Dear Comrades,
Thanks for the support and for all the comments, whether supportive or not.
Thanks to Cde Mandla Radebe, Secretary of Linda Jabane District, for
reminding me of Marx on "Indifferentism", and even more so, of Engels on
"Authority".
I have made a short version of that piece of Engels' writing and pasted
it below. It certainly applies in this case.
Whether I ban or whether I leave, is my decision. Authority is with me
in either case, and whether any of us like it, or not. Whether I am
right or wrong, my authority over the CU for the time being cannot be
avoided by the subscribers, or evaded by me.
Please feel free to discuss what Engels wrote about the question of
authority, comrades. This will surely not be the last time the question
arises, and at some moment in the future, this question of authority may
well become the most crucial question of all in our revolution.
Thanks also to those comrades who remembered that when Floyd Shivambu
recently posted his opinion on the ANC's public discussion document on
"The Second Transition", and some comrades asked for him to be banned at
that time, I declined to do so and instead encouraged the comrades to
engage with what on the face of it was a /bona fide/ (in good faith)
contribution by Floyd to an important debate.
Clearly I saw a qualitative difference between that previous post of
Floyd's and the present one, and I acted accordingly and differently in
each case. My decision is final. There is no DC here, and no DC of
Appeal. Nor would these be of any use when the people concerned do not
respect such authorities, and publicly defy and insult them.
I don't propose to argue the merits of my decisions in detail. I would
rather let Engels do the talking, because everything that needs to be
said, and discussed, is there in Engels' document.
One comrade noted that Floyd Shivambu wanted to use our forum as a
theatre of war against the movement. I think that is true. I have
written before that the job of moderator is guided by a principle of
protecting and preserving the forum. I will continue to follow that
guiding principle.
*VC*
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*On Authority (Engels, 1872)*
/Extracts/
Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the
imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand,
authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound
bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the
subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any
way of dispensing with it, whether --- given the conditions of
present-day society --- we could not create another social system, in
which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would
consequently have to disappear...
Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon
each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever
mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to
have organisation without authority?
Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now
exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth.
Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the
anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had
become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will
authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let
us see...
... the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will
nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas.
There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous
and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.
When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid
anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the
following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority
which we confer on our delegates, but of /a commission entrusted/! These
gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they
have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers
mock at the whole world.
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 2012/07/20 08:39 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I agree with you Comrade Sandile. This censorship won't help us.
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