2026-01-18

Engels on authority

I long had thoughts about the article On Authority written by Engels. This article is the reference in Marxist circles whenever you raise the issue of authority and government. It is easy to see why. Engels solves the question of authority by appealing to demands of the economy. It is perfect Marxist syllogism: the basis determines the superstructure.

The heart of Engels’ argument is that we cannot avoid authority in modern economy where we must coordinate the work of large industries. Any given employee must be compelled to work within the established production chain.

Notice that what Engels describes here is economic authority. It is quite different from political authority. The difference between the two is easy to illustrate with Kant’s article What is Enlightenment? In the article, Kant advocates for liberty to express your opinion about the state of affairs, but while the rules are in place, one must follow his duties. Kant gives us a clear separation of political and economic authority. Political authority is ability to sketch a policy that will be imposed on all and everyone. Economic authority is a coersion to follow your assigned duties. We can also express this distinction in terms of law: there is drafting and then there is enforsement of laws. Is there a Marxist theory of law? We have a critique of law under capitalism, but we don’t have a positive notion of law we wish to see. Will we retatin due process and habeus corpus? We know a lot about capitalism and very little about communism.

Engels postpones the issue of political authority until the very end. Who draws up the policy? Who’s taken into consideration? What is the mechanism of conflict resolution?

Engels writes:

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.

True interests of society. What are they? This vague term hides the fact that any society has conflicts of interest. If the interest of the peasants in Russian agrarian society stands in the way of true interest of industrialization, peasants are crushed even though they constitute the majority of society.

That’s the problem with the vanguard of the proletariat. First of all, proletariat is one among many. There are many interest groups in the transition period, even withing a class. Second, how does bureucracy assume the interests of the proletariat? How the policy can be amended by the people? If there is an unaccountable body called the Politburo that has the supreme political authority to sketch the policies, then conflict resolution is skewed. After the fall of the Soviet Union, we know the cost of dictatorial political authority. Unaccountability inevitably leads to mismanagment, disasters, deep resentment and slow deterioration of society.

Economic authority doesn’t evaporate if we get rid of dictatorial political authority. Socialists can and must have effective mechanisms of conflict resolution. When we sketch policies, we must take into the account the interests of all sides, not brand people’s material interests here and now as petty bourgeouis reactionary ideology. As though it’s just a quirk of the mind and not the livelihood of millions. If we transition from private property, there should be avenues for people to enter the common ownership with dignity. There is such an animoustiy to capitalists, who are easily blended with militant reactionaries, that there is no clear line when revolutionary self-defense turns against people that would like to integrate into a new society.

Engels closes the issue by saying that we can’t abolish the political authority in one day. There are reactionaries that must be crushed. The revolution is authoritarian because it dictates its will to all classes of society. All right, but how do we get from most authoritarian to apolitical government that serves true interests of society? When is the appropriate moment to become free? Soviet decrees were published very early and were soon forgotten with the advent of civil war. After the civil war, the ways of wartime stayed in place. Then came the ban on franctions in the party. Unity of the party became an obsession. When it is appropriate to design the system ahead, not in a reactive way?

We must answer key questions beforehand. We cannot postpone them in a manner “we can’t write recipes for the cookshops of the future”. The future will come sooner than we have any recipe at all.

Private property is a mechanism of conflict resolution. I hold my own estate, I command it, I am responsible for it, I can go to court to protect it. Thomas Jefferson wished that America would be the republic of farmers. Each and everyone would hold an estate. There would be no imbalance of power. But we do not live in such a republic. We live in a global capitalist system. It is skewed towards the people who own the means of production. And yet, we can’t replace one mechanism with a half-cooked one unless we want to see what happened with collectivization and industrialization in the Soviet Union. All the friction of the policy when it collided with reality on the ground was blamed on sabotage. This conspiratorial thinking arises because there is not even a conception that policy of the vanguard can be against the interests of the people. This way, in 1933, the wheat was still collected and sold to the Western countries while the peasants were starving.