Its moreso that “anti-authoritarianism is stupid because steam doesn’t care, and the machines of the factory I own must be operated during these hours because thats when the despotic steam engines are running”

Its a really silly argument, but I’m also taking the worst bits out of the essay because that point is stupid and funny.

To be more fair, Engels is trying to critique libertarian socialists and anarchists and he is doing a bad job about it because the language used by him, and the language used by anarchists did not line up. Engels expanded authority to be broad and impossible to escape, where the anarchists and other anti-authoritarians were talking about a specific type of authority, hierarchic authority.

His argument for most of the essay is essentially “collective activity means cooperation, and in order to cooperate you must, at some point submit to the will of the others.”

That argument is stupid because it lacks any nuance on authority. The authority of a police officer, able to violently impose their will on someone with a badge and a gun is different than the authority of a group of friends coming to an agreement on where to get lunch even when one doesn’t want to get food at that restaurant, which is different to the authority of a slave-master demanding that his slaves must work the loom in a particular fashion to maximize productivity.