Do they think the Catalan Anarchists had no bourgeois blood on their hands? Do they think the Makhnovites never executed counterrevolutionaries? Fucking idiots. I preferred it when anarchists actually threw pipe bombs.
I will gladly comment on this.
Anarchist are anti-hierarchy. Authority is usually hierarchically designed and implemented. And thus we as anarchists condem it.
This statement ignores other forms of power. Like non-hierarchical power structures. Mutual aid groups and community self defense. These and many other forms of direct action do not require authority or hierarchy to be powerful.
We can be powerful, productive and non-hierarchical. We can have groups of people working together solving problems without bosses, masters, cops etc.
How does commumity self defense not require authority? They’re certainly imposing their authority on whatever they’re defending themselves from.
Someone who is attacking you is attempting to enforce a hierarchy/authority on you. Defending yourself is rejecting that hierarchy/authority. If you were to attack back, then I would say you were trying to impose your authority on another. But self defense alone only brings one back to equal footing, where neither party has authority over the other.
That is a good point. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone here links On Authority to try and debunk you, but (and this is an unpopular opinion on this instance) it’s a garbage argument that projects the fallacy Engles is making onto the anti authoritarians, namely using a definition of authority different from the one anyone actually cares about. It is Engles who “…think[s] that when [he has] changed the names of things [he has] changed the things themselves”.
