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?
Alguém sabe me dizer se essa frase é mesmo do Engels?
A Wikipédia diz que é; tem inclusive uma fonte, que nos leva a frase que eu postei. No entanto, essa frase é do livro Marx-Engels Reader do Robert C. Tucker. Agora não sei se essa frase é do Tucker ou é do Engels mesmo. Alguém saberia me dizer de quem a frase realmente é?
O trecho em questão é de Engels , no artigo "Sobre a Autoridade" , do qual há no MIA , além da
versão em inglẽs ( retirada da coletânea de Tucker) , a
versão em português. É um texto de polêmica contra os anarquistas (oa antiaautoritários ) após a derrocada da Comuna de Paris.
O texto de Engels é de 1872 e provavelmente é a resposta ao
texto de Bakunin sobre a autoridade.
O parágrafo completo de onde o trecho foi retirado é:
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?
Edit: complementadas as referências.
