• @XiangMai
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    4 years ago

    I like mastodon but both mastodon and twitter are full of left aesthetics and safely in the realm of metaphysics where it does not trouble anyone

    You see accounts with descriptors of left wing thought but like this comment have no real intention of ever trying to change anything - it’s left in the realm of idealism of a certain twitter/mastodon clique

    These claims to “authoritarianism” which were long ago settled by Engels/Marx have to keep rising in an effort to defang Marxism - to reduce its revolutionary fervour to a more palatable SuccDem position and to ensure that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat remains too much of a taboo and not the driving force of emancipation and the building of socialism

    Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority.

    Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

    Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

    -Engels, On Authority

    Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

    • Engels, Civil War In France

    A position that poses no threat to Imperialism or the Capitalist system - because Marxism 101 teaches us that the State is an instrument of oppression of one class over another. Therefore if we are not bound by ‘authority’ to a proletarian state that must defend itself and suppress bourgeois elements then we can only stand on the side of the bourgeois as they suppress the majority