critical-mass.net

TOWARD A NEW RENAISSANCE?
In a previous article entitled ‘Reality versus Ideology’ (Part 4), I suggested that Marxism was a failed 20th century Renaissance of anthropocentric thinking; that Marx and his ‘Marxist’ followers, had failed to go beyond the dominant anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. I had also insufficiently situated this suggestion within the wider context of what has become known as the Western European concept of Renaissance. This was a shift in thinking and doing which occurred at the end of the Middle Ages. More specifically from around the 14th century and continued for another three centuries until the 17th century, with its effects lasting well beyond the 17th century. This particular shift in thinking came after a period in Western Europe in which hierarchical mass societies had long been dominated by clerical elites who were allied with and often official members of the Roman Catholic version of monotheism.

The conquest and expansion of the countries and regions of the Middle and Near East and Europe by the Roman Empire, had all but eliminated the previous influence of the original hierarchical mass societies of that entire region. Among the relative few of the elites who could read and write, the knowledge of Greek, Persian and Egyptian intellectual traditions (philosophy, literature, art, architecture, history and democratic politics) had been largely swept aside by the rise of the Roman Empire and the imposition of its culture. This particular renaissance comprised of the active pursuit of all this ‘lost’ or ‘neglected’ information and knowledge assumptions developed before the common era (BCE). That Renaissance is considered to have begun in the Republic of Florence in Italy, at the end of late middle ages, and took the form of an intellectual movement of rediscovery and revival of what became known as the acheivements of classical antiquity.

It was primarily an intellectual movement whose effects were felt for far longer than 15th and 16th centuries, and was characterized by the European rediscovery and revival of the literary, philosophical, and artistic achievements accruing during the esrlier period of classical antiquity. This renaissance period was also associated with great changes in art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and technology. Although this Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence, then spread to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe. The importance of this Renaissance, from a modern revolutionary-humanist perspective is that it marked the beginning of a distinct break between religiously imposed ideologies and a move to secular based understandings of life on earth. The core of this shift in understanding is perhaps best intellectually understood as an amalgamation of the Roman concept of ‘humanitas’ and the rediscovery of the classical Greek philosopher Protagorus (490 BCE to 420 BCE), who had proposed that it was not the gods, who were the measure of all things, but had asserted that; “man is the measure of all things”.

In other words the idea that contemporary ‘humanity’ was the important ‘influencers’ and the ‘central’ actors of life on earth, was competing with religious ideology, which considered it was god. We can imply from this evidence that during the time of Protagorus, Greek Intellectual development was already firmly lodged in the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. This literary evidence suggests that elite, self-gratification and self-congratulatory narcissism was circulating on a continuous, self-sustaining, feedback loop. Although much in nature had been studied during the classical Greek period, the full complexity and sophisticated species integration over billions of years of bio-chemical and biological developments had not registered in even a modest inkling way among the most profound thinkers. This abscence occurred not because Greek intellectuals were not highly intelligent, but because they and their social system lacked the accumulated evidence, along with appropriate tools and instruments to view life on earth beyond the external surface impressions.

Knowledge and understanding in any epoch is not only or simply a product of individualised talent and persistence, but a product of combined social and technological development across many disciplines. Such developments were accompanying the progress of the capitalist mode of production, which began in merchant capitalist forms, around the sea bound trade of Fuedal agricultural hierarchical mass societies. (The ancient maritime trade around the Mediterranean Sea had been significantly expanded beyond the straits of Gibraltar and countries were by then exporting surplus products across multiple tracts of water to numerous destinations.) This ‘expansion’ of trade required and produced an associated expansion of thinking and contemplation. Although, unintended this practical economic inter-change dragged along with it numerous unintended consequences and one of them was the fact that this renaissance had moved the focus of knowledge and understanding from the imaginary mystical and invisible ‘spiritual’ realm controlled by priestly access, toward the realm of the actual and daily visible, controlled by the rising merchant elites.

This alternative elite perspective represented a considerable advance in critical thinking. I should of course make clear that I am using the term Renaissance in the sense of representing a significant paradigm shift in the dominant orientation (or assumed intellectual axis) around which the intellectual understanding of ‘life on earth’ pivots or orbits. For significant sectors of the populations, that pivot had ceased to be solely God and God’s will, but trade (with Gods blessing) and trade whether blessed or not was gradually winning. Real conversations about communities trade relationships were regularly occuring at least six days a week, whilst imaginary conversations about communities relationships with someone invisible continued to relegated to a Saturday or Sunday Sabbath.

Even with fear and subservience imposed by the governing elite side, at a ratio of six to one, the odds were not in god’s or his self-appointed bishopric intermediaries, favour. Moreover, after the European Renaissance, knowledge and understanding could in future be increasingly based upon the reality of life on earth. By means of careful analysis, detailed evidence gathering and experimental confirmation, rather than relying on naive beliefs borrowed wholesale from ancient, supposedly-non-human ‘sacred’ scrolls or books, reality could be pursued with reasonably accurate understandings, if not the fraudulent absolute truths presented at Saturday or Sunday sermons,by men in fancy robes and gilded replicas of shepherds staffs.

The Renaissance’s intellectual basis was founded intellectually on a version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who had written that “man is the measure of all things”. It is important to note that Protagorus was a pre-Socratic intellectual thinker within Greece, which as far as we know, also predates the full development of the Abrahamic monotheisms which matured within the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. At that stage in the historical development of the hierarchical mass society aggregation of humanity, man in the abstract was already being elevated into the pre-eminent aspect of life on earth and the imaginary top-god (Zeus) was in the process of, or had already been, divorced from his goddess partner (Athena) and family of gods and goddesses; had been removed from his residence on mount Olympus and allegedly had been given a refuge somewhere way up high beyond the clouds. So it turns out that the early pre-socratic belief in the unique central placement of human beings which was culturally set within the pre-monotheistic religious universal spiritual order headed by Zeus and the anthromophrphic family of gods and goddesses, had only been a temporary unsatisfactory myth and needed it’s own socio-evolutionary updating.

It was only later, after the establishment of the Abrahamic trio of monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), that this was also found unsatisfactory and that the consequent human grandeur and dignity of the ancient period needed to be resurrected by the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, in his ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’. These successive adaptations and departures from the framework of mystical belief had previously laid down the foundational myths of the later monotheistic patriarchal abrahamic trio of Judsism, Christianity and Islam. All three of which continued to adhere to the central part of the anthropocentric patriarchal man-centred tradition, which had imagined a fundamental, intellectual bifurcation between humanity and nature. The result of this estrangement of humanity from nature being imagined as life on earth comprising of two distinct and opposed realms of material reality; social reality and biological reality. This intellectual bifurcation still dominates and still awaits it’s own renaissance. The common reality of the bio-chemical basis of all life on earth – in all their manifest biological species forms – had not yet entered the 19th century peripheral vision of humanities intellectual contemplation, let alone become a central focus of it.
Biology at the sophisticated and complex cellular level along with the evolution of species functions and forms was then in its early, socio-biological, stuttering steps, and still remains so in many places. However, in the 19th century, alongside the development of the capitalist mode of production, a broader but still limited form of renaissance in thinking, was taking place. The philosopher Hegel, for example, had pioneered and developed an ideological dialectical approach to critical thinking to replace the ideological dualism of religious forms of belief. Contradictions between things were not just fixed and final opposed categories (dualisms), but changing and evolving categories that could transform themselves or be transformed into their opposites and even into entirely different forms or categories (dialectics). A seed could sprout and become a flower or edible plant, etc. Karl Marx, as a young Hegelian student and in conjunction with Ludwig Feuerbach, inverted Hegel’s dialectical idealism into a materialist dialectic of thinking about religion and life on earth.

However, despite a perceptive observation by Feuerbach, Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanism and materialist dialectic never escaped from within the dominant anthropocentric paradigm of all hitherto thinking. It is worth considering this insight by Feuerbach for although Marx was full of admiration and praise for Feuerbach and wrote a letter to him saying so, Marx never took the following observation any further. Feuerbach wrote the following in a book entitled ‘The Essence of Christianity’;

“The doctrine of the Creation sprang out of Judsism; indeed, it is the characteristic, the fundamental doctrine of the Jewish religion. The principle which lies at its foundation is, however, not so much the principle of subjectivity as of egoism. The doctrine of the Creation in its characteristic significance arises only on that stand-point where man in practice makes Nature merely the servant of his will and needs, and hence in thought also degrades it to a mere machine, a product of the will.” (‘The Essence of Christianity’. F. Feuerbach. Chapter 11. Emphasis added. RR.)

In that one short paragraph by Feuerbach is summarised not only the essence of Christianity and the essence of Judaism and all other monotheisms, but also the essence of the transition from previous hunter-gatherer biologicaly based aggregations of human communities, to socially based aggregations of aggriculturally organised human communities. The social organisation of Agriculture is the means and practice where humans consistently attempt and partially succeed, to make ‘Nature the servant of their needs and will’. Within settled agricultural communities, the relationship between humanity and Nature was no longer viewed as humans being part of the sum total of all biological life on earth, but humanity ebotistically and narcisistically imagined as a superior natural species which had been given dominion over nature (by an imaginary spiritual man-like creater-being) as an exclusive resource to be used and fashioned according to the will and wishes of the human species.

It is a commonly held assumption that ‘things’, including ‘species’ must have an origin, but this assumption, lodged within the neo-cortical regions of the religious and anthropocentric mind-set is frequently firmly attached to the concept of a ‘creative force’, which itself is based upon the centrality of anthropocentric thinking. Humanity itself exerts a creative force by making things out of the materials available in nature and so the idea of ‘creative force’ has widespread relevance and accuracy, but ‘creation’ is clearly not a universal phenomenon and this applies to the realm of biological and chemical forces. The atomic or molecular particles of two (or more) inert inorganic materials combining naturally can create a new material or release the energy which binds these molecular structures together. Gunpowder is a mixture of substances which under certain external circumstances can explode; baking bread is a mixture of inorganic ingredients which under the right external circumstances can become a form of delicious nutrition, and those are only two of the many thousands of things that have an origin without having a creator, that the discipline of chemistry deals with.

The human bakers, wine-makers, explosives manufacturers don’t actually create the results they desire, they just arrange the materials and conditions which the facilitate the results of natural interactions on a regular and controlled basis. If someone does not comprehend that ‘nature’ has it’s own source of creative force in the movement of the solar system’s planetary bodies and the energy contained within its solid, gaseous and liquid elements, then it cannot be surprising that to them nature, in all its manifest, complex and aesthetically pleasing appearances, must have had an origin and also an intelligent creator of that origin. However, if someone understands that natural substances themselves contain material forms and forms of energy that making cakes or wine out of some of them only requires the mixing of them under the right circumstances to turn the semi-liguid ingredient slush into my favourite date and walnut cake, or turns the not very appetising liquid mixture into a delicious red wine, then the understanding of reality abandons its child like innocence and imagination and becomes deepened by an adult level of understanding. Since life on earth pre-dates the origin of the human species by millions or even billions of years, the only other further intellectual hurdle the adult needs to make to eliminate the need for a human or super-human mixer of such ingredients, to be the force to change the ingredient form into another a more useful or pleasant form.

That intellectual hurdle was provided by the concept of evolutionary adaptation and change measured by the duration of changes by the invention of a standard known as time. If existing potentionaly active materials and energy forms can be combined under the right circumstances of heat, pressure, time and mixture to form useful new properties can these circumstances occur naturally without the existence of conscious intelligent external creative force? This is where evolutionary theory, provides a more realistic, plausible and natural explanation for life on earth than the imaginary invention of an invisible, male-like God, that wishes life into being and is still keeping an eye on things here on earth. Instead, during the billions of years that the hot gaseous planets circulating the sun cooled and became solid on the outer surface of the planetary system orbiting this sun, on one planet that we call earth, the natural mixture of mineral dust, gasses and liquids and the atmospheric conditions were such that over billions of years of such random interactive natural molecular activity some molecular ingredients were able to chemically break up and recombine in such a way that they became repeating slow molecular reactions and interactions that eventually formed stable molecular and atom based chemical combinations.

Eventually over millions of these naturally occurring interactions these stable chemical bonds became the bio-chemical units we now know in the cellular forms of Prokaryotic and Eukariotic cells. And it is these self-forming, self-organising and self-reproducing, cellular units which are the bio-chemical functioning cells which form the basic structures of all plant, animal, insect life forms along with the bacteria, viruses and fungi which make up the biosphere and all that live within it. Just how this initial transition from inorganic active molecular and atom based material existence, into the realm of bio-chemical and biological existence occured is still not known. However, it is based on provable material evidence and of course, this ‘spark’ of life coming into being, obviously did occur and continues to occur, with every new birth. It then energises the reproductive and growth phases of the Nutritional, Metabolic, Growth, Reproductive, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A – D) phases of all forms of biologjcal species from the most microscopic to the largest Macroscopic organisms. Biology and thus nature is indifferent to human wishes and has to be violated in any attempt to deflect it from its bio-chemical essence and to serve non-biological or sociologically determined needs or wishes.

But of course Marx in the 19th century was not sufficiently aware of the quality and quantity of the type of evidence we now have and although he welcomed Feuerbach’s bringing humanity back into prominent consideration rather than thrusting pure imagination into the the gaps in human knowledge and understanding (via a God of the gap’s). Nevertheless, he did not pursue Feuerbach’s crucial insight, into humanities intellectual assessment of nature as an object of utility and thus the effective degradation of nature into a mere machine of production – a series of products to be bent or shaped to human wills. It is not possible to say if anyone from a secular position had asked themselves the obvious following question. That if humanity treated the rest of life on earth as a system of production to be fashioned according to the will of elite humanity, what would be the implications and what could be the eventual outcome? Certainly from my research it appears that no one from the Marxist tradition, from the 19th century Marx and on to his 20th and 21st century Marxist academic or activist followers, seem to have asked this question or pursued the implications of this hierarchical mass society agricultural ‘practice’ and its intellectual rationalisation. But nevertheless, it is possible to say when Marx wrote the following he certainly demonstrated that he remained firmly within the traditional hierarchical mass society anthropocentric paradigm, even within the capitalist mode of production social form.

“Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature”….”If, therefore, industry is conceived as the esoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature, or the natural essence of man”……”The nature which develops in human society – is man’s ‘real’ nature: hence nature as it develop’s through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.” (Marx. Marx/Engels Collected Works. Vol 3. pages 298; 303.Emphssis added. RR.)

Conflating the social organisation of hierarchical mass society forms of human aggregation with the biological structure of life on earth, and vice versa, is a secular version of those monotheistic religious ideas which assert that prayer to an invisible god is a force that might bend nature (biology) to human desires. For Marx in the 19th century it was not prayer but industrial manpower which is deemed capable of achieving this result. This particular written piece of evidence, along with the written evidence drawn from many successive anti-capitalist and ‘Marxist’ writings, is the basis of my previous assertion (in Part 4) that Marxism, despite its reputation for being a revolutionary form of understanding was not fully so. Despite Marx’s self-declared ambition to pursue ‘a ruthless criticism of everything’, a form of criticism which was meant to be neither afraid of it’s own conclusions nor of the powers that be’, much of it was reform of the politics of governance. From all this evidence the conclusion emerges that ‘Marxism’ has been a failed Renaissance in human thinking practice in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The supposedly top-tier of revolutionary anti-capitalist thinkers in the 20th century, such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, also made no attempt to either correct (in theory or practice) their anti-capitalist social theories and activist actions, they merely demonstrated in practice their own allegiance to the mainstream anthropocentric distortion and juxtaposition of biological and socially understood ecological reality. In this their differences with bourgeois radicals in their allegiance to the hierarchical mass society over the degree of authoritarian acceptable within them was extremely marginal. The intellectual apologists of Stalins euphomism of the Nazi regime breaking eggs to make an omelette, or of Hitlers apologists, reminding us that the Volkswaggon beetle was a car for the working man and Germany needed to expand to make Germany Great Again for all Germans. Intellectuals, as Trotsky pointed out; are frequently flexible enough to be “federalist, centralist, embrace autonomy, autocracy, democracy or dictatorship, without in any way changing its essence nor the nature of its political interests”, whilst doing so himself during his career from 1916 to 1930.

To some extent the previous centuries intellectuals of all shades and convictions, can be excused for not reaching really revolutionary conclusions about the hierarchical mass society system of exploitation of nature and humanity along with the estrangement and dehumanisation of humans socialised within such societies. The promotion of reformist alterations to political forms of hierarchical rule by self-declared revolutionaries, rather than actual evolutionary ones, was due to the anthropocentric concensus among intellectuals from ancient Greece to modern capitalism, that hiearchical mass societies were an expression of civilisation not an actual war of the succesive ruling elites to appropriate the resources of nature, to exploit the labour power of their slaves and wage slaves and to dehumanise the essence of the human species, so that this would accepted or at least tolerated. The possibility of this excuse for previous intellectuals arises because many of the facts and the processes for linking them into coherent connected evidence were lacking throughout the 20th century, but this is no longer the case.

The electron scanning microscopes invented in the late 20th century have revealed the sophistication and self-repairing and self-reproducing complexity of the previously impenetrable Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cell infrastructure components of all living things, and mass computer analysed data gathering and models, from modern instruments, whether totally accurate or not has indicated sufficiently that human industry is not the true resurection of nature as Marx thought and expressed it. Indeed, modern automated and computer aided industry and commerce turbo-charged by the ‘profit’ and ‘interest’ motive has become the direct or indirect executioner of many essential and necessary species of life on earth and the grave digger and robber of many essential ecological niches and resources needed for the survival of other essential species of life on earth. So the question arises; where is the motive for a 21st century renaissance of intellectual thinking about life on earth to come from, given that Marxism and every other form of ism so far, has hardly been up to the job? Plus the fact that the tradition of thoroughly studying and meticulously recording ‘results and prospects’ has been dwindling for decades.

Fast adulterated food, off the top of the head judgements, facile facebook opinions, Snap Chat interactions, YouTube shorts and three word advertising slogans have reduced most things into sharp, short bytes until attention spans have got shorter and shorter, whilst lengthy computer and AI aided academic theses seem to be getting longer and more incoherent and incomprehensible as well as proportionally longer. The 19th century ideologically created anti-capitalist perspective of a popular revolution motivated by disgust or de-humanised conditions of living and working conditions, still lives on in the words and writings of a few of those who remain intellectually attached to that tradition, but it is neither convincing theoretically or possible practically.

Its mass human basis (factory based industrial proletariate) no longer exists, and its dedicated revolutionary leadership (Stalinist, Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist) are revealed as hierarchical mass society replacement reformists with a smattering of green agenda tokenisms, dragged along behind them. They seem to have learned little or nothing useful in understanding the past, the present or the future of life on earth. They remain sectarian and dogmatic anthropocentric idealists, whose sects are at war with each other and who are narcissistically in love with their own intellectual output. They are afraid to admit the failure of their own tradition or to embrace any serious form of self-criticism or to consider any alternative perspective.

Yet this failure means that any ability to convince and mislead future community and worker activists to follow an already failed revolutionary top-down strategy of vanguard-led elite, industrialised mass societies, disguised by the words socialism or communism, is highly unlikely. The utter failure of the 19th century anti-capitalist revolutionaries in Russia, China, and Cuba to facilitate bottom up localised communal forms of human aggregation or to abolish the categories of contemporary wage labour and past fixed labour as state or private capital indicates they only attempted to reform the worst aspects of hierarchical mass societies, not revolutionise how humanity related to it’s own species and to nature. Consequently, once this latest capitalist based hierarchical mass society system collapses due to its structural contradictions and the unprecedented scale of its systemic wars, genocides, global land, air, sea and river pollutions, consistent ecocide and Epstein-style elite oligarchal inhumanity, there will be little chance or appetite for resurrecting it in any comparable or even diluted form.

The fact is that changes in modes of production, never appear as revolutionary from the get go, and never start with a hierarchy of ideas and individuals. They commence with small groups of community minded individuals who untypically initiate a qualitatively different way of living and co-operating for their (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological processes, whilst painstakingly persisting with this form until it is successful and if necessary modifying it as they persist with pursuing the humane and ecological principles they feel are relevant to themselves and to the environmental constraints they find themselves functioning within. The original middle eastern mass society settlements based on agriculture did not commence as heirarchical top-down mass societies, but as small scale egalitarian collectives and only later adopted or were commanded to adopt the hierarchical form of city states and the ancient expansionary polis.
That type of embryonic bottom up process was repeated by the original scattered Soviets in 1916 and 1917 which were started by local peasant and soldier activists who, during war torn socio-economic collapses, re-opened factories, and re-vitalised peasant farms, before they allowed themselves to be persuaded (in some cases forced) to become wage workers for a Bolshevik run hierarchical mass society disguised under the populist term, a ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’. From that stage on (1917-1950) working people in the Soviet Union were ruled by a hierarchy of Communist Party chosen Commisars, who replaced the previous hierarchy of Aristocratically chosen Officials. Nothing can be seriously pimped up and presented as revolutionary, when the slogan; ‘The Czar is Dead; Long live the Czar! is effectively replaced with; The Romanov Elite are Dead; Long live the Leninist (or Maoist) Elite! Elite words, invariably misrepresent reality.
Roy Ratcliffe (June 2026)

This series of articles follows on from the logic developed in my latest book, ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’. For more details see those at the end of this article. The book dealt with life on earth from its billion year old, bio-chemical and biological beginnings emerging from inorganic planetary materials into single cell Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic forms, and on to the evolution of multi-cellular plants, insects and animals. The research for the book established that in essence life on earth was a biological phenomenon and that all life forms had a common six stage biological process of existence comprising of Nutritional intake; Metabolic processing of the nutrition; Growth and re-growth of cells; a Reproductive process; an Ageing process; and a process of Dying. For ease of use this biological process was abbreviated to (N-M-G-R + A-D).

In addition, sections of that book dealt with the social organisation of the human species from the pre-historic period of hunter-gatherer and herding societies, before focussing on the development of settled agricultural communities. The notable difference between the two modes was that the latter communities became the first (and only) form of species social aggregation in which a hierarchical class forcefully dominated this form of mass society and continues to this day. These class divided societies began in the global west of the world within the middle and near east, Fertile Crescent region. The book then traced the turbulent and brutal historical record of these hierarchical mass societies in considerable detail before pointing out the fundamental contradictions inherent within all examples of this particular social form.

A particularly problematic biological contradiction arose because in addition to the daily needs of their ordinary working communities, the extra quality and quantity (luxury) demands and needs of the elite class, far exceeded what local nutritional and non-nutritional resources could naturally supply. The introduction of this excessive social demand (for palaces, finery, ornamentation, conspicuous consumption, royal entertainment) from local natural resources meant ever larger natural resources (whether already occupied or not) were used, needed and taken.

Territorial expansion and resource acquisition therefore became an existential requirement for the continuation and development all hierarchical mass society settlements, either ancient or modern. This requirement in turn led to annexations, deforestations, internicine wars, slavery and occasional local genocides by even small city states, such as ancient, Athens, Troy etc. The population/resource pressure was even greater when some of those Fertile Crescent city states eventually developed into regional empires, such as Egypt, Persia, Macedonia, Greece and Rome etc.

Incidentally, whilst Marx was correct in pointing out the errors of Malthus who in the 19th century had argued that overpopulation was caused by the fact that human reproductive rates appeared to be geometrical and the reproductive rates of the edible species to feed them appeared to be arithmetical. Malthus therefore thought this biological mismatch would lead to catastrophic overpopulation, famine and starvation, however in my opinion Marx was wrong to call him stupid. I am no fan of Malthus myself, but although Malthus had not understood the problem in full (nor had Marx or anyone else at the time) Malthus was not stupid or wrong in spotting a potential problem with hierarchical mass society levels of production and consumption. The elements missing from Malthus’s (and Marx’s) 19th century evaluations were four in number. 1. The increased rate and mass of extraction and consumption of natural resources, due to industrial methods and to elite greed; 2. The increasing rate and mass of industrial pollution; 3. The increasing rate and mass of essential species extinctions along with the habitat disruptions and collapses of other species,; and 4. The finite limits of the planets biosphere to supply an infinite rate of human created demand.

The Metabolic Rift hypothesis.

Although Malthus is no longer considered relevant, there is a trend of left, pro-Marxist thinking, which considers that the current ecological problem facing life on earth in general has been caused by the capitalist mode of production which they claim has created a metabolic rift between capitalist societies and nature and that this metabolic rift had been previously identified by the revolutionary-humanist thinker, Karl Marx. I have not yet found any convincing evidence of a connection between Marx’s views on production, ecological destruction and a metabolic rift. Indeed, in my research, that term was not used by Marx in any of his works. For this reason it seems to me that the term itself is an entirely modern fabrication by those intellectuals who are grasping at the equivalent of ‘straws’ to try to make themselves and Marx relevant to modern ecological concerns.

I suggest that the works of Marx are significant, comprehensive and valuable enough without trying to pin on them a modern version of a form of dogmatic Marxism, particularly as he is unable to disagree and refute such an interpretation. Refutation of mistaken assumptions about him was a process Marx frequently undertook while he was still alive. Meanwhile, it is worth considering the argument put forward by this modern metabolic rift trend. It is along the lines of; ‘capitalism is massively disrupting essential exchanges of matter and energy between society and the rest of nature, which is putting the entire Earth System in danger….Metabolic Rifts offers a scientific basis for understanding the deep causes of today’s environmental crises’. Does it? We shall see! The exchange of matter and energy within the entire biosphere of earth includes the bio-chemical carbon and nitrogen cycles which are predominantly regulated by plant organisms, which take in and exude elements of these gasses to produce with other inputs an oxygenated atmosphere within an ecologically balanced biosphere.

It is true that deforestation and desertification, monoculture production as well as sea pollution disturb the quantity, quality and balance of these natural gaseous processes, but this destabilisation was occuring long before the capitalist mode of production was adopted by hierarchical mass society elites. Just think of how many forests were decimated just to supply the ancient thousand strong fleets of huge triple-decked trireme’s, operated by many sides in the Greek Peloponnesian wars, or the fleets of huge entertainment and haulage vessels of the many elite orchestrated thousand year long Egyptian Dynasties. Just to float the granite blocks from quarries to the sites of pyramid and palace building, over decades of building would have cleared a forest or two. Logic suggests that if the mass of earths plant life forms become insufficient to absorb the mass of carbonic acid exhaled by animal life forms, then plant nourishment sources have also been drastically reduced along with any reduced production of oxygen by them.

Any rifts and disturbances in the carbon and nitrogen biological cycles were not the cause but the result of the over extraction of plant life by all hiearchical mass societies and this continued throughout the Roman Empire and late middle ages and was particularly accelerated during the wooden ship seafaring, and gunship antics of the late medieval merchant trader period. Not a few forests must have been cut down to manufacture the Spanish, Portugese, French, Dutch and English fighting and trading ships of the late feudal and pre-capitalist countries of Europe as they fought each other to control and consume natural materials, wherever the wind, tides and a compass would take them. To claim that the capitalist mode of production within a long succession of hierarchical mass societies was the factor that introduced the ecological and environmental instability into the bio-chemical balance of life on earth, is to have failed to understand the biological structure of life on earth and the disturbance of it by a particular long-standing hierarchical social form of human aggregation, a form that began long before the merchant capitalists of Holland, Portugal and Venice started to accumulate their wealth in the form of capital.

Nevertheless, the concept of metabolism is not commonly used in everyday discussions on politics, social, economic, or medical affairs, so it is worth establishing what the concept normally refers to, when discussing life on earth. Metabolism refers to the ‘chemical changes which take place within or between microscopic biological cells when food or protoplasm is broken down within them and the resulting constituent materials are then reassembled and built up in living organisms to create and replace essential energy and tissue requirements, or excreted as waste.’ This complex metabolic process is a constant feature of all living creatures – without exception – and it is happening to me as I write and to you as you read this sentence and it continues on a 24/7 annual life-long basis. Is it not amazing that these complex and sophisticated  microscopic cells within biological organisms, keep on keeping us alive and functioning on a couple of modest balanced meals per day?

Nevertheless, whether we are familiar with the concept  or not, the terms metabolism and metabolic are those used to identify specific biological processes at the microscopic unseen level, although this does not mean the term could not be used metaphorically to serve other non-biological or social purposes. However, in such an extended use the term would then lose its biological specificity and become an abstraction. The term ‘rift’ is normally used to designate a physical crack, or an opening, a cleavage such as the ‘rift valley’. The term has also been used to describe a disagreement or discord occuring within human affairs. Such as, for example; ‘my criticism of the use of the term Metabolic Rift might well cause an intellectual ‘rift’ or deepen an existing one between myself and other commentators on the current causes of ecological disturbances and species extinctions.

But, however we define it, the term metabolic-rift is nonetheless the deliberate combining of a description of a biological/organic process (metabolism) with a non-biological inorganic physical process, (cleavages). However, although on first hearing or reading, the term may sound impressive, I suggest that it does not convey any easily understood or generally accepted meaning. It is tempting, therefore to provisionally consider that it may fall into the intellectual category of ‘a jargon of authenticity’ type aphorism. So for the moment I think it best not to consider what some intellectuals choose to write about Marx, but what Marx himself wrote about the link between human social production under the capitalist mode of production, and the human consumption of natural resources.

Marx on consumption and Industrial production.

“Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. It is clear that in taking in food, for example, which is a form of consumption, the human being produces his own body. But this is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some particular aspect.” (Marx. Grundrisse. Introduction. Emphasis added. RR)

And;

“As soon as consumption emerges from its initial state of natural crudity and immediacy – and, if it remained at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested there.” (Marx. Grundrisse; Introduction.)

And;

“The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed…..Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.” (Marx. Capital volume 3. Emphasis added. RR)

The possibility of a ‘constantly expanding reproduction processes’ appears not to have rung any ecological or pollution alarm bells for Marx in the 19th century and sadly his disparaging description of hunter-gatherer peoples as ‘savages wrestling with Nature’ is just another anthropocentric dismissal of our highly intelligent homo sapien ancestors. Just because such modern arrogance was often par for the course within 19th century intellectual discourse, doesn’t make it acceptable or true. More to the point, nowhere, in Marx’s extensive and provisional Grundrisse notebooks is Metabolism mentioned nor rift. Although the phrase; ..”consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant”, in the above quote, does indicate that Marx was fully aware of the bio-chemical metabolic procesess involved in the metabolism of plant nutrition and human nutrition, he does so without mentioning the term.

Personally, I think it is highly significant that although Marx specifically describes the metabolic process of taking in food, and chemical substances, in order to produce the body of the plant, he makes no specific mention of the term metabolism which is the only appropriate term for the process he is describing. Nor does he mention the possibility or actuality of a ‘rift’. Moreover, no mention is made of it in any of the later three volumes of Das Capital nor in the three volumes of Theories of Surplus-value. However, the following quotes from Marx, do indicate his positive assessment of the relationship between capitalist industry and nature, and these contain not even a hint of a metabolic rift. I suggest this terminological abscence throws considerable doubts upon the claims being made by some intellectuals, that Marx endorsed the use of this term as an accusation against capitalist industry. For example;

“Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature and therefore of natural science to man.” (Marx. Collected Works. Volume 3, page 298 and 303. Emphasis added. RR)

And;

“The earth itself is an instrument of labour. (Marx. Capital volume 1. Page  Emphasis added RR)

And;

“…nature as it develops through industry, even though in an ‘estranged’ form, is true anthropological nature.” (Marx. Collected Works. Volume 3, page 298 and 303. Emphasis added. RR)

The ‘estrangement’ Marx notes in the last quote above, cannot be construed as an oblique or confused reference to a metabolic rift between humanity and nature in general, because Marx did not express confusion in any of his early notes or later mature works. In this particular case he was referring to the rift between working and producing humanity and a particular mode of production, which had ‘estranged’ the worker from the means (and purposes) of production. Yet even with the existence of that form of human ‘estrangement’, Marx considered that human capital intensive industry was a true anthropological expression of nature and not a metabolic rift with it. Based upon my own assessment of his extremely extensive writings, had Marx thought differently, he would have said so explicitly.

Indeed, Engels, a close friend and dedicated collaborator with Marx also mentioned the biological process of metabolism without ever using the term itself. In explaining the dialectic process within nature, Engels wrote the following;

“….every organic being is every moment the same and not the same; every moment it assimilates matter supplied from without, and gets rid of other matter; every moment some cells of its body die and others build themselves anew; in a longer or shorter time the matter of its body is completely renewed, and is replaced by other molecules of matter, so that every organic being is always itself, and yet something other than itself.” (Engels. AntiDuhring. )

The ‘matter supplied from without’ is material comprising of molecules which are considered nutritional in larger organisms, and the replacement by other molecules are those proteins, minerals and carbohydrates synthesised by the metabolising process, inside the particular cells in question. Any ‘rift’ in that metabolic process would be purely an individual, molecular or biological processing failure or breakdown within a living organism , not a species wide or social system failure. As previously noted, a further problem with dubiously linking the concept of metabolic rift directly with the capitalist mode of production and directly with Marx, is that it assumes that ecological destruction, excessive extraction, production, consumption and pollution were not alteady taking place prior to the onset of capitalism. In fact the historical record of ancient hierarchical mass societies and empires that were being created, were also collapsing and leaving behind them desertification, forest extinctions and soil contamination, all whilst extracting more natural resources that could be naturally or artificially reproduced.

Marx and Feuerbach.

In this last section I also wish to draw attention to an interesting anomaly. In previous parts I have pointed out the negative role of those anti-capitalist intellectuals and activists in the tradition of Karl Marx, such as Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and their later 20th century followers who had no idea about the importance of understanding the biological essence of humanity nor of humanities absolute reliance on a multi-species, ecologically-balanced biosphere. I include myself in that detailed knowledge deficiency in the first half of my life as worker and activist. In part 3 of this series I also drew attention to the severe limitations of biological and ecological knowledge during the 19th century period in which that particular generation of anti-capitalist activists grew up and matured. However, it needs to remembered that despite those almost universal limitations there were some intellectuals in the 19th century, that did not succumb entirely to the dualistic bifurcation of humanity and nature which most revolutionary thinkers and activists had done.

In fact one of the intellectuals who differed from Marx in this respect was someone he admired to such a degree that he drew up a series of Theses which he named after this intellectual. They became known as the eleven ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ by Marx and were named in honour of Ludwig Feuerbach, to whom he later wrote a letter which contained the following;

“Dear Sir,
I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect – and if I may use the word – love, which I feel for you…..you have provided …..a philosophical basis for socialism….the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society…..with best wishes for your well-being.”
Yours, Karl Marx.

(Marx/Engels. Collected Works.Volume 3. Page 354-357)

Clearly Marx very much appreciated Feuerbach’s approach to the question of understanding Nature and the human species attitudes to it, so it is worth understanding why he had such high regard. The research and one of the books written by Feuerbach which Marx admired bore the title; ‘The essence of Christianity’ and in a chapter on the ‘Creation’ in the Jewish religion of Judaism, Feuerbach had written the following;

“The doctrine of the Creation in its characteristic significance arises only on that stand-point where man in practice makes Nature merely the servant of his will and needs, and hence in thought also degrades it to a mere machine, a mere product of the will. Now its existence is intelligible to him since he explains and interprets it out of himself, in accordance with his own feelings and notions.” (‘The essence of Christianity’ chapter 11, page 112. Emphasis added. RR.)

I think in these days we would classify the essence of the last sentence in the above quote, as the prevalence of an intellectual form of a lack of self-criticism known as confirmation bias. This form of prejudice and bias within human intellectual production only selects and accepts evidence and opinion that confirms what is wanted or expected to be true or valid. Political movements of all complexions, left, right and centre, including religions and even Marxisms, are replete with confirmation biases. The self-critical Feuerbach also rhetorically asked the following question;

“The question, Whence is Nature or the world?….Why does it exist? But this wonder, this question, arises only where man has separated himself from Nature and made it an object of will.” (ibid page 113/114)

Feuerbach in the 19th century had recognised that humanity at some stage had “in practice made nature a servant of his will and needs”. Clearly the practice of making nature a servant of humanity being referenced there, had been initiated before, during or after the historic transition from hunter-gatherer nomadic and semi-nomadic communities to settled agricultural farming communities when hierarchical mass society structures had been formed. Prior to that the the human species did not treat nature as an object of will or as a machine for wealth production. This change only occured due to a transition between nomadic and settled existence which is mythically recorded in the Judaic Torah/Old Testament narratives of having a pastorialist wandering life-style and a mobile Ark of the Covenant to carry around with them.

I suggest it is important to take a moment to note some revealing common industrial language used by Feuerbach and Marx in the above extracts. We have Nature described as an object and a machine by Feuerbach and Nature as an instrument of labour, by Marx. But also note the subtle difference between how they had phrased them. For Feuerbach humanity had decided to treat nature as an object – out of unadulterated egoism; for Marx, nature was already assumed to be an instrument of labour and that nature was already “truly anthropologica!” A further interesting point about the origin of Judaic Monotheism that Feuerbach makes, which is relevant to the 20th and 21st century, particularly with regard to the  manifestations of ‘estrangement’ and ‘dehumanisation’, as revealed in the Israeli Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, for example appears in his  following statement.

“The belief in a special Divine Providence is the characteristic belief of Judaism. Water divides or rolls itself together like a firm mass, dust is changed into lice, a staff into a serpent, rivers into blood, a rock into a fountain; in the same place it is both light and dark at once, the sun now stands still, now goes backward. And all these contradictions of nature happen for the welfare of Israel, purely at the command of Jehovah, who troubles himself about nothing but Israel, who is nothing but the personified selfishness of the Israelitish people to the exclusion of all other nations – absolute intolerance, the secret essence of monotheism.” (Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity’ page 113/114. Emphasis added. RR.)

The actions of Personified selfishness in not sharing land and the absolute intolerance of the indigenous people of Palestine has been manifested by a majority of Zionist Jews of Israel since the Israeli occupation of Palestine in 1948 and has continued for eighty years. But notice that Feuerbach identified that the essence of monotheism – not just its Judaic form – is also absolute intolerance and of course there are other forms of monotheism. Is it not the case, that Christian monotheism in the guises of European country colonists were personifications of selfishness and absolute intolerance when they ‘coveted’ the land and resources and made war upon the native Plains, Coastal and Forest Indians of North and South America, and also on the indigenous peoples of Africa and Oceana?

And is not also a fact that most fundamentalist Islamist Muslim monotheists ancient and modern personify forms of selfishness and absolute intolerance against non-Muslims and Apostates from their own creed? Although it is abundantly clear that the 2026 missile attack upon Iran was initiated by a Judaic led Israel and Christian led USA, the Islamic led Iranian elite have also demonstrated their own version of personal selfishness and absolute intolerance. In Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and the Gulf States is it not true that these Islamic elites have demonstrated absolute intolerance against their own citizens who are opposed to the regime and for those ordinary citizens of other nations who are opposed to their own elites?

The future: Biology or Sociology first?

As noted in Part 3, of this series, the true reality of the essence of the human species, once critically and seriously examined is both biological and social and the biological essence is fundamental and primary. Our own personal existence verifies this. Individually, we all start off from a single unfertilised female biological cell, (the ovum) when this biological cell is fertilised by a male biological sperm cell, we each develop into a multicellular biological entity, which continues to live within another multi-cellular biological being, the female human body until birth.

This truly amazing essential biological process of (N-M-G-R) until birth is the special biological case for every species of human being, in every country, for every generation. The bio-chemical, biological essence of all human beings is the same for all members of the human species.  There is no other special biological form. The fact that every cell in every body is comprised of an internal association of organelles and sub-units, does not on present definitions, make cells a social phenomenon. That functioning integration of bio-chemical entities within cells is known as symbiosis.

Only after birth do we, as a gendered biological species-being, enter into an additional consenting social community and tentatively begin our own sociological estrangement and social conditioning. Each species of human biological being goes through the same identical process. None of us at birth subscribe to a religion, a culture, a class, or a prejudiced opinion. None of us are born aggressive, racist, sexist, nationalist, fascist, opinionated, disrespectful, vegetarian or carnivore.

These characteristics are all socially created, socially learned, socially transmitted and in many cases socially enforced. The idea that any religion, culture, gender, nation, or ethnicity are inherently and essentially or biologically different or superior to others, such as Jew or gentile, dark or pale skin tone are just socially constructed narcisistic ideologies of religious or secular social origin. They are not biological and therefore not natural. They are historically derived  symptoms of social self-delusion with no biological evidence to support their existence.

Indeed, the global statistics on Covid 19 pandemic deaths, indicated that no countries populations were superior in the potency of their biological immune systems. The global statistics on Covid deaths averaged out at 1,400 deaths per million of population and the fluctuations between the highest and the lowest communities were most likely due to the amount of viral exposure each population was subjected to and/or the individual viral load each infected person suffered from.

In the same way, the seriousness of other morbidities to the health of each infected person was dependent upon the fitness and relative immune functionality due to age and the existence of poverty. The fact that viruses and bacteria are also biological entities that must consume nutrients and can evolve as they are doing so, means that there is no absolute prevention or cure to these type of infections so again prevention and healthy, unpolluted, and unstressed life forms are best suited to the continuation of vibrant communities.

Hierarchical mass societies. The final countdown?

Yet overworked, over stressed, over exhausted, poorly paid working populations are being employed to gouge out ever new or half used resources because that is what all elites need in order to maintain profitable productive output and economic growth. That way all, or most of the elite can continue to increase their wealth. Hierarchical mass societies, unless stopped or by-passed, will continue, as they always have, to increase extraction, production, consumption and pollution, from and of nature . Only now in the 21st century, there are no pristine places to move on to. This year on year process will thus unleash further climate change, shortages of natural resources, epidemics and pandemics.

In addition, there will be further financial crises, economic crises, poverty, social unrest, political authoritarian despotism, wide-scale pollution and ecological species extinctions along with wars and genocides. Moreover, any one of these factors, if large enough or if one or more overlap enough, this too can hasten the final countdown of the hierarchical mass society system. When its internal contradictions start to break through any remaining concensus wishing to conserve the hierarchical mass society form, the beginning of the end will commence – if it has not started already. It’s current and past secular, religious, military, democratic or authoritarian led elitist forms are already at each others throats, some with their fingers ready to reach out toward nuclear missile firing buttons.

Since the hierarchical mass society system’s elites cannot remove a senile president or two, the only serious alternative is by communities creating alternative socio-economic forms which in practice as well as theory has humans engaging with biological nature as one of its constituent biological parts. The past of arrogant narcisistic led social elite-dominated systems is over. We either do little or nothing now or we start changing how we live, think and treat each other and the rest of our biosphere support species. Pioneering alternative small community changes is better than doing nothing or waiting until absolute chaos and desperation drive people into being influenced by aother set of elite demagogues. who promise solutions yet deliver more problems.

The problem is the re-balancing of the human consumption of natural resources, whilst leaving enough reproductive natural resources untouched, so as to be abundantly available for the rest of the biosphere species to survive. The solution is to organise small, local, independent support groups who have fun as well as reading, discussing how to act in ecologically considered ways, who in future can link up with other like minded support groups, without losing their local independence and are able to avoid becoming pawns in some future hierarchical elite-led mass society initiative.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2026)

Life on Earth’ (Past, Present & Future)
(From a Revolutionary-Humanist & Giaia-centric Perpective)

The above heading is the title of a recent book I have recently published. The back cover of the book bears the following blurb.

“Of all the millions of species of life that have existed on earth over billions of years of cellular and multi-cellular evolution, only the members of one species has consciously and systematically done the following.

Over-polluted, seas, lakes, rivers, air, top-soil and land in general.

Destroyed – on a huge-scale, members of its own species.

Dismembered on a massive scale, members of many other species (forests, animals, insects, fish).

Elevated a minority of its own species to live in obscene luxury.

Relegated huge numbers of its own species (male and particularly female) to low and subordinate status.

Have attained the most profound amounts of knowledge.

However, it is only in the last five or six thousand years, out of the 500,000 plus years of hominid and Homo sapien evolution, that the human species began to initiate such actions and only in the Middle/Near East and Europe.

Until then, the rest of the planet remained populated by humans but largely unpolluted and ecologically undisturbed, by them. Now in the 21st century every corner, every height and every depth of the earth’s biosphere is extremely polluted and ecologically and climatically imbalanced.

In exploring the main species categories of life on earth, this book is intended for those who are puzzled by how in one relatively short period of human evolution human activities have resulted in the six characteristics listed above. The book will also be of interest to those who have begun to consider what can be done to halt and even reverse those unnatural symptoms.”

Apart from a preface and introduction, the book contains the following chapters;

Chapter 1. The inorganic elements of life on earth.
Chapter 2. Cells. Bio-chemical (organic) beginnings.
Chapter 3. The inorganic/organic composition of Soil.
Chapter 4. Plant and photosynthetic organisms.
Chapter 5. Insect Organisms.
Chapter 6. Animal Organisms.
Chapter 7. The social evolution of Hominid life.
Chapter 8. The social evolution of Homo Sapiens.
Chapter 9. Hierarchical Mass Societies.
Chapter 10. Hierarchical mass society reflected in ideology.

CONCLUSION.

This book offers a fully Giaia-centric perspective in that it starts from the propositions that;

“Hitherto, ‘life on earth’ in general has always been studied from the particular perspective of humanity.

The study of humanity from the general perspective of life on earth, has hardly begun.”

This book is the author and bloggers contribution to redressing that historic and devastating imbalance.

It can be obtained in ebook form from Amazon and others at around £2.99 or in paper back form from around £14.99. From Amazon; brownsbfs.co.uk; Bookshop.org or ebay.

In the two previous parts of this article on the estrangement, alienation and dehumanisation of the human species, which has been experienced under all the previous forms of hierarchical mass societies, we ended with noting the importance of Marx. In the 3 volumes of Das Capital, Marx had analysed the capitalist mode of production in forensic detail and that analysis had confirmed the existence of these psycho-social symptoms. In this part 3, I shall present some of Marx’s actual comments and considered opinions on these and on their effect upon humanity.

Estrangement, was identified by Marx as a socially created symptom which occurred when working people who lacked means of production and sufficient natural resources of their own, needed to seek employment from the owner of some form of means of production. On that basis, the worker then had to work for that employer in exchange for money to buy the necessary materials to ensure that his or her (N-M-G-R + A-D) biological processes, were completed. Marx at that stage of his study considered that the natural essence of the human species (as a social species) was to work (or labour) to produce objects from nature, and ‘exchange’ them with each other.

However, under the capitalist mode of production, he stressed that the objects (commodies) the workers produced and the means (tools, buildings, machinery) used to produce them did not belong to the worker but to the employer. Thus Marx concluded from his detailed study of capitalist industrial production, that since the worker was personally estranged from the products he makes, and is also estranged from the ‘means’ of production and also estranged from controlling the pace and method of production, that something significant and un-natural had occured. What had taken place was that the production of essential natural resources had been collectivised by an elite, not by themselves. Consequently as a result of this socio-economic process, the working classes had been estranged from their natural human ‘essence’. The consequences were clear and Marx wrote that the worker;

“Does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortified his body and ruins his mind . The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work and in his work feels outside himself . He feels at home when he is not working and when he is working he does not feel at home.” (Volume 3 of his Complete Works p 274)

Any modern slave or working class ‘wage-slave’ or ‘salary-slave’ for that matter, will have no difficulty in recognising the validity of the critical content of this paragraph and since Marx was not from the working class, he undoubtedly must have deduced or confirmed the authenticity of that hierarchical mass society symptom by listening to more than one worker. I can personally confirm it myself. I loved doing engineering tasks in my dad’s shed and in my own as an adult, but I hated practically every minute of my eventual ten (8 + 2) hour shifts as a wage slave employed at Dehaviland Aircraft Company. Personal feelings aside, the quote above demonstrates a crucial level of understanding of how Marx developed his opinions and theoretical evaluations. Marx studied reality, alongside ideas about reality.

Nevertheless, there has been a tendency among modern intellectuals who declare themselves ‘Marxists, to assume that Marx perfected his most important ideas and theories by studying other talented intellectuals and philosophers. Therefore, there are books and articles on the importance of the influence of Hegel, Epicurus and other philosophers upon Marx’s theoretical conclusions. However, these books, articles etc., are usually written by intellectuals, but then intellectuals are bound to reach such intellectual conclusions – aren’t they? However, in reality the main and fundamental influence on Marx’s theories and evaluations was a deep and consistent perusal and then a serious study of reality, not a deep and consistent perusal and study of philosophers or sociologists. In fact he made a number of comments on that issue, such as;

“When reality is described, a self-sufficient philosophy loses its medium of existence.” (Marx/ Engels. Collected Works. Volume 5 p37)

But of course to describe ‘reality’ in the more modern context, it is frequently necessary to see below the surface phenomenon of reality and thus while human beings lacked the instruments to see below the surface of nature, their understanding of it remained seriously limited. Moreover, the limited 19th century understanding of human biology and the complex inter-connected and interdependent biology of nature was made clear by the following quote by Marx.

“Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature – the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature………Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature and therefore of natural science to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the esoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature, or the natural essence of man.” (Marx. Collected Works. Volume 3, page 298 and 303. Emphasis added. RR)

One particular social achievement by a section of the human species (industrial production) was being interpreted by Marx as the natural outcome of biological evolution and (‘industrial society was judged the “true resurrection of nature”). We now know that hierarchical mass societies, since the industrial revolution, have been extracting and destroying visible and invisible organic and inorganic nature in huge swathes and is now polluting every part of the biosphere from the upper atmosphere to the deepest ocean depths. The above formulation was no isolated one by Marx, because there are many more such formulations in Marx’s writings, such as Das Capital, the Grundrisse and other notebooks. Here are two more.

“The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present”………”The nature which develops in human history – the genesis of human society – is man’s ‘real’ nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an ‘estranged’ form, is true anthropological nature.” (ibid p 302/303. Emphasis added)

Already, this opinion by Marx, that the five human senses are not a long process of biological adaptation and evolution of the human species, but a product of the “entire history of the world”, should be ringing alarm bells in the critical faculties of a modern reader. Then the assertion of; “..nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature”, should be stimulating a critical assessment even more alarming. By Marx’s own critical assessment, the capitalist mode of industrial production was the latest, albeit, estranged form of human socio-economic production. Therefore, to imply that once industrial production is rid of estrangement by class divisions its genesis will be an example of humanities “real” nature, can no longer be considered valid or accurate. These and other assertions locates Marx’s concept of estrangement entirely within the millenia-old anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. This next extract confirms it. Marx writes in Das Capital;

“The earth itself, is an instrument of labour, but when used as such in agriculture implies a whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high development of labour.” (Capital Volume 1.)

The concept that ‘the earth itself is an instrument of labour’, indicates that Marx’s 19th century life-style and thus his social consciousness had themselves also been ‘estranged’ from nature. Any hunter-gatherer people would know that the earth is a provider of nutrition, clothing, tools and shelter. They would not regard the earth or the land as an agricultural instrument for creating surplus-value and profit for Medieval and modern land owners. Furthermore, any reasonably educated modern human being would also know that in addition to providing base-line nutrition, the earth, (more specifically the earth’s biosphere) also supports, not only the plants we eat but that some of those plants also provide the oxygenated air we breathe and materials we use for the clothes we wear.

We can judge from these extracts by Marx, (and many others) that the 19th century advances in science and technology had not advanced very far in the direction of biological and ecological understanding of life on earth. Therefore humanity, in the form of it’s most advanced economic and social critics of the time (Marx and Engels), had little understanding of life on earth from a microscopic level of biological detail. Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanism, although an advance in 19th century thinking at the time was insufficient then to understand the essence of the human species and without significant modification they remain so in the 21st.

Some ‘Marxists’ who have not yet grasped that Marx was advocating an evolving revolutionary perspective in transition, not a finished and final dogma, will also not have realised that the conclusions Marx reached were seriously wrong and had been handicapped by the 19th century general lack of a detailed biological understanding. The anthropocentric fixation and evidence deficient level of human intellectual output was so thorough that for generations sociological thinking in the form of the Abrahamic monotheisms and other such isms, had been inadequate for a more rounded understanding life on earth. Anthropocentric focussed ideas, following anthropocentric hierarchical socio-economic practices had intellectually separated human hierarchical mass societies from nature and nature from hierarchical mass society humanity.

The real world intellectual development of the human species had created a mystical God to explain humanities existence and the existence of other species within nature; and this reality had been imagined in reverse. Instead of real human beings creating the idea of an all powerful male God, a myth was created that an all powerful male God had created humans and a bountiful nature. Anthropocentric thinking was so thoroughly embedded in human intellectual input and output that by the 19th century, despite some people dropping the God as the creative instrument or architect of humanity and nature, they then imagined that nature itself, by species ‘selection’ had become the architect of itself. We now know that biological evolution occurs by bio-chemical, cellular mutations and/or frequent multi-cellular use-adaptations. However, in the mind of Marx, and some others, anthropocentric industrialised social production was viewed as a natural outcome of the evolution of nature.

Yet in actual fact industrial methods of producing commodities from nature are not a natural outcome of biological evolution, but a social outcome of one specific species and during one specific period of its biological evolution. Moreover, it is only this hierarchical mass society period of history which has produced outcomes severely detrimental to biological processes of life on earth in general and to the continued extinctions of many biological organisms – including it’s own species in particular, by war and genocide. But the long term incorrect anthropocentric interpretation of the essence of humanity – as a socially evolving organism – rather than a biologically evolving organism has culminated in the following symptoms of hierarchical mass society living. The estrangement of individuals from each other and the intellectual ‘estrangement’ of humanity from it’s own biological roots.

Which side are you on?

A recent article on the US/Israel elite missile bombardment of Iran, by a left wing author who quotes Lenin, demonstrates that the total estrangement of humans from each other extends to the left as well as the right. It also indicates how confused much of the old cold war left has become in regard to hierarchical mass society elites and the cold-war concepts they are still clinging on to He asserts the following;

“Which side are you on? Iran is not just Israel’s war, friends.  It’s not even America’s war.  It’s the Empire’s.”….”Give Iran and other opponents of the Empire critical support”.(Counterpunch 28/3/2026)

The author represents a misguided section of the left who continue to view the American Imperialist elites as the 20th centuries residual problem and that any other elites who oppose American elites should be supported. This suggestion ignores an obvious fact. All elites are ruthlessly oppressing and exploiting their own working populations, men, women and children and now in 2026 the three elites in the US, Israel and Iran are also raining down drone and missile munitions on the men, women and children under the rule of those opposed to them. The fact that some left individuals and blogs are publishing intellectual material which advocates taking the side of any modern elites or to give them critical support is to give support to the oppressors and remove it from the oppressed. The suggestion also gives support to a repeatedly failed ‘lesser evil’ strategy of the past, whilst avoiding the task of developing new strategies to support the victims on all sides, not the elites on any side.

‘Which side are you on’ is a tactic both the Bourgeoisie and Bolsheviks used historically to divide oppressed communities from each other and get activists to campaign for the interests of one elite over another. It’s a repeat of the one used by those left dualist thinking activists who advocated support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine because the American elite had chosen to support Ukraine’s elite. The crude dualistic tactic of abandoning revolutionary-humanist principles and giving ones allegiance to the enemy of ones enemy does not make them a friend. It never has done and it never will do.

Furthermore, this ersatz tactic also draws attention away from the fact that supporting either sides missile barrages effectively supports the fact that once again huge financial and material resources are being directed away from both sides civilian populations and the materials being blown to pieces are people, (whether as soldiers or civilians) and the infrastructure destruction involved is further polluting the air, soil and seas of an already over polluted middle east region. And it is a region whose connections to other regions by ocean currents and atmospheric winds will circulate this pollution around the entire planet.

To return to the above noted historic detour of humanity from a naturally evolved essence to a socially evolved, hierarchically divided essence, it is important to realise that it has allowed generations of similarly mistaken and evidence-lacking elite-supporters to invent semi-permanent socially constructed distinctions, with disastrous results. Religions, races, nations and classes have been presented as naturally occurring definitive identifyers which have become the causes of irreconcilable divisions within our one biological species. The divisions within humanity into the above competing and even warring sections, is neither a biological symptom, nor a social imperative in general. These symptoms have arisen from just one particular social form of living and producing which no other species of social, plant, fungus, insect or animal of the millions in existence have developed.

This fact alone indicates that such competitive characteristics and warlike divisions are not natural, or biologically induced, but are based primarily on the socio-economic divisions of labour created and upheld by elites within the current plethora of hierarchical mass societies. Even the biological bifurcation of the human species for biological reproduction, has been negatively socialised by hierarchical mass society elites into permanent gender divisions which mirror its patriarchal mode of production.

The crucial historic omission of a more complete and detailed understanding of the complex biological inter-dependence of life on earth as a whole, is being felt not only within and between human communities in the form of wars and genocides, but between the human species and the rest of our biological species cousins – both distant and close. The hierarchical mass society economic system has for generations been systematically killing macro-organisms that we live on by eating and breathing their products and microorganisms that are in us, digesting our food, and consuming or neutralising problematic viruses and bacteria.

The fact is, therefore, that we and our other life form pets have never been physically estranged from the biology of nature and we are still not in any full physical or material sense. Only in the practices of our hierarchical mass society systems and in the ideologies their elites propagate, have we become physically, emotionally and intellectually estranged from each other as a single human species and estranged from those millions of other species we depend upon for eating, breathing, sheltering and for curing us when we are ill.

The true reality of the essence of the human species, once critically and seriously examined, is both biological and social and the biological essence is fundamental and primary. Our own personal existence verifies this. Individually we all start off from a single unfertilised female biological cell, (the ovum) when this biological cell is fertilised by a male biological sperm cell, we each develop into a multicellular biological entity, which continues to live within another multi-cellular biological being, the female human body until birth.

Only after birth do we, as a gendered biological species-being, enter into an additional social community and tentatively begin our sociological estrangement and conditioning. Each species of human biological being goes through the same identical process. None of us at birth subscribe to a religion, a culture, a class, or a prejudiced opinion. None of us are born aggressive, racist, sexist, nationalist, fascist, opinionated, disrespectful, vegetarian or carnivore. These are all socially transmitted, dis-eases, from our biological entropy.

Every human being on every part of the planet during every generation, before or since we evolved into the Homo sapien species has had to be socialised into these 13 socially created characteristics and the many more I have not listed. Once we understand the concept of ‘estrangement’ from our natural biological essence it also becomes clear that many of the negative characteristics listed above are the results of various forms of hierarchical mass society induced estrangement. The importance of incorrectly recognising and misunderstanding the two essential essences of humanity – the biological and the social – now becomes clear. The concepts are  being used in order to confuse and kill many of us.

Furthermore, the fact that the biological essence of humanity is primary (and natural) and the social is secondary (and learned), makes the following suggestions obvious. That a) the entire biological realm of life on earth of which we are an integral part and upon which we depend for nutrition, protection and breathing, needs to be protected from destruction, extinction and pollution. That b) the fact that the social is secondary and learned means that destruction, over-extraction and overproduction are not biologically or economically inevitable and therefore can be both unlearned and in future removed from our life-styles.

The human species can, and has in the past, changed their social modes of obtaining their biological processes of Nutrition, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N-M-G-R + A – D), and can do so again when more of us understand enough to see the need to do so and when we ally ourselves with others who have reached that level of understanding. Amid the current 21st century regurgitation and repetition of the ancient examples of hierarchical mass society excesses and competitive turmoil, which invariably end in wars and genocides, it is tempting to focus on our individual and family survival and those of our local communities. However, the fact that many of us have families means that concern about the future of life on earth in general, is also demonstrating active concern for our families future. For if we do nothing, the younger members of our families and friends are going to be living amid whatever mess they then inherit.

Bequeathing them a social world of banality in which people are either actively or passively and thoughtlessly consuming and exterminating nature and our citizen masses, is not the only alternative. The alternative is to incorporate into our daily struggles – in practice and theory – alternative patterns of living and thinking to the current ones. We can expose and contradict the past and present ‘old world’ social and biological theories and practices within our families and communities and shape a new world’s future in small but positive ways. The old world anthropocentric common sense invites you to expend your non-work energy on supporting the existing hierarchical mass society system by choosing new or different candidates to occupy hierarchical political positions, in the vain attempt to produce different results than the last lot.

The historical record from ancient Sumer, Persia, Egypt, Greece and Rome indicated that it is the hierarchical mass society form that is the problem for humanity not just who governs them. The hierarchical aristocratic nation states during the Middle Ages, the later bourgeois capitalist ones, the Fascist and Communist ones as well as the current so-called Liberal Democratic and Islamic ones have all confirmed that hierarchical systems, to a lesser or greater degree, perpetuate the estrangement, alienation and dehumanisation of all their citizens.

Furthermore, the idea that revolutions in living are top-down creations created and/or led by elite individuals is historical and ideological nonsense. Revolutions in living and ‘being’ are always small scale, local individual or community led initiatives, that if successful, are replicated by others until each small transition links up and becomes parts of an inter-connected movement for change. So don’t think you have to think big; think small; and do it! Just don’t destroy nature whilst doing it and nature will become a pleasure not a wasteland.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2026)

PS. My book ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future) presents a critical review of life on earth from ancient to modern times. It also indicates how and why the status of non-elite people, women, animals and other species were demoted into becoming exploited servants of the elite strata of hierarchical mass society systems, in times of peace as well as war. It is available in paperback or electronic download. From Amazon, Ebay, Brown’s Books and other booksellers.