critical-mass.net

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.

This is the final part of a long article, tracing some of the developments of the trend of political thinking originated by Karl Marx and its contradictory continuation by his followers – the ‘Marxists! As we saw in Part 4, the dualistic conceptual framing by Marx of one extremely subjective species (humanity) treating all other species as objects (instruments) of production and satisfaction by exploitation and extinction, mirrors the fact, if not the motive, of successive hierarchical mass society elites. In their treatment of working people and other species of life on earth, they treated everything except their own class as objects (instruments) of production (sources of surplus labour) to be exploited by extracting surplus product and accumulating surplus value and wealth from their enforced exertions. Marx, clearly wanted that exploitation of humanity to end, but by what means and for what ends, we shall see.

Characterising life on earth in this dualistic anthropocentric ‘us and them’ way, as the many quotations from Marx have indicated, clearly iestablishes the fact that he was operating from within a commonly held 19th century anthropocentric focused intellectual tradition. It was a tradition which had long been universal and as such had been comprehensively incorporated into the various ancient monotheistic religions and philosophies. The originators of these religious traditions had done so by asserting that their Abrahamic god had created the first human and then created all the other forms of life for mankind to utilise as they saw fit. In doing so they had merely recorded what many or even most humans at the time chose to believe. That belief continued even though, as a universal trend, that universality had been fragmented into differing and aggressively competing political, national, religious and ethnic socially aggregated communities.

However, by the 21st century, it had long been known that the human species is a single species and since the 20th century, it has been known that the Homo sapien species is an integrated and inter-dependent part of the biological matrix of life on earth. Yet, as previously noted, the continued use of the ‘common sense’ abstraction ‘nature’, has routinely and problematically obscured the detail and inter-dependence of the multi-species biosphere. This habit has allowed the living reciprocal, inter-dependent matrix of life on earth, to be problematically marginalised and even ignored. So, although Marx, and probably every 19th century gardener of any reasonable ability, would have known that good soil needs manure and decomposing organic material, to be optimally useful as a growing medium, the exact interdependent biological and cellular activity along with its universal microscopic Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic structures would have been unknown. So there can be no real surprise when Marx in the 19th century again asserted;

“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.)

Consequently viewing the earth as an instrument of labour and seeing the planet (and soil) as something seperate from the life-cycle of the human species and consequently viewing human labour as another thing, is to be expected However, it also means Marx and to a certain extent, the ‘Marxists’ cannot be relied upon to bring accuracy or clarity to the existential threats facing life on earth. in reality, both the above abstractions are part of the same planetary biological metabolic processes. It would be more accurate to say that labour, as effort (i.e. the biological multi-cellular effort of species, exerted in order to obtain their (N-M-G-R+ A-D) life-cycle needs is a function of the bio-chemical composition of nature as a whole. Although using the abstraction ‘nature’ would still serve to obscure the complex interconnected reality of life on earth. We should note here that from within the limited 18th and 19th century understandings of life on earth that whilst the earth itself (the planet and its biosphere) was reasonably well understood as solar system of remotely interconnected objects; the fact that on earth’s surface millions of self-replicating, inter-dependent biological systems and sub systems, had evolved, was not.

That the planets surface liquids, gases, minerals, molecules and proteins had somehow combined to become self-replicating, biologically based, ecologically integrated, and inter-dependent organisms within a holistic planetary system, was not even an untested hypothesis, let alone being close to a theory. Science was still being constrained within and distorted by, religious and secular forms of dogmatic certainty. So all the known species were then treated as God (or nature) created separate, independent living entities, some of which just happened to eat each other. When in reality and later revealed as probable fact, life on earth in all its diverse forms, is one biological system in which the earth–bound organic entities are not only entirely dependent upon each other for nutrition (N), but are also dependent upon the inorganic minerals, gases and radiant energy of the beyond-earth solar system.

Although some aspects of this inter-dependence, at a basic level, was known in general, detailed knowledge was limited and so could not be considered in sufficient detail to arrive at any alternative interpretations. What had been handed down by previous generations continued to be handed down. To classify, as Marx did, this complex integrated matrix of organic species and internal and external inorganic material inputs and outputs as an instrument of the labour of one of its most recent species – humanity – was in retrospect a form of secular anthropocentrism writ large. By means of this ideological framework, the entire earth was being viewed (and still is by those who still subscribe to this underdeveloped, distorted, anthropocentric way of viewing life on earth), as a ‘possession’ of’ and ‘instrument” of, the human species.

No species of life even posses their own power of animation, for more than a relatively short time, let alone possess a planets resources. Such lingering ancient imaginary intellectual separations of humanity and nature, also clings on in the 20th century and was manifested in the 20th century fantasies that humans could colonise, possess other planets and transplant some resticted form of nature onto them (i.e. terraform them) in order to sustain the large number transported human colonists, needed for a sustainable gene pool. This illusion or naive delusion ignores the fact that it was the complex billion year evolved bio-chemistry (biology) of integrated species (‘nature’) on earth, that eventually produced a viable hominid species now known as humanity! This mixture of arrogance and ignorance was not seen as a problematic characteristic by the 20th century and current 21st century stock of star trek dreamers. The idea that humanity can eventually sufficiently replicate the biological complexity of life on earth (nature) on another planet when the current Homo Sapien species cannot even prevent the continued extinction and degradation of parts of its essential biological species here on the relative stable platform of earth, is fatuous.

Yet the long 5,000 plus year history of anthropocentric practices and intellectual assumptions have repeatedly inverted the actual relationship between biology in general life on earth in general and the particular sociological form of one biological species (humans) out of the millions of inter-dependent biological species. Some among the human species have replaced the bizarre notion of a superior, invisible, all powerful creator God, with the less bizarre, but equally naive idea, that human scientific knowledge and technical abilities can send enough of them to sufficiently populate and replicate what their imaginary ‘god’ created in seven days or what Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic multi-cellular combinations took millions and billions of years of evolution to ultimately establish. The whole imaginary concept of star trek fantasies really is a regression to a pre-adult stage of human wish fulfilment.

The reality, is that the soil, which in Part 3 of this series, Marx was quoted as thinking was independent of humanity, was initially an inorganic compound of various ground up solid materials, which over billions of yearly planetary orbits, eventually also became the recipient of dead and decaying earlier life forms, which therefore added, organic materials to the mineral materials which had been reduced by weather actions into a relatively fine particle top layer. This fine top layer over millions, if not billions of years then became habitat for and organic nutrient source for, micro organisms, plants and fungi. The life processes of these organisms all added and mixed further organic materials to the original proto soil by their living activities and post-death decompositions. Furthermore, animals including human animals before flushing toilets were invented have always defocated upon and disposed of food waste upon soils, enriching the soils fertility and then plants, insects, animals and humans have fed upon the plants and roots which grew in the soil they have jointly fertilised.

If we care to think of it, before hominids evolved into Homo sapiens, before Homo Sapiens became agriculuralists, and before agricultural means of production became industrial means of production ‘nature’ was a self-replicating biological recycling, mutually dependent, dynamically balanced multi-species system of life on earth. For multiple millions of years nature and the millions of species co-existed with nothing remotely resembling mass producing industries. Thus the initial surface soils became in turn the habitat and nutrition source for an additional layer of larger plants, insects and animals, both surface and burrowing, all adding even more variety and organic richness to its composition. Yet with his focus of research almost exclusively fixed upon the social developments of capitalistically organised humanity, Marx drew the following anthropocentric and dualistic conclusions.

“The labour-process resolved as above into it’s simple elementary factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; it is a necessary condition for effecting exchange of matter between man and Nature; it is the everlasting Nature imposed condition of human existence and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase. It was therefore, not necessary, to represent our labourer in connection with other labourers; man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other, was sufficient. (ibid. Emphasis added RR.)

Man and his labour on one side Nature and its materials on the other, is an anthropocentric dualistic conception. For it is a fact that, prior to the capitalist mode of production, there were other modes which effected the exchange of matter between humanity and nature. Nevertheless, its 19th century capitalistic mode, Marx considered that latest human mode of production was a necessary condition for the exchange of matter between man and Nature’. So despite Marx’s excellent description of the human ‘estrangement’ from its species essence, by the class and occupation divisions within the capitalist dominated hierarchical mass societies, he (along with his contemporaries), remained trapped within the anthropocentric intellectual bubble created by prior hierarchical mass society assumptions.

These were theoretical assumptions which asserted a crucial division between biological nature and one of its evolutionary offsprings – socialised humanity. It is important to remember that this dualistic anthropocentric formulation is no isolated assertion by Marx or Engels. And of course, even the use of terms such ‘sides’ are concepts derived from describing geometrical shapes, not derived from description of biological organisms. There are no ‘sides’ in biological shapes and processes, or straight lines in nature, those are sociological constructs limited to human sociologically based intellectual based imagination and assumptions. Biological and astronomic systems involve only inorganic and organic materials, interacting and merging devoid of number, geometric shape, linear distance or specific time periods.

The reality of life on earth is that the organic material of life on earth (i.e. the biological system of life on earth) is both determined and dominated by the inorganic material of the entire planetary system. The fluctuating temperatures, the climate patterns, the seasonal fluctuations, the solar energy pulses supplied to the planet earth, are what organic life depends upon and these variable inputs presuppose the existence of the wider solar system and galaxy, of which it is a part. In turn the existence of the human species is also determined and dominated by the biological sphere of life on earth (the oxygen, the photosynthetic species and the species used as nutrition), not human measurements of time or human measurements of distance. We humans need to get over ourselves and realise that the human species is not the prime concern or beneficiary of the solar system.

The human species, in a sequential sense, is a third existentially dependent biological part of the total galactic system and not the first or primary existential part of the entire system. The first primary realm being, the Inorganic realm of the galaxy, the second inorganic realm being the solar system, the the third realm being the organic realm of the earth’s biosphere, and the fourth realm being the sociological and related intellectual realm of humanity. Or, 1. The physical realms, 2, The biological realm, and 3, The sociological realm of humanity.

Anthropocentric based ideologies both secular and religious have reversed or inverted the natural sequence and evolution of the universe, as depicted above, into the opposite sequence. With anthropocentric focussed intellectual constructs, the hierarchical sequence is 1, the human realm is viewed as the primary and dominant one. 2, the biological realm is viewed as a subordinate realm and 3, the astro-physical inorganic realm is viewed as being the next realm to be conquered and subordinated by elite humanity. Since the anthropocentric ideological constructed intellectual bubble thinks this ideological inversion of reality is the actually reality, its human personifications have consequently acted and continue to act upon their own inverted perspective of reality.

Elites within the bourgeois era have perfected that intellectual bifurcation of life on earth. They have sought to conquer, dominate and exploit humanity, and to conquer, dominate and exploit the planets biosphere, and are now seeking to conquer and dominate parts of the solar system. They have used their power and wealth accumulated from the exploitation and dehumanisation of the bulk of their citizens, to insist that the true essence of the human species is conquer, possess and exploit everything that has so far not been conquered, possessed and exploited. In doing so they have turned their dehumanised subjects into consumers, of objects and experiences, which have to be paid for and the production of which is steadily eating away and destroying the biosphere foundations which support all forms of life on earth.

But the actual non-virtual reality is that everything physical (and emotional) depends upon the stability and continuity of the existing relatively stable solar system, everything biological depends upon the stability and continuity of the earths rotational system and existing intensity of solar radiation; everything sociological depends upon the stabilty and continuity of the inter-dependent biological species system, within the total species biosphere. The focus on the simple elementary abstract factors of human labour processes by Marx, and most of his followers, signals that this was a consistent and exclusively anthropocentric paradigm of thinking that Marx and everyone else were mired in during that earlier period. And of course, the anthropocentric paradigm is a cultural habit of thinking that many people are still hopelessly mired in.

For example, simply curbing climate changes by achieving clean air and 100% electrical power, as some superficial thinkers imagine cannot and will not slow down production in general or production in particular industries. Production to satisfy the needs, demands and expectations of the members of global hierarchical mass societies, particularly the resource consuming appetites of the elites, will still require the frequent extraction and consumption of far more organic resources than can be regrown fast enough to satisfy demand, or alternatives discovered.

Because, whatever the source of energy used for production, the relationship between existing hierarchical mass society communities and nature requires that multiple organic species be extracted, processed, consumed, and waste materials to be dumped or further processed. Whatever the source of energy, food, clothing, housing, vehicles, many consumer goods and entertainment materials are made by mass extracting processing and directly or indirectly consuming inorganic materials and of course many of the organic species that are actually essential for a balanced biosphere.

It should be an obvious fact that an entire forest with its plant, insect and animal residents with their continual activities of recycling of debris, gases and nutrients, which took hundreds of years to mature, can be be cut down in a year or less using electrical chain saws and tracked electric vehicles. Even if forests are replanted (which currently is not always the case), it would take more centuries before new forest plantations were again absorbing a similar amount of carbon and nitrogen and delivering similar amounts of nutrition to its future inhabitants and oxygen to the atmosphere. Therefore the ending of all hierarchies and all elite privilege in wealth and power is a necessary first step in beginning to solve the current ecological and climatic imbalance.

Consequently, the growing ecological crisis on planet earth, is about far more than energy and climate, and its solution is about far more than the anti-capitalism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao’setung. The evaluative phrase Marx uses, that ‘man and his labour on one side, Nature and its materials on the other, was sufficient’, for his purposes, confirms that this 19th century dualistic limitation, extended across all classes. And with regard to such excessive extractions of natural resources, by the ever increasing productivity of the productive forces of humanity, Marx in the 19th century also saw only positive potentials. For example, he reasoned that;

“The means – unconditional development of the productive forces of society – comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world market…” (Marx. Capital Vol 3 page 244/245. Emphasis added. RR.)

In other words whilst Marx at that 19th century stage of understanding was analysing the ever increasing productivity of profit driven commodity production and its relative overproduction, he was not even remotely considering the probability of an absolute overproduction and its consequent undermining of the inter-connected and inter-dependent biological reproductive rhythms of life on earth in general or life – as a whole. He had simply considered that removing the profit motive would allow the “unconditional development of the forces of production” – by socialised humanity. Such views were not confined to Marx, but as we have indicated previously, it extended to Engels and beyond, and as far removed as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks. For example Engels in his book AntiDurhing asserted that the class structures of hierarchical mass societies were “based on the insufficiency of production” but when workers take over control of production, he asserted, they will expand it; and therefore the following will occur;

“The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself….The conditions of existence environing and hitherto dominating humanity now pass under the dominion and control of humanity, which now for the first time becomes the real conscious master of nature…..It is humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom……Men, at last masters of their of their own mode of social organisation, consequently become at the same time masters of nature, masters of themselves – free. (Engels. AntiDuhring. Part 3 Socialism. Section 2, Theoretical. Emphasis added RR.).

Note the abstract reference to ‘bonds’ and the breaking of them! Anyone with even an embryonic grasp of the ecological species balance of life on earth along with global pollution, cannot fail to be alarmed by a phrase such as; ‘a practically unlimited growth of production’ and humanity becoming ‘masters of nature’, which the capitalist classes have already tried to achieve, and failed, in their global investment practices.

Of course Engels was not a capitalist, but his anthropocentric assumptions were essentially the same as those of the bourgeoisie and previous historical religious and secular elites. The world (nature included) was there to be used as humanity saw fit. Engels along with Marx envisioned a classless form of humanity, but a humanity organising the unlimited growth of production. Furthermore, the above viewpoint articulated by Engels, was not an individual maverick going off Marx’s message, because Engels was just articulating what Marx, using philosophical language, had articulated almost from the beginning of his theoretical researches. Marx, in 1844 had written some manuscript papers that contained the following.

“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. 1844 Manuscripts. Volume 3 Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 3 page 300 -303. Emphasis added. RR.)

It could not be made much clearer than that by Marx. The human essence of nature and the natural essence of mankind is manifested in – industry! Despite his much neglected revolutionary-humanist analysis of human estrangement due the hierarchical mass society form which had been embraced by the capitalist elites and their mode of industrial production, Marx (and others) concluded that once the capitalist class had been overthrown and/or absorbed into the working class and class distinctions eliminated, the following conclusion would be reached; “Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature, the true resurrection of nature”….”Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature (and therefore of natural science) to man”.

How Marx gets to this line of deduction is revealing. These 1844 manuscripts were notes Marx made for himself as he worked his way through his theoretical approach and for this reason can not be considered definitive. Nevertheless, they do give clues to why Marx, starting off with the estrangement of humanity from it’s natural biological essence can end up with industrial mass producing society as being nature personified. By this point in time, Marx clearly considered the essence of the human species was characterised by what humanity could produce socially using its advanced scientific and technological methods of industrial production.

According to Marx – at his most advanced stage of critical thinking – the human species should not be considered as a late developed and still firmly rooted and still learning part of the biological system of life on earth, but something already superior to it. Instead Marx considers that the human species is an advanced evolutionary outcome of a sophisticated sociological human inspired system of mass production, with all the intended and unintended consequences that such systems entail. Consequently, in considering the question of human dependence or independence and the religious hold of mystical ‘creation’ type reasoning upon ordinary humans Marx wrote;

“The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, (i.e. every day reasoning. RR) because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life.” (ibid vol 3 p 304)

But of course although by denying that nature and man were created by a god, this secular fact does not make either of these categories entirely independent of something else – such as bio-chemical, self-replicating organic systems. It only makes them independent of being created by a non-existent mystical male deity. The fact that species through sexual or asexual biological reproduction produce new copies of themselves also means they are not independent, or that they ‘exist on their own account’ but are dependent upon many other biological human beings, as well as being dependent upon inorganic planetary material and organic material from other species.

So the fact is that man as a biological species and nature being made up of millions of biological species which also biologically reproduce definitely do not exist on their own account, as Marx asserts. Life on earth exists on account of the bio-chemical process of organic and inorganic recycling of life on earth, which is dependent upon the entire evolution of biological species taking place within the whole biosphere of earth. Nor does it mean that the rest of the biological system can be materially or intellectually incorporated as an integral part of the socio-biological system’s of humanity.

So when Marx also concluded in the 1844 manuscripts that in effect; “Human industrialised societies represent the complete unity of man with nature and nature’s true resurrection”, he was declaring what he considered was the essence of the human species, and attempting to establishing that intellectually imagined ‘essence’ – as a logical fact for his and future generations. Furthermore, when he added that;
But since for the socialist man, the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis.” (ibid 305)

We can begin to understand that Marx was not able to utilise a bio-chemical explanation of the common evolutionary origin of the Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells within life on earth and their internal organelle structures in the evolution of multicellular species, within the plant, insect and animal types of life on earth. In fact nobody could, because this detail and its implications had not been sufficiently revealed and understood, until the late 20th century. Nor was their mutual ecological inter-dependence understood at the time. We can also understand that Marx’s defining of humanity and nature as having a sociological essence, rather than just a sociological form and a biological essence was largely due to a lack of detailed biological knowledge

So in the 21st century we need to differ from Marx substantially, and in addition remind ourselves that defining the essence of the human species, is an ongoing collective task for every generation, not an assertion by any particular individual talented or not. This is because we also know that the human species is capable of self-critical reflection and of changing its practices and its thinking as accurate knowledge accumulates, even if not all humans consistently exercise that capability. And that possibility presupposes that the human species collectively ceases to eliminate all the myriad species, which provide an adequately supportive biosphere for life on earth.

To sum up so far: The forensic level of analysis by Marx of the capitalist mode of production is still unsurpassed by any subsequent intellectual or economist. His perceptive development of the ‘estrangement, alienation and dehumanisation symptoms created by living in capital dominated hierarchical mass society forms, remains extremely relevant and pertinent, even though he did not specifically recognise these symptoms have dominated all forms of hierarchical mass societies, from ancient to modern. These symptoms become evident particularly when we consider the histories of past slave based societies, their ancient wars to annex land and resources and the multiple genocides by the empires of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome. Not forgetting of course the current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. The forced estrangement, alienation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people from their homes, their identities and their human rights is beyond question to all but the perpetrators of these crimes.

Marx’s comments upon those three symptoms are particularly relevant when we also consider the revelations surrounding the release of the Epstein photo’s, emails and assorted materials. These pieces of previously mostly hidden but blatently recorded evidence, reveal one section of a modern powerful and dehumanised international elite, savagely exploiting and oppressing any age or any gender of life’s species on earth, they fancy in order to satisfy their insatiable desires.

The same scandal has also revealed another section of the dehumanised elite complicit in denying their own complicity and/or covering up the physical and mental crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated against their dehumanised victims and which they have been aware of. Plus the fact that we should not forget an educated, literate middle class media sector who have actively and persistently turned a wilful blind eye and failed to expose or report upon the things they were turning a blind eye upon.

However, recognising the outstanding or degrading human contributions in one elite dominated area of life on earth, does not mean abandoning a thorough criticism of any other areas of importance. Those who have not as yet grasped that the distinction between the current sociological realm of human existence and the biological realm of nature as articulated by Marx, was wrong, is now revealed as a purely anthropocentric ideologically derived construct, belong to the past, not to a Giaia-centric future.

For modern Marxists, environmentalists, humanists and feminists, it is no longer difficult to uncover convincing, reliable evidence that a crucial biological separation between the human species and all other species does not exist in the real material world. That 19th and 20th century ideological position was a mixture of intellectual ignorance and arrogance. It is also not difficult to understand now that the many forms of prejudice and oppression are not biological symptoms but socio-psychological symptoms of a social system designed by elites to function in that prejudiced, discriminatory and oppressive way. The current sociological system has incentivised individuals to conform to these symptoms by creating and granting various rewards for adopting and acting upon those symptoms, whether in perpetrating them, excusing them, ignoring them, denying them or covering them up.

The current generation of Revolutionary-Humanists need to patiently but consistently call out all those who perpetuate the above noted Giaia blind trend of Anthropocentrism in any of its forms, whether these symptoms issue from conservative, liberal, radical, revolutionary or Marxist, political tendencies. This is because 21st century evidence indicates that whatever form of future such advocates thought they were proposing, they have now become representatives of the past levels of general understanding, not advocates of a sustainable future.

Such dogmatic intellectuals will be compelled by their biological essence to continue to exist in a real inorganic and organic, biological world, which sustains their breathing, their thinking, their eating, their drinking, their procreation, whilst continuing to be seduced by long held habits or by forms of ideological loyalty or dogmatic certainty to continue to think within a virtual anthropocentic focussed world of their own and others socially constructed historical and contemporary imagination.

In their social activism and imagination, they may place the complex one-sided sociological world of hierachical mass societies based on destruction way above the importance of the infinitely more complex biological world of species complexity, continuity, mutual inter-dependence and cooperation. In doing so they may imagine that their sociological realm of elite humanity is going to be able to find a way sustain a future biological realm, here on earth or on another planet, when they have self-indulged themselves in the current ones destruction. However, in the end reality will always replace imagination, even after some of us are no longer here to imagine anything at all.

Roy Ratcliffe (February 2026)