What’s your response to the ML criticism of anarchism that posits that revolution is an inherently authoritarian process since it involves a class forcing it’s will upon another class?

class-struggle-anarchism:

it’s actually older than Marxism-Leninism, this is one of the oldest criticisms of anarchism, first articulated by Engels in his essay “On Authority” in 1872. It’s all built on the false assumption that is something can be described as an exercise of “authority”’ in any sense or from any perspective at all, anarchists are automatically against it.

For communist anarchists like myself, who have politics rooted in class struggle, the observation that a revolution involves “a class forcing it’s will upon another class” is obviously true – but it also leaves out an important bit of context which is that one of those classes is already forcing it’s will on the other. Classes aren’t just free floating discreet groups of people who can either be on the top or the bottom, they are produced and reproduced in relation to one another through specific, violently enforced relations of production.

The way this question is usually framed is as if our antagonism with the bourgeoisie is just a simplistic battle between two sets of people with the same aim – to repress the other by force – but our aims are fundamentally different, it’s about the reinforcement or abolition of class society… and our enemy isn’t just simply the group of people who currently compose the capitalist class, it’s class society itself, and the social relationships that produce and maintain it.

The ultimately violent authority of private property, capital and state is an organizing principle of society which determines every aspect of our lives. We are submitting to authority right now, is it “authoritarian” to stop? If someone has their boot on your neck, is it authoritarian to kick them off? From the perspective of the bosses, sure – the same people who perceive strikes and picket lines as violent incursions on their liberty, for them any sign of people rising up from their knees appears as an act of aggression – if we look at revolution from their perspective, then yes Engels had a point, we are authoritarians and every anarchist who ever punched a nazi or threw a brick at a cop is a huge hypocrite. This is of course the ancap point of view, and I accept that it exists, but it hasn’t really troubled the conscience of communist anarchists through 100 odd years of punching and brick throwing.

Anyway that was a much longer answer than I thought it was going to be, but Iain McKay dedicated a whole section of the anarchist FAQ to refuting this argument:

Didn’t Engels refute anarchism in his essay “On Authority”?