MODES AND MEANS OF PRODUCTION (Part 2.)

Posted on July 20, 2026 by stutteringsteps

Part 1 of this series on Modes and Means of Production, was written and published in order to point out that the historically attruted connection of the concept of ‘life on earth’ directly with the anthropocentric social development of humanity, was historically incorrect in fact as well as in biology and logic. The historic anthropocentric attachment of an imaginary god-created nature which was ‘given’ in perpetuity to mankind had been invented and maintained by successive elites, religious and secular, who had governed them since ancient times. So by using the direct biological link of everyday eating and excreting that all us humans experience from cradle to grave, I sought to indicate that despite the mystical fictions concerning the origins of the human species that our real origins lay elsewhere. That origin and our continuing human essence lies firmly within the biological sphere of life on earth, and definitely not the social. The much, much later social development of an urban-centred social sphere created by humanity, for humanity, in the form of cities and Empires, had by that time become an arena of physical and mental experience that caused most human beings to be almost totally separated from nature.

Therefore, in contrast to that socially constructed physical and intellectual divide, I asserted that; a) the human species is a multi-cellular biological organic species situated firmly within the general biological processes of Nutrition, Metabolised absorption, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death, (abbreviated as (N-M-G-R + A – D). These processes and their sequences, although variable, are common to all life forms on the planet. I then asserted that; b) no matter how complex the ways the ruling elites choose to describe the functioning of the socio-economic system that they control and support, its function is, always has been, – and will always have to be – understood as a dependent part of an interconnected biological world system. I then described the concept of a mode of production as a collective social system whose primary function is to enable the biological sequence of (N-M-G-R + A – D) to be consistently achieved by human collectives. However, at that point I also added that the hierarchical form of mass society anciently chosen to organise and control its various modes of production and its class divisions of labour, contained a number of fatal flaws.

The class structure chosen for this hierarchical system, initiated and resulted in the estrangement and dehumanisation all the members of the human species living within them. They became estranged and dehumanised away from their natural biological essence as a distinct species, but this occurred in class differentiated ways. The three basic classes in such societies were made to conform to specific, but different permanent roles and responsibilities from which in general there was no alternative life style possible and no easy method of escape. In general each class had to conform to the life-long repetition of a restricted repertoire of one-sided or one dimensional, social and technical skills and experiences to which over long periods of time they became socially conditioned to endure and some to enjoy. Thus the slaves, were both forced and conditioned to slave away on a daily basis; the ruling elite were both compelled and conditioned to rule on a daily basis; and the administrative class were both directed and conditioned to administer also on a daily basis. One or other of these class-based patterns of existence became the 24/7 lived reality for the vast bulk of the citizens of these societies and this conditioning or socialisation continued for the whole of their working lives.

Consequentially, what practical and intellectual activity they did repeatedly over such long periods of time influenced and in many cases determined who they were, how they acted, how they viewed themselves and what they thought about their situation. The historically recorded evidence in texts emanating from these hierarchical mass society systems indicates that the elites introduced forced labour, coercion and punishment toward the labouring classes and these coercions and punishments were implemented by the governing or administrative elite classes. Thus in such systems, the elite members of the human species, became accustomed to having a callous disregard for the physical wellbeing of the working class members of their societies, but at the same time had an enthusiastic regard for the delivery from them of their actual and potential labour power skills and energy in fulfilling elite orders. Within this particular form of social aggregation, elite social power over non-elites became almost absolute as were elite assumptions concerning their own special privileges. The administrative class became conditioned to obediently implement and administrate ruling elite decisions and to treat people ‘below them’, not as citizen equals, but as servants of the system. The ancient and subsequent history of the human species became and remains a history of class-enforced divisions and differences.

Yet prior to this hierarchical mass society development, (and despite it) the human species for millions of years of evolution had always been a single species of life with each average individual among them having the average, age-related ability to learn and adapt to any number of skills and aptitudes. Nevertheless, this natural biological adaptability was severely curtailed and restricted by the clearly defined, socially enforced and continually reinforced responsibilities allocated to the various classes and to the occupational roles dispersed within them. Living within these societies made their members part of an integrated authoritarian social system which required collective, class-based socio-economic repetition and discipline rather than individual expression or creativity. Consequently, individual frustrations and class determined contradictions and conflicts characterise the social relationships within hierarchical mass society communities from their earliest stages. In real sense, this class division and its enforcement was the first fatal flaw in the hierarchical mass society system. Aother fatal flaw with this hierarchical mass society form of aggregation was that the class structure enabled the elite to materially reward it’s own members and the middle administrative sections according to how the governing elite viewed the systems progress.

Furthermore, since the fundamental biological purpose of these hierarchical mass societies was to fulfil the (N-M-G-R + A – D) to all its members, it follows that in general the nutritional input levels for the working setions could not be lowered by too much or their daily work and/or the length of their working life would be radically reduced. However, the rewards going to the other elites and the administrative middle ranks could be increased – if and when the elite saw fit. This nutritional and social discrepancy and inequality is depicted in historical records and remains so to this day. Elites have always granted themselves considerably more resources from nature than the slaves, serfs, peasants, or workers. Since ultimately the rewards of ordinary, skilled or elite labour at whatever level of society it is exercised, are always forms of biological or inorganic material, that come directly or indirectly from organic or inorganic nature, any negative effects upon the local resources, are always crucial. This sociological/biological imbalance holds true, whether it comes directly by a centralised allotment of produce or indirectly through purchase via a centralised allotment of money or some other social token of value.

This is where the conflct between the two interlocked systems (biological and sociological) begins to manifest itself negatively in both systems. Since the rate of biological growth of those species used by farming communities as nutrition (i.e. crops, fruits, roots and animals) continue to grow and mature according to biologically determined, seasonal time scales, (measured in growing seasons and months), and human hunger visits the body at least twice per day, the amount of land (and water) hierarchical mass societies need to have available for agriculturally and water sourced Nutrition and other essential uses needed to be sufficient for the regular needs of the respective classes as well as sufficient for unexpected contingencies. Consequently, even with relatively large areas under local hierarchical control, intensive farming for developing hierarchical mass societies, therefore always tended sooner or later to exhaust the local soil and water resources, being used. Since the (N) needed to keep the biological survival process of (N-M-G- R + A – D) for all citizens (either static or growing), the land or sea based organic resources being used for those purposes needed to be regularly extended from time to time.

Therefore, as these systems multiplied in number and community size, extending land and resource control became a constant historical necessity, for settled hierarchical mass societies. Territorial expansion remained an existential imperative for such societies, even when and if, the extra land needed was already occupied by other species, such as plants, animals or humans. The historical record indicates that river, seafaring and agricultural hierarchical mass societies had begun to destroy anciently established forests within one or two generations of their establishment in the early periods of ancient Egypt and Greece. Intensive goat and other ungulate forms of herding for other communities was already stripping rocky pastures bare. Hence neighbouring human communities could and did cease to be friends and neighbours and instead became competitors, rivals and even enemies, particularly in the near and middle eastern Fertile Crescent regions. Consequently, the single human Homo sapien biological species began to self- dentified as us and them (or us and the other). This social bifurcation tendency was subsequently followed by the social invention of different religions, different ethnicities, different nations and later different ‘races’. No biological differences, they could still biologically procreate but social prohibitions were increasingly invented. From very early on in the history of the hierarchical mass society form there existed a phenomenon which no other species of life on earth replicates. The phenomenon of dehumanisation of other human beings and the enslavement of them as an elite led investment strategy. Thus the Greek Philosopher and Warrior, Xenophon advocated the following profitable investment strategy;

“Assume, however, that the total number of slaves,to begin with is twelve hundred. By using the revenue derived from these the number might in all probability be raised to six thousand at the least in the course of five or six years. Further, if each man brings in a clear obol a day, the annual revenue derived from that number of men is sixty talents. Out of that sum, if twenty talents are invested in additional slaves, the state will have forty talents available for any other necessary purpose. And when a total of ten thousand men is reached, the revenue will be a hundred talents.” (Xenophon. ‘Ways and Means’)

The above quotation was part of a lengthy reasoned discussion by an elite military and philosophical member of the Greek city of Athens during the third to fourth century period BCE. What is notable to me in this extract, (and many others of that period and even later) is that the socialisation of the Greek hierarchical elite to the hierarchical mass society structure had already dehumanised themselves and their slaves, to such an extent that the idea of the enforced slavery of fellow Homo sapiens was no longer unthinkable, but a long accepted part of a system of oppression and degradation of their own species. It had become so acceptable that it allowed a rational proposal for an Athenian investment strategy to be put forward without any strong reservations. Xenophon had already been a mercenary in Syrus the Younger’s attempt to seize control of the Achaemenid Empire, which, by definition involved a level of dehumanisation, which had no hesitation in spearing or hacking to death any human being (male, female,old or young, who stood in the way of seizing their assets of land and resources including their women and children.

By the Egyptian, Persian and Greek period dynasties, humanities evolutionary progress could no longer be realistically described as sociologically or biologically progressive but these societies had introduced an entirely new phenomenon within the immensely long biological evolution of species life on earth. After billions of years of Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cellular and multicellular life forms on earth, the sociological development of one species (the human species) had introduced slavery and genocidal mass killings within a biological natural system that during those billions of years of evolution had never evolved that phenomenon. Once examined, these historic examples reek of the ancient equivalent of the Epstein oligarchal elite who also traded in children and young girls and shared the indifference or complicity of the European elite to the genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Incidentslly, the late admission by the new Labour Leader and others that they “got it wrong on Gaza” is just crass political cynicism and duplicity. In their earlier 2025 and 2026 calculations the left, right and centre political elites in Europe, and elsewhere, chose to side with the Israeli elite because it paid these political careerists financially and politically to side with the genocide alliance of European, North American and Israeli elites. Inspite of the abundant evidence – and in spite of the charge of Genocide brought by South Africa and ratified by the appropriate International courts! The political classes of Europe punished those who protested against the genocide of Palestinian’s, not those who perpetrated it.

But now the Labour Party careerist elites (and others) have calculated that it no longer pays politically to belong to the genocide alliance of Israel and the USA. So the political chameleons in the Labour Party and elsewhere have calculated that they had backed the wrong side, now that, that side is in complete public disgrace and disarray. Other politically calculating elites also ‘got it wrong’ on the bungled handling of the Covid Pandemic, the Prosecutions of the Post Office Managers and the bombing of Iran when in each case people died as a result of them calculating what was right for themselves – at the time – only to have to say they got it wrong – again!! However, if all they need to keep saying is that they got it wrong to keep themselves in power and to line their ample pockets, then the next thing they will get wrong after failing to keep to the climate crisis targets, may be future support for and participation in another world war. Plus a second tier of political manipulation still waits in the wings. They can call for a public inquiry and then promise to “learn the lessons” after decades of obfuscation as in the Hillsborough case, were again people died. All brands of hierarchical mass society Political Party’s are wedded to the current system and to the dominant political players in that system. And none of this disregard and devastation for the ordinary citizen by the governing elites is new or recent, but as old and as continuous as the hierarchical mass society system itself.

From the recorded history of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome we have documentary and archeological evidence of hierarchically aggregated humanity regularly engaged in savage and ferocious wars with each other and abundance of evidence of genocidal elimination of human species communities by hierarchical mass society elites. All this with no serious qualms and, for no other reason than the victims were just in the way of the territorial expansion calculations of a established great power. Moreover, these were not just all symptoms of the distant past. The British Empire, the Russian Empire, the French Empire, the German Empire, the Spanish and Portuguese Empire’s and the North and South American New World attempts at Empire building, were all achieved a few hundred years ago by state based elites who desired to expand their territorial control of land and resources, by eliminating those of their own species who were already living there. The indigenous peoples of North America, South America, Africa and Oceana, were ruthlessly eliminated or enslaved two or three centuries ago by members of their own species, for no other reason than the resources they occupied were coveted by elites wishing to find new sources of wealth to absorb.

Bringing this hierarchical mass society de-humanised, resource hungry pattern of behaviour up to date in the 21st century, what else was the gradual and then rapid genocidal elimination of Palestinians in Gaza and the Left Bank in 2025/26 by the Jewish nation of Israel, but a naked land and resource grab. What else is Putin’s Russian Special Operation in Ukraine but land and resource acquisition? What else is America’s joint operation with Israel over regime change and territorial control of parts of Iran and Lebanon, if not the modern occurance of this millenial old necessity of elites to replace old exhausted or depleted resources, with alternative sources or even new types of resources? Moreover, it is a serious mistake, to assume this symptom of the hierarchical mass society expansion of territory by aggressive military action is a elite personality driven symptom even though extremely dehumanised and demented individuals are often elevated to power to push the dehumanised aggression forward. In reality the behind the scenes calculations are being pressed and pursued by powerful oligarchal collaborations who know the hierarchical mass society system is once again facing extreme system-threatening contradictions and are hoping to direct anger away from the type of system itself and toward a useful or the most plausible scapegoat, they can identify.

However, it is time for me to return to pointing out the hold of anthropocentric framework of thinking upon the bourgeois and petite-bourgeois members of the dominant 20th and 21st century elites governing modern versions of the hierarchical mass society communities. This is because it is the dominant ideology informing all political trends whether they self-identify as Left, Right, Centre or so-called Revolutionary political positions. It stands to their dehumanised reason that anyone enjoying an above average social position and an above average financial remuneration from the existing mode and means of production, would be reluctant to undermine it in any substantive way either by ditect action or criticism. Yet in this Part 2, evidence will be provided that even the staunchest critics of the current capitalist mode of production, owned and controlled by the modern hierarchical elites, were (and are) themselves whole-heartedly committed to conserve the industrialised methods of ensuring the (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes of human life are realised. The pursuit of social production by one species (humanity) has been elevated above the combined biological reproduction of all other species.

One of the most intellectually advanced thinkers of the 19th century, dedicated most of his adult life to a detailed critical social and economic analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and for this he was excessively denigrated and pilloried by the elite establishments of hierarchical mass societies. For a time, it also meant that he was excessively lauded and exalted by those anticapitalists opposed to the capitalist mode of production. However, as is often the case, most of those individuals on both sides of the exaggerated hyperbole about him, had not bothered to extensively read and examine what he had actually written – which he often did at considerable length. His name was Karl Marx and depending upon how anyone viewed the capitalist mode of production, Marxwould be considered as a saint or a sinner; a god or a devil.

The Bolshevik and Stalinist anti-capitalists for example made statues and portraits of Marx and placed them everywhere; in towns, offices, factories, shops, schools and homes, very much like Christian iconology and iconolatry placed statues and portraits of their imaginary ‘immaculate” one, as a form of respect, awe and worship. Some pro-capitalists would destroy his images and burn his books. Given that his books were mostly very long and detailed, most working people had neither the time, the literary skills or the spare energy to plough through volume after detailed volume. For this reason Marx and Marxism became something of a fringe middle-class indulgence. I remember at Teacher Training College and later at University in the 1970’s and 1980’s student ignorance about Marx, (apart from his actual name) was rife. Yet even when encountering that fringe Marxist milieu, it turned out that dipping an intellectual toe into the Communist Manifesto and a few pamphlets was more par for the course than ploughing through the three volumes of Das Capital, let alone the three volumes of Marx’s notes on Surplus Value.

But do not let that description of mine blind you the reader, to the exceptional level of dedication and skill that Marx himself brought to his decision to undertake “a ‘merciless criticism of everything” to do with the capitalist mode of production or his commitment to the liberation of the working class from the category of wage-slavery and poverty. Almost ten years of daily or weekly visits to the British Library to take volumous notes from as many relevant books as he could lay his hands on earned him the respect of the library staff who allegedly reserved the favourite place and chair of Mr Marx in the library and greeted him by name. His dedication also earned him the respect of anyone who has thoroughly read the resulting three volumes that he wrote as a result of taking those painstaking notes. I doubt whether the forensic level of analytical detail concerning the functioning of the capitalist mode of production has even been equalled by anyone since Marx, or ever will be. I doubt also that any other non-working class person has put as much effort into supporting the formation of an initial Internaltional Working Men’s Association as Marx did. But, nonetheless, Marx, like every other living human being was a product of his day and age and he could not see further or any clearer into the future than the general and exceptional understanding limits of the age they live in would allow. This is ‘material’ fact is something most ‘Marxists’, fail to observe themselves.

It is important to understand that the stage the capitalist mode of production had reached by the time Marx was writing about life on earth, past, present and future, was alteady quite advanced technologically and industrially, but not so much in terms of biology or ecology. The 18th and 19th centuries were periods in which life on earth was indeed being considered from a biological and geographical perspective by Humboldt by Darwin and others such as Wallace from a biological perspective. However, their studies took place with limited instruments and within a limiting framework of anthropocentric assumptions. The lack of optical instruments that could see or probe below the outer protective layers of plants, insects and animals, meant therefore their understanding of the biology of life on earth was severely limited. Their anthropocentric assumptions of the superiority of human thinking over the non-thinking of biology and nature in general, limited their ability to think beyond their own narcisistic arrogance. Therefore, the detail of the cells, making up the inner and outer elements of all organic forms of life were not much better visualised and understood than the atoms and molecules making up the inner and outer layers of inorganic materials.

Consequently, with both these undetected limitations in play the 19th century Darwin drew on his understanding of the selective breeding and cross breeding of animals, birds and plants to interpret how biological species must have evolved through time by successive breeding stages of their evolution. In rejecting the long held notion of an abstraction called god being the biological change agent or selector, Darwin advanced the idea that the abstraction ‘nature’ was doing the selection toward biological ‘perfection’, hence he coined the term ‘Natural Selection’, or the Preservation of Favoured Races, in the Struggle for Life by Natural Selection’ as he subtitled his book on the origin of species. Leaving aside the oxymoronic assertion that any abstraction can select anything or that the concept of different human ‘races’ are nothing more than an invented Victorian or Edwardian class and colonial prejudice, I suggest something else anthropocentrically was occurring.

Marx, obviously aware of Darwin, however, with the same limitations at play, came to the conclusion that nature in producing the human species had proved that biological nature in its essence was in fact part of a ‘human’ sociological dimension. For example, he asserted that “society was the complete unity of man with nature” or ‘nature with man. Rather than paraphrasing what Marx wrote, I think it is worth quoting some of the many statements by Marx which unaquivically prove that this anthropocentric viewpoint was one which was firmly held by him. I have decided to include the following extracts by Marx because it may seem to readers that the above assertion by me is a most unlikely one to be accurately presented. This might be particularly the case for those Marxists and academics who have not yet begun to question the 19th century anthropocentric assumptions they have been led to accept as correct. Marx wrote;

“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)

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)

“And;

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

Indeed, by the assertion that by understanding industry we can “gain an understanding of the human essence of nature” it couldn’t be expressed in any clearer fashion; the latter anthropocentric assertion that ‘the earth is an instrument of labour’ also sums up the collective viewpoint of all hierarchical mass society elites from the ancient despotic one’s, through to the modern liberal democratic capitalist one’s and on to Fascist, Socialist and Communist variant’s. It is the overwhelming hegemonic domination of this anthropocentric ideological paradigm, which ensures that the whole spectrum of political thinking from extreme right manifestations through liberal centre manifestations and on to extreme left manifestations, can only imagine that ‘another world is possible’ if it follows the same hierarchical mass society templates as all previous ones. The only difference being that it would be led by a different elite working class management and governance team. Instead of the religious abstraction god making man and the rest of nature for his sustenance and pleasure, for Marx the abstraction ‘nature’ had produced man and the rest of nature as an instrument of and for his labour.

This anthropocentric fixation, obsession and confusion which was carried forward by Karl Marx, one of the most outstanding and talented anti-capitalist intellectuals, explains why all such Marx influenced political spectrums aimed at reforming existing hierarchical mass society systems will fail, even if some or all of their advocates are placed in governmental power over them. If Marxists haven’t yet understood Marx’s own 19th century limitations what else have they not understood and can they be trusted to be self-critical if they have just borrowed their ideas from a talented 19th century revolutionary-humanist, but not updated them by 20th and 21st century sources of biological and ecological knowledge. In fact when sociological systems and biological systems are both sufficiently understood, it becomes clear that the sociological essence and aims of the past and present hierarchical mass society systems themselves are incompatible with the biological systems reality of life on earth. The extract which follows gives an indication of how innacurate and confusing the socio-economic abstractions within the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking and discourse have become on the anti-capitalist left.

“We are living in the end times, which Georges Gastaud has theorized as the age of exterminism. If it be imperialist warfare verging on a nuclear apocalypse, the brutal intensification of capitalist social murder, or the catastrophic decimation of the planet, the stakes of class struggle have arguably never been higher. It is a question of life or death for the species and even the biosphere. This is no longer—if it ever was—a time to indulge in the theoretical games of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. It is a time to call the latter out for what they are and engage in serious ideological warfare.”

And;

“French Theory is part of a much broader intellectual world war aimed at discrediting dialectical and historical materialism, as well as actually existing socialism. It has had an expansive and deep influence, including within the Marxist intelligentsia around the world and, most importantly, progressive organizing. For those of us who know this tradition from the inside, we have a responsibility to clarify its function within international class struggle, in order to both defend Marxism against its reductive dismissals and to go on the offensive by demonstrating the power of dialectical and historical materialism. As an innovative, collective, practical science of liberation, we can draw on it and further develop its tools to understand and transform the world before it is too late.”

Note that the author/s of these religiously inspired “end times” musings, predict the ‘decimation of the planet’ and ‘life and death for the species’, and that his or her solution is not to seriously encourage direct action by the working class and engage in practical action themselves, but to engage in serious ideological warfare. The self-defined function of this Marxist intelligentsia is to defend “existing socialism” which are simply words representing another (Stalinist) idea rather than a lived hierarchical mass society reality and to demonstrate the power of another idea – dialectical and historical materialism. Unsurprisingly, for most intellectuals, revolutionary transformations have always been more about ‘a battle of ideas’, than about changing the way they live. This is despite their named mentor Marx writing the following and other similar warnings, including clarifying what constitutes practical force in changing a mode of production rather than destroying and killing ‘ other’ human beings.

“Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men are needed who can exert practical force.” (Marx. M/E Collected Works. Volume 4, page 119)

The patriarchal language used by Marx also needs rejecting to make it relevant in the 21st century. In order to carry out ideas people are needed who can and will exert practical force. Indeed, in numerous of his writings, Marx considered that a revolution was the practical activity working people would and could engage in to end their class subordination and win back control of their own collective labour power. Failure to fully understand Marx and his 19th century limitations, mean that Post-Marx, ‘Marxist’ ideas about revolution are predominantly idealised abstractions. They are ideas about future top-down mass society imaginings rather than the small practical steps of forming new lived realities out of the existing deteriorating circumstances of a mode of production in its terminal phase of collapse. Conveniently, pulling ideas out of thin air individually or collectively and recording them electronically or on paper means that no one has to get their hands dirty digging, or ever finding out that their body is exhausted from practical constructive productive activism. And in that way of course, nothing practical gets done.

Intellectual production only recreates itself. It creates resolutions, reports, evaluations, talking points, guidelines, campaigns, strategies, to do lists, and sets diary dates for future conference talking shops. Intellectual production by itself does not do anything to accomplish real world change. It doesn’t bake a cake or knock a nail in. Repeatedly talking about revolution in the abstract does not even clarify what constitutes revolutionary action nor does it bring actual revolutionary change in its wake. Put crudely in working-class, shop-floor terminology, revolution requires intellectuals to start getting off their conference acclimatised butts and abandon their theoretically imagined top-down mass society fantasies in order to become small-scale, energetic, change agent, snag team activists, working alongside actual Giaia-centric (N-M-G-R + A – D) individuals dedicated to initiating alternative biologically and ecologically aware daily acts of social living.
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Roy Ratcliffe (July 2026)

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MODES AND MEANS OF PRODUCTION (Part 1)

Posted on July 11, 2026 by stutteringsteps

Everyone who survives their birth alive and well, in every country and over every generation, very soon consciously know that in order to survive they have to eat and drink regularly and get rid of the used and unused food and water their bodies no longer want or need. Even before we speak in our mother tongue we experience these basic facts before any other things we might subsequently encounter and learn. We know this because practically from day one (or two) after we exit from our mothers birth canal we are eager, if not desperate, for food, and after digestion the residue fills our nappy or runs down our legs. At that stage we do not know that the food comes via a social mode of producing it and that the waste also goes away via a social mode of waste disposal. Nevertheless daily hunger and this hot and then cold feeling on our baby skin are symptoms that are impossible to ignore for parents and children. As we get older, we soon learn to largely ignore such ‘minor’ biological distractions, but of course they are not minor and they never go away.

So even though we learn to control either end of the nutrient intake and waste output, this actual or potential embarrassment represents a frequent reminder of life on earth at it’s most basic biological level. For most of us who are sensibly grounded our intimate connection with our biological essence prevents us from forgetting who we really are and imagining that we are something unique, seperate and way above the rest of nature. In contrast few narcisistic individuals like to imagine they are superior in all things to all other human beings and to the other species of life on earth. But thinking rationally doesn’t always prevent someone from creating a virtual world of ideas, linguistic abstractions, speculative fancies and self-promoted narcissism about themselves and any others they admire. Politicians of all leanings and creators of intellectual products are the most prone to conjuring up virtual realities out of words and images that bear no direct correlation to reality. Indeed, the new Artificial Intelligence entrepreneurs are really tripping out on creating and inviting others to mimic them in creating seemingly new virtual realities out of old scrap (past intellectual production) and convincing themselves it’s refreshingly real.

[N-M-G-R + A – D]
But interestingly, the tiny fragment of daily self-knowledge (via oral intake and anal expulsion) not only keeps us grounded, but once understood in more detail, informs us of something quite profound about life on earth. Moreover, it is, a profundity which cuts through all the pretentious mystical creation stuff about how life appeared here on earth. These two acts relating to Nutrition unequivically identify the biological essence of what life everywhere – in all its amazing forms – is comprised of. At the bottom of everything else, (literally as well as metaphorically at the bottom), Life on Earth, is in a sense, eating, drinking, pooping and peeing, with other important things only occurring in between. This pattern becomes obvious for it starts from the moment we are born and continues until the moment we die. Furthermore, the real world we live in comprises of many essential life forms that live and reproduce themselves and their own species by utilising some other life-forms poop and pee as their main nutritional source.

The oxygenated air we need to breathe comes courtesy of plants and algae all of which have some root, tubule, or Hyphae dangled into some form of nutrient rich excrement and detritus re-labelled as compost or healthy topsoil. Therefore, this Nutritional recycling process does not only involve us humans. Indeed, all, ‘Life on Earth’ from microbes, plants, insects fungi, birds, fish, mammals apes and humans are part of a continuous biological process of absorbing Nutrition (N), Metabolising the nutritional source into suitable forms for the cellular components of our particular organism to utilise, which then enables it to Grow, (G), then during their life spans all (or most) life forms Reproduce (R), their own cells and more of their own species before Ageing (A) and then Dying (D). Or the sequence [N-M-G-R + A – D] for short. In general this biological process is commonly available knowledge, of course, but as a sequence ‘common’ to all forms of life on earth, it is more frequently overlooked than revealed, more frequently ignored than considered and even less understood.

Also overlooked is knowledge and understanding of exactly how the extensive combined biological and economic system functions which 24/7 delivers (N) to our human mouths. For example, I went through Primary School, Secondary School, Engineering school and Teacher Training College (17 years of government designed and sponsored Education) without anyone specifically mentioning modes of production or means of production. I conclude from this that conomics is not a subject frequently disturbing our entertainment and pleasurable distractions from dealing with the constant estrangements, alienations and dehumanisation of everyday life. Until we are ill, we are rarely informed or inform ourselves in detail how this biological sequence of (N-M-G-R + A – D) is taking place in our own bodies and in all other organic species, functions. Yet this unique biological process is effecting the whole ecological system balance of life on earth. Even when nature does get mentioned in passing, its fundamental importance is rarely considered. For most of us adults, for most of our lives, our knowledge of the earths biological process starts in the vicinity of the kitchen area and ends up in the vicinity of the toilet pan – and that’s the extent of it. Despite the existence of, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates, fibre, sugars and adequate liquid absorbtion, the routine of Nutritional intake itself, is not considered a mystery or overly complex – except in the artistry of celebrated chefs.

Incidentally, with the exception of bees, ants, and termites, all the other species of life on earth (and there are millions of them) do not need nor have created a social mode of production. Apart from domesticated plants, insects and animals, each individual organism is just located near what they need from the natural environment and then extract enough nutrition for themselves and any incapable offspring. This individual hands on or mouth on phenomena was very much what the whole human species did before hierarchical mass societies were created. In fact the human species for hundreds of thousands of years were all hunters and gatherers or pastoralists, moving about the continents and between them whilst living in relatively small communities compared with modern cities and towns. However, since the creation of hierarchical mass societies, an alternative system was established as a mode of production which developed class based divisions of labour, within them. Some members were selected (or forced) to labour in the fields and mines, others were selected to govern, others selected for a range of other purposes.

Between that ancient agricultural and social revolution and the modern era the complexity and size of such hierarchical mass societies has grown until in the late 20th century the hierarchical mass society mode became globally dominant, increasingly large and complex Empire sized aggregations. In fact with regard to modern humanity there are now still two complex systems, actively functioning side by side, but not in a synchronised way. One is a biological system and referred to as ‘nature’; the other is social, and referred to as the ‘political economy’ of the state. Both are constantly inter-meshing together on different time scales, in different locations and both function to achieve diverging and increasingly conflicting outcomes. The biological system grows anywhere it can. Jungle biology or desertification has more than once buried large conurbations flatteringly given the appellation of civilisations‘ beneath its leaves, branches, roots or so-called sands of time.

The second, the sociological system, also referred to as a mode of production, is systematically planned and organised, until it finally exhausts its accessible resources and is abandoned. First and foremost these socio-economic systems are a way of collectively organising and producing those things considered necessary for the human species to complete the biological phases (N-M-G-R + A – D) of our own biological and our own social existence. Currently the mode is designated as the capitalist mode of production and its means are now advanced forms of tools, machinery, mechanised motive power and money. This is because the ownership and control of the main ‘means’ of production, (the land, the factories, the machinery and sale’s outlets) which are used to extract natural resources, (organic and inorganic) manufacture them and offer them for sale are in the hands of those individuals and companies who own and control directly or indirectly large amounts of money capital. Capital in the form of money, credit, physical assets or asset-based securities.

However, capital in any of its social forms does not directly connect with the biological system that provides, via multiple (N-M-G-R + A – D) species processes, all the food and useful resources humans need. So as capital cannot directly grow, mine or stimulate the biological system which together with physical structure of the planet, produces all the organic and inorganic material humanity needs, ‘capital’ is best considered as a ‘means’ of purchasing and organising the economic system to produce the materials for humanities (N-M-G-R + A – D processes. Throughout history, every mode of production in every social system therefore has needed a biological intermediary to interface with the biological system and gather, pick, plant, mine, reap, catch etc and distribute the essential resources necessary for survival to their respective communities. Traditionally within hierarchical mass societies those biological intermediaries have been grouped within certain specific sections of the human species, known as slaves, serfs, peasants, other forms of indentured/unpaid labour and now under the domination of capital the human interface with the biological system of ‘nature’ is via waged and/or salaried workers.

The need for all species to have access to adequate Nutrition in order to survive and the biological resources available to do so, existed before we did and before our species did. It is important to recognise that the biological system has been reproducing and functioning on a seasonal, geographic, weather-affected, temperature-determined pattern of growth, matrurity and reproduction for multiple millions of years. Over billions of years of earth orbits, this biological development gradually transformed the planet earth from a hot, inorganic, rock, liquid, and gaseous mass orbiting the sun into a green and blue mixed environment teeming with variations on its theme of cellular and multi-cellular Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic life forms. Incidentally, this actual evolution is far more amazing and complex than any of the mythical, mystical creationist imaginings of our ancient and less ancient ancestors, could come up with.

Even the most imaginative inventor of fictions and fantasies (and there are many) could not have come up with the detailed complexity of the Eukaryotic, Prokaryotic cells, the DNA strands within them or the microscopic structure of any of the many viral forms now revealed by the magnifying power of the modern electron scanning microscopes invented by the skilled technicians of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In contrast to the longevity and sophisticated complexity of the biological realm on earth, the current human socio-economic system – taking advantage of this whole billion year old self sustaining system – operates on a crude, daily, even hourly short duration non-self-replicating basis, and has only been doing so in its hierarchical mass society form for several thousand years.

Note the vast difference, both quantitatively and qualitatively, between the two active systems: self-reproducing biology (nature) has existed for billions of years, fueled by non-polluting sunlight and decomposing bio-chemical energy sources; sociology in the form of hierarchical mass societies of (humans) has existed for a few thousand years and has been fueled by highly polluting wood burning, lung destroying coal burning, cancer inducing petro-chemical burning or toxicity on steroids nuclear fission burning. The latter being pimped up by vested interests as ‘clean’ energy when its spent fuel rods will not be ‘clean’ for many thousands of years and not safe for many hundreds of years.

Note also that biology operates on a large-scale reproductive frequency spectrum of hours, days, weeks, or years, decades and even centuries in the case of forest’s and Petro-chemical deposits; in contrast ociology (humanity) operates on a reproductive frequency of hours, days and at best decades. This difference, particularly with regard to the natural resources used by humanity as sources of Nutrition and energy, represents a huge actual and potential contradiction. The difference between the rate of production of Nutrition over seasons and years by nature and the consumption of nature by us humans twice a day (or more)is considerable and becoming larger. The more natural resources we destroy or consume and the more people we need to feed the more the contradiction intensifies and the sooner comes the reckoning. That contradiction has been ignored by elites for generations and is stil be ignored by current generations.

Furthermore, if humanity exists in communities in which some members consume far more than the average member needs daily to survive, then the problem of the limited supply coming via a natural, biologically determined rate of reproduction to supply a social system based overwhelmingly on socially determined – immediate – needs (often based on greed and conspicuous consumption) this situation exacerbates the contradiction between the historically determined rates of human consumption and the biologically determined rates of natural resource production supplies. A biologically focused human economic strategy suggests that the biological resources extracted for social needs should not be exceeding the resources being biologically produced, particularly when these land based resources are being reduced by destruction or by alternative use. It’s as simple and as profound as that.

Historically, this actual and potential contradictory scenario began when humanity ceased to be hunter-gatherers living on adequate, but subsistence level diets and became agricultural societies governed by hierarchical elites who demanded and obtained an increasingly luxurious life-style of sophisticated food resources, personal items of luxury clothing/jewelry and luxury housing in the form of castles and palaces. All this continually increasing top-down human demand upon limited natural organic and inorganic resources was routed through the historically settled agriculturally-based hierarchical mass society modes of production which although frequently flexible comprised of three basic classes; a ruling class, a labouring class and a middle-tier administrative class.

This three tier class system, given occasional variations, is the template which has prevailed throughout the recorded history of the human species. That is to say that the much vaunted complex history of class struggles and genocides within the track record of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation, is the primary one actually recorded. In contrast, the previous activities by human beings before hierarchical mass societies were formed, are the subject of the disciplines of archeology, anthropology and ethnology. Nonetheless, these latter disciplines do provide some contrasting evidence to the current dehumanised and estranged positions humans find themselves experiencing within the hierarchical mass society form of communal living. Therefore, the modern economic and financial complexity we hear about in magazines, newspapers and electronic news media is the result of a professional study of the latest mode of production – capitalism! Moreover, we all know professionals have a vested interest in complicating their knowledge and language so as to appear more intelligent and capable than the non-professional members of society and to maintain a financial advantage over them.

Whatever sociological or technical complexity is intentionally or unintentionally woven around or above that basic fundamental biological fact does not alter its fundamental simplicity. All species of life need Nutritious food in – used food out – and that nature supplied that process for billions of years before humanity existed and that it continued to satisfy humanities requirements for millions of years until the onset of hierarchical mass societies, cannot be denied. It was only then that wars, genocides, slavery, wage-slavery and poverty and malnutrition became endemic for the bulk of humanity. Intellectuals and experts in economics, politics and finance, may make it more difficult to understand or interpret what they are explaining or justifying, but that will not alter the basic fundamentals that appear at every babies feed time and nappy change. The most complex it needs to be for the ordinary citizen to understand life on earth in all its interconected variety can be indicated by reference to the sequence – Nutrition, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death or (N-M-G-R + A – D) for short. More complexity, if so desired, can be added later by looking in detail at each of the phases indicated by the appropriate Capital letter in the above sequence.

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2026)

For a fuller consideration of the history of the hierarchical mass society system of human aggregation, download a copy of my extensive book ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future) obtainable from Amazon, Browns Books and Google in either digital or paperback form. Roy Ratcliffe.

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ADDENDUM TO PREVIOUS ARTICLE.

Posted on June 27, 2026 by stutteringsteps

Just how estranging and de-humanising from the biological essence of life on earth the effect of living within hierarchical mass societies has become has once again been illustrated this month (June 2026) by some individuals within the anti-capitalist left itself. In a recent left article defending the current Cuban communist type of governance from the tactics of the ex Cuban committees and the USA elites interference in Cuba the author wrote the following;

“….. 67 years after Cuban revolutionary forces marched into Havana, Cuba, and declared victory, this white Cuban scum is still a very irritating element amid continued U.S. attacks against the Cuban people. We couldn’t be more tired of these low life roaches“.

Here we have from within the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left the same bourgeois and petite-bourgeois fascistic ideology of dehumanisation of human beings by reference to their skin colour and by comparing them to scum and cockroaches. Cassifying human beings alongside insects and vermin, and by skin colour identification of the human species was an elite colonial period invention created to rationalise discrimination, oppression and exploitation of other human beings and labour power. It serves no other purpose. The above authors show their own ignorance and inherited misguided prejudice and have chosen to adopt and adapt a vocabulary created and sustained by anthropocentric colonialist era elites and their 20th century fascist imitators..

Yet this vocabulary has no natural or empirical validity and is simplistically hurled back at the other inheritors of such sociologically derived concepts, whilst its hurdlers pretend to have achieved a higher moral ground, a more rational understanding of class struggle and a more thought-out revolutionary position. Moreover, the general anthropocentric malaise is spread much further. Others on the left have chosen to publish this anthropocentric racist nonsense with little or no critical reflection on its reactionary form and retrograde meaning. In addition the authors and subsequent publishers demonstrate they too have little understanding of the detrimental relationship between hierarchical mass society means of mass production and the ecological and climatic balance of the biological and bio-chemical basis of life on earth beyond their own direct and limited experience of it.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2026)

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LABOUR FRIENDS OF ISRAEL.

Posted on June 26, 2026 by stutteringsteps

Well at last one Labour Friend of Israel’ (Keir Starmer) who failed to condemn the 21st century Genocide perpetrated by his ‘friends’, in the Israeli governmental elite, Netenhayu et al, has gone from the leadership of the British Labour Party. However, the Zionists war criminals in the occupied territories of Palestine, and the remains of the once Epstein-led oligarchal cult won’t be too worried. The Labour Party ranks, particularly the front bench, are full of Friends of Israel, who have been groomed, compromised and cultivated by campaign donations and complimentary trips. Trips to experience the wonders of the territories confiscated by Israel from the previous Palestinians in 1947 and later.

This political cultivation includes the probable next leader of the Labour Party and the almost certain next Prime Minister of the UK (Andy Burnham) whose allegiance to the Apartheid and genocidal Jewish state of Israel has never wavered, since he climbed onto the ladder of Labour Party advancement. Mr Burnham was not even deterred from involvement and support whilst ‘Israel’ was killing children, (queuing for food and water); murdering first responders attending emergencies; targetting hospital staff whilst they were saving lives and shooting journalists for daring to expose the atrocities carried out by the IDF and settler para militaries. This tells us all we needs to know about moral quality of the ‘loyal’ opposition to the so-called democratic ‘peaceful’ nation-state of the UK.

If the reader needs confirmation of this probability just take note of how many Friends of Israel cult members he appoints to his own elite peer group of chosen ones. So what the citizens of the UK can expect from any new leader of the Labour Party, is very much the same as what has gone before during the history of this third party of ‘revolving-door’ elite UK governance. Think of a distilled essence of Tony Blair, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown and pipe smoking Harold Wilson and you won’t be far off the mark. After all, the Labour Party was founded in 1900 by reformist minded dissidents from the Liberal Party, the Tory Party and the salary tenured officials within British Trade Union Movement.

This opportunistic liberal alliance was never hostile to the capitalist mode of production or to the hierarchical structure of its political governance. Its elites just wanted to find a regular place at the elite feeding trough of Parliamentary privilege. True, there was an early impatience with the previous conservative approach to governing the capitalist mode of production. The Conservative elite had kept highly intelligent representatives from the middle class, newly educated members of the working classes and ambitious bureaucrats trained within the official Trade Union movement, away from official positions of influence and power, but that ended. The initial route chosen by the rising liberal elite, was to create a political party and movement which would stand reliable candidates in parliamentary elections in constituencies dominated by badly treated working class citizens. It succeeded.

Ideologically and practically, Mr Burnham is a product of the Blarite New Labour perspective of accomodation to and supporter of, close ties with the ruling capitalist elites in industry, commerce and finance. For those of us who came across him in the Lancashire town of Leigh, it was obvious that he adopted none of the Harold Wilson rhetoric of squeezing the rich until their ‘pips squeeked’. Not that Harold ever did much squeezing, he drew the line at initiating sticks and stones that might hurt their bones, but Harold knew that name calling would be like water off a duck’s back. So a careerist who would not even speak out against the most heinous of human crimes – genocide of men women and children – will not even speak ill of the dead, let alone anyone living and who are able to loosen the purse strings of grant’s, campaign contributions and lucrative deals.

Diplomatic silence and avoidance of anything which may puncture the polished surface of elite sensibilities and cut off any gravy train of advancement is avoided by the knights of the working class tilters at windmills. The best that we can expect to come from Mr Burnham in office, (or any alternative from Labour, is a slight reform of something which is obviously problematic and yet also inconsequential. The management of nation-state societies in the period of 21st century decay, decadence and discontinuity hs become an even greater delicate balancing act between competing class interests. It is a balancing act that largely ignores the biological and ecological implications of the capitalist mode of industrial mass production and of the limitations of the current socio-economic model in addressing these climate and ecological altering symptoms.

The British Labour Party has long been just part of the anthropocentric political spectrum of hierarchical mass society ideological praxis which is based upon the hope (or ambition) that hierarchical mass societies can be persuaded to adopt some minimal ecological policies and principles which run counter to its fundamental structure. The clue to its inevitable practices is in the description of its social type. A hierarchical mass society, whatever word is used to mask that fact, (democratic, fascist, communist, socialist or theistic) is by function a hierarchical institution in which the desires and wishes of the dominant elite prevail, within a hierarchical mass society political and economic system.

I have demonstrated at length elsewhere that even the most radical intellectual thinkers of the most destructive capitalist phase of the hierarchical mass society form, such as Karl Marx, remained firmly trapped within the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking and acting productively. Although Marx castigated the negative side of Industrial mass production by ‘capital’s, he extolled its productive capacities potential for unlimited production to lift the oppressed out of capitalist induced poverty and repetitive drudgery.

Modes of production are essential to mass societies as they are the sociological structures which form an interface between human aggregates and the necessary biological and and bio-chemical inputs that all life forms on planet earth require to survive. However any mode of production which has been designed to function primarily within sociologically determined parameters rather than within biologically determined parameters, sooner or later will become biologically unsustainable. Marx and the Marxists lacked the evidence to reach that conclusion and so continued with assumption that nature can be manipulated without any limits.

If such radical 19th century thinkers and observers as the revolutionary-humanists around Marx, and the 20th century revolutionary minded inteligencia that produced the Bolsheviks and Maoists, could not cast off the anthropocentric limitation of their thought processes and considered that unlimited production of nutrition and useful materials from nature could be sustained at high levels indefinitely then the 21st century opportunistic climbers within the system are even less likely to reach such conclusions let alone perceive any viable solutions.

The anthropocentric fixation of campaigns (political or otherwise) constructed for the sole purpose of just remedying the negative effects of the current system upon various marginalised or exploited human beings, as destructive and despicable as they actually are, is only a level of understanding (or misunderstanding) the sociological part of the problem of life on earth. The large number of facts that are currently unknown or being ignored by the anthropocentric fixated intellectuals, embrace the following. The human devised sociological part of the vast matrix of human life on earth, rests entirely on the existence of an entirely separate and naturally functioning, biologically based ecological life support system which exists in the form the planetary biosphere.

The Labour Party leaders and intellectuals are not the only activists who have failed to advance their understanding, beyond the anthropocentric limitations of the past, but their social irresponsibility includes the fact that they have consistently assumed they don’t need to. That limitation is an almost universally self-induced handicap. It may require many more unnecessary and preventable disasters to shock enough of our populations out of their socialised complacency and break free of the intoxicating complexity of the busy, busy, too busy to do anything but relax and enjoy moments out of the daily grind. The idea that the future existence of life on earth is somebody else’s problem not our own, seems to have permiated all but a thoughtful few and those few are not currently among the ranks of those with influence and power. For those who are prepared to question the prevailing anthropocentric orthodoxy, the next section briefly explains the 21st century view of nature

NATURE AS WE CAN NOW SEE IT.
The nature that has been seen by humanity with the naked eye is biology – in it’s full visual splendour and enormity. To the naked eye nature is demonstrably an integrated, interdependent system which is colourful, multifaceted and splendid. Yet it’s full complexity and intricate sophistication has been hidden from the vision of the human eye and from the intellectual consciousness of humanity – for almost the entire history of the human species. Consequently, there is as much (or even more) to the biological essence of life on earth that we don’t see than what we normally do see.

Indeed, despite this complexity and sophistication within all species of life, it still remains hidden from all other biological forms of species on earth and from all of us humans who do not have access to the modern technology which can now reveal it. It was only during the late 20th century that humanity manufactured the means to magnify the the microscopic bio-chemical and biological elements that make up that intricacy, complexity and sophistication. It was only then possible to make it visible to the sight of a minority of fortunate, specially trained human beings. Only after s further period was it then was it possible to make it accessible to human intellectual understanding via the diagramatic, photographic and written representations these specialists have published.

From these specialist sources, the microscopic life forms hitherto hidden from sight until the mid to late 20th century comprise of two basic microscopic bio-chemical lipid membrane bound units designated as Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells. (Imagine a long lasting soap buble, within which are a number of other functioning things. Now shrink it down until its invisible. That’s the closest crude analogy I can come up with at the moment. RR) Each of these cells comprise of a lipid bio- chemical membrane, containing within it is a liquid called cytoplasm, and within that either a nucleus bounded by a second lipid membrane (the Eukaryotic cell) and other bio-chemical sub units, or a nucleus without a lipid membrane (the Prokaryotic cell) and other bio-chemical sub units. The membranes, nucleus and sub units within the outer membrane of these cells are all active bio-chemical units which have evolved the ability to absorb minerals and liquids from outside their external membrane and process them within the internal liquid of the cell in different chemical combinations that serve the self-renewal and self-replicating of the cell itself. Additionally in the case of the Eukaryotic cell, the internal sub units can metabolise and create mineral and energy material to be passed across by tubules to other specialist cells within any multi-cellular organism.

The cells, although microscopic in size have within their membranes many other smaller sub-units such as ribosomes, nucleotide, flagelum and membrane in Prokaryotic cells (as in Bacterial life forms), whilst Eukaryotic cells (animal life forms) contain mitochondria, golgi apparatus, microtubules, and DNA within the nucleus RNA strands, which we now know are part of the self reproduction (sexual or asexual) of all species of life. This description is only a condensed, crude and schematic representation that I am offering here since the main objective here and now is to create enough information for the reader to begin to grasp the sophistication and complexity of the biology of life on earth which has sustained itself over billions of years utilising only minute portions of the natural liquids (water), gaseous (oxygen, nitrogen), mineral (sugars, proteins and carbohydrates) and direct energy sources of the the solar and planetary system. No need to believe in magic, nature exceeds it in every dimension. There is no equivalence in the anthropocentric world of humanity.

The nearest comparison to the complexity and sophistication of a biological Eukaryotic cell from within the sociological domain of the human scientific and technological expertise, would be the following. ‘If humanity devised a tiny almost invisible, self-repairing, self-reproducing, self-improving and self-energising general computer that could mass produce itself, integrate itself, with feedback loops, into myriads of other electro-mechanical – self-repairing, self-reproducing, self-improving and self-energising, computers and began to endlessly accomplish appropriate tasks, within an electro-technical domain for the next million or so years.

That of course is technically, electrically and mechanically impossible! Everything humanity devises has a sell by date and a type-determined limited duration of active existence. Yet even if it were possible, those imaginary tiny electro-mechanical devices would still not have constructed the equivalent of the earths biosphere which contains, food, water and air to sustain millions of species and billions of individual units, many of them with consciousness and some with self-consciousness. And furthermore, unlike machines, biological systems, if left unmolested will carry on for many more millions or billions of earth orbits.

It needs to be constantly born in mind, that the bio-chemical, biological basis of life on earth was sufficiently ecologically balanced and self-reproducing for generation after generation of species numbering in the millions, (i.e. plants, insects, animals (fish, birds, mammals and humans) over millions of years. The hierarchical mass society sociological structural of human aggregation has only lasted for two or three thousand years and in several key essential survival areas is already undermining the basis of all current and future species of life on earth.

The human species evolved from within this biological system and after a long period of it’s own evolution eventually, without even knowing of this unseen biological microscopic intricacy, decided it could hijack this system and bend or break it in pursuit of its elites own whims and fancies. Thus commencing with the hiearchical mass society phase of human aggregation which in turn began the so-called ‘progress’ of creating climate change, mass sea, air and soil pollution and commencing a long period of wars and genocides against it’s own species and all other species that couldn’t be profitsbly utilised and or which simply got in their way.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2026)

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REALITY VERSUS IDEOLOGY (PART 5a)

Posted on June 11, 2026 by stutteringsteps

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 ‘imperial’ culture. This late middle ages renaissance comprised of the active pursuit of all this ‘lost’ or ‘neglected’ information and knowledge assumptions developed before the common era (BCE). That particular 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 earlier period of classical antiquity. This renaissance period was also associated with great changes in European art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and technology. Although this Renaissance was first centered in the Republic of Florence, it 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 toward 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 viewed god as at the centre of thinking and being. However, we can imply from this historical evidence that during the time of Protagorus, Greek Intellectual development was already firmly located and lodged in the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. This literary evidence suggests that elite, self-gratification and self-congratulatory narcissism had been circulating on a continuous, self-sustaining, feedback loop, for multiple generstions. Although much in nature had been studied during the classical Greek period, and since, the full complexity and sophisticated species integration over billions of years of bio-chemical and biological developments had not registered in even a modest 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 its 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. Nevertheless, 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. (By that period, the ancient maritime trade around the Mediterranean Sea had been significantly expanded beyond the straits of Gibraltar and countries were by then exporting and importing surplus products across multiple tracts of water to numerous destinations.) This ‘expansion’ of trade both required and produced an associated expansion of thinking and contemplation. Although unintended, this practical economic inter-change dragged along with it numerous open ended 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 world increasingly controlled by the rising merchant elites.

This alternative elite perspective represented a considerable advance in critical thinking. I should of course, at this point, make clear that I am using the term Renaissance in the sense of representing a significant paradigm shift in the dominant orientation (or an 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 (of course with Gods imaginary blessing) and trade whether blessed or not was gradually becoming the axis around which international relationships moving. Real conversations about communities trade relationships were regularly occuring at least six days a week, whilst imaginary conversations about community relationships with some invisible spiritual being continued to relegated to a sungle Saturday or Sunday Sabbath.

Even with fear and subservience imposed by the governing papal and secular 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 and in future would be, increasingly based upon the reality of life on earth. Philosophers, explorers and traders, by means of careful analysis, detailed evidence gathering and experimental confirmation became more reliable informants than those , relying on naive beliefs borrowed wholesale from ancient, supposedly-non-human ‘sacred’ scrolls or books. Reality could be pursued with reasonably accurate understandings, rather than being misled by the fraudulent absolute truths presented at Saturday or Sunday sermons. Men in fancy robes and gilded replicas of shepherds staffs, were consulted about future journeys to heaven, not about trade with distant lands..

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 generations previously had written that “man is the measure of all things”. It is important to note that Protagorus was a pre-Socratic intellectual thinker within ancient 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). The extended family of gods and goddesses; had been removed from their residences on mount Olympus and the one-top- god 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 an 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 more recent monotheistic updated narrative 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 the latters ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, the fallen Adam (influenced by a snake and his ‘spare-rib produced partner Eve), and his progeny had been granted some posthumous dignity. These successive adaptations and departures from the earlier framework of mystical belief had previously laid down the foundational myths of the later monotheistic patriarchal abrahamic trio of Judsism, Christianity and Islam. But all three 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 intellectual result of this estrangement of humanity from nature resulted in life on earth being imagined as comprising of two distinct and opposed realms of material reality; social reality and biological reality. This intellectual bifurcation continued to dominate 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 (i.e. dualisms), but changing and evolving categories that could transform themselves or be transformed into their opposites and even into entirely different forms or categories (i.e. 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, eventually inverted Hegel’s dialectical idealism into a materialist dialectic of thinking about religion and life on earth.

However, despite an extremely 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 crucial observation by Feuerbach any further. Feuerbach had previously written 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 pinpointed the structural means of the transition from previous hunter-gatherer biologicaly based aggregations of human communities, to socially based aggregations of aggriculturally organised human communities. In light of the historical evidence it is clear that the social organisation of Agriculture is the means and practice where humans consistently attempt (and partially succeed), in making ‘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 egotistically 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 food-bank and material 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 has expanded considerably.

The human bakers, wine-makers, explosives manufacturers, although they may claim otherwise, don’t actually create the results they intend, 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 yet 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 not only 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 circumstance then logic follows an alternative path. With that level of understanding, turning the semi-liguid ingredient slush into my favourite date and walnut cake, or turning the not very appetising bitter liquid mixture into a delicious red wine, does not need an invisible creator. Accurate, proven knowledge allows human understanding of reality to abandon its child like innocence and imaginary magic and become 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)

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REALITY versus IDEOLOGY (Part 4)

Posted on June 1, 2026 by stutteringsteps

REALITY VERSUS IDEOLOGY (Part 4.)
Left Anthropocentric theory and practice.
In this part 4 of the series on the contrast between reality and ideology I shall again focus on the radical left positions on ecology and climate concerns within hierarchical mass society social and political structures. The following statements have been issued by a radical tendency dualistically opposed to the prevalence within the radical left of a milieu of revolutionaries who talk and write about the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production but do little or nothing practical to achieve that end. The first statement I draw attention to is the following;

“The purpose of communist theory has never been the cultivation of moral prestige, nor the production of a subcultural identity through which educated classes can symbolically distance themselves from the brutality of capitalism whilst continuing to materially benefit from it.”

It was followed by;

“Entire milieus of self-described radicals speak endlessly of liberation whilst remaining structurally incapable of confronting power beyond rhetorical performance.”

This opinion correctly identifies that Communist theories have become a method that some of the educated individuals within the literate classes have adopted in criticising the capitalist mode of production, whilst materially benefiting from its hierarchical based form of producing the biological essentials of life within a collective social structure. Marxist and anti-racist ideas are also used by many commentators more in the nature of virtue signalling than as calls to action. Interestingly, such criticisms generally ignore the advice suggested by Marx himself when he wrote that;

“They forget, however, that they are opposing nothing but phrases to these phrases, and they are in no way combatting the real existing world when they are combatting solely the phrases of this world.” (Marx/Engels. Collected Works. Volume 5, page 30.)

Then the same radical left tendency moves from abstract descriptive evaluation to historical analysis asserting that;

“Communist theory emerged historically as the intellectual weapon of classes forced into struggle against dispossession, starvation, colonialism and industrial exploitation.”

In actual fact, communist practices and ideas are almost as old as the practices and ideas of hierarchical mass societies themselves and along with them increasingly sophisticated theoretical ideas about them. Sparta in ancient Greece, along with religious communes and same sex monasteries were practical ways a few early pioneers of communal living and the theories about them, but these were never used as as intellectual weapons. The same practical rationale applied to the medieval communards and digger movements and also to the secular egalitarian communist theories that emerged from within a few 19th and 20th century ‘Diggers and Dreamers’ middle-class intellectuals.

The latter 20th century manifestations evolved through an analysis of the capitalist mode of production and as response to the practical contradictions manifested in economic and social crises such as dispossesion, starvation, exploitation and colonialism, symptoms which actually date back to the hiersrchical mass societies of ancient Egypt, Babylon and Persia. The modern versions of these symptoms perpetrated by the personifications of capitalism were further analysed in detail by a number of individual such as Adam Smith, David Rìcardo and most notably by Karl Marx. So why would anyone on the left assert that communist theories emerged as intellectual weapons of class struggle – if they really know the history of what they are talking and writing about? The following statement is then added, by the same tendency;

“…capitalism is not primarily an ethical problem but a system of material domination. One does not defeat it through moral purity, one defeats it through organised power.”

This exemplifies another level of confusion in which abstractions are just being used to appear to be suggesting something relevant and profound. Capitalism is the term to describe a particular mode of production, it is not primarily a system of material domination, therefore ‘capitalism’ cannot be defeated by organised power. Material domination is achieved by organised power and can be overcome by an alternative form of organised power, but that then would still leave intact another form of organised power, wouldn’t it? . This is just not an abstract theoretical objection, for the Bolsheviks in 1919, did just that. They became an organised politival power which first overthrew, then took over the the Czarist organised state power that had already encouraged and allowed the introduction of the capitalist mode of production but this left political practice by its Bolshevik Leninist advocates didn’t cause or attempt to cause a change the mode of production. Red Czar’s (Lenin, Trotsky andnStalin) took over from a white Czar (Nicholas) and Russia continued to be ruled by an ‘organised elite power’.

This defeat of one organised power, by another in Russia, just allowed the ad hoc wage-labour and capitalist based system of post-feudal production to be accelerated and extended further, but under the domination of a new Bolshevik form of organised power. Opposition from within the hierachical mass society system of production and consumption, by those who suffer from its class contradictions and exploitative/oppressive practices are as old as the hierarchical mass society system itself. However, this opposition from within has invariably, if not always, started from an anthropocentric, human-focussed point of view. That view was to some extent inevitable in a social system devised by, and for, the benefit of the human species, and which evolved into its various hierarchical mass society forms.

Biological collectives.
Nevertheless, it was not the socio-biological essence of human societies which caused the potential overthrow of the original revolutionary biological transition from the earth as an inorganic planetary object orbiting around a declining star; to a planet teeming with the organic life of countless bio-chemical entities and multi-cellular organisms, energised by that declining stars’, internal atomic combustions. It is possible to assert the above claim, because of course, many species of life on earth, from Insects, Plants and Animals have formed groups and associations for temporary or more permanent socio-biological activities, but no other species has formed internal hierarchies requiring the existence of a privileged groups with the rest of the species being subordinate to an elite and performing labour services to those within the governing hierarchy. Species such as edible plant based grasses and forests, or Insects grouped in colonies and swarms, animals congregating in flocks and herds; aquatic animals such as schools of Cod, pods of Dolphins etc., exist as large-scale collectives, but not as large-scale hierarchical collectives.

Some life forms have congregated for biological purposes such as feeding, drinking and breeding, others for safety, but only the human species has added to these essential biological reasons for social aggregation the additional parasitic motive of having a class of subordinate workers who not only provide the essentials they need to exist as biological entities, but also provide a wide range of organic and inorganic luxuries which the hierarchical elite individuals have historically identified and consistently demanded. This hierarchical mass society form has been the sociological instrument by which the elites have articulated by means of another unique feature of the evolution of the human species, the acquisition of linguistic forms of education and written and spoken communication.

The hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation together with the development of written and spoken languages have formed the basis of an estrangement of the human species from its biological essence as a species being. This system has transformed those human beings socialised within them into playing down that biological essence consciousness and elevating the social essence and consciousness. In my book, Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, I trace the bio-chemical essence of all biological life forms as comprising of the recycling sequence of; Nutrition, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing, and Death (N-M-G-R + A – D). That bio-chemical process is the essence of all individual cellular or multi-cellular organism of each category of species of life forms on earth.

This is so from the smallest Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells, to microorganisms, plants, insects, birds, fish, animals and humans and the nutrition fueling those processes is obtained from the inorganic elements of the material substance of the planet and from the organic material provided by the immense range of living species. As each form of life dies, whether at the end of it’s own specific (N-M-G-R + A – D) life processes, or prematurely before a natural death, it becomes the nutritional source of some other microscopic or macroscopic species form. That is the biological essence and biological processes of all the millions of species of life on earth and this essence and theses processes can be traced across all the multifarious food chains on the planet we call earth.

But it is important to note that this biological essence of life on earth and these biological processes of (N-M-G-R + A – D) are such that no matter how large or complex the multi-cellular organisms becomes, the nutritional (N) input for each organism within each species is based upon an optimally sufficient amount. Importantly, within the earths biosphere, consuming optimally sufficient natural resources, rather than excessively consuming natural resources, does not prohibit or curtail an evolutionary development within each species, were this ocurrs. Organism and species sophistication and complexity are clearly not restricted by modest consumption of natural resources (N) within the entire biological paradigm of existence. Unlike hierarchical mass society forms which have historically raised productive extraction of natural resources in order to allow their elites to consume them at rates beyond what is optimally necessary and sufficient for their species. In fact to a level that is unnecessarily, exorbitant, unhealthy and now, demonstrably biologically destructive.

Over billions of years, each biological organism and species have only taken from nature what was optimally sufficient for their own (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes in order to continue to exist and evolve – when possible or necessary. Biologically thinking rather than sociologically thinking, anything less than the optimally sufficient Nutritional intake and one or more of their M-G-R processes might fail; anything more than the optimal (N) intake and either the surplus (N) will be excreted or will trigger other symptoms such as more than average organism growth, or result in more than average reproductive activity. It is well recorded, that increased population growth or decreased population growth follows very closely the availability or absence of adequate nutrition (all other factors remaining equal or optimal) of most species forms of life on earth. This symptom occurs from abnormal algae blooms, abnormal insect swarms, abnormal plant yeilds, animal herd numbers and even results in human population increases or decreases.

The socialisation of a biology.
If we now contrast the biological essence and processes of life on earth in general, the (N-M-G-R + A – D) phases energised by bio-chemical or biological sufficiency – with the sociological essence of hierarchical mass society humanity, we immediately note a stark contrast. From shortly after humans began to be perminently aggregated into hierarchical mass societies, we notice a different nutritional (N) intake rationale emerging and also a different relationship to movement and change. Biological change is relatively slow, incremental, seasonal and frequently millenial. In nature a change in evolutionary form and function can take immensely long periods of miniscule incremental adaptations, measured in decades or even in millions of years. However, with the onset of settled heirarchical, agricultural mass communities, the human consciousness of change (and consequently the invention of units of time as a measurement of change) becomes determined by seasonal changes and by productive activity measured by daily or hourly units of labour.

In human hunter-gatherer communities, the human species, like all other species were not consciously (or radically) changing the nutritional and useful aspects of nature, but adapting to its general and particularly evolved rhythms and evolutionary forms. Obtaining Nutrition and other useful natural resources, from settled agriculture communities, however, required a different relationship of the human species to nature based upon controlling the quantity and quality of what natural resources, were to be grown and extracted from the specific areas chosen for cultivatation. Alongside that socio-biological change came another. On the one hand, for the elite strata of such societies in particular, the individual (N) intake was switched from a routine bio-chemical nutritional sufficiency based upon biological survival, to routine over-indulgences, gluttony, organ system dis-eases, such as gout, social system inflicted malfunctions and even premature death.

On the other hand the nutritional intake of the non-elite individuals within them; such as slaves, serfs and tied labouring populations were frequently reduced to below the optimum sufficiency, with the result that their own spectrum of sociologically created and class-based deficiencies and occupational dis-eases commenced. These twin bicameral biological results of the hierarchical mass society form of social aggregation has continued from ancient to more modern times. The modern capitalist elite – as a class – over-indulge in consuming biological organic and inorganic material extraction from nature – in all its manifest forms. It does so whilst, under their capitalist mode of production and distribution it; a) restricts the extraction power of the labouring classes from nature to below the optimum biological (N-M-G-R + A – D) level by the introduction of low wage and salary ‘income-policies’, along with paltry social ‘benefits’ for those surplus to employment category requurements and; b) encourages the over-indulgence and over-extraction of natural resources by those middle income sectors situated between the ruling bourgeois elites and the working classes.

Hence, since the formation of hierarchical mass societies the essence of humanities sociological existence has overwhelmingly negated and directly (and indiretly) dominated the natural biological essence of the human species and msny other species. Since the formation of hiearchical mass society format, the human species has been at war with itself and with its biological support matrix. Despite ecological and biological reality, human consciousness, has over thousands of years designated the highest form of life on earth to be concentrated first onto a single, supposedly superior species among all other species – i.e.humanity; then this anthropocentric biological reductionism was further focused into the supposedly superior male gender and finally reduced into the great male elite personifications – Xerxes, Agemenon, Jason, Alexander, Ceasar etc. This real-world historical hierarchical mass society process, achieved by brutal levels of humanity, was then woven into a mystical and magical narrative form of monotheistic religions and given a supposedly superior, peaceful – other worldly origin – in an invisible creative spiritual’ ‘force’ – modelled upon a human male leader – god!

Biology, not sociology, creates a sustainable complexity.
The slow, marvelous, evolutionary path of the biological cell, into single complex and multi-cellular combinations is stunning when it is realised that after millions of years it culminated in complex and sophisticated living organs and species. When humans discovered that this sophistication and complexity included the higher cortical processing abilities within their own and other species central processing brain organs, it had already been used to imagine and create fictions about life on earth and colluded in the imaginary existence of an invisible representation of an elderly father figure. The cultural evolution an imaginary, invisible bipedal god was a betrayal of the rational capabilities of the biological evolution of the human brain. The real, but previously unknown, unique and complex biological basis of the origin and subsequent development of life on earth, in all its myriad forms, had to await the electron scanning microscope developed in the 20th century. It was only then that the subsequent discovery of the microscopic Prokaryotic, Eukaryotic cells and their functioning internal organelles, bio-chemical associations and self-reproducing biological forms containing complex functions, was more fully revealed.

But as yet, this awesome complexity and sophistication, has not been fully revealed to everyone. The anthropocentric cultural conservatism of the capitalist elites, together with the extractive dynamic of their preferred mode of production and the compliance of their scientific intellectual fellow travellers, has hindered the emergence of a 20th and 21st century renaissance (rebirth) in the materialist sociological intellectual perspective on the existence of life on earth. In the 19th century, Marx in particular, had challenged and advanced Hegel’s idealist dialectical world view, by moving its focus away from mystical, ideological fixations, toward a more materialist dialectic. Nevertheless, whilst doing so, he had not been able to challenge or overturn its anthropocentric and one-sided obsession with it’s own particular species, rather than with life on earth as a whole! When Marx wrote in his personal notes (prior to the publication of his major economic work, Das Capital), that the system of capitalist production was contradictory, he had also then added;

“This contradictory requirement, whose development will show itself in different forms as overproduction, over-population etc., asserts itself in the form of a process in which the contradictory aspects follow closely upon each other in time. A necessary consequence of them is the greatest possible diversification of the use value of labour – or of the branches of production – so that the production of capital constantly and necessarily creates, on one side, the development of the intensity of the productive power of labour , on the other side, the unlimited diversity of the branches of labour , i.e. thus the most universal wealth, in form and content, of production, bringing all sides of nature under its domination.” (Marx. Grundrisse. Introduction. Emphasis added. RR.)

Thus although Marx identified some of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, he did not view the ‘development of the intensity of the productive power of labour’ as problematic, for life on earth, nor the arrogance assumption of ‘bringing all sides of nature under its domination’. Indeed, he viewed the capitalist mode of production as the means of ‘unconditionally developing the productive forces of society’. He also asserted 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.)

And;

“Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [ Naturbedürftigkeit ], and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social forces.” (Marx. Grundrisse. Introduction. Emphasis added. RR.)

Marxism: A modern Renaissance failure.

The all-side development of production and consumption, along with the historically created needs supplanting those of natural necessity (i.e. biological necessities) was for Marx the logical and necessary revolutionary outcome of the collapse of industrial capitalism as a social system and its replacement with industrial socialism. Marx represented the pinnicle of 19th century Anticapitalist analysis and humanist critique, but from Marx’s own words this pinnacle clearly remained anthropocentrically located both within its practices and its ideological expressions. In the almost 200 years since Marx forensically analysed the capitalist mode of socoalised production, it has changed considerably and so too have human discoveries and evaluations, particularly the detail and sophisicated complexity of the interdependent species which make up the earth’s biosphere. These and the hierarchical mass society per-capita need for the excessive extraction and consumption of natural resources and the polluting effects of the waste materials created during production, all need to be factored into the assessment of the ecological present and future of life on earth as a whole.

Indeed, the success of industrial capitalism, in its all-sided development of production and consumption, along with its ‘historically created needs’ in place of natural ones, has created an almost impenetrable barrier to a wide spread understanding the problems life on earth in general and the human species in particular, and its reluctance to eliminate or even correct them. The historic needs and power of the ruling elites have increased incrementally and geographically and by the same automated and computerised industrial production methods has intoxicated vast numbers of the increased populations on earth whose system manipulated historic ‘needs’ have assumed the form of expected and demanded ‘entitlements’ to consume ever more sophisticated commodities and services. Entitlement to consume has become the dominant form of human emotional attachment to life on earth, and is experienced positively as fulfilment, or negatively as denial. Therefore, the dominant global socio-political tendencies in the 20th and 21st centuries, left, right and centre, have all aspired to institute economic reforms, which deliver these ‘so-called’ historic ‘entitlements’ on an more or less unrestricted or restrictricted basis.

During the Second World War (1939 – 1945) rationing scarce resources, limiting personal consumption, restrictions on private financial speculation, promoting national self-reliance on food and clothing, were all subject to Emergency Powers Acts, undertaken to defend the elite from conquest by foreign elites. But such possibilities are not even considered as temporary expedients to save the lives of the poor in the 21st century. The idea of introducing such radical measures in future human societies, in order to curtail or end the current excess extractions from the now, far from balanced biosphere, is not even in any current or future political manifesto. Hence, it is nigh on impossible to escape the following conclusion. Alternative ideas alone – not even the most extreme – will ‘shock’ the majority of humans out of the current anthropocentric, narcissistic, self-obsession and self-indulgence. Even among those on the anti-capitalist and radical green left, it is clear that an anthropocentric, ‘entitlement-syndrome’ – is now firmly rooted there also. As yet, the vast majority of global citizens simply wish to breathe their own particular sociological ‘elixir of life’ into this dying, top-down socio-economic system of human aggregation, instead of getting busy creating alternatives.

Building alternatives, of course, requires a necessary understanding of how the biological essence of all life on earth, functions, and why the vast matrix of life forms are absolutely necessary to make the planetary biosphere habitable to all the life forms currently resident within it. But it will also require a practical, real-world shock! I suggest a series of sufficiently large crises and collapses of the current sociological anthropocentric hierarchical mass society system, will be the necessary level of shock, to galvanise commitment to obtain sufficient understanding and to maintain the required energy for a really comprehensive, revolutionary change to become seriously contemplated and actioned. Alongside and prior to that, it will be necessary for a critical-mass of non-authoritarian, revolutionary-humanist, Giaia-centric activists, to emerge and assist locally in promoting humanities return to its origins and roots within nature and with the raised biological consciousness necessary to use our intelligence to ‘nurture’ and protect our planets unique and amazing biosphere.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2026)

For those who are interested in the evolution of ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, I have written a book bearing that title which contains a more detailed consideration of the historic tension between the biological essence of life on earth and the social essence of the human species. The book can be obtained in Ebook or Paperback form from Amazon, Browns Books, Waterstones, Strand Books and Google.

Two recent independent reviews.

“Discover the history of life on our beautiful planet with Life On Earth (Past, Present & Future!) by Roy Ratcliffe. A book that will keep you hooked till the very end.”

“Humanity now dominates a planet that once teemed with life’s myriad forms — yet this domination has come at an unbearable cost. ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, strips away comforting myths and exposes the brutal truth: our species has polluted skies and seas, decimated countless others, entrenched inequality, and disrupted the very processes that sustain life itself. More than a history, this is a radical critique of anthropocentric arrogance and ecological devastation. It demands we rethink our place in nature, confront the deep roots of the crisis, and envision a future grounded in ecological humility and justice.” (Countercurrents.org)

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REALITY VERSUS IDEOLOGY (Part 3)

Posted on May 15, 2026 by stutteringsteps

Reality

Of course the effects of the previously noted excess extractions from natural resources (Parts 1 & 2) also extends to imbalances in the planets biosphere such as pollution, climate changes, insect pollination levels, rain patterns, sea level rises, reduced glacial reflections creating temperature rises, all of which have predictable and unpredictable effects detrimental to life on earth in some of its forms. Even if some of the evidence has been exaggerated or deliberately minimised, there are enough reliable sources to suggest some serious changes are already taking place and that more are yet to come. The reality of life on earth in the 21st century, is that the hierarchical mass society system can no longer be biologically or sociologically sustained on its previous basis of unlimited extraction, unlimited production, unlimited consumption, unlimited pollution and elite governance. The biological system’s processes of life on earth (N-M-G-R + A – D) are breaking down in a number of essential and non-essential organic and inorganic categories.

The huge forests and plains grasses on land and the sea based plant and algae species are all severely degraded either by pollution, acidification, physical clearances, monocultural planting, culling, or over-consumption. The loss of plant life and land-based soil micro-organisms, pollinating insects and their sea based equivalents, are undermining not only the nitrogen/carbonic acid exchanges which are essential to replenish the level of oxygenated air, stable weather patterns and for the pollination of plant nutrition. All of which of course forms the basis of the land-based food chains which nourish all forms of land based life on earth. A similar but more hidden process of degradation is taking place within the sea-based sections of the biological species spectrum, which also forms a substantial part of the nutritional consumption which is essential for the metabolic processes of human and animal species.

Ideology.
Yet the anthropocentric ideological fixation of the human species elites in general and the relative ignorance of their own biological essence in particular has resulted in a form of self-inflicted intellectual brain fog. After many generations, most human brains can no longer adequately process their biological reality because they have been too busy processing their sociologically derived reality of self-importance and their ersatz commodity based form of wealth. The hierarchical mass society social system has become so collectively entrenched in it’s own self-consciousness and self-importance that for upteen centuries the biology of life has been abstractly designated as ‘nature’ and nature itself has been reduced in human consciousness to the equivalent of pleasant (or untidy) side-show gardens or wild-life reservations to occasionally visit. For most economic, financial and political elites, nature is something to plunder from or on a small scale, to relaxingly tinker with or get the gardener to do that, after the main business of making money.

Even the most dedicated mainstream ‘nature’ enthusiast and commentator often views the biology of life as seperate, ‘special’, inter-spersed areas of outstanding beauty for visiting or ‘protected islands’ of diversity for medical study and extracting new drugs. In general consciousness, Nature is not something humans have to absolutely depend upon and have become a destructive part of it. The reality of the biology of Nature – as the source of everything living and non-living – has been imaginatively reduced by human intellectual ideology to area’s of curiosity located between the percieved more important sociologically created city buildings, metropolitan infrastructures and concrete highways. The biosphere, that was established by the long evolution of life on earth and which has supported a unique range of complimentary and integrated life forms, including the eventual evolution of the human species, has become a variously neglected secondary (or lower) feature in the political and socio-economic life of the species once candidly and biologically classified as the naked ape.

Life on earth via the lens of anthropocentric thinking, has like camera lenses, inverted the image of reality, until the social system of humanity looms larger and ranks much higher than the biological system which gave rise to all species. Anthropocentric ideologies are so biased in their own favour, that very little of serious intent to radically change humanities relationship to its biological origins has been thought about and even less been actioned. Ignorance or denial of any serious problems for life on earth caused by hierarchical mass societies and their historical elites has become the default position of most of the modern capitalist and pro-capitalist elites. The majority of the more liberal political parties and movements of all left, right and centre positions at their very best have adopted only slight and marginal nature friendly reforms to the socio-economic system. Reformists, as the term implies, only want to remove the worst symptoms – once they have been identified – not the causes in the hope that these will prevent even worst symptoms from emerging.

Basically, ‘green’ reformists just want humanity to keep the local ‘nature’ garden tidy and the global kitchen garden plentifully stocked, but that’s the extent of it. In anthropocentric ideologies of all types, religious or secular, the essence and purpose of humanity has become merely to accumulate public or private wealth and consume as many resources as is ecologically possible. No other more worthy ambition disturbs the consciousness of those thoroughly socialised and emotionally adapted to the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation. Coming from a life-long working class, revolutionary-humanist tradition I have come to the conclusion that one of the best litmus type tests to illustrate the general reluctance to radically alter how we live is to consider the views of the most radical critics of the current system. Faced with the accumulated evidence of several decades, that our own socio-economic activities have introduced a progressive deterioration in the levels of organic life on earth and inorganic changes in climate, weather patterns, it is worth considering the current attitude of the most radical left fringes of the few remaining anti-capitalists.

Anti-capitalist ideologies. (a)
Just recently in a number of articles on this blog I have highlighted, without embarrassingly naming the authors, some of the feeble and limited understandings and responses from such anti-capitalist intellectual sources that I have come across recently. I suggest that even if the future reality of life on earth only turns out half as bad as some of the more evidence based predictions have asserted then there is trouble now and even more trouble ahead. After reading the following most radical 21st century expressions of anti-capitalists thinking I suggest the reader asks his or her self, the following question: ‘Apart from yourself and a few others who else is going to begin to seriously change how we treat each other and the rest of the planets life forms’ before it really is too late to save many of them. Here are some more recently published ones.

“It is Capitalisms … economic “blindness” that drives this ecological depletion. The crisis stems from a structural mismatch between wealth and value”

The first extract again demonstrates the conceptual confusion among much of the left including the anti-capitalist left. The abstract economic term ‘capitalism’ which represents nothing with an actual material identity, has been given a biological characteristic of ‘blindness’ which can only be applied to a living biological entity equipped with eyes. Does the author know what he is actually writing or just feeling off abstractions? Capitalism cannot possibly be blind either economically or literally. Wealth and value are not structures, they are also linguistic abstractions and therefore cannot have a structural relationship (another abstraction) with each other whether mis-matched or perfectly matched. I suggest we must assume that the author is genuinely concerned with ecological ‘crisis’ and wishes to inform readers of how to understand and counter it, but it appears that he or she does not yet even understand the content of the crisis or the difference between abstract ideologically produced jargon and the unfolding ecological reality. Here is another example;

“The first real victory of the Social Revolution will be the establishment not indeed of a complete system of communism in a day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary adminstration whose definite and conscious aim will be to prepare and further, in all available ways, human life for such a system.”

This recent extract is itself an extract from a late 19th or early 20th century general tradition, in which an unmentioned form of ‘social ‘revolution’ would take place and a ‘revolutionary administration’ would take over the functions of the state. The state personnel’s aims would be “to prepare and further – in all available ways – human life” for a new mass socio-economic system. Basically this 19th century anthropocentric revolutionary tradition was followed by the communist leaders of the revolutions in Russia, China and Cuba. These particular revolutionary administrations included, Socialist and Communist Party members as well as non-party experts, who also had access to the previous stores of wealth and power. It was a top-down hierarchical mass society system in which the hierarchy was no longer drawn from aristocrats as in Feudalism, or from the bourgeois capitalists and petite-bourgeois pro-capitalists, as in capitalism. The workers would continue to work for the state which would function as the board of directors of a state-capitalist nation! And at rates and conditions set by the revolutionary administrative elites.

Albeit with subtle variations, the Bolshevik, Maoist and Castroist revolutionaries of the 20th century also followed that particular revolutionary administrative model with ruthless determination and with results that were far from satisfactory for the majority of their working classes and peasants. Incidently, variations of this administrative model were also adopted by the post-Second World War reformist governments in Europe and North America. One of the most refined and comprehensive versions of this socialist administrative, socio-political model took place in the UK whose post-war Labour government brushed aside bourgeois objections and Nationalised all major industries and social institutions, such as coal, railways, telephones, water, electrical and gas power distribution, health services, education (Primary, Secondary and Higher) and even road transport. But of course it turned out that what was accepted by a governments of reform can be reversed by governments of reaction and that reversal was done during the counter-reform era of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. Here’s yet another!

“Day two of the “revolution” will not see ecological equilibrium restored. But it will open up a space where workers, scientists and activists can find a way forward – at the same time as having access to the wealth and power they need to deal with immediate issues.”

Here we have another left version of a revolutionary administrative strategy in which on day two the administrators will be comprised of workers, scientists and activists, who will find a way forward using their access to wealth and power to deal with immediate issues. There will be a state apparatus, because although unspecified it is implicitly referenced with regard to the power and wealth needed by the selected workers, scientists and activists, to find a way forward and deal with ‘immediate issues’. Moreover, on the way forward to that idealised projection we are informed that;

“….this, requires taking control of the values and “expropriating” the factories.”

Since ‘values’ are not physical objects, just how it is possible to take control of ‘values’ (another abstraction) is not made clear by the author, perhaps because it is impossible from any practical point of view and values and control of them, are just words and ideas floating around in the authors ideological framework of thinking. However, expropriating the factories does introduce the reality of physical buildings and the take over of them by the workers, scientists and activists, in order to find a way forward. However, the author seems unconcerned to explain the direction toward which the factory-based workers, scientists and activists are supposedly finding a way forward for the rest of us to follow.

Yet it would seem from the above author’s remarks that after the revolution, in this view there will still remain social structures of wealth, power, elite workers, scientists and activists and an industrial economy of some kind. In other words all the socially constructed class structures that have contributed to the estrangements, alienations and dehumanisations within the human species, wiĺl remain along with the ecological destructions and climate disturbances. It would seem here again that those who aspire to be revolutionary cannot imagine humanity being free of the hierarchical mass society social form or escape from its ideological expression in anthropocentric thinking.

Roy Ratcliffe (May 2026)

For those who are interested in the evolution of ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, I have written a book bearing that title which contains a more detailed consideration of the historic tension between the biological essence of life on earth and the social essence of the human species. The book can be obtained in Ebook or Paperback form from Amazon, Browns Books, Waterstones, Strand Books and Google.

Two recent reviews.
“Discover the history of life on our beautiful planet with Life On Earth (Past, Present & Future!) by Roy Ratcliffe. A book that will keep you hooked till the very end.”

“Humanity now dominates a planet that once teemed with life’s myriad forms — yet this domination has come at an unbearable cost. ‘Life on Earth (Past, Present and Future)’, strips away comforting myths and exposes the brutal truth: our species has polluted skies and seas, decimated countless others, entrenched inequality, and disrupted the very processes that sustain life itself. More than a history, this is a radical critique of anthropocentric arrogance and ecological devastation. It demands we rethink our place in nature, confront the deep roots of the crisis, and envision a future grounded in ecological humility and justice.” (Countercurrents.org)

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REALITY VERSUS IDEOLOGY (Part 2)

Posted on May 7, 2026 by stutteringsteps

a) Anthropocentric arrogance.

The real world within which life on earth – as individual organisms, particular species or in the form of the whole interdependent and integrated planetary biosphere functions – is in essence comprised of a cycled and recycled interplay of inorganic and organic materials. In contrast, to the billions and millions of years of the detailed microscopic and macroscopic evolution of life on earth, the ideas and the ideological expressions of that reality, circulating within the human species is relatively recent.

Compared to that immense stretch of evolutionary reality, the five or six thousand years of imperfectly recorded ideas and partial understandings and misunderstandings is the sum total of humanities, philosophical, sociological and scientific knowledge and expressions of that billion year life on earth complexity. That is all humanity has collectively attained and retained. Moreover, our individual general and critical knowledge of those records and past limited understandings, are even more varied and limited than that sum total.

Consequently, I suggest that to inflate or elevate that limited knowledge as representing a sufficient basis to understand that whole biological evolution along with the combined historical experience of the human species represents an extreme form of anthropocentric arrogance and conceit. To then double up on that conceit and assert a capacity to equal or improve upon nature, represents a secular version the biblical assertion of being a ‘vanity of vanities’.

A part of this vanity has long been expressed from within a paradigm of anthropocentric ideological thinking with an assumption that every problem and every solution can be accurately identified and satisfactorily implemented from within the existing hierarchical mass society socio-economic dimension. In fact the historical reality proves quite the opposite. Unintended consequences and intended consequences that have backfired, are spread across the historical record as they currently are in the dragged out wake of the Israeli and US – Pearl Harbour type – pre-intended sharp-shock attack upon Iran.

Led by its governing elites, the hierarchical mass society social form has been the means by which its various hierarchical modes of production have been used to enrich the elites at the expense of degrading the bulk of humanity whilst progressively destroying life on earth in general. Life on earth was once an ecologically integrated and balanced organic and inorganic system – but the Hierarchical Mass Society elite control system (HMS) by their voracious and unbalanced conspicuous consumption of organic and inorganic resources, has in its latest capitalist iteration, become existentially unbalanced.

From its inception, this form of human aggregation (HMS) has had built into it the problem of systemic over-consumption, systemic over-production and systemic over-pollution. Wars and genocides frequently presented as idiosyncratic anomalies or exceptions occasionally arising from demented individuals, but they are not. They are the internal socio-economic logic of the system itself, working it’s way through whoever happens to have gained the levers of power, whether or not as individuals, they  suffer from narcissism, delusions of grandeur or Dementia.

b) The sociological problem of over-consumption.

The relatively short existence of hierarchical mass societies on planet earth, is measured in thousands of yearly revolutions of the earth around the sun which is the primary energy source of all life on earth since life first evolved on planet earth. By the sun’s internal nuclear fusion energy which in the form of radient particles, which have spread throughout the solar system and its planets, it has also energised biological life forms on earth, throughout their billions of years of cellular and multi-cellular evolution. But don’t just note that fact and file it away, think also of the wider implications. Of all the planets within the solar system, the the only one to evolve life upon its surface, was the one positioned a huge 93 million miles away from its central nuclear source of energy – the sun!

No other planet in our solar system (or any other such star-based system as far as we know) has evolved cellular and multicellular life forms of any description – and with good reason. High intensity energy of the magnitude and atomic force of even a much reduced intensity star has the ability to obliterate and liquefy solid materials let alone skin, bone, flesh, lipid boundaries of cells, internal protein molecules and delicate DNA strands. Too close to a nuclear energy source and a biological cell, a delicate petal, a fragile insect, the most magnificent bird, the fiercest predatory animal and the most talented human being would disintegrate in seconds. Even too long exposed to the sun at the earth’s colossal distance of 93 million miles and skin cancers, heat stroke, dehydration and blindness can quickly or slowly disable or even end some aspect of life on earth.

Yet ideologically driven, elite nuclear scientists on earth with their increasingly sophisticated large-scale chemistry sets and limited knowledge of anything else but their own narrow atomic specialism, urged on by ideologically driven elite financial speculators who want to boost their wealth and ideologically assenting elite politicians wanting to provide an endless supply of energy to power the extraction of natural resoresource, feel they are entitled and competent enough to bring nuclear power stations into every countries back yard. Despite the previous and drastic accidents and disasters of such nuclear experiments, in the USA, Ukraine, Japan etc., elite theoretical assurances that in future every procedure will be foolproof, remain blatently false and insincere.

No one can guarantee that all current and future spent fuel rods will be safely stored; that no future nuclear engineer will ever make a mistake; that no contaminated waste will ever escape its containment drums during their hundreds of thousands of years of radiating existence? No one can guarantee our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will be safe because the nuclear elite will say they have ‘learned the lessons’ from previous mistakes. Really! Will anyone outside of vested interests be really convinced? Official safety theory and ideological reassurances were not good enough to contain a Covid 19 virus that dies after a couple of hours if it fails to infect a living host. The reality of covid was of unnecessary pain, suffering and premature death. Reassurances by vested interested elites are notoriously spurious, like those uttered by elites in 1918 and 1945 that there would be no more wars. These are just a few examples representative of the desire of ancient and modern elites (and those in thrall to them) to over-produce, over-promise, over-consume and over-pollute

When hierarchical mass society elites adopted the capitalist mode of production and eventually abandoned the Fuedal agricultural mode of production after the unfolding of civil wars and political revolutions, they effectively turbo-charged the previous horse and wind-power over-extraction of natural resources and the wealth accumulation of their elites. In medieval times the over consumption took the form of palaces and aristocratic indulgences for kings, queens, whilst cap-doffing peasants worked from Dawn to Dusk. Later production utilising steam and petro-chemical powered machinery, meant that a global industrial economic and financial system could extract, produce and consume far more than could be produced and consumed by means of a horse and a plough. Over-indulgencies then took the form of millionaires, then billionaires and now even 21st century trillionaires.

In anthropocentric theory, the entire world, and all that lived in it and on it, became not the result of an amazing billion year old bio-chemical transformation of inorganic material into a vast matrix of organic forms and species, but was viewed as the raw material for elite self-gratification and their individual wealth accumulation. I suggest that the lead song from the film; ‘The Great Showman’; stands as a perennial anthem to the self-indulgent, dehumanised elites within hierarchical mass society elites throughout their recorded history and I suggest the Trumps and Epstein classes of this modern world have sentiments like these below swirling around their neo-cortical matter dodging whatever else they have imbibed during the day.

“All the shine of a thousand spotlights
All the stars we steal from the night sky
Will never be enough
Never be enough
Towers of gold are still too little
These hands could hold the world but it’ll
Never be enough
Never be enough”

Once the logic of “It’ll never be enough” is considered from a biological perspective rather than from an anthropocentric sociological perspective, it presages the logical end of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation, particularly in its capitalist mode of production form. 21st century modernity in its elite forms is mostly all superficial, surface level, social estrangement and has no real enduring species substance. Yet the biological essence of life on earth has material circumstances or processes such as obtaining Nutrition, Metabolising it, Growing/regrowing and determining it. This includes the Reproduction of a next generation, Ageing and Death, or (N-M-G-R + A-D) that applies to all life forms, irrespective of their morphological and gender differences. These are biological imperatives that sociological practices can only modify.

Those natural evolutionary circumstances and processes ensure that within the biological paradigm, no life form needs to genocidally eliminate it’s own species or limit the access of it’s own species to the necessary processes of Nutrition, Metabolism, Growth and Reproduction. Life on earth in its biological form has evolved so that even the later biological stages of Ageing and Death of the indivodual organism or species form are not destructive of other organisms or species. Life on earth in death, simply becomes recycled as Nutrient material for the (N-M-G-R + A-D) processes of other life forms. Any mineral residue becomes after death a further source of useful or problematic inorganic material, such as chalk, bones, coal or oil.

Yet in stark contrast, the sociological essence of elite humanity and their sycophantic supporters has very few limits to their imagination and therefore few limits to their ideological preferences and desires. Not only has the human species forms of social life on earth, introduced wars, tortures, murders and genocides into the biological lives of their own and other species affairs, but even cultivated narcissistic self-indulgence. Indeed, trips into space, or trips down to the Titanic; making money out of manufacturing and using weapons of mass destruction, to eliminate members of their own species; purchasing several luxury homes, while members of their own comunities sleep on pavements, is not just accepted but tolerated, expected, perpetrated and promoted.

Despite, occasional rhetoric about peace and crocodile tears about the reality of human deprivation and death the global elite spent $2887 billion on military weapons and ancillary equipment in 2025, for the sole purpose of aggressively defending a socio-economic system which is clearly in social, political and ethical meltdown. With zero concern about the ecological and polluting effects of all this production and consumption – in simulated as well as real military actions – the military and political elites are not defending life on earth in general, but are continuing to hasten its actual demise.

c) Over consumption requires over-production.

It is also completely historically and logically false and also a serious ommission to assume – as some on the left do – that the capitalist mode of production is the sole cause of over-consumption and over- production and that Marx’s thorough treatment of that phenomenon in his Das Capital studies, meant that this treatment by Marx confirms its origin in the capitalist mode of production. Where that assumption has been made by contemporary ‘Marxist’ commentators also indicates a lazy or half-baked approach to Marx’s many published works. To consider, the whole of the capitalist mode of production in such a forensic level of detail, as Marx did, was already a massive task, which is the actual one he set himself and he actually died before it was finally completed. Marx also left at least seven or even eight thick volumes on the detail of the capitalist mode of production. He could do no more. After that level of intellectual help by Marx, we are all now on our own in understanding life on earth.

It turns out if we consider the concepts of over-consumption and over-production of natural resources, beyond the capitalist system then it is clear it can occur under any mode of production used by humanity. Since no other species or individual organism within a species, takes from nature more than what is required on a needs basis, then relative (or absolute) over-consumption and over-production characteristics are certainly specific to the human species and no others, but they are not specific to a particular mode of human production. They are even applicable at an individual friends and family level. If I make more pancakes than my family want to eat, I have over-produced; and if they happen to be delicious the temptation may be to over consume them, with mixed results in digesting them. Or if they are over-consumed because they are so good, I may have to go back to the pan and produce even more.

This is an extremely crude analogy, I know, but in part it holds good at scale with trading capitalist elites and countries. Think back for a moment to the elite creators of investment ideas prior to 2008, who, looking to provide investment opportunities for fictitious and non-fictitious global money hoards. In the US they over-produced mortgage backed securities on sub-prime (un-realistically secured) mortgages and the eager private and public global investors who scrambled to over-consume them. All superficially appeared ok on a rising market for a short time until reality kicked in and it became obvious that the whole process was out on an absent or crumbling limb or foundation. The scheme then collapsed in 2008.

The same type of over-production is also re-occuring with the idealised (fictitious) projections of the latest digital Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Bitcoin investment booms. The economic system of capitalism is built exclusively upon an elite based sociological interpretation of what it means to be human and to be human is to view the rest of life on earth as raw material to be utilised in realising that elite interpretation. And that elite sociological interpretation is based upon gaining and maximising personal wealth and power not on ensuring that the biological and ecological basis of life on earth is protected, respected and celebrated.

So at all times, elite, over-consumption triggers over-production to replace the dwindling available items; at other times, elite overproduction triggers overconsumption, in order not to miss out on enhancing wealth accumulation. Booms in production create conditions for slumps; slumps in production create conditions for booms. Whenever we consider production it is important to bear in mind that production is always production of both organic and inorganic substances. They are simply the two sides of a common phenomenon within private life and within all elite-based socio-economic systems that I classify as hierarchical mass societies. The one aspect can trigger the other and both of these types of natural materials are required in the nutrition of most life forms as well as for other uses.

The obvious biological reality is that the earth’s productive biosphere is limited, whilst the ideological ambitions of the elite classes to consume are unlimited. So to repeat; a section of the human species in the distant past, formed hierarchical mass societies, and due to the excessive demand of the elite classes, gradually began to consume more organic and inorganic material from nature each year than could be regrown or extracted from it during each year. As long as they stayed within their own immediate environment, shortages were inevitable. Hence in order to continue to thrive, hierarchical mass societies had to expand their control of land and resources beyond their existing borders, thus spreading out from within the middle-east.

Consequently, this model of human society could only peacefully function as long it could continue to expand on unoccupied territory within the middle-east region. After that, when this area became too occupied by other such societies, war became inevitable. Therefore, the model was moved on to the Mediterranean, Asia and beyond, by colonisation and imperial type subjugation and conquest Each time they flourished on the efforts of the labour of their subjected working masses and over extracted their available resources, (whether organic or inorganic), they either peaked, moved on or both. In doing so they frequently left behind social disturbances, altered habitats and ecological devastation of one kind or another.

Eventually due to the broader colonial era wars, annexations and conquests, all the earths resources were being subjected to the capitalist mode of production and consumed in various ways. It was then that in the 20th century, the era of world wars commenced and clearly this bourgeois development did not replace the previous ancient city-state, national, religious, regional and international wars, for these are being replicated in the 21st century. But it needs to be constantly kept in mind that underneath all the various supplementary rationalisations explaining away the causes of wars, there is something more fundamental taking place.

There may well be evil, greed, revenge, or insult etc., in the psychology of some individuals campaigning for war, but there is an even greater form of compulsion. The spectre of communal hunger exerts an even greater persuasive pressure for seizing extra territory by force than madness. Madness can find other things to focus upon but the biological processes of (N-M-G-R + A-D) are unrelenting and required 24/7. The absorption and metabolism of Nutrition, for Growth and Reproduction are number one, two and three in terms of existential priorities for past, present and future of all life on earth, particularly for large-scale societies. Materials suitable for nutrition must contain organic and inorganic mineral substances and the bulk of these substances can only be biologically reproduced or grown when sufficient fertile land is made available and monopolized.

d) Hierarchical Wars and Genocides.

It is here that the problem of a planet, not only full of large hierarchical mass societies of humans constantly eating, using and carelessly abusing natural resources arises, but also a super rich class of elites who in advanced capitalist countries are individually controlling and extracting more resources than the enyire populations of some countries. A human species consuming a greater mass of available for organic material at a greater rate than that organic nourishment can regrow itself, has for centuries created a fundamental contradiction within the biological self-replicating system of life on earth. Ancient and more modern ideologies may have asserted that an unlimited supply of natural resources have been made available (gifted by god or nature) but here again biological reality is different than social ideologies.

Natural biological resources were prolific here on earth long before humans and doubly long before religion and science and their personifications appeared and these resources are definitely not unlimited and they have definately not been gifted, but more like grafted. Natural resources whether organic or inorganic for Nutritional or non-nutritional use have always required sufficient time, biological effort and sufficient fertile environments to go through their own (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes.

For an extended period of historical time, the hierarchical mass society problem of over consumption, was temporarily deferred by the fact that in the period from ancient to modern historical times, much of the planet was only sparsely populated. Therefore, each hierarchical mass society was able to periodically to extend and gain control of large enough expanses of unused natural resources to ensure sufficient resources both for their immediate needs and their elite’s desires.

However, once all the available planetary nutritional and useful resources had been controlled, taken over or exhausted and once many fertile regions had been destroyed then the hierarchical mass society system had entered into an existential crisis phase of its ability to continue. A period of wars over securing resources for each HMS use and denying them to other hierarchical mass societies had commenced. The extreme phases of the hierarchical mass society finally broke out in the 20th century with the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, with unnatural deaths of humans reaching multiples of millions.

Not long after that, in the late 20th century and early 21st century symptoms of many crucial planetary climate, seasonal, temperature, essential species parameters began to exceed previous numbers and natural boundary levels. Indeed, the seventh UN Global Environmental Outlook (GEO – 7) published by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) predicts in the next 20 years or so there will be ‘Crippling heatwaves’; ‘Destructive resource extraction’; ‘Air pollution’; ‘Economic decline’; Lost ecosystems’, and much more. They also conclude that time to halt and reverse this downward path is shrinking fast. The report’s summary concludes that;

“All life on Earth, including humanity, is facing an unprecedented threat, represented by the convergence of human-induced global environmental crises: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of biodiversity loss, land degradation and desertification, and the crisis of pollution and waste. These crises are interlinked and mutually reinforcing, pushing planetary systems towards uncharted territory where there is a growing likelihood that several tipping points may soon be irreversibly crossed. Despite numerous political commitments and repeated calls for action, the world is still not on track to meet internationally agreed objectives for responding to these crises.” – GEO-7.

Roy Ratcliffe (May 2026)/

Part 3 of this ‘Reality versus Ideology’ article will consider some of the ways ideologies – of all political persuasions – from extreme right to extreme left (and in between), have reacted to the growing evidence, of which the above United Nations latest report, is but a small part.

PS. Read ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Pesent and Futire) by Roy Ratcliffe for a revolutionary-humanist and Giaia-centric perspective on how to play a positive role in the evolution of life on earth.

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REALITY VERSUS IDEOLOGY (Part 1)

Posted on April 28, 2026 by stutteringsteps

A) Fiddling while Rome burns.

Fiddling while Rome Burns has become more of a metaphor than a historical reference to an actual event where an elite member and his entourage, consciously did something satisfying, to themselves whilst avoiding doing something to save the capital city of the Roman Empire from burning. Reality in the form of a natural phenomenon (fire) was destroying the social ideology of the might of Rome and the so-called brilliance of its Imperial rulers. However, the metaphor still stands for the inhumane lack of concern shown by elites for the people they govern. Homes and civic infrastructure burning to the ground is of little concern to those who have multiple homes and multiple resources located in safe places. The estrangement from their human essence as an intelligent species, afflicts all members of competitive, class-based hierarchical mass societies, albeit in different ways and with differing intensities. Nevertheless, the saying does cover a very real phenomenon due to the wealth and power gap between the elites in such societies and the ordinary citizens subject to elite power and their privileged life-styles.

The hierarchical form of mass society, with elites in control of the social mechanisms of power and privilege, have always had the ability to do something or to do nothing about situations which are existentially detrimental to the mass of ordinary citizens of such societies. The 21st century is no different in this regard. Currently, the burning and destruction of homes, infrastructure, lives and livelihoods of ordinary people in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and Ukraine is being achieved directly by missiles, bombs and drones; indirectly by the interruption of supply chains. Both of which are the results of the direct and indirect actions of elites in Israel, USA, and Russia, and direct and indirect inactions by European elites. This destruction is merely a repetition of elite action and inaction during the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. However, the 21st century ‘fiddling’ is not being done on an alleged stringed instrument, as was conjectured in ancient Rome, but by bribes, contract deals, investments in war production, speculating in Bitcoin creation and real-estate futures and purchases.

Another lucrative ‘fiddle’ has been by the practice of taking advantage of incidental or deliberate shortages of essential materials such as food or fuel, in order to artfully raise prices. Despite the many differences, between ancient Imperial Rome’s elites and Modern Capitalist elites, the hierarchical mass society system still functions in the way it was always intended to do, ever since it began in ancient Sumer, Egypt, Persia, Greece and then Rome. From their formation the ancient elites manipulated and eventually cleverly perfected the scam of monopolising control of nature and its resources. Since that beginning, the function of such societies is to enable the enrichment of their elites by benefitting from the employment of the labour power of their working populations. In exchange for working people being minimally fed, clothed and housed (along with their families); either in the form of slaves, semi-slaves, landed tenants, or wage/salary slaves, their main activities were to produce wealth for the elite classes.

The substance of the scam initiated by the above noted historical elites, is revealed by the fact that the whole of humanity had previously employed themselves in collective groups for millions of years of hominid and Homo sapien evolution to live off the land, lakes, rivers and sea, which no individual or species had ever previously monopolized or ‘owned’. Moreover, those global hunter-gatherers who remained outside hierarchical control still did so until the 16th and 17th centuries and of course, a remaining few still do. In contrast, the terms and conditions imposed by hierarchical mass society elites for providing such alternative ersatz employment has always been decided by the governing elites. This has led to the relative or absolute impoverishment of the working masses and the poor, throughout that hierarchical mass society history. Hierarchical control or purchasing all the land, rivers and seas (and since these are the only sources of nutrition and useful materials) this has meant that the bulk of humanity has little or no alternative source of obtaining such essential resources.

The historic elite scam of producing and monopolising essential aspects of life on earth, including monopolising such activities as thinking and doing, has been perfected by the latest mode of social production – capitalism! Incidentally, the fact that some modern elites are buffoons and incompetents whilst others are more calculated and systematic in their manouvres and military annexations or predations, is no different than was made clear by Edward Gibbons in his lengthy study ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. The historical record going as far back as ancient Greece also indicates that hierarchical mass society elites were, and are, no different in that fluctuating idiocy and incompetence regard also.

b) The war against Iran.

The genocidal alliance of the elites of Israel and the USA has now added Lebanon and Syria, to its list of Gaza and the West Bank to ethnically cleanse and occupy. Behind the real decisions to attack Iran, lie the elite ideological visions of a Greater Israel and a Greater America which are no longer a closed door discussion but openly admitted. Lebanon, Iran and even Turkey, are elite targets for an idealised Greater Israel project; Canada, Venezuela and Cuba are viewed as logical targets for an elite  Greater (Make America Great Again) America for invasion, occupation and control by the Trump and Netanyahu cliques.
Whilst, Trump’s strategy in this first crush Iran phase, seems to be no more advanced than is needed to play a drunken game of ‘chicken’ Tiddly Winks, with military buttons standing in for plastic ones and yet he and his backers already seem closest to chickening out or manoeuvring to make a humiliating loss appear as a strategic win. In contrast, the Iranian elites are playing a disciplined but ruthless form of economic and military chess, albeit with a more limited number of pieces, but plenty of sacrificial citizen pawns; with the straits of Hormuz being another of them. On balance the Islamist elites  appear to be winning this first round of who will survive  to forcibly govern the rest of us.

Natayahu is playing his usual game of a multiplayer Russian Roulette with himself and his Zionist followers deploying willing Israelis to commit war crimes and genocide in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria on behalf of his Zionist ruling Cabal. They seem to be determined to become more than just a rogue, fascistic mythically imagined  ‘chosen’ nation. The real war-time facts are that the Zionist elites in charge of Israel, are hell bent upon building a middle-eastern ‘Greater Israel’ empire ruled by Zionists of Jewish identity. No multi-cultural liberal capitalist democracy for them. Such a project is certainly ambitious in the 21st century, bearing in mind that the previous Ottoman and Islamic empires, also governing most of that territory, failed to survive into the 20th century. Israel’s attempts at doing any better than Islamic or Christian elites, does not bode well for themselves or anybody in the path of their American supplied weapons.

Indeed, that prospect would be a complete anathema to all other peoples who aspire to retain some – if not all – remnants of the humanity inspired by the popular resistance to the 20th century National Socialist empire-building of a Greater Germany. That same war also ended the ‘axis’ Japanese Empire building project in Asia. So how long an exclusively Jewish one, even if initially successful, could survive in the middle-east is perhaps indicated by the following fact. Even with the American dysfunctional, elite-run putitive empire on its side for the last 70 plus years of funding and weapons, it could not subdue the Palestinian, non-state popular resistance in Gaza, let alone those resistence fighters populating Lebanon or Iran. Whatever, the individual or collective level of narcissistic self-indulgence of the various global elites and their respective fantasies; empires since the 19th century have been on the decline, not on an upward trajectory .

The conditions for the existence of empires no longer exist. Empires, only succeeded in the past when most parts of the human occupied world only had hunter-gatherers and pastoralist peoples, to resist and oppose them, not armed and militarised nations, willing to resist. The 21st century reality is that the relative strengths of the declining large-scale nation states such as Russia, China and the USA has altered and along with that relative strength alteration, so too have their alliances. The surface phenomenon at the moment is the Israeli-led war against Iran with a section of the US elite enthusiastically in tow, but within the mayhem of this missile and drone conflagration is a historic economic and military re-adjustment of hierarchical mass society nation-based elite status.

c) The old world order with new faces.

The elites, in China, and Russia are asserting their economic and military prowess (institutionalised in the form of BRICS) and asserted during the Iran war and the US elites (institutionalised in the form of a collapsing NATO) are further draining their own. The end of this Iran war, will merely formalise what has already occurred and witness a consolidation of the elites in China as the dominant world power and the one with the most industrial overcapacity. This refers to a situation in which production capacity in some countries persistently and structurally exceeds demand over several years, leading companies to sustain high levels of production, with the obvious impact of extracting ever more resources from an increasingly degraded nature and the eventual degradation of expended capital value. In contrast, the USA, elites, of all political persuasions will replicate the demise of the British Empire elites after the Second World War. Historically, powerful elites, from Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome also drained themselves of resources and support, whilst desperately trying to save and retain their relative economic and military status. This hubris (insolent pride of superiority) and nemesis (eventual failure and retribution) is a common narcissistic socially transmitted arrogance which infects those elites socialised within many hierarchical mass society forms of human aggregations.

The elite in Iran, may or may not retain its lucrative control of the Hormuz straits, but in surviving this mutual, malignant negation of humanity claimed by the US as liberation from clerical authoritarianism they will, like the elites of Israel, have drained their human and infrastructural resources along with their citizens patience with enduring outdated and humiliating hierarchical and patriarchal forms of rule. The endless wars by Israel to increase their control over middle eastern land and natural resources are proving self-destructive. Plus it should not be forgotten that armed nation states (large, medium and small) exist everywhere and furthermore their elites are now first and foremost at war with their own citizens over who gets what in the hierarchical mass society system.  Caused by the fact that the biological and ecological system can no longer sustain the demands made upon it by elites.

Maintaining previous and current levels of production, consumption and pollution is now biologically unsustainable. Class wars, within, national wars without nations are therefore, inevitable. Those recurring skirmishes remain the dormant first fronts of the coming class wars of elites versus their working citizens. The second front of this global class war is between elite alliances and the rest of the life on earth species. The pursuit of elite interests throughout the globe is extracting, processing and consuming more from nature than nature can reproduce. This process of competitive, extraction, production, consumption and pollution on an international scale is creating climate change, extreme weather events, essential species loss, viral spillover events, systemic human and infrastructure poverty and degradation and global discontent.

Here too the ‘Fiddling whilst Rome Burns’ analogy can be applied because of the fact that all the elites on all sides, are treating the ordinary citizens in their own countries and the citizens of their enemies countries, not as the essential producers of nutrition, clothing, shelter, energy, culture, education, safety and entertainment, for our species, but as an unlimited layer of pawns to be replaced when the last lot have been swept off the board of national existence, by drone, bomb, or missile strikes. But an additional layer of Fiddling whilst life on earth is burning or failing is with regard to the whole existence of life on earth. Elite hands and brains in militarily advanced countries are already enhancing nuclear capabilities, whilst fingers are already hovering close to Nuclear Option buttons.

The elite mentality, which surfaced long ago in the history of hierarchical mass societies and reappeared in the form of defeated Nazism, and Christian Zionist end-time nihilism, still has a following among estranged and dehumanised citizens of modern hierarchical mass societies and considers that; ‘if our side can’t win and rule the world; then let’s kill everyone on all sides’. That sentiment in the mind of a demented ruler who asks for nuclear codes, means that there is now, a chemical, biological or nuclear means, of actually doing so. That is the socialised logic of the hierarchical mass society system when it is governed by hierarchical elites and others who have been so estranged and maladjusted by their process of class socialisation, that their own (and others) dying is preferred to existance as a non-privileged and average human being.

Killing and harming other humans because of honour, anger, religious or national duty or ‘following orders’ has only become a pattern of human behaviour due to the dehumanising results of hierarchical mass society living.  Take a moment to think about the following sentence! No other species of life on earth has resorted to that self-destructive pattern of behaviour in pursuit of ensuring that the metabolic necessities of living are regularly obtained. Only the human species systematically kills large numbers of it’s own species and large numbers of other species, not for urgent need, but for current and future greed. Those are not the results of natural biological species living but the results of unnatural hierarchical mass society living.

Note also that the elites within these systems, when not involved in military wars, (the so-called peacetime periods) their targets may be marginally different, but their actions are fundamentally the same. Their ‘normal’ non-military activities of hierarchical mass society socio-economic efforts involve extraction, production, consumption and pollution which is still on such a scale that it is disturbing, degrading, destroying and destabilising the biospheres inorganic and organic resources of land, sea, air, rivers, lakes, plants, insects and animals, and, doing so on a 24/7 basis. Yet these inter-dependent and integrated biological species life-cycles are the ‘natural’ efforts which sustain and support the whole bio-chemical and ecologically balanced system of life on earth!

d) Biology or sociology; which defines our essence?

Since the social history of hierarchical mass societies, has been recorded in language and literature it has too often been assumed that human societies and their language and thinking processes are part of a qualitatively different process and domain from the biology of the rest of living nature. Anthropocentric ideology assumes that, unlike the rest of the non-human species, humanity owes its uniqueness to its own social structures of language, technology and scientific thinking. A majority of the human species, if they think about it at all, guided by religious and secular elites, think that humanity has moved on from ‘crude’ nature and left the biological origins of nature and the rest of the non-human species behind. If even someone as critical and self-critical as Karl Marx could write;

“An animal only produces itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature…and therefore he contemplates himself in a world he has created.” (Marx. 1844 Manuscripts. Section: Estranged Labour.)

This 19th century assertion by Marx is patently not true. An animal species doesn’t only produce itself. Its species produces and recycles its habitat and its own deaths has produced the source of nutritional content for many other life-forms. Furthermore, human beings don’t reproduce the whole of nature. On the contrary, the whole of nature,  in the many forms of cells, beneficial bacteria, phages and other symbiotic microorganisms, reproduces the whole of nature: and the biology of nature as a whole reproduces humans. We can see from this extract (and others) that 19th century anti-capitalist human intellectuals and activists had neither fully understood nature nor fully understood their own species absolute dependence upon the bio-chemical and biological structure of life on earth. Sadly, this lack of understanding also extends to those in the 21st century, who claim to follow Marx without even recognising his own personal and the general 19th century intellectual limitations, and of course their own.

Consequently, this and the sections yet to be published, will once again consider the biological essence of all forms of life on earth, including the fundamental biological essence of human social systems and the biological essence of human thinking and the forming of our individual and collective social ideas and ideologies. Previous generations had been taught to think that all this apparent human uniqueness was created by divine magic. Later secular thinking considered that humanity had created it’s own uniqueness, by its ability to think and produce complex machines and among those thinking that way was my own economic-analysis hero, Karl Marx

But in the 21st century, we also now know that human thoughts and experiences including speaking, writing and manufacturing complex systems, arise from human sensory perceptions of our environments, via specialised biological cells in our eyes, skin, bones and combined within biological organs such as ears, vocal chords and neo-cortical cellular matter. These sensory perceptions, moreover, are also circulated via bio-chemical nerve chains, dendrites, synaptic gaps and other brain-linked bio-chemical cell clusters. All these biological assets, no matter how sophisticated they have become in various species, are all evolutionary developments of the bio-chemical biology of multicellular organisms.

Human thinking as well as human actions are the biological results and responses which are bio-chemically processed within and between biological cellular links and connections. This biological fact remains so however socially saturated or reinforced they have become, with collective knowledge accretions. Even socially mediated and modified thoughts are the still the product of one or more biologically, multi-cellular functioning species members contributing to the collective understanding or misunderstanding. This complex and sophisticated evolution of organic life on earth, from the single celled bacteria type organisms to large and multi-talented multi-cellular species of life on earth – including the human species – is truly amazing! But it is far from perfect! Yes it is far more amazing, than any previous myths or mystetious ‘origins’, of life on earth, imagined by our distant historical religious or secular ancestors, who even imagined an imaginary form of perfection.

Moreover, we also know that even the many sided social inputs on understandings – even at their best – are not perfect representations of reality. Indeed, many external bio-chemical and social events and substances accidentally or intentionally administered can interfere, with the quantity and quality of these biologically acquired sense perceptions, memory storage systems and their memory stored conclusions. It is well known and documented that drugs, alcohol, emotions (such as love, hate, fear), loyalty, rewards, peer group pressure, religious preferences, hope’s, age and threats can effect the perceptions, memories and understandings that we all take away from our experiences of life on earth. These influences and ‘influencers’ effect what we may then transmit to friends, family and other members of our communities.

In class-based societies, class-based, gender and ethnic preferences and prejudices, make it difficult to know who or what to trust for reliable information. As a consequence of this universal problem the philosopher Bertrand Russell advised those – who would listen – that whenever we have seriously studied anything and we are sure of our due diligence in selecting appropriate evidence and in reaching our considered conclusions then, we should still maintain our certainty – but at the same time maintain it with a measure of doubt‘. That way our own individual and social limitations will be open to the emergence of further evidence and alternative understandings and help circumvent our entry into the twin intellectual cul-de-sacs of dogma and confirmation-biased thinking.

Roy Ratcliffe (April 2026)

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Hierarchical Mass Societies: The Final Countdown? (Part 4)

Posted on April 7, 2026 by stutteringsteps

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.

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