On Authority¶
Core Argument¶
Engels’s 1872 polemic On Authority is a direct intervention against a faction within the socialist movement—the anti-authoritarians—who had begun to condemn any exercise of authority as inherently reactionary. Engels argues that this position is not merely mistaken but objectively reactionary, because it ignores the material basis of authority in modern production.
The core of the argument is that authority—understood as the imposition of another’s will and the corresponding subordination—is not a political invention of capitalism that can be abolished by decree. It is a technical necessity imposed by the material conditions of large-scale industry and agriculture. Engels surveys the economic landscape of his time: the replacement of isolated artisans by combined labour in factories, of horse-drawn carriages by railways, of sailing vessels by steamships. These developments, he insists, are not reversible. Wherever combined action exists, organisation is required; and organisation, by its nature, entails authority.
To test the anti-authoritarian thesis, Engels performs a thought experiment: suppose a social revolution abolishes capitalist ownership and places the means of production in the hands of the workers. Would authority disappear? He takes a cotton mill as his example. The cotton must pass through six successive operations, each in a different room; the steam engine dictates the hours of work; a delegate must settle questions of distribution and method; the individual worker must subordinate their will to the collective process. The automatic machinery of the factory, Engels writes, is “much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been.” To abolish authority in large-scale industry is to abolish industry itself—to smash the power loom and return to the spinning wheel.
He extends the argument to railways, where the coordination of an “infinite number of individuals” is necessary to prevent accidents, and to a ship at sea, where in moments of danger the lives of all depend on “instantaneous and absolute obedience to the will of one.” The anti-authoritarians, when confronted with these examples, retreat into a verbal dodge: they claim that what is at issue is not authority but a “commission entrusted.” Engels dismisses this as a change of names, not of things—a mockery of serious thought.
The chapter’s most striking polemical turn comes at the end. Engels distinguishes between the eventual disappearance of the political state—a point on which all socialists agree—and the immediate abolition of all authority, which the anti-authoritarians demand as the first act of the revolution. This, he argues, is absurd. A revolution is itself “the most authoritarian thing there is”: one part of the population imposes its will on another by rifles, bayonets, and cannon. The Paris Commune, he notes, survived only as long as it wielded the authority of the armed people; its failure was to use it too little, not too much.
The conclusion is blunt: the anti-authoritarians either do not understand the material conditions of modern production, in which case they merely create confusion, or they do understand and are betraying the proletarian movement. In either case, they serve the reaction. Authority and autonomy are not absolute principles but relative things, whose spheres vary with the development of society. The task is not to abolish authority wholesale but to restrict it to the limits imposed by the conditions of production.