly given our above analysis, the major weakness of Engels’ case is in how he defined authority itself. It is incredibly vague, yet not vague enough to keep Engels from contradicting himself.

In exploring the ways that Engels was vague, we found several ways the word “authority” or “impose” might be taken in a broader or narrower sense. Engels is making authority appear necessary with examples that only make sense if he is using a broader interpretation. While he claims he is using the term in the same sense as the anarchists, this is false. While they do discuss authority as a kind of imposition, this is elaborated on or given a particular context that makes it clear it has a narrower sense.

I demonstrate this in Read On Authority with a lengthy survey of many different early anarchists in the hope of constructing a “standard” anarchist definition. For this paper, I am comfortable more directly reporting what I found, although I can still fill in additional details and examples in footnotes.³⁰

The first major finding was that, unlike Engels, anarchists consistently made things clear they were discussing a coercive kind of imposition. This kind of social relation is made especially clear when it is found in an institutional form, such as when we can more clearly understand capitalism by analyzing it as a class relation and not merely a transaction between an individual capitalist purchasing the labor-power of an individual worker.³¹

For anarchists, this was frequently expressed in their opposition to Capital, the State, and the Church, exemplifying three ways the coercion of authority manifests as economic power, physical power, or intellectual power.³² This institutional form also highlights how this kind of command made against others, backed by this power, manifests as a kind of right held by some, solidifying their privilege and creating a related duty of obedience from those below them.³³

This recognition was especially clear in the IWA, which held that socialism would eliminate this division of rights and duties. Thus they declared in their General Rules “That it [the IWA] acknowledges no rights without duties, no duties without rights”.

It is not the mere existence of these powers which constitutes authority for anarchists though. Authority is a combination of both matter and form, fulfilling a particular kind of social function. This is typically described as establishing a social relation of domination and exploitation, the former being about a more direct kind of oppression while the later is more indirectly mediated through things or examined as surplus-labor.

Authority is therefore closely related to systems of class rule, especially when examined in a systematic form, so long as class is understood to encompass not only economic class found in capitalism, but also other systems of oppression (with which capitalism intermingles) like colonialism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc.

This kind of social relation is highlighted not only by understanding it in a systemic and institutional form, but also by contrasting it with other forms of social relations, ones we would expect to be especially dominant in a classless society. This is especially found when people relate to each other as free equals, as when people relate as common owners of the means of production, establishing a voluntary relationship. Anarchists frequently describe this as one of free agreement.

Freedom and equality in this respect does not mean one of every respect, of course. To be different individuals, people must be, by definition, different in some respects, and therefore unequal. We fully expect this to include differences in ability between individuals, which may still be seen as a kind of power in a sense, but need not manifest as authority. This is seen in Bakunin’s discussion of the “authority” of the bootmaker which he does not push back against, despite rejecting all authority.³⁴

The so-called authority of experts then, divorced from these kinds of coercive power, shares very little with authority in terms of matter or form. There is a greater similarity when we consider resistance to authority, since this can use very similar methods of violence, but it still has a distinct form by fulfilling a very different function, seeking not to establish new privileges, but destroy existing ones or to prevent their expansion.

This likewise ties in with the General Rules of the IWA, which says “that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.” Little wonder then that the Jura Federation declared in the Sonvilier Circular that the IWA was “only an immense protest against authority.”

With all these points in mind, I constructed what I present as a “standard” anarchist definition of authority as the following:

Authority is a social relation of domination or exploitation coercively imposed by one party onto others, claiming a right to command or forbid, or exercise some similar privilege, backed by means of physical, economic, or intellectual power, especially when found in a systemic or institutional form and when considered in contrast to free agreement, expert advice, the inevitable laws of nature, or resistance to this imposition.

With this we can also see the immediate failures of Engels’ syllogistic argument. If we actually go with what the anti-authoritarians mean by authority, it is clear that none of Engels’ examples of supposedly necessary authority actually qualify. People may engage in combined action and establish things like schedules without relying on authority, but instead using free agreement. Even if this task is given to a delegate, entrusted with this commission, that people voluntarily follow what they put together and listen to experts in no way constitutes a form of authority by itself. This is true whether we consider factories, railways, or a ship at sea.

Likewise, while a revolution does involve violence, which despite Marx and Engels’ claims we know anarchists were aware of, we are able to materially distinguish it from authoritarian violence. This is not merely a moral distinction, even though anarchists certainly have generally considered authoritarianism to be immoral. It is also a sociological distinction, rooted in and implied by class analysis itself.

Because of how vague Engels was, it can be hard to tell precisely how his argument goes wrong. If he truly understood and meant his definition of authority to match how it was being used by the anti-authoritarian socialists, then his second premise is wrong, or at least not demonstrated by his evidence. If he didn’t understand how anarchists were defining authority, or decided to actively misrepresent them in this matter like he did with their stance on violence, insisting on his broad definition of what it means for something to be “imposed,” then his first premise is false. If he switched back and forth between the various definitions of authority, then he is committing an equivocation fallacy.

No matter how you look at it, On Authority completely fails as an argument.

On Authority gets Marxism wrong

It is a bit surprising to say someone like Engels can get Marxism wrong, a man arguably more responsible for building a “Marxism” than Marx himself.

The fault here is not in Engels’ lack of knowledge about the subject, of course. He was intimately aware of Marx’s thoughts, as they were close friends and frequently corresponded. On Authority was published directly alongside an essay from Marx.

Nor is the issue here a lack of ability. Engels was perfectly capable of writing very insightful analysis, and many of his works still hold up extremely well today like Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, or Anti-Dühring. While these may have their issues, they still contain a lot of insightful analysis. He served as Marx’s editor for Capital, and carefully put together the last two volumes after Marx passed from his various manuscripts.

Nor is the issue Engels simply being unfamiliar with anarchism or not having a chance to listen to anarchists properly. He was part of the General Council of the IWA, and On Authority was only written after years of conflict with Bakunin. Engels personally acted as the secretary of the General Council to Italy, which was where the anarchist movement was strongest. He was in regular contact with Carlo Cafiero, who did his job diligently and in good faith, and accurately relayed the position of other anarchists from the area.

Engels gets Marxism wrong here because he got lazy. On Authority is not a work of serious theoretical engagement with anarchism, but a piece of polemical slander. Engels wanted to denounce anarchism, and any argument he believed could stick worked as well as any other. In the process of warping this caricature of anarchism, he had to pretend, or simply ignored, the ways his argument runs into obvious conflict with the rest of more serious Marxist theory, including the theory he put out himself. He took wild swings and hurt himself in his confusion.

Beginning with the most minor issue, there is Engels’ description of the revolution. Engels briefly references his own position, which he equates with the position of all socialists, that the state will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution. This idea of the state “withering away” is consistent with the rest of Marxist theory. In a way, given how much more broadly Marx and Engels defined the state, it is even consistent with anarchist theory, seeing as how they also believed the bodies they create for resistance to authority would disappear once they are no longer needed, contradicting Engels’ claim that anarchists believed things could change overnight.³⁵

The issue is rather that, when Engels describes the revolution, he does so in a way that is completely class-blind, something Marxism should never be. Instead of presenting a revolution as the uprising of a subordinated class (or classes) against a ruling class(es), we have the more plain description of it as “the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon.” This description completely eliminates any kind of sense that an uprising is occurring, presumably because highlighting that would help the anarchist’s case that each side of this conflict are not equivalent or mere mirror images of one another. A war between different governments could similarly be defined as a “revolution” of this kind, or if that is precluded by how we are defining the population, at least any civil war. Two princes having their armies fight to see who inherits the throne would be a “revolution” of this kind.

I say this issue is more minor because it at least is technically correct about an actual revolution. A revolution is not merely one part of the population fighting the other, but that is still part of it. Engels isn’t trying to give a technical definition of a revolution here, but merely calls attention to how it involves violence, which he was pretending anarchists rejected. That he excluded class from this description is a subtle way he is misleading things in a way that obviously is not compatible with the rest of Marxist analysis, and is instead adopting a more liberal worldview.

The major issue in On Authority with respect to the rest of Marxism is Engels’ assertion that the machine will remain an authority in socialism. As was noted above, Engels is going out of his way to describe socialism as a kind of hell for the working class, unable to escape the forces of nature constantly avenging themselves against mankind.

I am not the first person to point this out. The translator Robert C. Tucker made a similar point in his introduction to the essay:

In this article written in October, 1872, and originally published in Italian in the collection Almanacco Repubblicano for 1874, Engels continued the debate against the Anarchists. Of special note is his argument that revolution itself is “certainly the most authoritarian thing there is,” and his further contention, which seems inconsistent with some of what we know of the thinking of Marx, that machine industry is inherently “despotic” in relation to the workers.³⁶

It is not only inconsistent with the thinking of Marx, but with the thinking of Engels himself.

Contrast Engels’ extreme language in On Authority to how he describes how the worker will relate to their means of production within socialism in Anti-Dühring:

In making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production. It goes without saying that society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. The old mode of production must therefore be revolutionised from top to bottom, and in particular the former division of labour must disappear. Its place must be taken by an organisation of production in which, on the one hand, no individual can throw on the shoulders of others his share in productive labour, this natural condition of human existence; and in which, on the other hand, productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emancipation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full — in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden.

It is as if Engels wrote this passage explicitly to contradict his position in On Authority.

Socialist production specifically does away with our subjection to the means of production, something which does not exist “independent of all social organisation,” but is specifically a consequence of how we have become alienated from our labor. The social plan the workers produce must be in harmony with their material conditions of course, which is just as true with individual action as it is with combined action, but such a plan in socialism is precisely demonstrating the workers’ mastery over the means of production, their complete social and individual freedom, not their continued subordination.

According to the Engels of On Authority, authority is an imposition of the will. Machines, as we have pointed out, do not have will. It follows that they cannot be an authority, despite Engels’ claims to the contrary.

However, they might have the appearance of having an intelligence and a will as a result of alienated labor, which might let workers relate to their means of production as if they were an authority. This is the position we find throughout the rest of the Marxist corpus. Consider this passage from Marx’s Grundrisse:

In fact, in the production process of capital, as will be seen more closely in its further development, labour is a totality – a combination of labours – whose individual component parts are alien to one another, so that the overall process as a totality is not the work of the individual worker, and is furthermore the work of the different workers together only to the extent that they are [forcibly] combined, and do not [voluntarily] enter into combination with one another. The combination of this labour appears just as subservient to and led by an alien will and an alien intelligence – having its animating unity elsewhere – as its material unity appears subordinate to the objective unity of the machinery, of fixed capital, which, as animated monster, objectifies the scientific idea, and is in fact the coordinator, does not in any way relate to the individual worker as his instrument; but rather he himself exists as an animated individual punctuation mark; as its living isolated accessory. Thus, combined labour is combination in-itself in a double way; not combination as a mutual relation among the individuals working together, nor as their predominance either over their particular or individual function or over the instrument of labour. Hence, just as the worker relates to the product of his labour as an alien thing, so does he relate to the combination of labour as an alien combination, as well as to his own labour as an expression of his life, which, although it belongs to him, is alien to him and coerced from him, and which A. Smith etc. therefore conceives is a burden, sacrifice etc. Labour itself, like its product, is negated as the labour of the particular, isolated worker. [Emphasis added in bold.]

At the most charitable reading of Engels, this is the best explanation for why we might categorize the machine as being an authority despite its lack of will.

However, it is clear here that the appearance of the machinery having a will, and therefore being able to act as an authority subordinating the worker and turning them into an “animated individual punctuation mark,” is a product of the worker’s alienation. It is therefore not a feature common to all labor, but specifically to alienated labor. This applies not only to capitalist production involving combined action, but all capitalist production, even if it is the most clear in factory labor.³⁷

It is alienation, and not combined action itself, that allows the machinery to function as a kind of authority. We are not dealing with the labor-process in general, independent of social organization, but labor within the context of a social system demanding surplus-labor, which in capitalism is found in the creation of surplus-value. This becomes the most clear in the factory system, taking a “technical and palpable reality,” but it is true whenever this kind of labor takes place, including with individual forms of production.

To claim that the authority of the factory is eternal is to declare that alienated labor is eternal. For the machine to appear as an authority in socialism would require our labor to be alienated in a similar way to how it happens in capitalism, which defeats the entire point of socialism. It is, effectively, to declare that socialism itself is impossible, that the worker may not be emancipated.

This, of course, is a rejection of the very core of Marxism, just as it is a rejection of the core of anarchism.

But thankfully for Marxism, Engels’ argument is terrible, and Marxists can correct this error in the exact same way anarchists can.

1. Quoted from my own Read On Authority. My source is found in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 23, p. 697, 703

2. James Guillaume, Michael Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch, Ch. 3; Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 7, p. 315-316; We Do Not Fear Anarchy, p. 35

3. Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 42, p. 18-19; We Do Not Fear Anarchy, p. 58

4. Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 43, p. 190. Marx wrote to Engels on December 15th, 1868 “Mr Bakunin – in the background of this business – is condescending enough to wish to take the workers’ movement under Russian leadership. This shit has been in existence for 2 months. Only this evening did old Becker inform the General Council about it in writing. This time the Nincompoop is right. As old Becker writes, this association should make up for the deficient ‘idealism’ of our Association. L’idéalisme Russe!” It is interesting that the parts Marx blames Bakunin for were actually Becker’s actions. Bakunin was unaware of the letter Becker sent that Marx blamed him for. See The First Socialist Schism, p. 4.

5. For more on Bakunin’s anti-Semitism, see Bakunin was a Racist by Zoe Baker

6. Minutes of the General Council, 1870-1871, p. 270; also see The First Socialist Schism, p. 86

7. Marx/Engels, Vol 44, p. 296, quoted in The First Socialist Schism, p. 86

8. See my paper How Engels Failed Italy, especially the section on “The London Conference and the Sonvilier Circular”.

9. The First Socialist Schism, p. 109

10. See the section in How Engels Failed Italy covering “The End of the General Council’s Influence in Italy”

11. See Zoe Baker’s Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States, p. 24-25, and Eckhardt’s The First Socialist Schism, p. 283-352, 357-68, 383-97.

12. For more on anarchist and Marxist notions of equality, see my paper Socialism as a Realm of Equality.

13. Engels letter to August Bebel, March 1875

14. Lenin, State and Revolution, Ch. 5

15. Engels’ reference to the small capitalist is one point I haven’t been able to disentangle from this essay, despite all my efforts. There are two obvious possible meanings: (1) the petite bourgeoisie, or (2) capitalists that are literally smaller than the “big factory.” The first seems like the take more in line with the rest of Marxist theory, but doesn’t make much sense here precisely because it was not the petite bourgeoisie who were the factory owners. As the sentence flows, it actually seems like he’s referring to literal size, but that seems silly. Doesn’t seem to affect his argument either way.

16. For example, consider this part from their Communist Manifesto: “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.

“[…] Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.”

17. It is worth noting that, while Tolstoy is sometimes referred to as a Christian anarchist today, he did not self-identify as an anarchist. On the contrary, decades after On Authority was written, Tolstoy would say he is distinguished from anarchists precisely because anarchists call for violence in a revolution. See On Anarchy (1900).

18. I cover this in How Engels Failed Italy. For example, Engels wrote to Carlo Cafiero that “Unfortunately the Bakuninists, with the narrowness of mentality common to all sects, were not satisfied with this. In their view the General Council consisted of reactionaries, the programme of the Association was too vague. Atheism and materialism (which Bakunin himself learnt from us Germans) had to become compulsory, the abolition of inheritance and the state, etc., had to be part of our programme.”

This was a completely false characterization of what the anarchists wished to do, as Cafiero, still an ally of Engels at this point, notes in his reply: “No member of the International with whom I have spoken in Italy expects those principles of atheism, materialism, the abolition of hereditary rights, common property, and so on, to be written into articles of our society’s pact; on the contrary, they would oppose this with all their strength; but on the other hand they are quite tenacious in wanting to lead all the members of their branch into sharing those ideas.”

This also directly contradicts Bakunin’s own stated strategy. According to him, “We think that the founders of the International were very wise to eliminate all political and religious questions from its program. To be sure, they lacked neither political views nor well defined anti-religious views. But they refrained from expressing those views in their program because their main purpose, before all else, was to unite the working masses of the civilized world in a common movement. […] Had they unfurled the flag of some political or anti-religious system, they hardly would have untied the workers of Europe but instead would have divided them even more…”

See Marx/Engels, Vol 44, p. 162-163, Eckhardt’s The First Socialist Schism, p. 80 and 123-24, Nunzio Pernicone’s Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892, p. 49, and Basic Bakunin, p. 98-99.

19. See Marx/Engels Vol 23, p. 254-255, partially quoted in The First Socialist Schism, p. 16

20. Means and Ends, p. 24

21. Engels wrote this to Paul Lafargue: “Our friends in Spain will now realise the way in which these gentry misuse the word 'authoritarian'. Whenever the Bakuninists take a dislike to something, they say: 'It's authoritarian' and believe that by so doing they damn it for ever and aye. If, instead of being bourgeois, journalists and so forth, they were working men, or if they had only devoted some study to economic questions and modern industrial conditions, they would know that no communal action is possible without submission on the part of some to an external will, that is to say an authority. Whether it be the will of a majority of voters, of a managing committee or of one man alone, it is invariably a will imposed on dissidents; but without that single, controlling will, no co-operation is possible. Just try and get one of Barcelona's big factories to function without control, that is to say, without an authority! Or to run a railway without knowing for certain that every engineer, stoker, etc., is at his post exactly when he ought to be! I should very much like to know whether the good Bakunin would entrust his portly frame to a railway carriage if that railway were administered on the principle that no one need be at his post unless he chose to submit to the authority of the regulations, regulations far more authoritarian in any conceivable state of society than those of the Congress of Basle! All these grandiloquent ultra-radical and revolutionary catchphrases serve only to conceal an abysmal paucity of ideas and an abysmal ignorance of the conditions under which the daily life of society takes place. Just try abolishing 'all authority, even by consent', among sailors on board a ship.” See Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol 44, p. 285-286, and The First Socialist Schism p. 143.

22. Engels wrote this to Cuno: “Now as, according to Bakunin, the International is not to be formed for political struggle but in order that it may at once replace the old state organisation as soon as social liquidation takes place, it follows that it must come as near as possible to the Bakunist ideal of the society of the future. In this society there will above all be no authority, for authority = state = an absolute evil. (How these people propose to run a factory, work a railway or steer a ship without having in the last resort one deciding will, without a unified direction, they do not indeed tell us.) The authority of the majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual and every community is autonomous, but as to how a society, even of only two people, is possible unless each gives up some of his autonomy, Bakunin again remains silent.” Also quoted in The First Socialist Schism p. 143.

23. Engels’ (inaccurate) thought on the relation between Bakunin and Proudhon is summarized well in how he wrote to Cafiero when he was still his ally, trying to prepare him to combat the “Bakuninists” in Italy: “Bakunin has a theory peculiar to himself, which is really a mixture of communism and Proudhonism; the fact that he wants to unite these two theories in one shows that he understands absolutely nothing about political economy. Among other phrases he has borrowed from Proudhon is the one about anarchy being the final state of society; he is nevertheless opposed to all political action by the working classes, on the grounds that it would be a recognition of the political state of things; also all political acts are in his opinion 'authoritarian'. Just how he hopes that the present political oppression and the tyranny of capital will be broken, and how he intends to carry out his favourite idea on the abolition of inheritance without 'acts of authority', he does not explain.” See Marx/Engels Vol 44, p. 162. Quoted in The First Socialist Schism, p. 122-23.

24. I cover one such blatant example in Read On Authority.

25. Anarchists historically had this same kind of intuition. In Read On Authority I bring up an interesting example from the French geographer Élisée Reclus. He writes in his essay “The Modern State” (1905):

“Just as property is the right of use and abuse, so is authority the right to command rightly or wrongly. This is understood well by the masters and also by the governed, whether they slavishly obey or feel the spirit of rebellion awakening. Philosophers have viewed authority quite differently. Desiring to give this word a meaning closer to its original one, which implied something like creation, they tell us that authority resides in anyone who teaches someone else something useful, and that it applies to everyone from the most celebrated scholar to the humblest mother. Still, none of them goes so far as to consider the revolutionary who stands up to power as the true representative of authority.

“Everyone has the right to speak the language that they want to speak, and to give to the words the meaning which they have personally chosen; but it is certain that, in the popular discourse, the word “authority” does have the same meaning as that given to it by Poseidon commanding to the tempests: “And thus, I order! No reason, my will suffice!” Since, the masters never talked any other way. Is it not established that the “cannon is the reason of kings”? And isn’t the “raison d’état” distinguished precisely because it is not reason? It places itself outside of vulgar humanity, it commands the just and the unjust, the good and evil as it wishes.”

It is interesting that Reclus explicitly denies that anyone would go so far as to present the revolutionary as “the true representative of authority,” when this is precisely what Engels and his followers are doing. Reclus counters this attempt to rehabilitate authority with what he considers the “common sense” meaning of the term, which lines up with the anarchist usage.

26. See Zoe Baker’s Means and Ends, p. 186

27. See The First Socialist Schism, p. 16.

28. G.P. Maximoff, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, p. 313-314; Also see Means and Ends, p. 168-171

29. Means and Ends, p. 75-76

30. I would add that, while I stand behind my conclusion in Read On Authority, there are two cases of nuance that I left out due to length, as hard as that might be to believe. Several other cuts were made as well, like the more lengthy historical section which I turned into How Engels Failed Italy. One is a tendency to use “authority” as simply a synonym for the State. For example, Ricardo Flores Magon in his Manifesto of the Mexican Liberal Party discussed the “sombre trinity” opposed by anarchism of “Capital, Authority, the Church.” Opposition to private property, the state, and religion was a common anarchist formula, and context makes it clear this is what Magon meant. Authority here is adopting a somewhat more restrictive meaning then, similar to when the police are called “the authorities.” He was not really deviating from anarchist philosophy as a whole in this way. The second thing I cut was a bit of an elaborate discussion I would have needed for Lucy Parson’s Principles of Anarchism, which I used. In it, she affirmed that anarchists do indeed call for a violent revolution against authority. However, she takes some time to describe this, positively, as anarchists “forgetting” they are anarchists for the moment, and pairs this with them “forgetting” they were revolutionaries after the revolution is complete. Clearly this is not literally forgetting anything, and Parson did not mean to imply anarchists were somehow contradicting themselves or abandoning their principles. As she affirms, this was the position of most anarchists already, and is being included in her own “principles of anarchism.” Rather, it seems to highlight the anarchist desire for a free society that is not based on violence, while also affirming the use of a violent revolution to get there. Since this did not seem to change the substance of the point being made while only potentially adding confusion that would require its own lengthy section to address, I did not include this part.

31. Marx frequently used this kind of class analysis to uncover the “illusion” of concealed social relations if we only look at individual interactions. For example, in Capital he describes the following: “The illusion begotten by the intervention of money vanishes immediately, if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single labourer, we take the class of capitalists and the class of labourers as a whole. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the labouring class order-notes, in the form of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The labourers give these order-notes back just as constantly to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity form of the product and the money form of the commodity.

[…] In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillations in the market-price of labour-power.” (Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1, Ch. 23)

32. Ricardo Flores Magon gives a very similar “trinity” of powers, as mentioned in an above footnote.

Emma Goldman similarly argues in Anarchism: What It Really Stands For that “Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. To accomplish that unity, Anarchism has declared war on the pernicious influences which have so far prevented the harmonious blending of individual and social instincts, the individual and society. Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man’s enslavement and all the horrors it entails.”

We also see Errico Malatesta argue in Anarchy that “There are two ways of oppressing men: either directly by brute force, by physical violence; or indirectly by denying them the means of life and thus reducing them to a state of surrender. The former is at the root of power, that is of political privilege; the latter was the origin of property, that is of economic privilege. Men can also be suppressed by working on their intelligence and their feelings, which constitutes religious or “universitarian” power; but just as the spirit does not exist except as the resultant of material forces, so a lie and the organisms set up to propagate it have no raison d’être except in so far as they are the result of political and economic privileges, and a means to defend and to consolidate them.”

As seen in this example, Universities are seen as being able to wield and oppress with intellectual power in a way similar to the Church. This is perhaps most obvious today with capitalist apologia found from economists. As Malatesta put it in Between Peasants, “The priest keeps you docile and subjected, telling you everything is God’s will; the economists say it’s the law of nature. But don’t believe a word of it.”

These institutional forms of power of Capital, State, and Church should not be considered “pure” versions of these kinds of power either. For example, capital uses its own forms of physical power with security guards and strikebreakers and intellectual power with propaganda, advertising, mandatory meetings, company trainings, etc. Despite this, its economic power to exploit stands out as its most prominent trait. The State and the Church are likewise able to wield economic power through things like taxes or tithes.

33. A good example of this found in anarchist thought is with Élisée Reclus’ discussion in Anarchy of how the “official morality” of authority, describing how this division corrupts people, and contrasting this to the kind of morality found between equals: “This sacrosanct system of domination encompasses a long succession of superimposed classes in which the highest have the right to command and the lowest have the duty to obey. The official morality consists in bowing humbly to one’s superiors and in proudly holding up one’s head before one’s subordinates. Each person must have, like Janus, two faces, with two smiles: one flattering, solicitous, and even servile, and the other haughty and nobly condescending. The principle of authority (which is the proper name for this phenomenon) demands that the superior should never give the impression of being wrong, and that in every verbal exchange he should have the last word. But above all, his orders must be carried out. That simplifies everything: there is no more need for quibbling, explanations, hesitations, discussions, or misgivings. Things move along all by themselves, for better or worse. And if a master isn’t around to command in person, one has ready-made formulas—orders, decrees, or laws handed down from absolute masters and legislators at various levels. These formulas substitute for direct orders, and one can follow them without having to consider whether they are in accord with the inner voice of one’s conscience.

“Between equals, the task is more difficult but also more exalted. We must search fiercely for the truth, discover our own personal duty, learn to know ourselves, engage continually in our own education, and act in ways that respect the rights and interests of our comrades. Only then can one become a truly moral being and awaken to a feeling of responsibility. Morality is not a command to which one submits, a word that one repeats, something purely external to the individual. It must become a part of one’s being, the very product of one’s life. This is the way that we anarchists understand morality. Are we not justified in comparing this conception favorably with the one bequeathed to us by our ancestors?”

34. As Bakunin elaborates in What is Authority, this kind of expertise functions as an ‘authority’ in a very different sense, coming ultimately from himself rather than something external and fixed, which is why he ultimately views it as no authority at all and not in conflict with his rejection of all authority, understood correctly. He summarizes the point like this: “I bow before the authority of exceptional men because it is imposed upon me by my own reason. I am conscious of my ability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, only a very small portion of human science. The greatest intelligence would not be sufficient to grasp the entirety. From this results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labor. I receive and I give—such is human life. Each is a directing authority and each is directed in his turn. So there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.”

35. For example, Bakunin wrote in the Principles and Organization of the International Brotherhood (1866): “The aim of this society is the triumph of the principle of Revolution in the world, and consequently the radical overthrow of all presently existing religious, political, economic and social organizations and institutions and the reconstitution first of European and subsequently of world society on the basis of liberty, reason, justice and work. This kind of task cannot be achieved overnight. The association is therefore constituted for an indefinite period, and will cease to exist only on the day when the triumph of its principle throughout the world removes its raison d’etre.” (Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 64).

36. Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 730

37. Marx makes this same point again later in Capital: “The life-long speciality of handling one and the same tool, now becomes the life-long speciality of serving one and the same machine. Machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a detail-machine. […] Here as everywhere else, we must distinguish between the increased productiveness due to the development of the social process of production, and that due to the capitalist exploitation of that process. In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.

“[…] Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power.”