The political compass is an attempt to reduce incredibly complicated political questions into two simple lines, and people accept it because it aligns with oversimplified narratives and cultural preconceptions.
“Liberty” and “authority” have little meaning beyond “good” and “bad.” If authority is defined more rigorously, or if we use more neutral terms like “centralization” or public vs private, then it becomes a lot less clear that what we’re talking about is contrary to “liberty.” The private sector, and private individuals, can be just as restrictive of liberty.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the American Civil War. The southerners were the champions of decentralization, they spoke constantly about how they were fighting for “liberty” against the supposed tyranny of the northerners - and the reason they wanted “states’ rights” and decentralization is that they would be able to keep people enslaved. It was big, centralized government, that evil “authoritarian” force imposing it’s authority that resulted in a greater degree of liberty. But that is not just some freak exception.
If someone can’t go out at night without fear of being attacked, that person is no more “free” to go out than if they feared legal repercussions. Governments are, at their worst, no different from a criminal organization, and yet there is this tendency to assign special status to restrictions imposed by the law, rather than being on the same level as restrictions imposed by private individuals or organizations.
And again, we can see how “big government” or “authoritarianism” can increase liberty in the context of regulations, of pollution, of food safety, and of untested drugs. If I can trust regulators to stop a restaurant from serving anything unsafe, then I’m free to order anything off the menu, whereas if not, then everything’s a gamble and I might feel restricted to foods I expect to be “safe,” if I don’t avoid the restaurant entirely.
There once was a time when states viewed things like murder as a personal dispute between families, and didn’t generally get involved. This led to all kinds of generational feuds, with people killing each other over a long forgotten dispute between their great-grandfathers. Was that “liberty?” Is that something we should idealize and try to return to?
I’m sure there are people who will read this as me being “pro-authoritarian” and ignoring all the bad things done by states. But that’s missing the point. The point is not that centralization or state power are always good, the point is that it’s not automatically bad. Having a knee-jerk reaction against it is just oversimplifying complicated issues, and doing so in a way that lots of powerful people want you to do. Because the ruling class understands that they can wield private institutions and privatization just as they can wield public institutions.
You can’t just blindly apply an idealist ideological framework of “anti-authoritarianism” to every problem and expect that to produce good results. You have to look at things on a case-by-case basis, applying class analysis.
Engels is very obviously not making a semantic argument. He explicitly addresses that dodge himself: changing the name does not change the thing. If a delegate, committee, workers’ council, commune, or assembly can make binding decisions, enforce them, discipline obstruction, coordinate labour, and compel compliance where necessary, then authority still exists. Calling it a “commission,” “community enforcement,” or “bottom-up structure” does not abolish authority. It just obscures what is actually happening.
The deeper problem is that you are treating all authority as if it were identical. It is not. The real question is: authority by which class, over whom, and for what purpose? Bourgeois authority exists to preserve exploitation. Proletarian authority exists to suppress the exploiters, defend the revolution, and reorganize society on a collective basis. Those are not the same thing.
And yes, bureaucratic degeneration is possible. Marxists have never needed fairy tales about that. Socialist construction can generate bureaucracy, ossification, careerism, and detachment from the masses. But that is not an argument for abandoning authority altogether. In the current hostile world, that idea is absurd. Socialist countries exist under siege: sanctions, sabotage, subversion, military encirclement, espionage, capital flight, ideological warfare, and constant pressure from imperialism. Under those conditions, the notion that a socialist society could simply dissolve all organized authority and still survive is not radical, it is politically unserious. It would be suicide.
You are also collapsing state and government into one thing, which is a common mistake. The state is a specific instrument of class rule: special bodies of armed men, prisons, courts, coercive institutions arising from irreconcilable class antagonisms. Government, more broadly, is administration, coordination, planning, and the management of social life. Under communism, as classes disappear, the state withers away because there is no longer one class suppressing another. But administration does not disappear. Coordination does not disappear. Collective decision-making does not disappear. Government in that broader administrative sense remains, even when the state as an organ of class domination has been abolished.
Modern production makes this even clearer.
Take a modern computer chip. It is not made by autonomous individuals spontaneously harmonizing their activity. It is designed through coordinated labour by multiple digital design teams, analogue design teams, verification teams, software toolchains, and engineering managers, often across firms such as design companies and manufacturers. Then it goes to fabrication, where entirely different teams handle masks, wafer processing, testing, packaging, logistics, maintenance, quality control, and cleanroom operations. All of this also depends on cleaners, technicians, utility workers, transport, and upstream material supply. If everyone simply acted according to their own immediate preference with no binding coordination, you would not get advanced semiconductors. You would get breakdown, waste, delay, and failure.
Take also a nuclear power plant. Here the anti-authoritarian fantasy becomes openly ridiculous. A nuclear plant cannot be run on the basis that nobody has decisive authority, nobody can issue binding orders, and everything is handled through loose voluntary consensus at the point of crisis. That would be suicidal not only for the workers inside the plant, but for everyone living anywhere near it. Safety procedures, emergency response, maintenance schedules, chain of command, and operational discipline are not optional bourgeois prejudices. They are material necessities.
Most importantly (as any ideology that does not account for the sick and disabled is not serious or worth consideration) take modern pharmaceuticals and disability aids. Drugs and medical devices are researched, tested, manufactured, transported, and monitored through highly coordinated labour across laboratories, trial systems, factories, supply chains, hospitals, and inspection bodies. Even in a society without profit motive, mistakes, contamination, negligence, and accidents would still be possible. So you would still need rigorous standards, quality control, testing protocols, and regulatory oversight to ensure safety and efficacy. That is authority. Necessary authority. Social authority in the service of human need.
So no, this is not a dispute about words. Engels’ point is material from beginning to end. Complex social production and revolutionary struggle require authority, discipline, and subordination of particular wills to collective necessity. The only real question is whether that authority serves capital or the working masses.
So when you say society can be reorganized into more “bottom-up/accountable structures” quickly, that still does not escape Engels’ argument. Those structures, if they are real, would still have to make binding decisions, suppress counter-revolution, coordinate production, allocate resources, maintain infrastructure, and enforce standards. In other words, they would still exercise authority. The issue is not whether authority exists. The issue is whether the proletariat is willing to wield it consciously, or whether it disarms itself while imperialism and the bourgeoisie do not.
There’s a funny sketch about this.