critical-mass.net

The nearest approach to my own understanding of the present and future threats to the integrity of life upon earth, that I have recently come across has been developed by members of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. This group  have been monitoring what they classify as; ‘functional biosphere integrity” for a considerable period of time. In doing so they have created computer models of nine characteristics of the global geo-biological system, which they consider are general indicators of systemic problems. They recently published an Environmental Studies  research paper entitled ‘Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries’ This research was issued by Katherine Richardson and 28 other international researchers, who provided considerable evidence to back up its findings. It suggests that six of the nine identified categories (listed below) have been taken beyond the limits (boundaries) of natural/sustainable reproductive recovery and beyond the capacity of some species of life on earth to continue their supportive role in maintaining the biosphere of the planet. The nine problematic characteristics they suggest are the following;

1. Stratospheric Ozone depletion. 2. Atmospheric Aerosol absorption. 3. Ocean Acidification. 4. Bio-Geo-chemical flows. 5. Fresh water contamination. 6. Land system depletion. 7. Biosphere integrity.  8. Climate Change. 9. Non-evolved entities. 

In identifying that the excesses in these nine areas are caused by what they identify as anthropogenic activities, this research team have clearly pushed the contemporary debate beyond the climate and weather pattern concerns of the mainstream media and beyond the limits that industry and commerce have been prepared to admit have become seriously problematic. As far as it goes, this nine symptom categorisation is to be welcomed, but I suggest it does not go far enough and misses the essential problems caused by modern production by a very long way. We shall read that this research project is still predominantly limited to and focussed upon inorganic planetary material as these criteria predominantly effect elite human concerns.

Consequently, the essence of this approach presents a complex dialectical biosphere relationship of species from within a rigidly dualistic framework of thinking. It has also reduced the complex multi-species matrix of life on earth, into an ahistoric framework of thinking linking humanity on one side of a dualistic relationship with the natural world being on the other. If this is one of the most serious and detailed research projects on the effect of the current mode of production upon the earth’s biosphere so far, and it is still lacking a biological and sociological dimension, then the rest of the suggestions and remedies being put forward by left, right and centre governments and influencers, are exponentially inadequate. For example, this report paper in its introduction describes it in the following;

“The nine boundaries all represent components of Earth system critically affected by anthropogenic activities and relevant to Earth’s overall state. For each of the boundaries, control variables are chosen to capture the most important anthropogenic influence at the planetary level of the boundary in focus. For example, land system change arises from myriad human activities, ultimately aggregating to alteration of biomes.” (Introduction)

The above extract makes clear that this is an abstract systems approach to the problems the planet and its multifarious life forms now face. The biosphere and the millions of active and interactive species within it are abstractly and mechanistically characterised as “components of Earth’s system”. The effects of elite directed human activity upon soil and its complex living community of organic life existing upon it, in it and under it, from microorganisms, plants, insects, birds, animals and species or fungi is abstractly characterised as land system change. That characterisation misses out the detailed content which is essential for any study of the biosphere. In general, it is necessary to have a detailed understanding of how something complex functions before considering what has gone wrong with it and in this particular case it applies to both the human social system and the biological system upon which it rests. Yet this Potsdam approach has abstracted away both the biological complexity of life on earth (nature) and the social complexity of the hierarchical mass society structure which has historically evolved upon the pre-existing biological structure.

The fact is that these millions of biological, life forms, clustered in the biosphere, by their life cycle processes, have created the oxygen life needs to breathe, and the plant based nutrients which land based species need to digest. These life-forms are not simply passive components of an ‘earth land system’, but active, creative and dynamic biological entities sharing common parts of DNA and other biological cellular elements (similar or almost  identical) with the rest of life on earth – including us! It is also a fact that the social history of the hierarchical mass society system has demonstrated that small oligarchic cliques positioned at the pinnacle of governments, institutions and now firms, have had and still do wield enormous power to start, stop, reward, or punish ideas and actions they prefer or reject. Just consider the glaringly obvious fact that the bulk of their respective citizens are incapable of directly (and also indirectly) seriously altering or halting the policies and actions that these oligarchal elites are implementing. For example, global Stop the War demonstrations of millions were ineffective against the Bush and Blair orchestrated and elite-supported invasion of Iraq.

Just consider how few elite individuals (a dozen or so out of millions of citizens) in the UK that it took during the Covid Pandemic to lock-down most human activity and to enrich themselves by manipulating the purchasing of certain resources. Just think of how few in the Trump controlled White House it took to send troops into States whose citizens did not support Trumps vision of Making America Great Again. Or how the half-dozen or so in the oligarchic Musk-led sub-clique it took to begin firing people on salaried jobs under the pretext of ‘draining the swamp’. and no one in the USA could or would prevent it.

Just consider how few in the Israeli cabinet oligarchy it took to unleash total war and genocide on all Palestinians in retaliation for the Hamas orchestrated armed breakout of Gaza. And remind yourself that no one in the rest of the worlds elite oligarchies could or would even censor the two year crimes against humanity there, let alone stop them. This Potsdam type of abstract systems analysis approach ignores or marginalises all this social and biological reality in the evolution of life in general and in the history of humanity in particular which stands in the way of change. It continues the same trend by adding the following;

“There is an enormous need for civilisation to utilise the biosphere – for food, raw materials and, in future, also for climate protection,” says Fabian Stenzel, lead author of the study and member of the PIK research group Terrestrial Safe Operating Space. “After all, human demand for biomass continues to grow – and on top of that, the cultivation of fast-growing grasses or trees for producing bioenergy with carbon capture and storage is considered by many to be an important supporting strategy for stabilising climate. It is therefore becoming even more important to quantify the strain we’re already putting on the biosphere.” (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.)

And;

“The ocean is becoming more acidic, oxygen levels are dropping, and marine heatwaves are increasing.” (Levke Caesar, co-lead of the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.)

Note that this perspective on the biosphere, whilst not directly co-opting an Abrahamic spiritual anthropocentric creation myth, nevertheless indicates an entirely anthropomorphic and anthropocentric focussed one. It clearly takes for granted a continuation of the ancient ‘god-given’ primacy of the human species to Lord it over (“have dominion over” Gen. 2 v 28) all other species. It also becomes clear that this perspective is not premised upon a fully scientific approach of looking at life on earth, and human history critically or self-critically. Its authors remain content to keep regurgitating a handed down anthropocentric, ideological based approach, to the erosion and destruction of a complex biological system that humanity as a species was only an extremely late evolutionary development from within and has as yet a long way to go before it fully understands its complexity.

Like all the other less systematic dabblers in so-called ‘climate science‘, the Potsdam Initiative is merely using some extra methods borrowed from science – not to understand those social and biological complexities – but to confirm its deeply entrenched Anthropocentric ideology and its commitment to the current capitalist mode of production. In their own words, the Potsdam Initiative is primarily concerned with “human demand for biomass” which is in fact a demand by a certain class within humanity (based in industry, finance and commerce) who are the ones promoting the elites who actually control what is extracted and produced, when it is produced and how much is produced. Consequently the Potsdam team take for granted that the hierarchical mass society system will need to “grow“, at the same time as admitting that the systems existing productive ‘growth’ output has already exceeded six of the nine inorganic boundaries identified by them.

Despite any individual good intentions by its members, the Potsdam Research Institute are effectively becoming a more sophisticated schizophrenia part of a massive science and industry collaboration confidence trick perpetrated by the global economic and political elite. This elite, spread across politics, finance, commerce and industry, have no intention of gelding the golden goose that makes them into billionaires and trillionaire by removing the obstacles to ‘growing the economy’. They have even been persuaded into making suggestions that some selected organic growth will be needed – but only as a supporting strategy – not for the biosphere sake – but for stabilising climate – so that elite humanity can continue to produce for the purpose of continuing to accumulate wealth. The rest of the occupants of the multi-millions of years old, inter-connected and interdependent species created biosphere, are only of limited value to the functioning of the current mode of production based upon capital and extracting surplus-value for the elite. From this narrow hierarchical mass society perspective, based around profit making, ‘life on earth’ has no intrinsic value either to the rest of humanity or to the life-cycles of all the other species inhabiting the biosphere. And the situation is getting worse from month to month as they go on to report Thus;

“The seventh boundary: The latest boundary to be surpassed is ocean acidification, which is closely linked to climate change. The ocean absorbs some of the excess CO 2 in Earth’s atmosphere, which in turn lowers the water’s pH and depletes seawater of certain carbon compounds that corals and other shell-building animals need to construct their protective homes. If the pH gets low enough, those shells and skeletons can dissolve.” (Potsdam Institute. Quoted in ‘Scientific American. 8/10/25.)

Despite, some scientific sounding vocabulary and methodology, the complete lack of an integrated biological understanding of life on earth, as well as the history of the various hierarchical mass society modes of production and the interconnected and inter-dependent links between the two, the members of this research project are destined to be part of the problem facing the future of ‘life on earth’ and are not part of the solution they think they are. The problem is the past and current socio-economic system of humanities relationship to nature and the class-based purpose of its functioning.  In effect these and other reformist efforts are merely attempting to extend the life-span of this unnatural ‘system’ by a few more decades.

It has often been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this road of ever increasing organic and inorganic extraction, production, consumption, waste accumulation and pollution is interspersed on the one hand, with a mixture of high return interest, profits and salaries for some among the elite. On the other hand for the poor and displaced that ‘road’ is increasingly littered with hardship, bad health, devastated communities, depleted environments, polluted air, seas, rivers, lakes, soil, along with extinctions of species essential to maintaining a biosphere suitable for all life, not just the lives of the elite.

The entire history of the hierarchical mass society form of obtaining and managing the necessary cyclical biological processes of Nutrition, cell Metaboloism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A-D) for life in general and humanity in particular, weighs heavily upon the modern generations. The division of our species into ancient hierarchical mass society formations competing with each other for the local, then regional, then international resources of nature has also layered other diversions and divisions upon those original socio-economic divisions. Divisions of class, gender, culture, and religions have become further social manifestations which serve to gloss over the fundamental biological unity of our entire species. These and other socially created and socially reinforced distinctions such as ‘nationality‘ are now being deliberately used to obscure and overlook the long evolutionary history of the Homo sapien species, which whilst mass killing each other nevertheless still shares the same DNA, the same morphological form of body and limb shape, the same blood types and the same higher cortical brain functions.

These undoubted shared biological characteristics and abilities along with common skills and knowledge have been utilised by the elites in these ‘social’ systems to create and promote unnatural social values such as; superiority over equality, violence over nurture, warfare over cooperation, hatred over compassion, genocide over liberation and overproduction over conservation. The hierarchical mass society system has twisted and distorted all the actual and potentially positive attributes of the human species into self-destructive, self-deforming and self-denying tendencies, until even obscene levels of wealth do not bring individual peace and contentment or social acceptance and collective support to the members of them. Despite vast differences in wealth accumulation, loneliness, anxiety, and numerous forms of deprivation are shared universal experiences among young, middle aged and old people of all classes whilst in actual fact they live amid societies of vast numbers and huge wealth accumulations.

Humanity, by its successive hierarchical modes of production has created and progressively locked itself into a social dystopia for itself and at the same time has created the scientific and technical means for achieving a current and future disintegration of significant parts of the earths essential biosphere – not just its climate. Yet the biosphere, which in its fully evolved, species-rich form, is the only system which supports life on earth in general as well all the other species including the human species. How self-destructive is that for a species congratulating itself as being wise? We need to wake up from the soporific lullabies of the elites. Humanity can never support nature or replicate its complex functions. Indeed, it is nature which supports humanity and has done so for millions of years. However, nature can no longer sustain itself and humanity at the levels of extraction and consumption now demanded by the modern hierarchical mass society forms of human aggregation.

Unlike all previous generations of those who have lived within one or other of the successive hierarchical mass societies during the last six or seven thousand years, those born in the 21st century are the first humans who have had access to enough information concerning the biology of life on earth and the socio-economic structure of these hierarchical societies to understand that the hierarchical form of human aggregation and its purpose, elite wealth accumulation, is ultimately incompatible with maintaining a dynamically balanced ecology and biosphere. Previous generations as a whole, took for granted that the earth’s organic material would always renew itself in sufficient quantities and sufficiently rapidly to always be available in whatever amounts humanity wished to extract from it. That is no longer the case.

Sadly, it is the case that only a tiny minority of the worlds citizens are aware of the full extent of the problems facing ‘life on earth’ now and in the future. In fact the vast majority are made up of those who have a) not been able to seriously consider biology, sociology, economics, and the insoluble contradictions inserted between these processes by the hierarchical mass society form; b) those who have dabbled with economics and think all the problems of mass production can be solved once the governance of hierarchical mass societies has been humanely and democratically reformed; c) those with a vested interest in denying that there is an unsolvable problem and that the science and technology of mass production can learn to solve the problems that the science and technology of production has already created. This huge difference in the levels of global understanding means that the combined inertia of a, b, and c, citizen categories is unlikely to support the adoption of any radical measures, to slow down or stop the continuous extraction, production, consumption, and destruction of organic species and inorganic materials before all of the above noted nine boundaries have been irretrievably crossed.

However, if the reader on examination and reflection of this article and the recent articles on this blog and in my forthcoming book ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future), accept in part or whole, the diagnosis and prognosis presented within them, there is no need to despair or abandon hope and do nothing. The fact of life on earth existing, in any of its initial bacterial forms getting started and becoming Eukaryotic and multi-cellular in the wake of the post-primal volcanic, gaseous, condition of the cooling planet we call earth, was far more unlikely of success than a tiny minority of those of us with a Giaia-centric perspective eventually influencing the rest of the planets citizens. Yet life, faced with those hot-house and turbulent impediments, did get started and after billions of years of existence and evolution now clings on whilst self-replicating and evolving in practically every available hot, cold, wet or dry, light or dark nook and cranny possible.

If that is insufficiently convincing for you, the reader, to remain actively supportive, of changing humanities over extraction and over-production, over-poluting way of living, then how about reminding yourself that you (like all mammals, etc.) in all your wonderful complexity and amazing skill levels started off as just one almost invisible biological cell (ovum) which had been impregnated by a microscopically tiny sperm cell and then; against all the internal challenges facing your undiferentiated and differentiated form in the womb of your mother and later through the ups and downs of childhood and adulthood, until there you are now at this moment reading these words. The biology of life on earth, across all species from the tiniest to the largest, of which you are an example, is amazing and persistent; isnt it?

And is it not time that the idea of life on earth – as a reflection of the whole biosphere reality – is also promoted by members of the only fully conscious species – us? So no matter how few of us keep persistently reminding others of the need to change our relationship to nature and why we should do so, we do know that persistence can eventually prevail. Improving the chances that humans can once again become ecologically compatible with the rest of the millions of amazing species existing within the earth’s biosphere cannot be written off just because the vast majority of those around us have not fully understood the biology of nature or the existential dangers to it that some economic systems of humanity have created and are therefore currently motivated differently than ourselves.

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2025)

I wish to apologise to my readers for the fact that I have been unable to access my editing process on this blog site for some days now. Consequently I have been unable to correct a number of typos and reduce paragraphs which were too long. I have consulted WordPress help line and they have suggested a number of things to try, but so far nothing has worked. So I will keep trying but in the mean time please bear with me.

Roy (2/10/25)

Everywhere on the left, even the so-called revolutionary left, all that agitates them recently concerning the socio-economic condition of the mass of the human species and its place within nature are demands for workers rights, some limited protections for the environment and the social need for a ‘just green transition’ between what the current socio-economic system is now doing to people, the environment and climate and what is vaguely imagined to be preferable in the future. The idea of revolution has disappeared! The multiple problems experienced by life on earth in all its forms have been reduced or redacted by most levels of ‘official’ anthropocentric reasoning to monitoring and controlling the average global temperature rise and catastrophe planning to cope with adverse weather patterns. Its as if most ‘experts’ believe that regulating and controlling these two or three particular symptoms – within certain limits – by means of governmental ‘reform agreements’ will solve, the multitude of problems facing humanity and the rest of the natural world. This belief is clearly nonsense for the obvious reason that next to nothing has been done to seriously limit these symptoms in the last decade or so.

Yet for several decades, the problem facing ‘life on earth’ from industrial production in general has been known and particularly in some key areas for much longer. Moreover, it has also been known for decades that the numerous United Nations and other quango ‘agreements’ to limit any form of human activity which is profitable for elites (trafficking, extracting, polluting, forest clearing etc) are at best sham paper-shuffling, resolution-voting, ways of pretending to be doing something practical whilst doing very little. Allowing the powerful financial, economic and military elites, to carry on ‘business as usual’ has long been the guiding principle. To provide a more existential example, the agreements entered into after the Second World War, to limit the ability of national elites to conduct offensive wars in general and genocide in particular, were flouted within weeks if not days of signing those ‘solemn’ declarations. Horrific wars in Biafra, Korea, Vietnam, Palestine, etc, etc, and crimes against humanity plus genocides (i.e. the systematic killing by weapons and starvation of non-combatant men, women and children) ever since, have been funded and supplied by the elites of all the national signatures to these ‘solemn’ agreements.

The latest most obvious, blatant and open disregard for the international ‘agreement’ to prohibit ‘genocide’, for example, has been allowed to take place by Israel, uninterrupted by official protests and unhindered by an insufficient stockpile of lethal weapons to conduct it with. Indeed, Israel has been aided and supplied with war material by practically every advanced capitalist country in Europe and North America. If governmental agreements not to allow the mass extermination of a whole people – members of our own species – have been largely ignored in 2024 and 2025, by powerful ‘business as usual’ elites, then it is not surprising that government agreements to reduce fossil fuel emissions, carbon footprints and species extinctions have been largely ignored over the last decades and continue to be ignored daily in 2025. However, don’t just trust my assertion on this particular issue, read the following.

“…the production level now planned by the governments of 20 major greenhouse gas emitters, according to the 2025 Production Gap Report, published this week by the Stockholm Environment Institute, Climate Analytics, and International Institute for Sustainable Development. Official targets for coal, oil and gas production in 2030 total 120% more than the 1.5ºC allows and 77% more than is consistent with a 2.0ºC increase in the global average temperature.” (This and further extracts, printed in Climate & Capitalism. 27/9/25.)

Moreover, since such information is not too hard to find it would take a gullible sycophant, a determined climate assassin, or a completely naive climate activist to pretend that his or her local, regional, national or even international climate conference attendence and solemnly agreed resolutions are worth campaigning for and wasting energy upon. However, as noted earlier, these three categories of hopeful’s (gullible, naive, and climate assassinating industries) are not the only ones bestowing credibility on pro-capitalist elites and urging we spend energy and time requesting that ‘business as usual’ governments implement action on this environmental and other important social issues. The real-world acceptance, implicitly, if not explicitly characterised, in any left concept of demanding workers rights and suggesting care for the environment, from such governmental elites is that these ‘lefts’ simply accept a world where it has become ‘normal’ that such system ruling elites are in control of the socio-economic system, and where it is ‘normal’ that they determine who has rights or not and of what these ‘rights’ actually comprise. In view of the magnitude and mass of the multiple problems, it is worth asking; Whatever happened to the idea of revolution?

However, even the concept of ‘rights’ uttered by left thinkers is utterly false. In fact what they are refering to are not ‘rights’, they are in fact temporary privileges granted to some citizens of hierarchical mass societies, but not to all. Furthermore, they are privileges which over centuries have ebbed and flowed in tempo with the circumstances and moods of the elites in control of hiearchical mass societies. Currently, depending upon which elite rule over them, many millions of people have no right to a job, no right to a decent house, no right to say what they think and in any declared war zone no right to expect to live unmolested by guns, bombs, shells or missiles. A harsh look at global humanity, reveals the fact that ordinary citizens of most countries have almost no rights, they are either the intended or unintended victims of their own elites policy decisions or those of some other rival elites. Historically, having a job, having the right to a decent house, having the right to say what they think and the right to live have been consistently denied to all but the ruling elites. Within the dawn of settled agricultural mass societies, at best even the right to relocate were temporary privileges, not available to many human beings in ancient communities and again in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although some of these privileges were granted to many (but not all) after the Second World War, these privileges have simply been progressively removed by the new class of elites who replaced the previous retired or deceased class.

Lest we forget, it is necessary to occasionally remind ourselves what happened to the ordinary people in 20th century Bosnia, South Africa, Gaza, Ukraine and many other places when all the temporary privileges (fraudulently described as human rights) apparently granted to all citizens by the so-called declaration of human rights in 1945 and those in the UN charters. They simply vanished. Moreover, the historical record confirms that these instances and many others, were nothing new. From the 17th century on such restrictions, caused peasant uprisings and revolutionary upsurges in towns and cities. Things had got so bad for workers in the 19th century that an International Organisation for workers (The First Internationa) was founded by English workers in 1863. The first of its provisional rules declared;

“That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes, means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule.” (Written by Marx in 1864.)

Note well that although revolution was not specifically mentioned in that quote, the ’emancipation of the working classes’ and ‘the abolition of all class rule’ implied an actual revolution as did the actions of the French Revolutionaries and other European Middle Classes in their particular struggles against the rule of Fuedal Aristocracy. Indeed the struggle of the European settlers in the American Colonies to be emancipated from European Monarchical domination and rule, took on an overtly revolutionary form. The rising bourgeoisie througout Europe and the Americas, constantly asserted their right to overthrow the reactionary and oppressive ancient regimes who oppressed their citizens and stood in the way of changing the existing mode of production which had long been favoured by the aristocratic classes. Indeed the Declaration of Independence issued by the North American colonists in 1776 summarised the principles the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie revolutionaries at the time held deeply and articulated clearly. They wrote;

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inaliable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it and institute new Government , ones that seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

It is clear from this declaration of American ‘independence’ that although the purposes of altering and abolishing destructive governments was specifically addressed by a particular class of men to a particular class of Men only, the drafters of this Declaration clearly considered that the People as a whole had the right to abolish governments and institute new ones in such forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Thus the modern concept of the governed having the moral right to overthrow reactionary and dangerous forms of government – whether this ‘right’ was enshrined in law or not – was established as long as 300 plus years ago. So what has happened to this moral right to overthrow destructive governments and to revolutionise how societies are constituted, when even modern self-declared ‘revolutionaries’ can only rhetorically demand that workers should be exploited slightly less severely than in the past and in effect beg cap in hand for ‘just climate’ transitions for the lowest paid? These are little more than tepid suggestions made to the very elite governments which are removing previous social privileges, trashing climates and eliminating wholesale, plant and insect species that are scientifically known to be essential to the survival of all species – including the human species. What more ‘destruction‘ will it take for citizens to draw clear revolutionary conclusions?

In the 21st century the planet we occupy along with the billions of species we share it with and whose combined species efforts make its air habitable, its water potable and its plants edibly nutritious, is faced with far more existential threats (climate change, air, sea, river, lake and sea pollution, soil contamination, mass insect and forest destruction, wars involving weapons of mass destruction, and the genocidal elimination of whole peoples) than our ancestors of two or more generations ago were faced with in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. And yet these 17th and 18th century characters – not facing air, water and sea pollution, or weapons of mass destruction from their ruling elites – still saw the need to overthrow their Fuedal Aristocratic elites, and an assortment of Monarchical Dictators and duly announced to the human species, the moral right to revolt against governments that were destructive of Life, Liberty and Happiness.

Yet now in the 21st century the current multiple existential threats to all higher (and lower) forms of biological species, including our own, can only stimulate politically sterile dogma and sectarian posturing among the so-called anti-capitalist radicals. These barren histrionics are taking place alongside feeble demands from left, right and centre conservative liberals (echoed by some anti-capitalist left) for the return of a few paltry privileges for workers (such as minimum wages) from an armed and autocratic elite who are hell bent on not only exploiting and exhausting the working classes, in order to accumulate even more wealth than they already have, whilst doing the same to the millions of species which by their multifarious biological (N-M-G-R + A-D) processes are the only global entities which are keeping this planet habitable.

I suggest there is now a general chasm of ignorance across a whole spectrum of anthropocentric intellectual elites from left, right and centre political persuasions, to the fact that It is not politics which determine socio-economic developments within hierarchical mass societies. That is merely how it appears to those who have only a superficially grasp of the relationship of reality to ideas and that includes most, if not all, of the anti-capitalist left. These ideologies are only intellectual representations of real world ‘objects’ and ‘relationships’, and these representations are only as accurate as the process of forming them from the study of real world objects and relationships. It should be obvious that any half-hearted, poorly conducted or second hand study of any aspect of reality will only result in half -baked ideas, poorly understood relationships and second hand opinions irrespective of whether or not they are claimed to be factually true. And sadly second and even third-hand is all that the working and oppressed people are getting from the intellectual classes as yet. The evidence for this assertion is overwhelming. The analysis and proposals for stabilising just one symptom of many – climate change – is such a case in point.

It is not politics which determines the means of production, it is the means of production which determine politics. In reality it is socio-economic developments around the social acquisition of (N-M-G-R + A-D) biological processes of living which are determining politics and more specifically the class composition of these social modes of production which are determining the type, function and intensity of the politics variously championed.

In non-crisis periods of socio-economic development, the politics of modern hierarchical mass societies, have assumed a more liberal and flexible appearance. However,  in socio-economic crisis periods, hierarchical politics re-assumes the authoritarian postures that had been adopted and practiced during the initial ancient and subsequent colonialist stages of mass society formation and whenever they were threatened in the past. The First and Second World Wars are outstanding examples. They were initiated by allied groups of European hierarchical mass societies which were experiencing economic, financial and social crises of considerable magnitudes. That is to say in crisis they dispensed with civilities and resurrected a held in reserve politics and practice of aggressive over-acquisition, overproduction and over consumption, of the planets biological resources needed for all forms of life on earth. Indeed, over extraction and over-consumption was not only continued but substantially accelerated after the World War using war stimulated advances in science and technology.

It is now clear to all who seriously think about it, that the fundamental biological requirements for all biological organisms to survive and evolve are to ensure that the resources needed for the Nourishment – Metabolic Growth – Reproduction – Ageing – Death, biologically determined processes (N-M-G-R + A-D) are extracted from the rest of nature and consumed. However, with regard to class based wealth accumulating mass societies, the extraction of these natural resources has been exponentially expanded throughout the entire history of hierarchical mass societies. This unnecessary level of extraction has been done in order to satisfy the ever expanding needs and ever growing greeds of the privileged elites, who are neither embarrassed by the excesses of the palatial abodes they live in, the luxurious garments and jewelry they wear, or the lavish banquets, commodities and energy sources they consume daily. Now they are not embarrassed by owning private Rockets for pleasure trips into Space, owning entire Islands, gaining massive investment profits without lifting a finger and owning multiple mansions, while millions of their own species expire in shacks or cardboard boxes and while children are trafficked for sexual gratification by elites.

Nor do they really care about the welfare of of any other species either. However, it is now clear that these 20th and 21st century examples of over consumption and (rampant species elimination) excesses have exceeded all previous centuries, but are still clearly insufficiently obscene to stimulate anything other than more greed by the wealthy, the most timid and respectful middle-class left requests for workers rights to be respected and just transitions to be tentatively urged. Transitions to what? Very few advocates of future change mention ‘change to what – exactly’. The exceptions being those ‘socialists’ who think that Russia and China offer a ‘imaginary’ green future promoted by the 20th century state capitalist practices advocated by Lenin and Mao and which are totally outmoded ideas bearing no relevance to addressing the crisis of over extraction, overproduction, over-consumption and over pollution. Such 20th century middle-class revolutionaries were revolutionary in name only, politically they were reformist and merely reformed hierarchical mass societies slightly by continuing with wage labour, state oppression, and industrial level mass commodity production, whilst replacing the previous managerial class by themselves.

These were 19th and 20th century men whose actual ideas and practices cared neither for humane or ecological sentiments but cared primarily for obtaining political and social power and for promoting higher and higher levels of production and consumption including planned over-consumption in order to fund state armies, bureaucracies and thought police to ensure political correctness conformity of the masses to the appointed Fuhrer or Commisar. Despite the steady falling apart of the latest anthropocentric empire of neo-liberal Finance and Commodity mass production, the sociological system of hierarchical mass societies, is nearing its end. Its system of social production, accelerated by electrical and nuclear power driven science and technology in the modern era has run into the biological buffered limits of natures ability to reproduce fast enough. The combined biological reproduction capacity of all the species which make up and construct the biological fabric of the earths biosphere is being outpaced by inorganic sources of energy and machinery, nevertheless, the biosphere is the ONLY place were life on earth can actually survive.

Yet despite this logical possibility, now moving toward a probability, it is undeniable that the left revolutionary bourgeois and petite-bourgeois ideas of the 17th 18th 19th and 20th centuries are dead even if some of their deceased exponents have been chiselled into stone statues or their conceptual output embalmed in literary protective bandages by a few historians and sectarian/dogmatic disciples. This literary embalming has been done in order to preserve their decayed corpus and tattered reminiscences, but there can be no actual resurrection of this particular tradition as a motive for reviving the moral right of human beings to resist destruction and replace their form of socio-economic aggregation to a constructive one. The task facing concerned humanity in the 21st society is to grasp the new biological reality which was hidden beneath a mixture of inevitable scientific ignorance and the domination of sociological and religious anthropocentic intellectualism. Both of which effectively reinforced the outmoded view that the human species was the ultimate form of species evolution and master of all it surveyed, whether this survey was by the naked eye or by the most advanced form of optical or electrical instruments.

The demise of the revolutionary tradition among the left, if not the death of this tradition altogether by its former adherents, has also consistently demonstrated the failure to fully understand the socio-economic advances made by 19th century anthropocentric economists such as Adam Smith and revolutionary-humanists such as Karl Marx. Throughout my sixty plus years of acquaintance with radical left politics from inside, and more frequently from outside of their sectarian and dogmatic groups, I have yet to come across any member at any level of their leadership ranks who have actually read and sufficiently understood, Marx’s major writings on Economics and Politics. I can therefore concur with Marx, that Marx was definitely not a ‘Marxist’ as he declared in writing before his death in the late 19th century. Having read practically all the volumes of Lenin and Trotsky I can also verify that their familiarity with Marx was far from complete, despite the acclaim of a few of their remaining contemporary disciples. I have published a book ‘Revolutionary-Humanism and the Anti-capitalist Struggle’ (available as a free download on this blog) outlining the extensive evidence drawn from their own writings which convinced me of that conclusion. It was a conclusion also later confirmed by a detailed study of the policies they advocated during their leadership of the Soviet Union from 1917 to their deaths, Lenin in 1920 and Trotsky in 1928.

What remains as counter productive resistance to the savage contradictions of the hierarchical mass society system, now dominated by the capitalist mode of production in the 21st century, are the futile extremes of political and religious forms of violence and idealistic reformism, none of which can fully understand let alone solve these socio-biological contradictions for they are systemically linked and built into the socio-economic organisation of such societies. For example, one recent anthropocentric left reformist writer asserted that;

“The struggle for socialism is not merely about a person or group fighting for power — it is a moral and human emancipatory project. The way one fights for socialism has a connection to the kind of world one wants to build. Socialism has an ethical dimension that should be up front — human solidarity, not destruction, and the reduction of brutality wherever possible. We believe, like Gramsci, that socialism is mainly won by consent, education, and revolutionary mass engagement to qualitatively transform the economy — not by self-appointed violent actors…”

Note in this purely sociological and partial analysis, that there is not even a passing reference to the rapidly deteriorsting condition of the biological and inorganic sources of everything that allows humanity to write such half thought out abstractions as well as to survive each day in a reasonable state of health. That assertion establishes that in the mind of the author, whatever this socialist project involves in its socio-economic detail, its essence and focus will be nothing more than, a self-centred moral and human emancipatory project. In other words the guiding intellectual thought processes are set firmly in the top-down anthropocentric paradigm. Even more arrogantly, the authors of this piece, not the people themselves, have already decided what the future form of human society will be categorised as (i.e. socialism) and what its fundamental,purpose will be. This would be neither democratic, nor revolutionary, for in the absence of any form of description of what is intended by ‘socialism’ it can only consist of the reform of an existing hierarchical mass society model, with all that that entails in terms of extracting from nature enough organic and inorganic resources to ensure the survival of these mass socialist societies. Once again this anthropocentric sociological framework has failed to take into account the most fundamental process underpinning all life on earth – the (N-M-G-R +A-D) Nutritional and Reproductive rhythms, their ultimate limits and inevitable outcomes if the social production of combined humanity continues to exceed the biological reproduction processes of life on this single planet – earth!

A further inadequacy of all varieties of anthropocentic ideologies and science has been an inability to understand and explain how one of the most fertile and sophisticated biological species transitions in the reproductive biology of species (the generalised male and female gender differentation) has led to a transition – under the hierarchical mass society system of humans – from female centred human societies to male centred human societies. In no other species has such a transition occurred. There are examples of biological reproduction, which do not involve sexual reproduction, but in which reproductive replication is achieved by means of cellular Mitosis, in which cell reproduction produces two sets of; DNA, organelles, cytoplasm and cell membrane material and in which two cells are created out of one, so that each cell receives an almost identical set of chromosomes. Thus ensuring that genetic stability, if not identity is maintained across generations. However, in sexual reproduction two phases of cell division occur which result in four cells develop each with just one copy of each chromosome. Subsequently copies of each male and female chromosomes are crossed over which create new combinations of DNA code. On fertilisation, these (haploid) cells are fused to form a zygote cell containing two copies of each chromosome, and the rest of this amazing process is also biology not god-ology.

The interesting and relevant part of this biologically determined sexual process for understanding the connection between biological reproduction and and social living is revealed by the fact that when reproductive cycles for many animals, including humans, occurr in periods of very low nutrition (N) intake, female ovulation can be suspended. Successful Ovulation and thus successful reproduction (R) is unsurprisingly dependent upon adequate prior nutrition as well as successful sexual intercourse. Such ovulation suspension – as a modern symptom – emerged in some post-war western societies when young women practically starved themselves in order to stay or become slim and thus their bodies ceased to ovulate and consequently they could not conceive. At the time in the UK this symptom was popularly known as ‘slimmers disease’. In the 1960’s this same phenomenon was investigated in reverse by a husband and wife medical team who studied a hunter-gather people in Africa. They had already established that the act of breast-feeding nutrition to a new born baby (N) (i.e. lactation) was roughly seven times less efficient than internal placental feeding of the unborn baby and that this extra effort after neonate birth reduced the level of female nutrition. This reduction in nutrition effectively reduced the frequency of ovulation and thus prevented pregnancy for a considerable period by any sexually active women.

However, the researchers found that when the same hunter-gatherer communities partly changed their mode of production and their females began to regularly include milk from cattle in their ongoing diet, the fact that their nutrition level went significantly higher due to milk enhanced nutrition (N) meant that their breast feeding did not reduce or suppress ovulation. Therefore, instead of just one pregnancy and one baby/toddler occurring for most women, they were then having multiple babies and at more frequent birth intervals. This increase of neonate care increasing from one infant to two, three or even four, (babies and toddlers) then made female gathering and other socio-economic activities more difficult for those females to take important or leading parts in non-reproductive community activities. Consequently their socio-economic status and dependency (particularly on men) for their own nutrition (N) supply was altered to their disadvantage. Since it was established earlier in this article (and elsewhere) that life on earth in all its bio-chemical and biological species forms adheres to a sequential process of obtaining the following biological phases for its existence; Nutrition, cell Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death, abbreviated as (N-M-G-R + A-D) then clearly some of these phases of individual and species survival are not optional or variable but imperative.

If it was the case that in many places, the nutritional benefits of agriculture over hunter-gathering raised the average female birthrates and frequency of conception, then it raises the folowing intriguing question. If the process of female reproductive biologically (R) was as similar in the ancient past as it was across two continents (Africa and Europe) in the 1960’s, then at least this socio-biological factor – amongst any other possible – contributing factors might have, or perhaps must have, had some bearing on explaining how women in crossing over to such transitional modes of production became variably subordinate to men in both nutritional/economic affairs and also with regards to other social and religious activities. That the almost universal female matrififocal and matrilineal biological principles were subsumed and reversed into the male patrifocal and patrilineal principles at some time in the past is indisputable from the amount of evidence of mother figurines, the proliferation of female goddesses, female place and day names, continued matrilineality within recorded ancient times and of course the crucial, irreplaceable species role of female biology itself.

The the effects of the transition between hunter-gatherer based socio-biological communities to agriculturally based socio-biological communities was certainly substantial and its effects could not have been anything but profound. The socio-economic transition to settled agriculture was certainly profound enough to eventually initiate continual monument building, to institute routine forms slavery, to professionalise warfare in a systemic pattern and conjour up entirely new mass (Abrahamic) religions and spread them widely; so subordinating the socio-biological role of the female of our species to a status below that of men can be considered as just yet another anthropocentric ‘brick in the wall’ of so-called civilisation. Aside from creative imagination and mystical speculation, what else apart from what we eat, how we obtain it and how we biologically reproduce, could be significant enough in the bio-chemical process of life on earth, to alter how people relate and behave socio-economically?

The dominant anthropocentric ideological frameworks, whether, secular or religious (and their subdivisions into different religions, ethnicities,  nationalities,  classes or political ideologies),   have never been able or willing to detail or resolve the inhuman and unnatural contradictions that have accompanied this form of human ecological and biological existence. This applies to even the most modern radical anti-capitalist knowledge frameworks, such as anarchism, communism, Marxism or Feminism. The revolutionary-humanism of Karl Marx came closest to unravelling the mystery of how surplus value was differently extracted from the labouring classes, during changes to the modes of production, from slavery, to peasantry and from tied peasants to wage-slavery. However, even with Marx, the absolute reliance of the social history of humanity upon nature and humanities exaggerated capability over the biological evolution of life in general was never fully explored or sufficiently understood. Indeed, the nature of interactive links between the two aspects of life on earth were viewed in reverse order: man first, nature second.

Thus the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking for millenia has focussed primarily on promoting and realising sociological forms of human organisation and then intellectually fitting biologically based nature, into those abstract and idealised sociological parameters. The alternative of understanding the biological processes of nature (N-M-G-R + A-D) and adapting the social practices of humanity to conform to the reproductive biological rythmns and practices which nature had evolved over billions of years a species collective which nurtures and protects all life on earth, was never even considered. There was neither sufficient accumulated knowledge and understanding of cellular biology, nor of the depth, breadth and numerical mass of species making up the integrated, inter-dependent matrix of the planets evolving biosphere, to arrive at such far reaching and truly revolutionary conclusions.

The social revolution now required for humanity to cease its biological warfare of over-extraction against nature and therefore its war against it’s own biological support foundations, does not require political action or a political revolution. Politics is intentionally elitist and has long been part of the problem for humanity not part of the solution. The solution is for humanity to begin – in as many ways as possible – a revolutionary return to living cooperatively and sustainably, in large or small groups, with all the species of life in the complex, species-rich biosphere of our unique and amazing planet. Revolutions in species behaviour are not top-down projects of elite imposition, but begin like nature with small sustained bottom up activities. Life on earth does not function like sociological think tanks having endless top-down discussions involving all-embracing grand ideas and then hoping to force other species to implement them.

Roy Ratcliffe ((October 2025)