"[T]he workers must not only strive for [a] one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority."--Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [click here for the source]
"No they must not!"--egalitarians
[Read here why Marxism is profoundly anti-democratic]
History of People Rejecting the Invalid Authoritarian Principle
by John Spritzler
The invalid authoritarian principle is the wrong (click here to see why, and read "What Makes a Government Legitimate" to see what the valid authoritarian principle is) notion that one must obey the highest level of government no matter what (i.e., whether or not the government is a truly legitimate government, as discussed in "What Makes a Government Legitimate?").
Often the invalid authoritarian principle is defended on the grounds that the government, typically a nation's central government, is supposedly "legitimate" because it was directly or indirectly elected, or because its leaders are special for some reason (closer to God than are regular people, divine, experts in the "science" of Marxism-Leninism, or whatever), or even sometimes merely because the government has been the government for as long as people can remember.
If one knows only what we're taught in school and what we read in the newspaper, then it would seem that pretty much everybody throughout history has accepted the invalid authoritarian principle without question. History, so we are led to believe, has been about conflicts over WHO should be in control of the central government, but never about whether one is obliged to OBEY it no matter what.
But people in the past HAVE, to their great credit, rejected the invalid authoritarian principle. They knew that blind obedience to a far-away handful of people is a recipe for domination by an oppressive elite.
Peasants during the 1381 Peasant Revolt in England (watch this video about it and read about it here) declared that one of their aims was to "have no laws in England, only those that they themselves moved to be ordained." [see time point 19:12 of the video.]
In England in the 1640s there was a revolutionary movement, known as the "Levellers," that aimed to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords. There was also a popular and anti-Monarchist army called The New Model Army that was strongly influenced by Leveller ideas. "They expressly opposed blind obedience to unjust civil law. 'I confess to me this principle [of obedience] is very dangerous,' declared John Wildman, one of the civilian Levellers. '...It is contrary to what the army first declared' in the June 14 declaration: 'that they stood upon such principles of right and freedom, and the laws of nature and nations, whereby men were to preserve themselves though the persons to whom authority belonged should fail in it.'" [bracket in but emphasis not in the original: The Third Revolution, vol. 1, pg. 113, by Murray Bookchin]
In France at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, after people in the streets of Paris stormed the royal Bastille prison and took it over, similar events took place throughout the nation.
"When existing municipal corporations failed to meet the townspeople's demands for price controls on food, they would invade the Hotel de Ville [i.e., City Hall] and forcibly expel the old authorities, replacing traditional institutions and their officeholders with more democratic forms and personnel. Once again, the unreliability of the army made these changes possible. At Strasbourg, for example, royal troops looked on passively as the Hotel de Ville was sacked by demonstrators. By such various means did the vast local officialdom of the ancien regime--from the loftiest intendant to the lowliest bureaucrat--withdraw from the places they had occupied, causing the collapse of the central authority. Effectively, France was now decentralized: the new municipal governments agreed to accept the decisions of the Assembly [i.e., the central governmental body], but only with the proviso that those decisions accorded with the wishes of the local population." [emphasis not in the original: The Third Revolution, vol. 1, pg. 286, by Murray Bookchin]
The leaders of the French Revolution in Paris, people like Robespierre, were upper middle class people, typically lawyers, who were absolutely in love with the invalid authoritarian principle. Their ideology held that there was something called the French "will of the people" and that it was the duty of their central revolutionary government in Paris to impose that "will of the people" on everybody in France. They also believed that it was necessary to chop off the heads of all those who disagreed with them about what the General Will was. Eventually they ended up chopping off almost all of their own heads because of disagreements among themselves about what the "will of the people" was.
Workers and Peasants Fought Against the Bolshevik Party's Authoritarian Domination
During the rule of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks strictly enforced the invalid authoritarian principle. The result was that the creative and intelligent initiative from below by the only people who had direct knowledge of the relevant facts--the workers in the various enterprises--was stifled. This in turn prevented the economic enterprises from functioning at all efficiently and reasonably to provide the products and services that people needed or desired. An excellent first hand account of this is provided by the author known as Voline, in Chapter 5 of his book The Unknown Revolution:1917-1921.
In order that somebody could do what ordinary workers were prevented from doing by the invalid authoritarian principle, a new category of person was required, known as functionaries. The functionaries acted as intermediaries between the workers in the different kinds of economic enterprises and as decision-makers for these enterprises, from manufacturing to farming. Functionaries were people who did exactly what the Communist Party leaders told them to do. They were motivated to rise to a higher rank of functionary by being absolutely obedient to the Communist Party elite because if they made it to the top ranks they enjoyed special privileges--materially and otherwise. Eventually there were about two million high level "functionaries" bossing about eight million low-ranking functionaries.
Top-ranking functionaries versus rank-and-file workers and low-ranking functionaries: this was the form of the re-emergence of class inequality in the Soviet Union, all made possible, in fact made inevitable, by the enforcement of the invalid authoritarian principle.
Contrary to the egalitarian practice of the anarchists during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-9, the Bolsheviks during those same years instituted extreme wage inequality. A former Bolshevik, Victor Serge, provides the following information for wages at this time (the following paragraph is partially exact quotes and partially my edited quotes from Serge's book Russia Twenty Years After, pg. 4-5:
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women workers get between 70 and 90 rubles a month (all figures are monthly here), a poverty wage entirely inadequate to feed the one who gets it. Laborers (males) get 100 to 120 rubles. Skilled workers get 250 to 400 rubles. Stakhanovist workers (i.e., those who work supposedly--it's all propaganda--absurdly hard) get 500 rubles and over. A scientific collaborator of a large establishment gets 300 to 400 rubles; a stenographer knowing foreign languages, about 200 rubles; a newspaper editor 230 rubles; miscellaneous employees, 90 to 120 rubles. A director of an enterprise or head of an office gets 400 to 800 rubles; high functionaries (communists) and big specialists get from 1,000 to 5,000 rubles. In the capitals, renowned specialists get as high as between 5,000 and 10,000 rubles per month. Writers get the same income. The great official dramatists, the official painters who do the portraits of the important leaders over and over again, the poets and novelists approved by the Central Committee, may get a million a year and more.
After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and Ukraine, there were major uprisings against their power by workers and peasants who wanted a real revolution. The sailors and workers in Kronstadt, in 1921, declared:
"A fundamental change in the policy of the government is required. In the first place, the workers and peasants need liberty. They do not want to live according to the regulations of the Bolsheviks; they want to decide their own destinies for themselves."
Two headlines of Kronstadt newspapers were:
ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS AND NOT TO THE PARTIES
and
THE POWER OF THE SOVIETS WILL LIBERATE THE WORKERS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE FROM THE COMMUNIST YOKE
These sailors and workers wanted their local elected soviet to be free from domination by the Bolshevik Party; they rejected the invalid authoritarian principle. "Lev Trotsky was sent to Petrograd to organize the armed response. He assembled as many loyal troops as he could under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevskii, and on March 7 began the bombardment of the island by the great guns of Petrograd." Tragically the Bolshevik Party--led by Lenin, not yet Stalin!-- succeeded in defeating the good people of Kronstadt.
In Ukraine, a large peasant army led by the anarchist, Nestor Makhno, fought against the Bolsheviks for the same liberty of the workers and peasants that the sailors and workers of Kronstadt fought for. Unfortunately, the idea that the invalid authoritarian principle needs to be rejected was not sufficiently widespread and understood in Russia/Ukraine at this time and the Bolsheviks, claiming to be the legitimate central government, were able to use lies to martial enough troops to be loyal to the central government to defeat these genuinely revolutionary workers and peasants. Read more about this in The Unknown Revolution:1917-1921.
Karl Marx Totally Advocated the Invalid Authoritarian Principle
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their 1848 Communist Manifesto, said the aim was to "centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class" with these words:
"We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."
Marx's phrase, "of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class" absolutely did not mean any rejection of the invalid authoritarian principle whatsoever. On the contrary, Marx and Engels explicitly emphasized that they embraced what I call the invalid authoritarian principle by writing in 1850, shortly after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, their "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" in which they criticized somebody else's plan and declared:
"In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc."*
To see why Marx's German republic (a national government) does not have true legitimacy, read "Why Should Laws Be Only Made By Local Assemblies" and "What Makes a Government Legitimate."
REVOLUTIONS WILL ONLY RESULT IN GENUINE DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY WHEN MOST PEOPLE HAVE A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT GENUINE DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY MEAN, ESPECIALLY A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF WHY THE INVALID AUTHORITARIAN PRINCIPLE MUST BE REJECTED.
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* Subsequently, Engels edited this paragraph with this note:
It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849. – Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.
Engles's point is simply that a strong central government ("political, national centralisation") is indeed required but that this is not in contradiction to also having local and provincial self-governments that act "within the general state laws" "similar the the American" system. Thus even Engels argues that there should be a strong central government the laws of which must be obeyed by everyone. The fact that Marx wrote the original paragraph clearly demonstrates that he advocated a strong central government.
After the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx and Engels added to their theory the idea of immediate recall of elected Central Government officials. In 1891 Engels wrote, in his introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France:
From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself,and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.
While immediate recall is a good principle, it is not a substitute for the more important need to reject the invalid authoritarian principle that says "You must obey the highest level of government (typically the Central government) just because the government declares it is legitimate." (Read about the valid versus invalid authoritarian principle in "What Makes A Government Legitimate?") Revolutionary movements aiming for genuine democracy had by this time already rejected this invalid authoritarian principle (go here to read about this history and here to read about why it is vital to reject the invalid authoritarian principle.) Marx and Engels, however, embraced the authoritarian principle. In their view the "deputies and officials" should be empowered--at least until they are recalled--to command (make laws for) everybody else. This is the opposite of how genuine democracy--voluntary federation--works, as described here.
For Marx, a strong centralized government was needed because it was, in his view, necessary in order to increase economic production to the point where scarcity would be abolished; only then could the state "wither away" in the classless society of communism. Marx was wrong; when economic productivity is a widely shared goal then decentralized power (voluntary federation, i.e., genuine democracy) is far more conducive to economic productivity than anti-democratic domination by a strong central government.