To be honest with you, I am not very interested in this, but I’ll point out as what I think is a meaningful and bizarre ideological failure because it’s easy to:

After going on, in an essay directed against Leninists, about the importance of dual power, with no recognition of the irony therein, this paragraph pops up:

Some Leninists might still advocate authority as a method by which one more “advanced” elements of the working class bring other elements of the working class into line in the fight against capitalism. But this can only ever re-create a class dynamic within the workers’ organisation and sabotage our own goals. If, at a given moment, the working class as a whole is not sufficiently class-conscious to defeat capitalism without resorting to authority, true social revolution is not possible at that moment. As Marx said “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.” to which I would add that “the workers themselves” can not be taken to mean some tiny sub-faction of the working class that is destined to become a new exploiting class.

This person either catastrophically misunderstands Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, or they are willfully misrepresenting it so they have an excuse to do “The People’s Stick” Bakunin bullshit like their type just love to do.

The philosophy that Engels is arguing for is one of democracy overcoming capitalism, and the authority of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the dictatorship of the many over the few. This few inevitably includes some proletarians for various reasons, though it is more discussed as being bourgeois because they are overwhelmingly within this collection of minorities. No one has an interest in this red aristocracy that the author strains to depict.

The author furthermore bares the poverty of their philosophy in this insinuation that the entire working class must be in unanimous agreement, that of a population of millions or even hundreds of millions, every single one must individually have all policies be completely in line with how they spontaneously prefer to act. That is the only way we can interpret these claims about “the working class as a whole”. No, we should not hold back 9/10ths of a hypothetical class-conscious working population because the remaining 1/10th isn’t on the same page.

I really think though that the average person can see problems like these just by having a passing familiarity with Marxism, specifically reading On Authority, and then reading this essay. I say that on good authority because I might be average on a good day.