REDEMPTION SONG!

Posted on November 12, 2026 by stutteringsteps

The recorded experience of those human beings living within the first hierarchical mass societies on earth, particularly from the point of view of those who sufferered from slavery, class differentiation and socio-economic  oppression, was indeed bleak. For the vast majority, of those living within such societies, human Life on Earth was at best a ‘Vale of Tears’; for others it was a veritable Hell on Earth’. Unsurprisingly then, from within that particular socio-economic system eventually came the formation and promotion of ideas about a physical and emotional escape from all those burdens experienced by individuals and groups living within them. The material basis of these ideas of redemption for those trapped within these hierarchical mass society systems, were those oppressive and exploitative experiences, along with the fact that they were never completely accepted as ‘normal’ or ‘inevitable’, by the systems victims.

Hence from very early on in hierarchical mass society development, the longing to be free of hierarchical mass society structures and their oppressive relationships, took the religious form of ‘redemption’. To redeem means to regain something already alienated, by means of payment or effort. One central religious essence of what was alienated from humanity was imagined to be ‘innocence’ by disobedience to divine authority concieved as a sin. So ‘redemption’ in this Abrahamic tradition was based upon the effort necessary to obtain a peaceful return to some natural form of human existence. Religious imagination had posited a miraculous species ‘creation’ for humanity within an original ‘Garden of Eden’ as an explanation of how life on earth had begun. This  early (and possibly the first relatively coherent) anthropocentric idea about the need for humans to escape from their “oppressors” and “merciless people’ (as noted in the biblical Psalm’s) came during the ancient pre-Christian era in the Fertile Crescent region of the middle east.

That this socio-economic source of desiring to regain (or reclaim) some essence of humanity that had been tragically lost, cannot be surprising, because the record of the rampant brutality of the early hierarchical mass society system is well documented both in religious and secular literature and carved into monumental records. In fact, the idea of personnal and collective redemption took various forms in Egypt, Messopotamia, Persia, Greece and Rome, which were the early empire building stages of hierarchical mass societies. Initially, this vision of (or aspiration for) freedom, became articulated and later embodied in a morally superior message supposedly delivered by an imaginary morally and physically superior spiritual source. In this spiritual version of redemption, any effort by a ‘sinful’ from birth (!) humanity would need to be assisted by a powerful creator God. This God  would guide and lead humanity directly or indirectly – via a chosen agent (or agents) of god. This divine agency would lead humanity into a regained period of nutritional plenty and social harmony.  This core Abrahamic message (eventual morphed into the good news of gospel Christianity) of redemption would be achieved by a combination of good works and divine effort and would be delivered, promoted and preserved  by earthly followers of Abrahamic and other religions.

In these various middle eastern religious redemption scenarios, the superior divine entity was an imaginary God (Atum Ra; Mazda, Yehwah, God, Jesus etc.), and the first category of earthly based followers would be named or unnamed charismatic ‘leaders’, message protectors, interpreters, and diseminators of the liberating message. For example,  Disciples, Priests, Rabbis, Vicars, Immams etc.. However, no matter how modified the religious interpretation of this hoped for redemption to regain a humane essence for the human species became, the material basis (hierarchical mass society exploitation, and oppression) remained the actual material foundation. Over millennia, the vast numbers of human beings, whether dehumanised, oppressed and exploited by ruling elites as sex slaves, economic slaves, wage-slaves, military or bureaucratic servant/slaves, they continued to suffer under the hierarchical mass society system. Even those born among the ruling elites became socially dehumanised and damaged by ‘learning’ how to treat their citizens inhumanely and by focussing on gaining and retaining wealth and power for themselves.

Consequently, throughout the ages, the idea of religious forms of redemption never completely died out because the reality of savage exploitation, oppression and destruction was built into the very founding principles of hierarchical mass society systems. Nevertheless, the religious form of this aspiration for escape from such conditions, actually atrophied over many generations, due to the repeated failure of any divine appearance, any magical assistance or any tangible form of redemption to materialise. In addition, the atrophy was intensified by a decline of general human trust in authority and a decline of naive belief in theological based belief systems of knowledge in general. Nevertheless, the aspiration for something beyond the hierarchical mass society system reality, continued to materialise within every new generation of human beings as each generation was required to voluntarily (or forcibly) submit to the hierarchical mass society system of production and consumption. Laws and cohersive institutions had been created, improved and repeatedly enforced so that successive elites were able to remain firmly in control of the ‘system’ and its versions of law and order.

Eventually, a transition between the medieval feudal mode of production and the capitalist mode of production, took place and intensified the levels of exploitation and oppression of the labouring populations. The socio-economic dynamic of the capitalist idustrialised mode of production, harnessed as it was to the scientific and technological advances made during the 80 years between 1760 and 1840, introduced a new period of super exploitation of human labour and a petro-carbon fueled supercharged rate of extraction of natural resources, both organic or inorganic. Starting in Europe and notably, in the UK, Germany, Itally and France this socio-economic transition made life unbearable for those who were forced off the land by aristocratic ‘enclosures’ and these became a new class of wage workers with no legal rights to the areas previously designated as ‘commons’ to all villagers. For the first time in history, wherever the capitalist mode of production began to dominate, the working classes were progressively prevented from having any form of meaningful access to cultivated and uncultivated land and consequently to any useful life-sustaining resources it contained.

The only options available for working people needing to fulfil their Nutritional, Metabolic, Growth, Reproductive, Ageing and Dying biological processes (N-M-G-R + A – D) of survival, were monopolized by the owners of land and capital. The vast majority of the populations had to seek poorly paid and often dangerous forms of employment, from the owners of factories, workshops and farms that were close at hand. Thus began a century or so of European ‘dark satanic mills’ and savage poverty. Oppression and exploitation for working people and their families, intensified as it spread beyond Europe and became a globalised mode of production. So once again – out of this 18th and 19th century destructive industrialised turmoil – emerged new and secular based ideas of amelioration and redemption from this more advanced and still unnatural form of human living and working with its attendant horrors and savage exploitation. Well before the 20th century horrors of two world wars of ruthless mass destruction broke out between alliances of elite capitalist controlled countries, the 18th and 19th century socio-economic conditions for the majority of people had prompted two vigorous and sustained responses.

The earliest sustained response at trying to achieve redemption came from working people and their supporters in the middle-classes, took the form of campaigning for legal measures to ameliorate the social and employment conditions for working people and the poor. This first strategy and its associated institutionalised tactics was initiated by organising trade unions and non-elite political parties. It was hoped that the latter, by its members entering the governing institutions and by eventually passing legal reforms, would legally forbid the worst examples of capitalist production and consumption methods from taking place. In this way it was imagined that eventually this reform process would correct all the life-shortening abuses, all the workplace exploitations, end all the environmental pollutions of earth’s once green and pleasant land. At the same time, it was hoped that this process would curb all the excessive powers accumulated within the ruling elites. At the end of an indeterminately protracted process of human effort and endeavour, the hope by this ‘reformist’ politial tendency, was that a New Jerusalem (echoes of religious redemptive hopes) would unfold in Europe and a world of peace and plenty – in our time – would be realised.

Needless to say, this outcome did not transpire and in fact even the vague aspirations for achieving such outcomes were abandoned by all the political parties of reform. The British Labour Party eventually abandoned its semi-radical Clause 4 amendment in its constitution which had called for the removal of private capitalist ownership by non-profit based nationalisation. Long before that 20th century New Labour rebuttal of the idea of a modified form of amelioration’ of low wages and detrimental working practices, a second 19th century response to the ruthless exploitation of the mass of humanity by an elite section of humanity, emerged. Unsurprisingly, It came out of the experiences of a new generation of working class totally dependent upon being wage-slaves. This tendency did not seek amelioration from the worst social and employment aspects of capitalist mode of production – which by then had been adopted by the hierarchical mass society system of elite governance – instead they sought a form of redemption by means of a social ‘revolution’. This would remove the bourgeois elite strata from ownership and control of the main means of production and then sensitively (rather than ruthlessly) utilise those industrial means of production to serve the interests of all humanity thus ensuring that all human beings had sufficient ‘mesns’ to enjoy a good life.

This tendency was provided with an extremely detailed set of ideas by a middle-class German intellectual, named Karl Marx, who throughout the 19th century intensely studied politics and economics. Redemption and escape from the hierarchical mass society system in this secular form had no overt connection with an invisible, all-powerful, divine god/man and the imaginary word of a god, but nonetheless the aim and the hope for a practical form of redemption itself, was remarkably similar. After, extensive research Marx, wrote a devastating evaluation and critique of the capitalist mode of production which amounted to five lengthy volumes of notes on the bourgeois economic system; three volumes of which were eventually published as Das Capital. During a forensic level of detail, Marx in his economic writings pointed out that the capitalist mode of production would inevitably lead to a progressive increase in the social wealth and power of the bourgeois elite classes and a progressive decrease in the social wellbeing and socio-economic status of the working classes.

In this more secular scenario, humanity, was to achieve it’s own redemption by it’s own efforts, and Marx became something of an intellectual leader of this tendency when he also articulated the following; observation “Workers of the World Unite; You have nothing to lose but your Chains”. He pointed out that the industrial mode of production developed by the capitalist investors was so efficient that it could ensure every human being could be adequately, fed, housed and protected by the economic system. The problem he identified was that the bourgeois elite power and control of the capitalist mode of production was so strong and complete that the bourgeois elite would not allow it to be reformed in that way. Marx, and others, concluded that the consciousness of the working classes, would need to come to the conclusion that therefore, a revolutionary overthrow of the ruling elites would be necessary and that the regularly recurring relative over-production crises, would sooner or later create the socio-economic conditions necessary for such a revolutionary overthrow. Crises came and went, but no overthrow. Indeed, during the 20th and 21st centuries neo-liberal phase of the capitalist mode of production, both of these results (incressing elite wealth and absolute and relative poverty for working people, have matured beyond a level consistent with any remaining degree of humane levels of concern.

In the 21st century, all pretences of concern by the elites for other human beings, have been dropped as the multiple socio-economic and eco-climatic crises are unfolding in real time, and ruthless defence of the hierarchical mass society system has become the number one priority for the elite. Not even the return of genocide has been resisted or publicly denigrated by the vast majority of elites and even those ordinary global citizens who have denigrated and resisted the normalisation of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide have been ruthlessly targetted by their governing elites for publically saying so. The general habits of belief and naive trust in ‘authority’ which had permiated the religious form of redemption were never fully superceded or overcome in this supposedly alternative secular version of revolutionizing the hierarchical mass system for the benefit of all humanity. So in in the minds of many faithful followers of anti-capitalism and Communism, as vehicles for a form of human redemption, the ideas of Marx, and Marxism simply replaced Moses and the Ten Commandments and Das Capital replaced the Old and New Testament ‘good news’. Interestingly, in this regards and true to anthropocentric form, few followers of either tendency (religious or secular) bothered to seriously read the full documentation relevant to the form of their hoped for redemption.

The number of commited believers in God and Jesus that I have come across during my Seventy years of activism who have actually diligently read the Old and New Testament are as thin on the ground as those commited anticapitalists I also came across who had not even seriously dipped into Das Capital, let alone seriously and critically studied it or much of Marx’s extensive political, social and economic resesrches. A similar pattern seems to exist with believers in Islam, who also seem to have not critically and self-critically read the Qu’ran. However, the ideological similarities do not end there because the senior, self-declared, so-called disciples of Marx, such as Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, as talented as they were in various ways, demonstrated in practice a complete lack of understanding of Marx’s revolutionary-humanist principles expounded in Das Capital and other writings. The ‘practice’ I refer to was the elite role they all played in Soviet society after the collapse of capitalism and the demise of Russian aristocratic hierarchy in 1917.

The workers, soldiers and sailors response to the late 19th century and early 20th century socio-economic crisis in Russia, was to set up rank and file committees, called ‘Soviets’ who met to discuss a wide range of urgent issues and the demonstrations that were being organised. One demonstration in particular raised a demand for ‘Peace, Bread and Land’ and this became a popular summary, encapsulating the three levels of exploitation and oppression which Russian workers and peasants were experiencing. The issues of Nutrition, Metabolism and Growth, were particularly urgent, not only in Russia, as they were key land based aspects of life’s (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes everywhere. Before proceeding further it is important to recognise that Marx on many occasions had argued that revolution against capitalism should be by the decision and act of the working class oppressed themselves, and were not to be “freed from above by philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle-classes”. Yet these were exactly the social milieu from which Lenin, the Lawyer, Trotsky the Intellectual, Stalin the Seminary trainee, and their intellectual fellow travellors were drawn from – as were many other senior Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Marx again;

“From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognise that the working classes, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again it’s only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery used against itself , and on the other, safeguard itself against it’s own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.” (Marx. ‘Class Struggles in France’ . Peking Edition. Page 15.)

On no occasion did that scenario occur in any of the 20th century revolutions led by the ‘communists’ in Russia, China, Eastern Boc countries or Cuba. Indeed, the very opposite took place in these countries. The first thing the new revolutionary communist elites did in those countries was to seize control of the old repressive machinery of state or initiate new repressive machinery and turn these forces and systems against the working and peasant classes. Furtheremore, it was predictable that whatever, the personal feelings of any elites, the fundamental existence of any non-economically productive elite depends upon a working class that produces everything that the elite need – as well as what the workers need. Intellectuals of whatever ideological tendency, in order to practice their particular intellectual skills, need before anything else, food, water, clothing, shelter and safety. By definition such well-honed intellectual or service skills – if they are to continue into the future – need to be free from the daily productive toil of; digging, shaping, constructing, baking, manufacturing, policing, convicting, punishing, torturing and even killing those who do not agree to ‘fit in’ and follow orders.

Thus the first instinct of ‘revolutionary leaders’, particularly those who think the revolution ultimately depends upon them, is to secure their own hierarchical survival before anything else. Any serious examination of the communistic revolutions in Russia, China, Yugoslavia and Cuba or the fascistic revolutions in Germany, Italy, Japan or South America or even the Liberal post-war revolutions in Europe, will find the same pattern, albeit with nuanced differences. They all took over and/or established hierarchical mass societies with wage-slaves as the productive workers and themselves as the unproductive elites.. This is because the structure of hierarchical mass societies formed for the economic survival of mass societies determines everything else built upon that social foundation. So not having fully read or understood the revolutionary-humanist essence of Marx’s theories and speculations, were not the only ideological drawbacks the Bolsheviks and Maoists etc., introduced into the potential secular redemption aspects of the initial rank and file Russian, Chinese and Cuban communist movements. Their actual skill sets could only be exercised and funded by a system that rewarded unproductive intellectual labour.

Those so-called revolutionary leaders, were themselves (as an existing elite) already a non-productive social creation of the bourgeois and petite-bourgeois hierarchical mass society system itself. As revolutionary intellectuals they had already existed long enough to become so on the surplus-labour/surplus-value extractions from the unpaid labour of the slave, wage-slave and peasant producers. This was both before and after the Russian, Chinese and Cuban Revolutions. They merely put themselves in positions of power and governance and substituted themselves as a predominantly intellectually productive Soviet or Chinese CP elite, for the previous aristocratic Russian and Chinese elite. And words and documents do not fuel the (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological processes of life on earth. So from their positions of intellectual superiority and socio-political authority they then designed and promoted modes of production dominated by mass industry and planning and used themselves to replace previous unproductive governing elites.

This abbreviated history of the two anthropomorphic humanistic trends of hoped for redemption, the religious and the secular, has indicated that neither was revolutionary in a fundamental way. Whether they actually believed their own rhetoric or not, both used the concepts ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ to imply or assert that what they advocated was more than a tactical ‘difference’ in the governance of existing forms of exploitation, oppression and elite privilege. In fact, the original religious form of escape from authoritarian oppression and exploitation (i.e. divine redemption) and the later anti-capitalist based secular escape from authoritarian exploitation and oppression (i.e. classless communism) they both actually did no more than actually reform the hierarchical mass society system of elite governance. In the first case by installing an Abrahamic religious elite, in the second case by installing a Communist secular elite. Which in both cases did nothing to overturn or eliminate the class-based elite structure of the hierarchical mass society system and the continued exploitation and abuse of nature.

As a consequence of all energy and commitment expended by the supporters of these two forms of sociologically based redemptive escape strategies, the multiple socio-economic areas of dehumanisation of the human species continued. This negative outcome is undeniable to those who are not mired in irrational belief systems of which Marxism before and after the death of Marx, became one. The evidence for this negative evaluation lies in the degeneration of Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanism, which first became transformed into ‘Marxist’ dogma before degenerating further into becoming the belief-based ideology of various sectarian cults formed around Marx’s surrogate disciples known as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or Mao. Those who doubt this assessment need to explain why the phenomenon of genocide, femicide, infanticide and ecocide continued under their supreme leaderships, and how the phenomenon of capitalist designed industrial wage-labour exploitation and oppression also continued during their periods of party governance.

Consequently, all these 20th century systems, whether led by Capitalist, Socialist, Communist, Fascist, Islamic, Liberal or Democratic minded individuals were by intention and design were not revolutionary in a more fundamental human sense nor in a biological sense either. Indeed, the religious anti-hierarchical mass society tendency of Abrahamic redemption from oppression and exploitation had negated and sidelined the entire biological structure of nature and the non-sociological based human ‘nature’ in favour of a mythical narrative based upon an invisible super-man creator of everything. So when Marx had declared and repeatedly confirmed that man was superior to nature by asserting that;

“Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs adding stature to himself…” (Capital Vol. 1 Emphasis added. RR.)

“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.” (Marx. 1844 Manuscripts part V. Emphasis added. RR )

“But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the emergence, the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so that he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis.” (Marx. Volume 3, page 305. Emphasis added RR)

It becomes clear for those with the time, patience and sufficient critical interest to research things thoroughly, that anthropocentric arrogance had permiated all elites within the hierarchical mass society intellectual spectrum. It becomes clear that even at their most radical best, anti-capitalists such as Marx, had also sidelined the fundamental importance of biology in the formation and continuity of all species – including the human species. This also explains why most of the remaining Marxists have become little more than mouthpiece ‘beleivers’ in a doctrine based upon a 19th century level of evidence and understanding, that has atrophied away from independent research and rigourous self-criticism into a religious type belief system. This is why we can still read the regurgitation of Marx’s 19th century unfulfilled hypothesis of workers revolution and the resulting taking over of the capitalist system of industrial mass extraction, mass production, mass consumption, corruption and commodity fetishism. A hypothetical perspective regurgitated irrespective of this systems devastation upon the ecologically balanced biosphere – the only sphere within which life on earth can exist – and upon which everything else apart from existence ultimately depends.

Finally, the left’s ill-thought out ‘Right to Work’ abstraction, falsely advanced as a revolutionary demand, conveniently neglects to reveal at what rate of exploitation, under what working conditions and who is doing the employing and for what purpose. The right to work for workers was guaranteed and enforced in Lenin and Stalin’s gulags, in Hitler’s death Camps and gas chambers, in America’s Chain Gang prisons and to the pilots of Bomber commands and to professional torturers – on all sides! The right to work under any hierarchical mass society system is merely a cynical reform under the deceitful control of a dehumanised elite, enforced by a military – only following orders – workforce, and whose operations are shrouded in secrecy and deceit. Under this system the ‘right to work’, amounts to the right to pollute the sea, to destroy forests, to drill for oil, to commit genocide and to shoot children in the head and heart. The only really revolutionary perspective is that the human species still needs to escape from this de-humanising, socio-economic hierarchical mass society cul-de-sac – of all political persuasions – that it has been trapped in for millennia and which has been imposed upon all other species of life on earth.

The motive for doing so remains essentially the same. The exploitation, the savage oppression, the systematic dehumanisation and the ecocidal destruction of the biological matrix which created the biosphere and became the foundation of biological evolution. However, as noted the previous religious and secular proposals to do so were not based upon any biological reality but upon anthropocentric myths, imagination and elite self-interest. The First proposal; a non-existent divine-guided religious based redemption; the Second proposal; the establishment of a Marxist guided, post-capitalist hierarchical mass society established by a workers revolution; or Third, proposal; an extreme authoritarian 1,000 year Fascist/Aryian Nazi envisioned future. All these strategies have been advocated, attempted and utterly failed to make any positive difference to the wellbeing of humanity as a whole or the earth’s biological environment as a whole.

It’s a crude analogy I know, but if there is any truth in the aphorism that; you can’t make a silk purse out of a sows ear; then it’s an impossible task to try to make a generally beneficial human society out of a hierarchical mass society system. 5,000 plus years of hierarchical mass society wars, genocides, crimes against humanity and crimes against other species, have never release the bulk of humanity from this man made “bottomless pit” that generations of elite determined slave or wage-slave ‘work’ keeps us digging. A truly revolutionary socio-biological transition back to biological and sociological sustainability, for life on esrth needs a completely different starting point than a hierarchical mass society based mode of production. Some of Bob Marley’s lyrics in his somewhat contradictory reggae song ‘Redemption Song’ echoed Marx (in his ‘Class Struggles in France’ quoted above) and still ring true when Marley sang;

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery”
“None but ourselves can free our minds”

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2026.)

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ZIONISM EQUALS RACISM? REALY?

Posted on October 28, 2026 by stutteringsteps

The terms Zionism and Racism are both sociological based linguistic abstractions, and as such they do not exist outside of the human brain and its means of communication with other human brains. Nor do the results of any actions which arise from these concepts being acted upon directly effect anything outside of human activities. Abstractions, like words, do not do anything directly, they simply guide or misguided actions. That is the essence of all linguistic abstractions. Consequently, they are only problematic when they become a frequent source of intellectual confusion by those using and misusing them and by those who listen to them or read them. Therefore Zionism and Racism are no different in this regard and can be seriously confusing. The most obvious source of confusion arises from the fact that abstractions are routinely used in at least two different ways. Some abstractions, relate to some aspects of life that have multiple real material contents implied by (or within) them, whilst other abstractions have little or no real content outside of convention or imagination.

For example Zionism is a sociologically derived abstraction which refers to a particular form of political ideology (i.e. it is a collection of related and publically expressed ideas) and is actualized by a related colonial settlement movement (a collection of socio-political land-based human settlements). On the other hand, Race and Racism, as applied to the human species, are concepts based upon no real material (in this case biological) content. Race and Racism were elite-created conceptual abstractions that only became linguistically prominant and ‘established’ during the period of European Colonialism. They became identified with an ideological trend, which was conceptually manufactured to serve as an ideological fig-leaf in order to hide, excuse and justify, the dehumanised horror of the armed seizure of New and Old World Islands and continents from their former inhabitants. Race was a concept intellectually designed and manufactured to subdivide humanity into discrete groups on the basis of supposedly superior and inferior physical and intellectual abilities.

These European derived elite criteria for diferential comparisons with indigenous people were all sociologically derived differences. They  had no physical, biological or geographical relevance or validity at all. Indeed, in contrast to indigenous peoples the Europeans who invented these so-called superior and inferior ‘racial’ distinctions were actually less competent in non-European survival knowledge and skills, than the locals. The histories of that period also indicate that the invading colonists and their enablers were less capable in expressing their basic humanity, in relationship to the indigenous peoples on every continent or island they invaded. The colonisers even had to learn what to eat, how to hunt and how to plant and preserve practically all the nutrition and safety protocols they needed, from the human victims of their colonialist invasions. Furthermore, it quickly turned out that all these global peoples could in fact (and did) interbreed, with each other. Within the human species, it turns out that the Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells, that make up the human body, the morphological distribution of skeletal bones, internal organs and limbs, reproductive biology, blood circulation and blood types of global humanity, are all within a narrow biological spectrum of variations that are common to all human beings, wherever they eventually finished up during their migrations.

Therefore in reality – rather than bourgeois ideological fictions – there are no races! This fact is important in understanding the modern world we live in. There are no races, but there are extreme forms of social discrimination, exploitation, oppression and dehumanisation in all hierarchical mass societies, including so-called socialist, communist and religious hierarchical societies. However, this fundamental discrimination is not on the basis of some mythical concept of seperate races. Discrimination within hierarchical mass societies is primarily based upon class based access and control of the essential means for any community to survive. Therefore logically, there would have to be actual races to be accused of racial discrimination. So in one important sense the Zionism equals Racism resolution is outdated linguistic nonsense, in which people are using these terms as a form of political posturing. The concept makes no rational sense and represents only an irrational ideological dogmatic entrenchment of a 19th century abstraction constructed on the basis of a fabricated mythical form of human identity.

Furthermore, as there are no such things as ‘races’ the source of any actual discrimination, whether mild, severe or murderous, must have (and does have) a serious alternative motivation, which needs to be clearly identified and stated. What has happened in this intellectual spat over the Green Parties, Zionism is Racism resolution between elites of all sides  of that debate, is that they have all failed to extract themselves from the 19th century anthropocentric paradigm of elite intellectual colonial discourse. Both sides have uncritically accepted a virtual reality version of human identity, based upon non-existent biologically different ‘races’. To repeat, the idea of superior and inferior ‘races’ was created for specific elite purposes of colonising foreign lands and extracting resources from those who lived upon those resources. The continued use of these 19th century made up concepts reveals that our current generation of elites have not yet been sufficiently bothered to put the concept where it belongs – in the museum of 19th century antiquities.

Yet revealingly,  the elites who had examined the war crimes of that ‘total war’ period (1939 – 45) and produced the post-war Human Rights Acts etc., had correctly felt no need to propose that the concept of a ‘crime of genocide’, was directly linked to the ersatz 18th and 19th century concept of race. Indeed, the sociologically determined and declared motivation causing the ethnic cleansing of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehova’s Witnesse’s, Trade Unionists and Communists was openly declared by the National Socialist Party leader Adolf Hitler. It was Lebenstraum – the expansion of German borders, first  to include Europe then the globe, and of course access  to low cost raw materials and labour. True, there was still a strong actual discriminatory ideology within the most European nations, which had been carried within the anthropocentric narcisistic Abrahamic Religious monotheism of Judaism, Christianty and Islam. All those communities had been reassured by their religious ‘leaders’ of their ‘chosenness’ due to their imaginary superior God’s personal grace. True also that many of the elite Arian/Germanic peoples felt they had also a supplementary claim to be superior biological entities to the rest of their species, but at the time a Greater German Territory was the overiding National Socialist (Nazi) ambition.

The historical and religious record also indicate that territorial expansion tied to some mystical God’s chosen preference has been a constant theme of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, such expansion also remained the openly declared ambition of the Israeli Jewish elite from the onset of their orientation toward establishing a Jewish state in Palestine to the eventual declaration in 1948 of the state of Israel.   Since the Palestinan people are not a different race of people, but an integral biological  part of the human species, they are the target of Zionist occupation and genocidal levels of brutality predominantly for other specific reasons. The most important being that they just happened to be living – without a standing army strong enough to resist – in a fertile crescent region that the Zionist trend of Judaism wish to have for themselves.

Like the North and South American and African native peoples, centuries earlier, Palestinians could not fully resist the colonisers. In both cases (and others of the period), the issue at the base of the conflict was not primarily race or skin colour but fertile, resource-abundant space. Settler isms, North and South American Colonialism and Zionist colonialism, were not issues motivated by human skin tone or body morphology but by the geo-politics of land and resource acquisition. Zionism is therefore not activated racism, but activated land theft and dispossesion, just as Colonialism was in general. Some Zionists may hold antiquated narcisistic ideas of superior and inferior races, but that oxymoronic anthropocentric fantasy is not Zionisms defining characteristic.

For Jewish Israeli’s the prior socio-political implications of the choice to embrace Zionism was to become militarised squatters on already occupied territory. For Palestinians their only political choice was to not oppose or to oppose and resist that Jewish colonisation. For the rest of humanity not directly involved, there are universal issues of human social and political rights, to consider. These latter were agreed and established after the Second World War, by the UN, which – for the safety of all peoples – not just the Palestinians – should be honoured and protected by and for all human groups. The emotional basis of the ideology of Zionism therefore is inhumane and discriminatory and its socio-political basis is land and resource predation and genocidal elimination of Palestinians. In practice, Jewish Zionism in Israel is the ideology of a modified hierarchical mass society system, organised to exclude from full participation in its social system all those who are not designated as Jews by birth or conversion. Israel, in practice is a 20th century version of an exclusive settler, colonialist society which like all those prior colonialist era projects sought to fundamentally displace and eliminate indigenous populations with settler populations, but only Israel has chosen to exclude all those individuals not identified as being part of one particular religion or ethnicity.

Whilst this article has primarily referenced the confusion caused by the misuse of the abstractions Zionism and Racism noted above, it is worth drawing attention to other 19th century abstractions which further confuse (intentionally or unintentionally) the discussion around the long running tensions between Israel and Palestine. This is use of the abstraction ‘antisemitism’. This abstraction arises from a term originally applied within the study of human religions and languages or philology. Within the larger Indo-European group of spoken and written languages identified in the 18th and 19th centuries, there is a sub-group of Afro-Asiatic family of languages which include Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Amharic and Aramaic, which were endemic in the eastern Mediterranean and were originally spoken in ancient Babylon, Assyria, and the middle east. The semites were thought to have been descended from a character named Shem and the Shemites (Semites in Greek) mainly comprised of ethnic Jews and ethnic Arabs. During the 19th and 19th century development of linguistics or philology, a semite was the term applied to any middle eastern people who spoke either Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Amharic or Aramaic.

So logically, being antisemitic in the 19th century would have been identified as exhibiting discriminatory behaviour toward all those who spoke one of the semitic languages such as Jews or Arabs. Whether we choose to be consistent with the 18th and 19th century orientalism of European linguistic scholars, or not, it seems a seriously inconsistent confusion to continue to use the 19th century term ‘antisemitism’ to refer to any irrational dislike of Jews when many Arab Palestinians might also still classify themselves historically or ancestrally as semites. An additional problem also arises from this 200 year old concept of semitism, because the term antisemitism is currently being used to label rational humanitarian based opposition by pro-Palestinian activists to the ongoing Israeli Zionist genocide conducted in Gaza and the West Bank. This opposition is being used as evidential proof of anti-zionists being motivated by antisemitism – a deliberate and inaccurate conflation or merging of the two abstractions. It then becomes ridiculously confusing. If Jewish people from Europe and elsewhere are entitled to consider themselves as descending from semites, then certainly indigenous Palestinians are entitled to do so. Logic would complain if those who were pro-Palestinian rights then claimed they were therefore exhibiting pro-semitic positions not anti-semitic ones.

This demonstrates the linguistic confusion in thinking and being that accompanies borrowed language and thinking uncritically reproduced in one later  generation from a previous generation (or two) as if history and understanding had stood still. In this way the mainstream left, right and centre intellectual tendencies who insist on perpetuating outdated and fictitious abstractions have got themselves and others who imitate them, into a tangled intellectual mess. In fact being (anti) against any act which is inhumane and considered as crimes against humanity, should be supported in the strongest possible terms, not automatically labelled as exhibiting a criminal attitude toward Jewish people. Consequently, the inaccurate term anti-semitism is being directed against rational opposition to Israeli genocide and crimes against humanity, as if such rational opposition was emanating from some medieval viral contagion which was spreading by physical contact. The global opposition to genocide in Gaza and elsewhere is a rational decision to recognise that the people of Palestine are part of the human species, like the rest of us, and that to express our humanity it is necessary to insist that Israel adhere to and abide by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and all the UN resolutions on this colonialist occupation of Palestine, Gaza and the West Bank.

A more up to date term to apply to the relative few individuals who have a phobic dislike of Jewish people with little or no rational justification for such intense hatred would be the term Judeophobia, which was actually suggested by a 20th century Jewish academic. Although he also thought the term antisemitism was doing more harm than good to the uphill task of trying to minimise irrational prejudices against any group of human beings in our dehumanised hierarchical mass society structures and relationships, he was ignored. But here again, as in so many cases, the intellectual, political, and sociological establishment elites are focussed on the irrational mass manufacture of profit-producing commodities and services rather than any critical and self-critical review of the effect of human activities upon life on earth in all its manifestations. Sadly, we cannot excuse the left and the anti-capitalist left either for such neglect.

This milieu too are still verbalising and writing on the basis of 19th century levels of knowledge and understanding pioneered by Liberal, Socialist and Marxist critics of the capitalist mode of production. Moreover, nearly every day I read many of their thoughts and find they are still using terminology and concepts such as race and racism, anti-semitism and white supremacy which are all false and superficial categorisations applied to a socio-economic system based upon the ownership of capital in all its material forms. Land, means of production, banking and finance capital are global and the capitalist class (of all skin shades) are the supreme ruling and governing global elites and capital accumulation is clearly blind to colour distinctions. After the 16th century, capital accumulation, ceased to be indigenous to European pale-skinned elites. For centuries now capital has accumulated in the bank accounts of persons of many skin colours, in any country or any nation that has adopted that mode of production and who have any advantage to leverage. The vast number of millionaires and billionaires in China, Africa and Asia of varying skin tones is a reality that overturns the colonial era ‘white man’s burden’ and authoritarian dictators come in all dark, medium and light skin shades.

Those on the left who cling on to superficial 18th and 19th century crude anthropocentric categories and still reduce everything of crucial economic importance in the 21st century, to a superficial question of which skin colour dominates among the global elites, reveal more than they intend. They demonstrate how little they understand about the socio-economic structure of capitalism and how little they understand about how non-human biological processes are the actual foundation of everything that lives, including themselves. Those crude categories and abstractions noted in this article, were first manufactured in the 18th and 19th centuries and are now – two centuries later – completely at odds with reality in the 21st century. The left who like to think themselves radical and progressive should be the first ones to abandon manufactured oxymoronic concepts and ideas such as racism, anti-semitism and white supremacy.

For it is actually the documented case, that those superficial sociological categories were proposed and perpetuated by the European bourgeois and petite-bourgeois elites, during their centuries of scrambles for India, North and South America, Africa and elsewhere. However, the continued use of these ersatz bourgeois categories by the left, authentically reveal their users to be staunch conservatives in their language and thinking. When critically examined, the lefts of most political persuasions, fall well short of their own exagerated, self-assessed abilities. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that whilst calling people racists when there are no races, when not challenging the fundamental intellectual contradictions inherent in the concept of anti-semitism, and by identifying the supremacy of the capitalism mode of production as being a white one, they are also ignoring much more.

On just as an important historic scale as the genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people, the ecocidal elimination of other essential species such as forests, insects, animals, microorganisms, algae, fish and birds, receive only passing comments and afterthoughts on the left. The same neglect occurs in their failure to critically analyse the entire history of the hierarchical mass society system – which prior to the domination of capitalism also  – over-extracted, over-produced, over-consumed and over-polluted. Moreover, it did so in order to accumulate surplus-product and non-monetary surplus-value to enrich all previous elites. This latest capitalist pursuit of wealth for a mixed skin global elite is preparing the socio-economic prerequisites for further wars and genocides over which particular elite controls the ever- decreasing useful resources. Current and future conflict over these dwindling resources, (water, fertile unpolluted land, tolerable temperature regions) will do to other peoples what was done to indigenous peoples in the colonial era past. Tellingly, what was done to the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Africa and Asia, in previous centuries is still being done to the Palestinians.

The lefts active perpetuation of the outdated abstraction civilisation to describe the trajectory of the hierarchical mass society form since its inception in ancient Sumer and Egypt, along with its past and current genocidal inhumanity, is to commit the same intellectual error as clinging on to the anachronistic abstractions race, anti-semitism and white power. Those and many other elite promoted ideological abstractions are all elite fabrications intended to confuse and mislead non-elite humanity about the prior and contemporary negative role of hierarchical mass society structures. They serve to mask the elites production practices which continue to destroy and atrophy the planets foundational biosphere.

Many on the left remained shackled to their inherited habits and dogmatic forms of thinking, when in reality the prospects for life on earth have fundamentally moved on and they now have nothing to lose by moving on themselves – but their intellectual chains. The decline and eventual, fall of this modern hierarchical mass society ’empire’ of commodity fetishism and dehumanisation continues whilst left, right and centre politicians can only think of how best to ensure ‘the hierarchical mass system’ is kept going by reforming it’s most outrageous extremes (and failing in the case of genocide) and  by themselves becoming ‘hierarchies’ new governers and ‘influencers’. Their ambition extends only in one direction, it is to become an alternative left, right, or centre vanguard elite.

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2026.)

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CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY (Collective and Individual)

Posted on October 15, 2026 by stutteringsteps

If the history of hierarchical mass societies is studied even superficially, it becomes clear that crimes against humanity perpetrated by the powerful against the rest of humanity who remain relatively powerless, are not a temporary abberation. They are a socially constructed built in attribute of the hierarchical system format itself. Even the incomplete recorded histories and sparse archeological findings of the ancient so-called ‘civilised’ world of the middle east testify to the fact, that murder, torture and genocide were rife from the beginnings of such societies. If the reader doubts this, take for example, the following extract. An elite individual ‘Ashurnacirpal’ during the early period of the ancient Babylon, Assyria and the Greek hierarchical mass societies, (from which modern political treachery and brutality eventually drew its inspiration), recorded the following inscription in 860 BCE;

“I drew near to the city of Tela. The city was very strong, three walls surrounded it. The inhabitants trusted to their strong walls and numerous soldiers; they did not come down or embrace my feet. With battle and slaughter I assaulted and took the city. Three thousand warriors I slew in battle. Their booty and possessions, cattle, sheep I carried away; many captives I burned with fire. Many of their soldiers I took alive; of some I cut off their hands and limbs; of others the noses, ears and arms; of many soldiers I put out the eyes. I reared a column of the living and a column of heads. I hung up on high their heads on trees in the vicinity of their city. Their boys and girls I burned up in the flames. I devastated the city, dug it up ; in fire burned it; I annihilated it” (Tablet inscription. Quoted in ‘A History of Babylonian and Assyrians’. By GS Godspeed. Section 168)

The crime of burning people alive, of course, was revived in the 21st century by the exceptionally dehumanised individuals who made up the dehumanised radical Islamic cult of ISIS. This continuation and resurrection of such crimes indicates the longevity of the social dehumanisation of members of the human species. Multiple forms of socialisation occur during the immersive upbringing of human beings in hiearchical mass societies. The level of devastation and brutality boasted about in the above quote can now be achieved in the 21st century by a single high explosive bomb, constructed in an air conditioned factory, delivered from a high altitude, in a temperature controlled bomber, with a crew of well paid and well respected airmen. The modern perpetrators, who unlike the ancient trained killers and arms suppliers get no blood directly on their hands, feet and faces from the severed limbs and incinerated bodies caused by high intensity thermal explosions. However, one characteristic continues. Killing men women and children, both requires and displayes, the same level of callous indifference and dehumanised attitudes to ‘others’ in the modern world as it did in the ancient world.

The reader just needs to think about the 21st century bombing of Gaza and Iran, by Israeli and USA elites, and also the Iranian elites destruction by missiles of US military bases and the torture of their own disobedient citizens, to get a general picture and to realise that the symptom is not typical to a particular gender, religion or ethnicity but to a specific social system – the hierarchical mass society system! To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the link between de-humanised crimes against humanity, it is only necessary to think about (or research about) how many such scenes of wilful crimes against humanity carnage, individual and collective, have occurred over the millennia since the begining of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation in the ancient near and middle-east.

INDIVIDUAL CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

In 2026, Maricarmen Abascal, a Madrid pensioner, could no longer afford the rent on her flat and so Aged 87, she did not die at home, as she had wished. Instead, she died in a hospital to which she was beaurocratically taken following her forced eviction from her flat. She had lived in the flat for 70 years and managed to pay rent previosly but those seven decades of citizenship participation and payments had not been enough to save her from eviction when the rent had finally been increased beyond her means to pay. This image of a frail member of our  human species being evicted by other members of our own species, illustrates on a smaller scale the extent and depth of the dehumanisation taking place within all hierarchical mass society systems, both ancient and modern. The final solution for the rentier class’s dehumanised indifference to its renters is eviction. This incident illustrates that the example of what Hannah Arendt classified as the ‘banality of evil’, was not restricted to nation states in periods of war and economic depression, such as Germany in the 20th century, but also to individuals in periods of peace.

And we should not forget that such singular instances of dehumanised behaviour are multiplied and multiplying exponentially as people are rendered homeless by impoverishment, climate implicated fire, floods, earthquake disasters, along with economic slumps in employment, or city or region regeneration programs. The numbers of human beings lacking the means to adequately house, feed and clothe themselves has expanded exponentially since the end of the Second World War in 1945, but this has been part of a continuum over millennia and it continued during and after both wars.  This phenomenon, epitomised by slavery, serfdom, and now wage slavery, was unknown prior to settled hierarchical mass societies in the ancient world. Indeed, these societies created a class of directly and indirectly employed armed bodies of men and through these ‘forces’ began to monopolise and restrict – on an ever expanding scale – unimpeded access to the natural resources needed by all the multiple species formerly having access to them. By any social measure of general humanity the hierarchical mass society system has no socially acquired ‘right’ other than that imposed by elite controlled ‘might’ to exist.

COLLECTIVE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

A collective ‘final solution’ to severe economic crisis was a ‘crime’ which in 1938 had been ordered and implemented by the leadership of National Socialist Party of Germany, (abbreviated in the West to the term Nazis), which was organised and implemented  by ordinary citizens of Germany who carried out military orders and/or loyally fulfilled civil employment duties. The term genocide and holocaust was applied to this modern form of enthnic cleansing and was eventually declared in the mid 20th century, a crime against humanity. In fact, as noted previously, it was a particular resurrection of a general symptom pioneered by ancient elites in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. The point I am making and challenging is that this particular form of ‘final solution’ has been incorrectly and repeatedly viewed as a temporary aberration, caused by a symptom religiously defined as an outbreak of evil.

Bit even before efore and during the period of the Second World War, the solution to unemployment and falling profits in Europe and elsewhere, had been increased dispossesion of resources from individuals and communities and in Germany had taken the form of organised and perpetrated forced dispossesion and removals of those citizens identified as Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, socialists and commumists from their homes to the gas chambers and/or transported to the starvation and torture regimes administrating the specially created concentration camps. No individual or group had felt convinced or compelled to or able to stop this process; later after the NAZI elevation to power no one in the law enforcement or military refused to carry out their orders, and eventually no one in state and civil employment had refused  to take part in those daily crimes of indiference, cruelty and dispossesion targetted against the German branch of humanity.

It is important to note that this kind of final solution to economic problems was not restricted to the elites controlling societies implementing the capitalist mode of production, but was also used by so-called 20th century socialist elites against reluctant peasants, anarchists and anyone who criticised the policies and programmes of communist party elites. One only need to recall the implementation of Gulags and mass purges of individuals and groups created and conducted by the Bolshevik and Communist elites in the Soviet Union, China and the eastern bloc countries against those who acted or spoke out against those policies, programmes and actions – to grasp its universality. Furthermore, that 20th century demonstration of dehumanised  banality, indifference and collusion with authoritarian elites policies and processes, has been repeated – again at scale – in Gaza and the West Bank in the 21st century.

The fact that such estrangement and inhumanity is not just a phenomenon involving masses but also is demonstrated in individual acts of inhumanity stretching from indifference to assault, rape, torture and murder operating within all classes of hierarchical mass society and within many families and human relationships. These frequent acts are usually perpetrated by those with physical, economic or institutional power over those who have become their victims. As noted elsewhere these symptoms of the dehumanisation of the ‘other’ have also been repeated by the Epstein elite oligarchal elites against their victims and also in the above single case of  87 year old Maricarmen Abascal in Spain. Think about the implications of these constantly recurring symptoms; not just in the past but now and on into the future! No one in these systems are completely safe from becoming a victim and even those close to us can become perpetrators of indiference, disrespect and dehumanised actions.

The historically recorded fact is that hardly anyone in these hierarchical mass society systems have refused to carry out their own miniscule particular part in these protracted sequence of sociological and politically-led dehumanised ‘events’ whether as organisers, facilitators, perpetrators, or bystanders. No one in Madrid was able or willing to prevent this single act of inhumanity to an 87 year old frail member of our human species; this individualised crime against another human being is not the most extreme example but it is an example of how it permeates us all to a greater or lesser degree. But does it really represent a ‘banality of evil’? I suggest it does not! Evil is a religious or poetical abstraction which is used by those commentators unable or unwilling to identify the real source of this phenomenon! We now have access to more detailed evidence which allows us to now do much better at understanding the sociological processes, which prompt, persuade or pressure ordinary people into denying their own and other peoples humanity. How we become part of a socio-economic system which can eventually perpetrate the most outrageous crimes against our own citizens and citizens of other such societies is down to a process of socialisation not an imaginary symptom of evil.

The recent documentary NAZA has thrown a modern light on the most extreme example of this estrangement and dehumanisation that frequently takes place within hierarchical mass societies whether large-scale nation states, non-state institutions, religious and political sects as well as within individual families. NAZA is an acronym used by the Israeli military personnel who utilising AI computer programmes to locate where military targets can be most readily located and easily assassinated. This usually in their family home. By monitoring the mobile phones of children, partners, parents and grand parents, the Israeli military by an operation entitled ‘where is daddy ‘ can gain information on where and when a suspect or target for elimination will be. Thus a time and place of a family gathering can be programmed for a drone, missile or bomb to explode and kill the intended target. But that’s not all. The implications of this situational form of targetting is that all those in the same house, flat, compound or hospital, will also be eliminated as calculated ‘collateral damage’. Incidentally, there were numerous examples of this military policy during the occupation of the US in Afghanistan.

In principle this targeting of individuals and even groups by intelligence gathering is nothing new and has been done throughout the ages by elites within hiearchical mass societies. For example the most notable ancient targetted assassination was carried out by a large group of elite assassins against Julius Caesar in Rome. The group had established the fact that he would be at a certain place (The Theatre of Pompey) on a certain day (15th March) at the time of the opening of the Senate Meeting and so the group gathered in waiting for him to arrive. When he did the large group, crowded around him and it is recorded that the Emperor was stabbed 23 times and consequently died. There are undoubtedly many, many more such examples during the millennia which lie between 44 BCE and Gaza in 2026 and many differences concerning the intelligence gathering and the partucular weapons of choice to deliver the decisive blow. The documentary film NAZA interviews the military intelligence officers who use AI computers and wireless equipment to fine tune the timing and to calculate the power of the explosives to be used.

The term NAZA is being used to quantify how many other non-targetted people, family, friends, neighbours are likely to die with a bomb or missile powerful enough to ensure the death of the target. A number is affixed to the term. 6 NAZA would kill six others. Such as children, wife and grandparents. A NAZA of 500 would probably kill every one in the entire high-rise flat complex or community hall So again this development within the Israeli military is nothing new historically or geographically! Indeed, such calculations probably took place during Trumps military operation of bombing Iran and Putins bombing of Ukraine and no doubt these collateral damage calculations took place formally or informally prior to every other such military operation either clandestinely or openly conducted. It is important to pause and reflect upon the fact that these collatoral damage calculations are not conducted only by sadists or those relatively  few deranged individuals who enjoy killing women, children and non-combatants males. Not at all. The bulk of these calculations of how many will die to fulfil the mission statistics will be made by those average and above average trained citizens who are otherwise considered as ‘normal’ and undoubtedly express love for their own parents, partners, children and country.

This is because the general dehumanisation occuring within hierarchical mass societies is routinely and primarily directed against those human beings designated as targets by their own superior officers or politicians, by being described as enemies or under the influence of enemy elites. This has been the socio-economic pattern supported and exported by elites in every so-called advanced hierarchical mass society from ancient times, throughout the middle-ages and onto modernity. It is a social conditioning process which is not a product of the biological evolution of the human species or of any other biological species. There is no archeological, anthropological, theological, or ethnological evidence that systematic dehumanisation of other human beings became an institutionalised characteristics of human individuals and their societies – until the formation of hierarchical mass society aggregations. Undoubtedly there were short lived individual skirmishes, like other animals over mating or some other temporary issue, but no evidence of wholesale, inter-species sustained warfare or actions which could be described as crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide.

In conclusion it is worth pointing out that in 2026 the global humanitarian backlash against the many decades of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, finally designated as genocide and crimes against humanity by the the International Court of Justice. For the first time in a generation the Human Rights of the Palestinian people has now been given a mainstream priority that has been missing since the 1948 declaration of the state of Israel. The quasi-military seizure of control of much of Palestine by assorted armed Jewish groups (Irgun etc.) at the time and the eventual declaration of the Jewish State of Israel came shortly after something of a catastrophe for the indigenous people of Palestine. Described as the NAKBA, it involved the forced clearances and seizures of many Palestinian, Towns, Cities and Villages cleared of their indigenous human inhabitants. It was a condensed version of the European wave of colonial control of much of the territory and resources of North and South Ameria, Asia, Africa and Oceana. Jewish Israeli might had also established Jewish Israeli rights, in 1948, but this was never agreed to by either the Palestinians or by International Law established by the United Nations.

The spectrum of estrangement and dehumanisation of the other resulting from the class based hierarchical mass society socialisation process stretches from physical torture and the physical elimination of the other in crimes against humanity at one end, to the distortion of language and meaning at the other. The supremacist arrogance of many of those individuals who benefit from the current hierarchical mass society system appears to have no moral bounds. A recent interview conducted by a high level pro-Zionist BBC presenter displayed not only how pathetically crude the intellectual defence of Isreali elite genocide against the people of Palestine has become, but also how low some human beings are prepared to stoop to ‘serve’ their paymasters. In the context of the continuing day by day genocide against the Palestinian people, Nick Robinson of the BBC prefaced his remarks by describing the treatment of Jews as the ‘worst act of racism ever’. His clumsy and incompetent sophistry in defence of the indefensible, revealed far more than he intended.

This is because out of the astronomic numbers of ethnically diverse native peoples eliminated from the continents of North and South America, the whole of Africa, much of Asia and large parts of Oceana, by the elite-led countries of Europe, the horrors perpetrated against the Jews have been given a disproportional higher importance than the rest of the world’s non-Jewish ethnicities who also suffered ethnic cleansing and genocide and probably by the billions when their estimates are added together. During the very period of the NAZA film revelations, Robinson the media huxter (Huxter: a mean and tricky sales person) had the gall to press Zack Polenski to openly defend the right of Israel to exist whilst distorting the historical reality of that existence at a level only a first grade student might crudely fashion. He claimed that the State of Israel had been created by the United Nations, which was the equivalent of a downright lie. The declaration of the state of Israel was exclusively pronounced by the Jewish representatives of the amalgamated Jewish military forces who, as noted above,  took control of Palestine in the wake of the clearances of the Palestinians from their homeland. That declaration of a state could only be made after the widespread ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, from their, towns, villages, cities and fields. Without a resource rich territory a state is only an idea as was fully recognised by Theodor Herzl in his pamphlet ‘The Jewish State’.

Indeed the United Nations have repeatedly passed resolutions condemning the actions of Israeli government and settlers for decades. There in the above noted interview is displayed the dehumanised elite attitudes typical among the Epstein class that can fail to adequately research and condemn the wholesale slaughter of non-combatants, men, women, children, and reporters in 21st century Palestine and yet find the time to incompetently condemn and inhumanly punish those who draw attention to the atrocities conducted by the Jewish military and West Bank settlers in Israel. Predictably, on a more sophisticated level, the question of what constitutes ‘rights’ was avoided by the anthropocentric narcisist global defenders of the state of Israel in it’s current form, including the obnoxious intellectually challenged BBC reporter mentioned above. His crafty ‘intelligence’ was used to misrepresent and omit well documented facts. For example he failed to disclose, that the first prime minister of Israel, Ben Gurion, had warned Jewish settlers to expect resistance to Jewish occupation and openly declared that; “we have come here and stolen their country”. And not a word by the crude huxter (NR) or the BBC on the rights of the Palestinians not to be subjected to crimes against humanity or genocide.

It is also revealing that again there were no mentions by pro-Zionist hucksters or the BBC Directors and reporters of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, in which Article 3 asserts a “right to life, liberty and freedom“; Article 7 a ‘right not to be ‘discriminated against’; Article 9 ‘being presumed guilty without evidence’; and Article 25, which states that;

“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…etc. (Article 25)

‘Rights’ unless adequately defined are a useless abstraction representing nothing more than words on paper or some other medium. Rights need to be further refined by statements outlining a standard on which they are based and with some concrete examples. Furthermore, Rights also need to be fitting, proper, appropriate, desirable or at least those which conform to that which is generaĺy considered to be morally good. Can Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West bank be justified in terms of ‘fitting’, ‘proper’ or ‘morally good’ or even ‘proportional’ for Palestinian forms of resistance? Do the words and actions of the elites and governments who support Israel’s genocide fall into any of those types of criteria, when they arrest peaceful demonstrators? Elites in general may have historically obtained the legal right to do whatever they see fit whether their citizens agree with that or not, but do they have the moral ‘right’ to do what is inhumane or ecologically destructive or not? That is the question which is now gaining ground globally with respect to not only human affairs, but also to the issues of climate change, weather patterns, air, water and soil pollutions and the industrialised systems production processes causing biological collatoral damage in the form of large-scale species extinctions.

Direct crimes against humanity are peripheral to biology in general but when examined closely many of them are simultaneously crimes against the foundations of the human species – crimes against a species rich biosphere which is the foundation of everything living. In the 20th century, the decline and fall of the hierarchical mass society system was epitomised by the two World Wars of that century but that dcline has now entered an accelerating stage of cracks and fissures opening up as the infrastructure of human societies and their surrounding environments once again decay and decompose due to excessive extraction, excessive production, excessive consumption and excessive pollution. The inadequacies and inhumanity of its Epstein and non-Epstein elites has become ever more pronounced and exposed. That is further sociological evidence of elite degeneration and culpability.

Further evidence lies in the rampant sophistry (i.e. plausible but totally fallacious reasoning) by elites. Whether it is intentionally or incompetently constructed, it is as old as the Greek polis, which spawned the ancient philosophic Sophists, from which the term derives. The fact that such crude sophistry now has Artificial, Automated-Machine Intelligence at its disposal, does not alter the fact that such sophistry remains the last resort of dehumanised scoundrels in politics, media, academia and government institutions. Incidentally, I also suggest that the proliferation of Data centres feeding the resource needs of AI equipment and feeding the greed for profits of AI investors, whilst further degrading and despoiling previous ways of making a living and the general environment, are also part of the decline and fall of this hierarchical mass society form of collective human living.

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2026)

(NB. For those who would like to consider the history of life on earth and hierarchical mass societies, in more detail from a revolutionary-humanist and Giaia-centric perspective, I would like to recommend my (non AI assisted) recent book ‘Life on Earth’ (Past, Present and Future). It exists in either paperback or E- book form, priced from £12.99 or £2.49 respectively from Amazon, Browns Books and many other book retailers. R.R.)

 

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HOW MARX GOT LIFE ON EARTH WRONG.

Posted on September 26, 2026 by stutteringsteps

Anybody, even the most, talented amongst us can be wrong, moreover some of us are more prone to being wrong than others, some are repeatedly wrong and some of us can never admit to being wrong. Being individually or collectively wrong, however, can have serious consequences, for ourselves and others. Neveryheless, for most of us this most obvious of human tendencies doesn’t really matter whether we are frequently or less frequently wrong in what we say or advise. The reason being that the majority of us human beings are rarely in contact with a vast audience, so our chance of negatively or positively effecting those not closely around us in any seriously problematic way are slim. However, a few people within hierarchical mass society systems have attained a status in which their ideas, propositions and opinions, whether well founded or mostly not, have become influential enough to effect the lives of thousands or even millions of people and, it must be said, rarely positively.

Throughout, history and in contemporary periods, Politicians, Philosophers, Military and Religious Leaders, come to mind as exemplars in this category of getting things seriously wrong, but one such individual has so far escaped serious scrutiny from those who have claimed to have been influenced by him. I refer here to Karl Marx, who although I still reckon he was as correct as he could be on the many 19th century economic and social issues he commented upon he was not always so. I also hold that he was not responsible for the eventual consequences when other social activist individuals either misunderstood or deliberately distorted the results of his researches or proposals and then implemented their own distortions in his name. For example, once the Bolshevik and Maoists leaders distortions of Marx are examined in detail this becomes obvious. However, the same criteria applies to Marx. The extracts from Marx which follow indicate that Marx was definitely wrong in a fundamental way, which directly and indirectly has led to hugely negative consequences for millions of human beings and other natural species, particularly but not exclusively during the 20th century. Consider, for example, that in his economic and social studies explaining the materialist conception of history, Marx reasoned that;

“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.” (Marx. German Ideology. Section 2 Premises. M/E Vol 5 p 31.)

Of course a premise in the sense used here by Marx is a logical proposition from which further logical inferences are drawn. This normally includes any pre-suppositions relevant to the premise. But it is obvious from the start of this sentence, that Marx has failed to include anything outside of the human-centred or anthropocentric paradigm. In fact, the first facts and premises of human existence (and history) is of course the existence of two essential bio-chemical features of life on earth. The first premise of human life and its subsequent history is the existence of an organic and inorganic bio-chemical (biological) system (biosphere) containing multiple species interactions and interconnections, which have collectively created the external conditions (air, water and nutrition) for mammalian species in general to evolve and survive. The second pre-supposition is the existence and long evolution of a series of mammalian species which have evolved into the hominid and Homo-sapien species lineage from which the latter species (us),has has evolved even further. Marx, then goes on to state;

“Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself…All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.” (ibid)

So after acknowledging the biological (physical) essence of the human species has natural conditions in which the human species exists, he nevertheless decides not to go into the actual physical (biological) nature of the human species or the natural biological conditions in which the human species finds itself in. That is a remarkable contradiction, because what then follows is not a material conception of human history, but a sociological/ intellectualised conception of human history. In deciding not to set out from these ‘natural’ physical/ biological bases, of humanity, Marx then sets out the sociological base that he will set out from. That is he sets out from a sociological distinction between animals and Mankind. It is as if the human species is not a particular mammalian form if animal species. Thus he writes;

“Man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life.” (ibid Emphasis added RR)

Marx has in the above quote made the common anthropocentrically biased assumption that the sociological development of planting seeds and or roots in fertile soil by human labour and reaping the results by human labour has replaced the millions of years-old evolution of the biological production of their naturally chosen nutritional species. When in fact biologically it had not. All that the much vaunted agricultural revolution of the ancient world had altered between biological species and the rest of nature was merely adopting a slight change in the location of the crop bearing fertile soil from ‘wild’ natural settings to predetermined ‘contained’ natural settings (strips or fields) of land with humanly delineated boundaries. With settled agricultural communities, the continuing natural dispersion of seeds or roots by wind or animals, was then actively assisted by human hands and feet, rather than exclusively assisted by animals, wind and gravity.

However, once planted, the biology of cell Reproduction, Metabolism and Growth by their chosen crop species had continued – as it had for multiple millions of years before – on naturally formed fertile expanses. The difference between natural hunter-gatherer picking/digging and ultimate eating and farm planting, reaping and ultimate eating did not directly influence the quality or quantity of the nutritional results, it only influenced the geographical location and extent of the fertile land subsequently used. Indeed, there is evidence that ancient and modern farming progrssively degraded the metabolically available nutritional levels of plant species used as nutrition. But just as importantly, humans were not then (and are not now even with computerised tractors etc.) producing their own means of biological subsistence; they are merely organising the location of the biological development of the nutritional species they have chosen, somewhat differently. And it must be said, this difference is frequently disastrous.

From such inaccurate and severely biological (material) evidence-light premises, Marx had further consolidated the general, anthropocentric, religiously inspired mistsken world view that nature had been gifted to humanity (with the 19th century emphasis on the Man in humanity, not god) and at the same time he had provided middle-class intellectual radicals and their political representatives with a supposedly scientific rationale for continuing to extol the hierarchical mass society form of human existence. This Marx inspired sociological vision of the future – known as socialism or communism would logically become what it actually became in the 20th century, under self-proclaimed Marxists and others (i.e. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and Castro etc.). It became a replica hierarchical mass society form with themselves as the new elite (a vanguard leadership) of an imaginary new world of egalitarian plenty. Supposedly achieved by an equally imaginary workers revolutionary process of overthrow and replacement of the capitalist elite with a socialist one. The actual sociological results of which appeared in the form of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba and (occasionally elsewhere embryonically) in the 20th century. The above abstract formulations were written by Marx in 1845 and/or conceptualised before, but Marx was merely continuing along an earlier anthropocentric line of reasoning of his in 1844 when he wrote the following;

“An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product….Through this production, nature appears as his work and as his reality….he duplicates himself not only as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.” (ibid.

Humanity, does not produce the whole of nature in any shape or form and if it ‘appears’ to some human beings that all ‘natural production’ is their own work and comprises of their whole material reality, it is clear that this reality is a virtual, sociologically produced one from written and spoken ideas. It is clearly not derived from a detailed study of the biology of nature. The above quote by Marx has been, constructed out of a series of linguistic abstractions, or ‘thought entities’ as Marx had already described them in relationship to Hegel. That form of ‘reality’ is definitely not a biological one. Unsurprisingly, it had not been constructed out of an examination of organisms and their cells surrounded as the latter are by lipid membranes and containing, mitochondria, cytoplasm, ribosomes, Golgi apparatus, nucleus and numerous other functioning organelles. I write unsurprising omitted because these microscopic detailed physical attributes of nature were at that time mostly unknown.

Therefore, the above anthropocentrically constructed excerpt vividly and quite accurately summarises a general, schizophrenic intellectual disorder arising from a biologically divided collective life. The hierarchical mass society was a form of human existence in which for the first time in hominid evolution, the human species as individuals and collectives had created a division in ther lives between existing amid a biological real world of (N-M-G-R + A – D) sequential biological processes and a sociologically constructed physical and intellectual (virtual) social world of hierarchically organised mass societies. These societies were organised around alienated and alienating labour processes, practices and experiences which became reflected back into its community level of intellectual understanding. This elite guided surplus – product producing system – coincided with the development of a professional intellectual elite who occupied and played an alienated and alienating role within it. The historical process was so consistently alienating that Marx concluded that for the human species;

Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs adding stature to himself…” (Capital Vol. 1 ibid)

Marx has here intellectually reversed the physical relationship between biology (nature) and the human offspring of biological evolution (humanity). Nature is posited as an organ of and for human activity rather than human activity being an long-term organic result of the immensely long evolutionary metamorphosis of multi-cellular organisms into animals, mammals, hominid species and finally Homo Sapiens. Treating nature in this way may have added intellectual stature to some self-absorbed narcisistic elite human beings, but human ingenuity and activity was already degrading the physical status of nature and along with that the status of the human species and its future. For those among us who have grasped that the 19th century Marx was not only significantly short of modern evidence concerning biology and hierarchical mass societies but also wrong in stressing the superiority of humanity over nature, this suggests more than just caution in giving to Marx more credit than was, or is, due.

Marx’s assertion that human industry was nature achieving its highest point in biological evolution, requires us think carefully before rushing to regurgitate old cliches and formulations made by him, Engels and other 19th and 20th century intellectuals who claimed to have carried his ideas forward. It requires us to read Marx – not slowly – as some backward facing ‘Marxists’ are currently recommending – but critically! And even before such critical re-reading of Marx we need to critically reflect on our own level of understanding or misunderstanding If the latter itself (our own level of understanding) is rooted no further forward than 19th century levels of evidence and 19th century levels of consciousness about that evidence, as provided by Marx and others, then we have become part of any problem for life on earth rather than individual contributors to any future collective solutions. We need to avoid what the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist ‘Marxists’ did in the 20th century when they (and others) knew nearly enough biology but intellectually swamped that cerebral locationt or drowned it out by copious deluges of anthropocentrically focussed sociological theories centred around themselves as the ‘vanguard’ leaders of humanity. Marx knew full well the general material basis of life on earth and the importance of fully recognising this fact, and yet was then deflected into noting the development of a two-fold appearance, of reality, writing;

“…life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things…..Therefore, in any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact in all its implications and to accord it it’s due importance…The production of life, both of ones own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. ” (Marx. ‘The German Ideology’. Section 1 History. Emphasis added. R.R.)

It is with the addition of the sentence highlighted in bold that we emphatically encounter an ideologically inspired caveat to the first and second sentences in the above extract. It is this which conflates the biological with the sociological. The first half of that highlighted sentence asserts that Homo sapien human beings have begun to produce their own continued biological existence via a social ‘production’ process as well as their species existence via a biological process of procreation. This is merely a continuation of his mistaken anthropocentric assumption that agricultural production had replaced nature (bio-chemical and biological processes) and substituted the human species for the multi-species natural production of nutrition which humans consumed. When in fact, as previously noted, human agriculture had only transferred the location of natural production from ‘wild’ soil environments to partially pre-prepared soil environments, landscaped by human agriculturalists. The ecologically and climatically sequenced bio-chemical processes of (N-M-G-R + A-D) continued as before because cells, microorganisms, plants, insects and animals can do no other than continue that evolutionary bracketed process and trajectory.

And of course this biological essence of life on earth also includes the reproductive phase which Marx identifies as pro-creation, because even this ‘private’ reproductive activity and ability is a totally dependent biological phase, although that phase also has a social dimension in all social species, not only the human species. This is because the substantive essence of all life on earth; large, medium, small or microscopic is bio-chemical or biological not sociological. Sociological patterns in human societies are simply the human form of dancing to (or prostrating) themselves to the timing, tempo and duration of the biological and astronomical rhythms of our solar system not to our sociological calender systems. But by starting from the two false premises a) that humanity was now reproducing the whole of nature and b) producing themselves socially; and collapsing the two aspects of human life (biology and sociology) into one, Marx continued along a commonly accepted anthropocentric path of reasoning. It was an intellectual path created long before him and to which he had added his own mistakes. Problematically, however, the anthropocentric path with nuanced modifications was still there for others to ‘follow’ and even for those bourgeois anthropocentric narcissists who wanted nothing to do with Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanism and the egalitarian ideas he also promoted. Interestingly, Marx explains the logical reasoning behind this conclusion clearly and succinctly.

“Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the others existence for him. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence…...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.” (Marx. 1844 Manuscripts part V. Emphasis added. RR )

Whatever, harmony there may have been or was previously between the human species and the biological organisms and sequences which eventually evolved into that form, had been added a progressively accelerating disharmony with the creation of hierarchical mass societies and their voracious modes of production. A disharmony culminating in the commodification of of organic life and inorganic material. Sadly, although Marx accurately depicted the de-humanising class nature of the capitalist mode of production and its crisis-prone boom and slump cycles, he lacked the means to fully understand the biological dimensions of life on earth and thus draw more appropriate conclusions. He too was also immersed within the common of core of anthropocentric intellectualised ideologies to distance his own revolutionary-humanist criticism from, (or to break away from) orbiting around that intellectual core.

Consequently, Marx saw that the enormous productive powers of industrial methods of production unleashed by the capitalist pursuit of profit, was being artificially restricted by capitalists particularly when profits slumped or ceased to be returned. His idea that if the oppressed workers of the world would just unite and overthrow the capitalist class and utilise industry themselves collectively, they would then be ‘free’ to enjoy the full fruits of their labour. He did not realise that industrial level mass production – on a world scale – would need such high levels of extraction and consumption of organic and inorganic material, that it would undermine and/or degrade the biosphere’s ability to produce and reproduce its resources. That ultimately this orocess would lead to extinctions, pollutions, climatic dislocations and would thus undermine the planetsry foundations of life on earth as a whole.

Marx had continued along the same anthropocentric line of reasoning that dated back at least to Aristotle’s patriarchal deduction from the product of male/female sexual intercourse in which a new member of the human species develops inside the female womb, therefore the patriarchal wing of the anthropocentric coalition presumed that; man begets man. Marx continues that thread of anthropocentric evidence limited thinking; “….you see, therefore, even physically man owes his existence to man” (ibid section V). The extent to which Marx and his generation are rooted in the sociological, virtual world of intellectualised thinking is demonstrated by the ommission of any reference to humanity as a whole or the fact that biology in the form of life on earth – as a whole – provides and sustains the biosphere in which the human species (and all other species) can exist with enough energy and for long enough, to begin procreating and evolving.

Each individual human being within the human species owes his or her existence to the biological evolution of the human species as a whole, not simply to our parents, our religions, our nationalities or modes of production. Moreover, the evolution of the human species as whole owes its collective existence to the existence of life on earth as a whole, from the contributions of microorganisms, plants, insects and animals, etc. It’s not that Marx doesn’t knows this or that he does and has just intentionally or unintentionally omitted it. It is evidence of a more fundamental problem than that. It is because his 19th century world view (and much of ours in the 21st,) was still mired in the anthropocentrically fixated socialisation of the hierarchical mass society modes of production, socialisation and intelectualisation. The final extract below concisely summarises this ideological anthropocentric hold on one of the most perceptive thinkers of the 19th century.

“But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the emergence, the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so that he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis.” (Marx. Volume 3, page 305. Emphasis added RR)

Marx undoubtedly did his 19th century best; but even our intellectual best is not always the ultimate evaluation of what is accurate or valid in one particular generation or another. That realisation is a reminder to continue to pursue our researches, but with less dogmatism and more humility.

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2026)

Part 2. Why correcting the human understanding of life on earth matters. Will follow soon.

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PERPETRATORS MASQUERADING AS VICTIMS.

Posted on September 21, 2026 by stutteringsteps

The recent furore around the Ed Sheeran bowing to the wishes of a genocide supporting billionaire owner of a stadium or two, has highlighted the moral rot at the heart of every global hierarchical mass society system. The elite classes, who benefit and profit from the industrialised, mass production AI assisted techniques, which are decimating and degrading not only the poor and precariously employed, but much more. They are also doing more or less the same to the ecological balance of the planet and thus also accelerating the consequent climate change problems for those not living in gated, secure domestic homes and bases. Their accumulated millions and billions whether expended or invested by them make them the prime perpetrators of this existing systems economic infrastructure  its associated destruction of nature, climate change destabilisation  and moral decay. This result of the system is now continually on display.

The relatively recent Epstein class exposure and cover-up, has revealed that the dehumanised moral rot within the global elite was occuring internationally as well as globally and so too are the crudely manufactured justifications. What is remarkable is that the billionnaire and millionaire class who are the perpetrators of the majority of the illegal or legalised cash scams (i.e. finding ways to get paid far more than they are worth to humanity as a whole) in order to become so rich. Then when they are exposed as inhuman dillitanties (or worse), they pose and parade themselves around as victims. Talented or not, nobody is worth the amount Sheeran and his ilk are hoovering up while essential workers like nurses, teachers, local government workers, drivers, power and water-system workers, pensioners and students are struggling to eat and keep warm. Yet typically such de-humanised elites pathetically and tearfully claim (as Ed Sheeran did this past week) to have suffered mentally and physically by any  backlash their elite actions had provoked.  Meanwhile, the Israeli perpetrated genocide against the Palestinian women, children and men continues unabated.     

Sheeran is not tearful, sickened and saddened by the thousands of dead, disfigured and disabled Palestinian individuals, children, women and men at the end of an ongoing decades long chain of western supported crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Jewish supported  Israeli  Government.  Not a bit of it! He has only been so recently ‘moved’  to tears by the negative reaction of his own ‘followers’ and non-followers who have condemned him for agreeing to an Epstein class billionnaire’s demand to discontinue the services of someone who publically highlighted the Palestinian situation, to a mass audience. It seems past victims becoming present perpetrators and present perpetrators pretending to be victims has become a go-to reflex for many modern elites. However, feeling sorry for elites, who feel sorry for themselves, whilst ignoring the mass of brutalised victims of the system as a whole, tells us nearly all we need to know about the moral rot occuring within modernity.

Over the last few days, Sheeran has been characterised as a coward by left and centre intellectuals, but that is not an accurate characterisation at all and more importantly it misses out of the picture of contemporary reality the most important global fact. These Epstein based and similar based elites and their immediate supporters are part of a whole layer of de-humanised individuals who have grown up to successfully adapt to and accept as legitimate, the following. An economic system which has been deliberately designed to do the three fundamental things; A) divide humanity into two major classes: an elite and their supporters who obtain far more than they deserve and need to comfortably exist; and B)  a non-elite who obtain far less than they deserve and need to comfortably exist; and C) to create and fund a middle class mass media educated (and trained) to intellectually rationalise and excuse this class divided economic system. 

Roy Ratcliffe (September 2026)

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MARX & MARXISTS in the 21st CENTURY.

Posted on August 20, 2026 by stutteringsteps

For the human species, the problem of really understanding the breadth, depth and range of ‘life on earth’, including the life of it’s own species, is that it is mostly a subjective endeavour. The only corrective to that one-sided individual perspective is through the collective contributions of many different perspectives and the correlation between those combined understandings with freshly observed reality. The remaining difficulty arises because the only physical and intellectual tools available are those devised and manufactured by humans, who are doing so under the influence and direction of the dominant elites. Our human languages, which both conserve and preserve meaning based upon past collective experience and thinking, is predominantly used to serve and conserve specific anthropocentric self-fulfilling functions and purposes. The latter are determined primarily by elites in society. Consequently concepts about the real world – even when they are unprejudiced attempts to describe it accurately – are only approximations.

All descriptions of reality, whether sophisticated or crude, are abstract opinions which only exist in the minds of those who form them and in the minds of others who are introduced to them through a process of education and aculturalisation. At best concepts and ideologies construct an abstract, virtual intellectual world, that with due care and attention approximates reality as accurately as possible, but recognises that these approximations do not fully describe actuality. At worst ideology deliberately distorts human concepts beyond any resemblance of reality. For a contemporary example there are no black or white skinned human beings or women without female reproductive organs together with specialised gamete cells, yet a large percentage of humanity have been persuaded or pressured think, write and talk as if there were. Moreover, some ‘influencers’ official and unofficial, eventually demand fiercely and aggressively with punishment threats that other individuals perpetuate the same fiction.

There are as many blatant and subtle language distortions of reality as there are words in any comprehensive dictionary. For example; ‘God created the world and lives in heaven‘ is another fictional distortion of reality which some people have had constructed for them and have gullibly accepted it at face value. There is not an ounce of reliable independent evidence to support it. We humans live 24/7/365 in a real biological world but understand it and our function within it through a 24/7/365 intellectual prism of anthropocentically and socially constructed linguistic approximations and fabrications. At best we flick between the objective reality and the virtual realities constructed for us and by us. The proliferating volume of AI produced media content, demonstrates this difference between reality and virtual reality vividly and prolifically. Consequently, at worst we live predominantly within one or more ideologically constructed prejudices and expect others to accept this. There is strong social pressure to only see and remember what the dominant ideology wishes us to see and remember and a tendency to ignore and/or forget any alternative perspectives. For multiple generations, this complex historic anthropocentric self-centred fixation only considered nature (biology) as a secondary or peripheral concern falling almost completely outside humanities own species-centric history.

Until modernity, for example, the idea of a biological evolution of life in general was not even a vague intimation, never mind a seriously considered hypothesis. Consequently the focus of history has always been, both literally and metaphorically ‘His Story’. History or ‘His Story began to be spoken and later written about by elite men, for elite men and from the perspective of elite men, only once herarchical mass societies such as originated in ancient Sumer, Ur, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, had been constructed and consolidated. This patrifocal anthropocentric concern has dominated ever since. Before that ancient period, (and for much, much longer after it) human communication was about current issues along with various myths and fantasy origin-narratives. Everything else living outside of that male anthropocentric narcisistic paradigm of hierarchical acting, thinking and being, (i.e. the rest of the plants, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, mammals, hominids and pre-historic Homo sapiens) may or may not have got a vague, an occasionally detailed, or a frequently fabricated mention – but only in passing and only in terms of how it effected the interests of males of the elite class.

This was clearly the case with ancient writers such Homer, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc., (there are simply too many of them to mention). The focus of their patrifocal concerns was almost entirely on the ‘progress’ or otherwise of the human communities to which they were part of and owed allegiance to, and it is still the case. Because of these immediate limited concerns, for multiple generations, the human species was not considered as part of the evolution of a widespread biological (organic) foundation of life on earth or as a continuum of living organisms, within a self-reproducing biosphere, fuelled by the energy and material of a solar system. The fact that biological cells reproducing and evolving from ancient single Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells through various lengthy stages to multicellular life forms within a dynamic biosphere, made up the biological essence of life forms, was completely unknown until modernity. Moreover, even in the 21st century the biology and evolution of life on earth is still not fully accepted as the essence of what it is to be human. The biological essence of Nutrition, Metabolism, Growth, Reproduction, Ageing and Death (N – M – G – R + A – D) of all life on earth is largely overlooked and even denied in favour of sociologically derived origin myths and vivid but limited imagination.

So in fact history (His story) only approximately began less than 10,000 years ago whereas life on earth’ in its earliest archaea forms is estimated to have begun billions of years ago and sentient animals evolved multiple millions of years ago. It is worth pausing to think about the difference between those two approximate time scales for a moment for they are truly enormous, against our own six, seven, eight or nine decades. Reflect also that this ‘His story’, construction is so patriarchically distorted that it depicts women as secondary to men when the female partners of all the millions of sexually reproducing species, have over multiple millions of years, by pregnancy and gestation been the main conveyors of biological continuity and the main bearers of biological (evolutionary) development. This includes the fact that biologically determined females of our species have also been the biological and evolutionary conveyors of the unique physical and mental attributes (bipedal motion, hand/finger dexterity, higher cortical processing abilities and advanced linguistic communication) of the human species. All of these biologically advanced and enhanced abilities of the human species pre-date by hundreds of thousands of years the formation of hierarchical mass societies and the sociological development of ‘His Story’, that elites narcisistically designate as the highest stage of life on earth. So despite the sociological myths and wishful thinking, the biological Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cellular essence of the Homo sapien species, is like all life forms, a common and fundamental biological characteristic of all life on earth.

Therefore history up to now has undoubtedly been ‘His Story’. Consequently, it is not a subject focussed primarily on the evolution of the inter-species dependence and interconnected biological system of life on earth. Instead history has been and remains a sequential narrative focussed predominantly on the anthropocentric concerns of a male elite within their own limited, narrow and contradictory social and intellectual perspectives. What is thought by them to be in their own elite male changing and contradictory interests, is the begining, middle and end of their main concerns. Hence the perspectives of the previously mentioned ancients; Homer, Epicurus, Plato, Socrates, Exenophon, Lucretius, Augustine, the later Hegel, and on the left Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and the subject of today’s blog article – Karl Marx, are what these elite men thought were in the best interests of the sections of humanity they represented. For example, the materialist interpretation of history pioneered by Marx, Engels and their Marxist followers is not focussed on the entire biological material of life on earth which supports all life on earth in general. No! The materialist interpretation of history, although an improvement on God-centred or Kingly-centred history, it still remains focussed on the specific material form and ‘means’ of social production by the hierarchically organised form human aggregation.

The term Marxism itself is a secondary verbal abstraction not a thing, yet Marxists and others talk of it as if it existed outside of human thought processes and restricted thought processes at that. It is in the written His Story record, that Marx did not approve of the term ‘Marxist’ and actually declared categorically – with good reason – that he was not a MARXIST! Clearly the modern ‘Marxists’ are either ignorant of that declaration by Marx or have chosen to ignore it. Is that surprising? Not really! Once seriously studied the Marxist’s of all shades reveal themselves to ignored Marx more after his death than before it. The core of Marx’s Revolutionary-Humanist ideas, have never been at the forefront of his ‘Marxist’ followers. Unlike Marx, they use his published and unpublished works, more like a menue of tasty abstract intellectual morsels to pick n mix and chew over. The materialist interpretation of history, for example is not a thing, it was (and still can be) an incomplete intellectual framework for considering the way that the human species, organised in societies, produce and reproduce the means of their biological existence. It considered the production processes of essential biological inputs for the human species, which in turn was (and is) held by this hypothesis to determine the political, legal, and ideological “superstructures” of hierarchical mass societies. But for Marx and Marxists ‘His Story’ is problematically understood by them as a succession of modes of production exclusively for and exclusively on behalf of one biological species only – the human species! The rest of life on earth is little more than a backdrop or interesting side show.

A further big problem for the Marxists is that humanity currently lives in an intellectually dominated highly industrialised period, in which individuality is celebrated above the collective. Although all other social animal species, apart from hierarchical mass society humanity, exist on the basis of the integrated and complementary efforts of the entire collective, with no particular individual organism being elevated above the rest of the species in status, privilege or power, hierarchically organised humanity does almost the opposite. Of course specialised functions within many species collectives undoubtedly exist from time to time on a temporary basis, but as the saying goes ‘nature’ (i.e. biology) abhors a vacuum (i.e. biology does not grow or reproduce vacuums) but it is also a fact that biology (nature) does not create guns, films or cars, but more importantly for this current subject, nature does not create kings and queens, terrorists, politicians or dictators and therefore using the same imprecise metaphorical basis, nature can be said to abhor privileged elites (i.e biology does not grow or procreate any privileged individuals within any species, only human sociology does that.).

There are NO other species of life on earth (and there are billions of species of life on earth) that have produced a privileged exploitative, ruling caste with the power of life and death over members of it’s own species and over the existential future of other species. None! No microorganism, no plant, no insect, no bird, no fish, no mammal species. In biological species terms, a privileged caste or class within the human species is a sociologically created aberration. Hierarchical mass societies since their very early development have been distinguished by creating a hierachical elite leadership form, (the biological and species abberstion) in which certain individuals have demanded, conquered or been granted privileged positions over the rest of their very hierarchical mass societies. This privilege may have been granted or asserted on the basis of might, wealth, intelligence, lineage or common assent from the social collective, but humanity having experienced many generations of such hierarchies being or becoming a leader has become both an aspiration for some and acceptance (reluctantly or enthusiastically) by others.

.And this is where the aspirational symptom within socialised humanity can manifest itself among those whose privileged knowledge base is considerably above the average of their contemporaries but not as high or as acute as their living or dead mentors or original initiators. This happens within all walks of ancient and modern life in general and the 20th century anti-capitalist left in Europe and the west in particular. In the 19th and 20th century periods, the ascendency of actual and potential left sectarian leaderships in the working class movements became noticeable to both Marx and Engels both of whom frequently commented upon it. Hence Marx, speaking of one such would be leader, noted;

“Moreover, like everyone who maintains that he has a panacea for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, he gave his agitation from the outset a religious and sectarian character.”(Marx. Selected Correspondence. Page 201.)

And at one later stage of the 19th century, Engels concluded that;

“…the solidarity of the proletariat is in reality everywhere being realised in different Party groupings, which carry on life and death feuds with one another, as the Christian sects in the Roman Empire did amid the worst persecutions.” (Engels)

After a lengthy practical and documentary research into the disintegration of democratic procedures within various democratic forms of 20th century collective organisations the left wing author (R. Michels) conducted a lengthy study on oligarchical tendencies within collective organisations and demonstrated from extensive evidence, the following patterns occurring within political parties. He stated in 1915 that;

“In the history of party life it is undeniable that the democratic system is reduced, in ultimate analysis, to the right of the masses, at stated intervals, to choose masters to whom in the interim, they owe unconditional obedience.” (Robert Michels. ‘Political Parties’ Page 217.)

According to Seymour Martin Lipset, in an introduction to Michels book, that only one senior Bolshevik, Nicolai Bukharin, bothered to read Michels research and then essentially dismissed it by asserting that any ‘incompetence of the masses’ would soon disappear under communism. Yet Michels was not claiming mass member incompetence at all, but that the system of delegation, specialisation and party officer control rendered the party leadership more institutionally dominant and capable than ordinary members. The point being that the material circumstances of mass system organisation created severe and insidious conditions of inequality not of incompetence. All this became chrystal clear in the Soviet Union by the mediocre intellect of Joseph Stalin being able to outmanoeuvre the highly sophisticated and articulate Leon Trotsky and then have him expelled and assassinated.

My own direct experience and documentary research throughout the mid 1950’s to the year 2026 in schools, clubs, political parties, local authority bureaucracies and left wing activist groups amply confirms the conclusions reached by Michels that “Who says organisation says oligarchy’ and this phenomenon was further demonstrated outside of the patriarchal paradigm by the early mid 20th century feminist liberation movement was revealed in an internal document entitled ‘The Tryanny of Structurelessness’ by Joline, where attempts to organise without hierarchy and structure within 20th century feminism were constantly being frustrated. Sociological practices and theories, no matter how sophisticated and far reaching they intend to be cannot escape the fact that biological systems and socially constructed mass relationships do not function satisfactorily or indefinitely in any form of hierarchical system and therefore that human organisational practice needs to stop trying to create them and then to maintain them begin imposing penalties in order to enforce obedience to an unnatural system.

For example, in the post-Second World War period feuding budding ‘sectarian leaders’ emerged again within UK Europe, North America, South America, Asia, India and Africa, in the form of small cells and sects based around one or other of the following identifying ideologies; Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism, all of which were continuous at intellectual (and sometimes physical) war with each other and their ‘leaders’ claiming to have sufficiently understood Marx, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Trotsky or Mao to be capable of becoming local and national leaders of the downtrodden masses of humanity. For anyone interested in more detail about this late 20th century period of left sectarian arrogant pretentiousness there is a free download of a book (Revolutionary – Humanism and the Anti-capitalist Struggle) I wrote containing considerable evidence on this symptom from their own publications on my blog at www.critical-mass.net. (See Free Downloads in banner Section)

For a long time Marx’s intellectual ability was considered a vitally important asset to anti-capitalist theory and practice. However, here is the rub. Marx was so exceptional that few could equal him among his contemporaries and that was also generally the case among his followers. In his copious notes finally published as the three volumes of Das Capital, Karl Marx almost singlehandedly advanced the understanding of the capitalist mode of social production beyond anything previously attempted, including Adam Smith’s two volume ‘Wealth of Nations’ or Ricardo’s, ‘Outlines of Political Economy’. Marx’s friend and colleague, Fredrick Engels, no intellectual slouch himself, rated Marx one or the foremost intellects of his time and with good reason. Marx’s personal declaration of conducting “a merciless criticism of everything” was followed by a life-time almost entirely dedicated to that type of task, primarily within the sociological and political spheres of human society. In doing so Marx constructed and promoted a materialist dialectic from a re- interpretation the detailed idealist dialectics developed by the philosopher Hegel.

In addition to his forensic levels of economic and socio-political research, Marx also provided a contemporary framework of human understanding which viewed everything in existence as being in some kind of motion, large or minute. Nothing stayed static, everything, inorganic and organic, changed and many things seemingly permanent were full of latent and slow moving dynamic contradictions, leading to slow or rapidly changing realities and changing perceptions. The organic and inorganic aspects of the biological world were perceptively and imperceptibly changing and so to was human knowledge and social understanding. During the 19th century Marx was so far ahead of most of his own generation of intellectuals economically, philosophically and politically that few in the 19th and even 20th centuries managed to catch up with that level, about the socio-economic situation of humanity let alone better his framework of critical and self-critical thinking about the socio-economic situation of humanity. And herein lies the dialectical social contradiction for his followers. No one could match him and very few even tried so most Marxists leaned heavily on Marx for intellectual support and prestige – and many still try to do.

But in doing so they seem to have too easily ignored two important facts. 1. That they are leaning on an outstanding intellect of the 19th century, not one of the 21st century. It would be like me consulting the written notes of a top surgeon living in the 1850’s for advice on how best to deal with a burst appendix in 2026. My real friends would urge me to consult one or more of the 21st century experts in this field, not joyfully wave me off for a sojourn down in the library stacks of some prestigious university, to dig out some 19th century manuscripts of a long dead physician. And yet Marxists still alive and actually living in the 21st century by relying on Marx’s 19th century manuscripts and revisiting his ancient sources are doing the equivalent! Therefore, unless we suppose that hardly anything significant had happened to the social and natural biological realms of the world during the 180 years since Marx did his research and writing then potentially a great deal would need updating or even flatly rejecting. Indeed, an incredible amount has happened in just one lifetime.

The 20th century has been a century of unprecedented radical changes in the science and technology, of production, destruction, distribution, consumption, pollution, ecological dislocation and essential species extinctions. 2. That no individual no matter how far ahead they are intellectually or in any other skill, can be a substitute for the collective. One hundred committed brains, let alone thousands, can gather and process more information than one individual no matter how dedicated or persistent that individual becomes. Therefore, for those Marxists living in the 21st century who are still less comprehensively knowledgeable economically and intellectually than Marx was in the 19th century, such individuals are clearly bound to be either floundering or obfuscating in the 21st. A gap of almost two centuries has occurred during which the capitalist mode of production has changed massively in both quantity and quality.

The technical and scientific tools of industrial production and processes along with the analytical tools for collecting, collating and considering the social and ecological changes within the earths biosphere have also changed in quantity and quality since Marx sat in the British Library and since he talked to delegates of the working mens trade unions and clubs. All this change needs contemporary analysis and critical current adjustments!adjustment. But revealingly a number of his followers in the 21st century, in an effort to catch up with Marx at his 19th century best are investigating where Marx actually got his 19th century ideas from. Some are researching his sources from as far back as Epicurus in ancient Greece and others are looking back at his study of a 19th century agronomist, Dr. Justus Liebig.

I suggest that these lines of Marxist study and research reaching back thousands of years to before the Christian era – in the case of Epicutus – and before the First Wotld War – in the case of Dt. Liebig are evidence of desperation by Marxists keen to make Marx and themselves more relevant, rather than a motive of academic interest or frustrated curiosity. Particularly if we ask-why Epicurus or Liebig? And why now? True, there is clearly a dirth of social and ecological knowledge and understanding within modern mainstream sociological, ecological and political tendencies which is reflected within current anti-capitalist tendencies. However, to search for 21st century social and ecological relevance in the distant past rather than in the creaking and growning present, indicates more about the limitations of the ‘searchers’ than of the social and ecological subject which need urgent attention. Dr Justus Liebig, like Marx was ahead of his time, but their ‘time‘ was a generation or so ago and although the formers 19th century interest and expertise lay in understanding organic chemistry as applied to agriculture which do remain relevant, Marx’s 19th century ideas about the limitless productive capacity of fully automated industry being beneficial for a mass ‘socialist’ industrialised society production processes are not.

Interestingly, Marx’s sociologically derived intellectual paradigm of analysing the materialist dialectical contradictions within bourgeois ideological constructions, which he identified and exposed during his lifetime, has not been applied by his ‘Marxist’ followers to identify and expose the sociological contradictions and limitations within the Leninist, Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist interpretations of Marx nor those of Marx himself. Marx, along with many others before him, had considered that no individual or generations ideas and conclusions were finished, final and complete no matter how rigorous and authentic their researches had been, yet trying to explain this recurring fact of generational practical and ideological redundancy to those who believe in one of the many imaginary narratives concerning an invisible, all powerful miracle man, who created everything in the universe called God will soon get tired. I know! I did as a teenager. Yet in my lifetime I have met a similar obstinacy when trying to explain to a ‘loyal’ and ‘faithful’ Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist that these ‘outstanding’ individuals and their followers were just men of their time and that period of time did not contain sufficient knowledge, or reliable evidence and understanding to make their conclusions completely valid for their own generations time – let alone valid for all future periods.

As Trotsky once asserted (prior to his being declared an enemy of the ‘Party’ by Stalin,) that as in the case of the bourgeois nationalists following the emotional proposition that ‘my country right or wrong’ so he too was prepared to followi Lenin’s Bolshevik faction and Party whether it was -‘right or wrong’. Moreover, Trotsky made this assertion at the 13th, Congress of the Communist Party in 1924 when Stalin was already mercilessly suppressing workers and peasant oppositions and inner party rivals and who within two years of that declaration had most of his ‘party’ comrades assassinated or incarcerated in gulags and had sent a trusted party comrade all the way to Mexico to bury an ice axe in the back of Trotsky’s head to silence his criticism. It certainly did! Yet It is interesting that Trotsky in an early 1904 pamphlet (Our Tasks) had made a shrewd observation that;

“The intelligentsia can be federalist or centralist, can tend toward autonomy or autocracy, democracy or dictatorship, without in any way changing its essence, or the nature of its political interests…..The nature of the intelligentsia is so plastic and supple that no one can enclose it once and for all.” (Trotsky. Our Tasks. New Park pub. Page 107)

You bet it can! Once 21st century AI plagerism has been incorporated into individual hesitancy and Central Committee deliberations. It is interesting that Trotsky outlines a characteristic of intellectuals which not only applied to Trotsky himself and others of that early 20th century generation but remained virulent in the post-Second World War period in Europe and North America. Among the Leninist, Stalinist and Trotskyist sectarian groups between 1950 and 2,000, it was virulent – with still fading echoes of it the 21st century. Indeed, as the 21st century social, economic, environmental and ecological contradictions caused by the hiearchical mass societies brutal and misguided interface with the biological reality of life on earth, continue to crack the facade of so-called civilisation, some Marxists are once again girding their ideological loins. As I have noted, a few remaining faithful adherents of Marx and Marxism are gathering around them the intellectual note book or iPad equivalent of buckets, shovels, trowels sifting trays and eager acolytes and keeping busy by excavating the remains of Marx’s previously recorded digs into the ethhnological sub-soil of human recorded existence.

The modern day intellectual excavators are looking for previously abandoned or neglected intellectual shards and clues that might be useful in the project of saving human ‘civilisation’ (sic) from its current descent into economic and militarised barbarism. Not a mention from them of the fact that the evolution of the capitalist mode of production has substantially and sufficiently altered the social as well as the environmental landscape of life on earth sufficiently to render Marx’s 19th century view of the present and future function of Industry as well ‘out of ‘use-by-date’. Nor of the fact that the means and essence of revolutionary social transitions, as envisaged by Marx are no longer available or valid! Instead, from the Marxists and their sub-categories among the Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists, we read not a word about the generational dialectics of practical and intellectual redundancy and the need for a radical re-assessment of how humanity needs to conduct itself within a life-sustaining biosphere located on planet earth. And that the ‘solution’ for humanity is far more simple and peaceful than their current top-down speculative fantasies of ‘climb the castle walls’; ‘man the barricades’, promote civil wars and conduct armed assaults to overthrow the armed working class soldiers currently on the side of the bourgeois state. The solution is for local communities to start small, sustainable local socio-economic initiatives and encourage others to follow suit. But that still needs to be thought through and tackled consistently, rather endlessly sketching out grand plans.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2026)

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LEFT WING ANTHROPOCENTRISM.

Posted on August 2, 2026 by stutteringsteps

In recent articles, I have pointed out at length and with a wide range of supporting evidence that all ideological trends within hierarchical mass societies, both ancient and modern, have reflected primarily on how the human species has lived since the formation of hierarchical mass societies. That this reflection has been done accurately or in a distorted fashion accurately or in a distorted fashion, is a subject for historical debate, but both the volume and focus of the historical records indicate a self-absorbed fixation on it’s own particular species designated as Homo sapien. The biological base line of how humanity has sociologically acquired and maintained its essential biological processes of (N-M-G-R + A – D) has determined how human societies have positively related or negatively related to the broader biological reality of life on earth.

I hold that the self-absorbed sociological dimension of human communal life has obscured and distorted the species reality of its origins and continuing dependency of the human species upon the the whole biological network of life on earth. On the basis of historical and biological evidence, this assertion of mine holds true, whether that ideology is held by its adherents within a conservative, religious, secular, liberal, radical or supposedly revolutionary framework of thinking. The human species, under the leadership of its elites, has, since the development of the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation, been socialised and educated into relating to the rest of the organic and inorganic material of the planet it evolved upon and within, not as an integral and dependent part of life on earth, but as the owners, controllers and consumers of anything and everything that they have found useful or desirable.

Within the limits of their technological know-how and physical capacity to extract, the elites have ordered the taking of as much of nature’s resources as they like, with little or no regard for its effects upon the rest of life on earth or the effects upon the environmental and ecological balance of the biological system they live in and on, as a whole. The evidence substantiating this assertion is contained within the mass of historical documents and Stele produced during the pre and post Common Era (now known as BCE, formerly BC). But the evidence of this assertion also appears in a more condensed form within the religious ideological discussions and documentation recorded during the same historical period. The domination of this religious variant of anthropocentric ideology is particularly embodied and embedded within the trio of Abrahamic Monotheisms, (Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

I suggest that this historic embodiment, represents one of the clearest historical (and well preserved) codified expressions of the universality of anthropocentric practices and the varied ideological expressions radiating from them. The period of human consciousnes which consolidated the settled, agriculturally based hierarchical form of obtaining the individual and collective biological (N-M-G-R + A – D) processes (prematurely and narcisistically referred to as ‘civilisation’) first produced the oral and then written religious narratives of that anthropocentric tradition concerning the origin of life on earth. Its final result was in the priestly creation of the Jewish, Torah, Talmud or Old Testiment Bible and by geographical and intellectual association, the later formation of the Islamic Qu’ran.

This Abrahamic narrative, was accepted as logically and spiritually authentic (and still is) by all three monotheisms and expresses its anthropocentric ideological assumptions in the following condensed way;

“God created the heavens and the earth In the very begining….And God said, let the earth bring forth vegetation….And God said, let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures and let fowl fly above the earth…..then God said let us make man in our image and let them have dominion over the fish in the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle… and over every creeping thing..” (Genesis 1 verses 1 to 30. Holy Bible; Peshitta Edition.)

However, it is important to recognise that this anthropocentric assumption that the human species was a ‘creation by an invisible unknowable force’ was not unique to the Abrahamic trend of Anthropocentrism. It was widespread within the middle and near east and independent of its later embodiment into and onto monotheistic forms of mythology. Given the immediate surface level of understanding that humans had at that period of ancient history, it is not surprising that their reasoning was severely limited by the restricted amount of reliable evidence that was then available to them. The best that some of the religiously inspired ‘influencers’ at the time could imaginatively come up with (and it was not a brilliant best) was the idea of the creation out of nothing of a single human male, (Adam) followed by a single human female created out of the first man’s rib.

The ancient spiritual ‘influencers’ received no other inward or outward inspiration than that these two highly developed biological organisms (male and female of the species) were created by an imaginary, invisible and unknowable super male-type being called God. The idea that the rest of this God-‘created’ biological biosphere (nature) was then gifted to humanity, was an evidence-lacking, religiously tweaked modification, of a widespread anthropocentric form of thinking. This anthropocentric form of reasoning was based upon successive contemplations of the partial and distorted reality of human-centred (i.e. anthropocentric) settled hierarchical mass society productive capacity. It was a socio-economic capacity enabled by the development of an agricultural mode of consciously planting seeds in land cleared for that purpose, in order to harvest the resulting biological growth of certain selected nutritional species.

This development was then, and remains so today, nothing more than a socially mediated act between human groups and biological nature, but which was retrospectively given the categorical terminology of agriculture. Superficially agriculture ‘appeared’ to be replacing natural forms of biological growth, when in fact it was merely a re-location of the pre-existing form of biological processes. It formerly took place in naturally formed landscape environments such as jungles, forests, valleys and plains where species reproduction was aided by wind, insect and animal seed dispersal. All that humanity strenously created were artificial landscapes such as fields, terraces, orchards, plantations and supplimented wind, insect and animal seed dispersal by their own hands. Sociology did not replace biological processes, it merely re-located them and consumed more of them than previously. Sociological understanding did not advance biological understanding, the former remaining partial and limited to the surface characteristics of plants and animals.
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However, the further implications of these partial and limited understandings about nature, were far more profound than the lack of understanding of the cellular structures (Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic) at the microscopic levels of life on earth. That the latter were essential parts of all forms of life on earth, remained hidden for generations. One of the profound implications of this lack of knowledge was that it encouraged intellectuals among the elite to make the anthropocentric and arrogant assumption that nature and biology operated according to humanities own limited sociological understandings. Thus according to anthropocentrically constructed pre and post- scientific understandings, nature was considered to follow and function according to predetermined processes intellectualise in the form of abstractly conceived laws. But of course these intelectualised LAWS were ‘products’ of humanity deduced on the basis of an extremely limited knowledge and understanding of life on earth.

It had clearly not occurred to early elite intellectuals, that simply making assumptions about the form and structure of the natural and biological world from within their own limited anthropocentric sociological paradigm of experience was not the same as how biology and the natural world actually came into being in the first place. Nor how it needed to function in order to maintain itself within its dynamic equilibrium. The fact that biological reality had preceded sociological reality and human intellectual processes, by billions of years was not known then. Nor were the origin and universality of the Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic cells and the viral archaic forms of ancient life on earth, known until the 20th century. These now established facts have condiderable and substantial ramifications for the past as well as the present. It means that human thinking about life on earth was woefully inadequate during the ancient formative period of history. Moreover, the 20th and 21st century lag in understanding between reliable evidence based ‘scientific’ discoveries and the general levels of understanding among the population, suggests that a woeful inadequacy still exists.

It is more likely, that what really happened during long tracts of evolution development, was that over billions of earth orbits around the sun, the biological system evolved the way it did and the best that human thinking could (and still can do) to understand how this occured, was to construct hypotheses about it from the available reliable evidence and test these hypotheses (where possible) to evaluate how accurate (or innacurate) they were. Yet the innacurate idea that science is actually discovering natural laws that exist independently of humanity still prevails in general and within anthropocentric focussed scientific and political discourse in particular. This form of putting the cart before the horse has become an intellectual habit of long standing. In reality, humanity, at it’s best, is learning from the natural world by studying it and experimentally verifying our understanding.

However, science at its worst, makes badly evaluated approximations and publishes them as fact before it is discovered that the evidence the science was based upon was insufficient, seriously flawed, or what is now classed as confirmation biased. This is why one generations scientific certainty, sooner or later, has been questioned as false and modified or rejected completely and a different hypothesis formulated in its place. Over hasty anthropocentric certainty more often than not guarantees that its assumptions will always need to be corrected – sooner than later if possible. The left Marxist trend of anthropocentric thinking is especially vulnerable to making such non-sexual ‘premature ejaculations’ with regard to its publicised conclusions. For example, a recent publication by one such pro-Marxist author asserted that;

“Is nature dialectical? The short answer is “yes”. A series of essays on contemporary advances in science and technology written by Engels between 1872 and 1882 were not published until 1925, after his death, with the first English edition of Dialectics of Nature in 1939. They included his ground-breaking but unfinished, The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Human; a demolition of the paranormal, Natural Science and the Spirit World; and notes on physics, chemistry, biology–and dialectics. Dialectics subsequently became codified by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other Marxists as a series of ontological principles or “laws”; the transformation of quantity into quality; the unity and interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation.”

We need to remember how the progress of thinking has developed within the intellectual history of hierarchical aggregated mass society humanity. Elements of contradiction were introduced by the ancient Greek schools of philosophical discourse, but the idea of dialectical contradictions driving social changes forward were developed in the European countries by Kant and primarily by philosophical trends leading up to the German philosopher Fredrick Hegel. The dialectical framework of thinking was then further developed by Karl Marx who famously stated that he had needed to turn Hegel back onto his feet to produce a materialist dialectic out of Hegel’s Idealistic Dialectics. Hegel like most philosophers before him dealt primarily with ideas and their refinement as the root to all human understanding. An anthropocentric closed circuit so to speak. Whereas Marx insisted that critical thinking must always proceed from a critical study of, and engagement with, external reality.

Whilst that adjustment to the dialectic method by Marx was useful and partially true, the problem with Marx’s study of reality (as was indicated in ‘Means of Production Part 2, on this blog), Marx’s reality was the more narrowly drawn 19th century, anthropocentric, sociological, linguistically described reality. It was not the actual wider scientifically authenticated biological reality of life on earth as a whole. The contradictions within human hierarchical mass societies, which can lead to social revolutions that may or may not resolve those contradictions by overthrowing the negative human actors within them and replacing them with positive actors may or may not have some validity at certain times. But they remain in the self contained context of hierarchical mass societies. Therefore, to assume that the essence of biological systems function in that sociologically described way, as Darwin, Malthus, Engels and the above author has done, was and is, a premature and evidence-lacking assumption.

Indeed, when Marx’s associate, Fredrik Engels declared that ‘Nature is the proof of dialectics.” he unwittingly illustrated the problem which anthropocentric thinking encounters even in it’s most radically critical expressions. The statement that ‘Nature is proof of Dialectics’ contains no direct reference to any form of reality. It merely contains two main abstract designations; ‘Nature’ and ‘Dialectics’. These verbal abstractions only exist as words and ideas, not as biological entities. Take away these words and there is nothing there. In English, the word ‘rose’ is still an abstraction but it is an agreed rational one, as it does represent something real. It is a particular form of flowering plant species and if we remove the word ‘rose’ from it, the flowering species it represents still remains. So some abstractions do have a secondary reality, whilst others have no existence in reality at all. Nature, for example, is a collective noun used to embrace everything living and none-living in general and therefore nothing jn particular; and Dialectics is a specific noun embracing a method of thinking in non-static dualistic opposites whilst contemplating evaluative thinking in general. Dialectics exists only in terms of thinking, speaking and writing. So when Marx wrote that;

“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.” (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;

“The history of industry is the open book of man’s essential powers”…..The objectified essential powers of man (humanity) are useful objects.” (Marx/Engels Collected Works. Vol 3 , page 302)

The objectified essential powers of humanity have resulted in an extreme form of commodity fetishism in which inanimate objects and materials have been worshipped with unreasoned devotion to the point that these ‘powers’ are daily undermining the current foundations of multiple species including the human species.
Moreover, the reader has just been invited by Marx in the first quote to read a linked sequence of abstractions, ‘society, unity, nature, true, resurrection, naturalism, humanism, man’, instrument of labour, which have actually designated nothing in particular and which the reader is left to smply remember or repeat these abstractions or to add any more concrete terms he or she feels would be appropriate. It’s almost a parallel analogy to Hegels philosophical reminder that we don’t actually eat ‘vegetables’ we eat carrots and peas or whatever. Marx in the above abstracts is not describing anything in particular, he is just articulating his opinion about what he considers is a logical relationship between two abstractions; humanity and nature. And he makes nature – of which we and he as individuals are temporary short-term visitors to its domain – into an instrument of humanity. Marx provides no verifiable concrete evidence to support these assertions, because none actually exists and also because nothing concrete has been identified by him. I suggest at this particular point, Marx had become an unwitting victim of the anthropocentric socio-linguistic paradigm of Hegelian abstract thinking. Thus Marx elsewhere reasons that;

“If mankind be not forced to labour, they will only labour for themselves; and if they have few wants, there will be few [who] labour. But when states come to be formed and have occasion for idle hands to defend them against the violence of their enemies, food at any rate must be procured for those who do not labour; and as, by the supposition, the wants of the labourers are small, a method must be found to increase their labour above the proportion of their wants.” (Quoted by Marx, in the Grundrisse.)

“Means must be found to increase human labour above the proportion of their wants”.. has been a central practice and theoretical expression of that practice by hierarchical mass society elites since their successful ascendency within the hierarchically organised mass society system of human aggregation. Indeed, that hierarchical mass society system was itself THE supreme means found to “increase humanities labour above the proportion of their wants”. And the capitalist mode of production has perfected that means to the point were it is undermining the very basis of the biological system which provided the biological foundation for the evolution of the human species to take place. To read these sentiments from the notes scribed by the pen of Karl Marx, demonstrates how strong a hold that system has had and still has over the practical and intellectual production of the human species.

Claiming logical relationships between non-existent abstractions is a functional weakness of anthropocentric focussed language and discourse. A frequently associated assumption has been that a generally accepted naming of something means it is considered to be a real ‘thing’ and therefore must exist; God, time, and gravity for example are repeatedly said to exist. Yet no one would even attempy to touch God, time or Gravity, weigh them or taste them and for a very good reason. They don’t actually exist in the biological/material world, they only exist in the intellectual/sociological virtual world of consciousness. Nevertheless, talking or writing about them is possible, thus providing the illusion to the writer and to the unassuming reader that something real is being described. Yet there is nothing in words and concepts to touch, weigh or taste. In reality these named entities are nothing more than linguistic conjectures needing investigation, confirmation or rejection. Meanwhile, during the period Marx was celebrating industrial society as the true resurrection of nature, and nature as an instrument of labour, a naturalist named George P Marsh in 1864 published the following;

“The subject of climatic change, with and without reference to human action as a cause, has been much discussed by Moreau de Jonnes, Dureau de la Malle, Arago, Humboldt, Fuster , Gasparin, Becquerel, and many other writers in Europe, and by Noah Webster , Forry , Drake , and others in America……. There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece , and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within that brief space of time which we call ” the historical period, ” they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted for human use…. (Man and Nature. George P Marsh. page 9 and 44. Emphasis added RR.)

Climate change was an issue in 1864! Since 1864, the technology of extraction has replaced axe felling, spade digging and horse and cart haulage, with petrol driven chain saw, excavator/digger, bulldozer, diesel road haulage vehicles and railway trsnsport. For the last 100 years, elite humanity has directed its varied labour forces to do to the entire world what earlier elites had ordered to be done to Asia Minor, North Africa, Greece and Alpine Europe by George Marsh’s day. So why are some modern Marxists, tracing Marx’s ideas back to Epicurus in ancient Greece, in order to understand Marx better rather than revealing why he was ignoring the findings of his own generation of naturalists in their warnings about economic system caused climate change and the over extraction and desolation being ravaged upon the planet 180 years ago? Almost two centuries later in the 21st century and a comparable level of elite ignorance and denial is still taking place within the ranks of right wing conservatives, left wing anti-capitalist revolutionaries and those Liberal socialists in between. All of them with no visible hint of embarrassment at their own complete lack of serious historical evaluation, re-evaluation and self-criticism.

In a sense the rhetorical question I have just asked as to why Marxists (and some liberals, conservatives and socialists) are looking backwards for understanding rather than forwards should be becoming fairly obvious. If Marx, as one of most talented and outstanding social critics and self-critical commentators during the 19th century, remained trapped within an anthropocentric sociological paradigm, it must be because the anthropocentric paradigm of thinking is constantly being reinforced by the hierarchical mass society form of securing the essential (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological processes. It follows then that if 19th century Marx remained immersed within it, then practically everyone else was unlikely to have escaped this practical and intellectual trap. Thus the solution to the contradictions identified by various estranged and dehumanised victims within these societies, have been and will be sought from within that hierarchical mass society system itself. The anthropocentric fixation in thinking and being forms a closed loop environment in which externalities to that paradigm are only viewed peripherally and fleetingly before anthropocentric business as usual focuses its narcisistic attention back on itself.

Moreover, in the late 20th century and early 21st centuries, these campaigns literally cover thousands of such discriminatory or oppressive practices. They are campaigns initiated in an effort to at least ease, if not end the contradictions emanating from within the existing hierarchical framework. They are anthropocentric sociological solutions to growing sociological problems and now to increasing biological problems. Hence, every individual campaign has only a one dimensional strategic and tactical direction, which is to make closed loop political requests or demands upon the only class that has the power to modify the hierarchical mass society system. The left in all their many manifestations, extreme left, to moderate liberal left are stuck in sociological ruts of their own and their predicessors ideological making. They have not even started asking potentially revolutionary questions, let alone circled their intellectual wagons around revolutionary answers.

Stripped of any superficial rhetoric, the liberal and left strategies of organising petitions, promoting lobbying campaigns and suggestions of tactical voting are merely requests to the elites to implement reforms within the existing socio-economic system, which the elites know is collapsing and are trying to prop it up. Whilst the radical and supposedly revolutionary left call for demonstrations, uprisings and general strikes (the latter two only sounding radical while in essence they remain reformist) amount to nothing more than impotent demands on the elites to implement reforms within their system; a tactic and strategy with no historical precedence or logical consistency. Reforms concieved within and demanded from the sociologically closed-loop system are not revolutionary in terms of the fundamental basis of the biological system of life on earth. Hence the much vaunted Bolshevik-led, Maoist-led and Castro-led ‘revolutionary’ uprisings with their limited 19th century perspectives and objectives set on the conquest of political power within the hierarchical mass society system, did not even think of replacing that hierarchical mass society form. Nor did they attempt to end the de-humanised wage slavery of their peoples, let alone revolutionising its biological relationship to nature be compatible with the rest of the natural world.

Thus it is simply par for the course, that the anthropocentric sociological paradigm of left thinking has also drawn its understanding of the concept of ‘revolution’ from within the narrow limits of the systems direct sociological and political experience. The hierarchical mass society system has always been the one-off exceptional form of species aggregation, with a top-down social system, and a governing elite perched insecurely at the top who pass orders and instructions down chains of command to the middle and lower ranks. But life on earth from its beginnings and from outside of the hierarchically organised sociological dimension, has always been a biological system with no such categorical social divisions and imperatives. True, the biological species in general have indeed, formed large-scale aggregations (herds, flocks, schools, hives etc.) whilst in the process of obtaining the essential (N-M-G-R + A – D) biological inputs and outputs needed for their own survival, but the difference between the billion year old biological structure of life on earth and the several thousand year sociological structure of humanity is fundamental and irreconcilable.

These non-human collectives have never established or resorted to permanent or hereditary elites, with the rest of their species as the equivalent of direct or indirect slaves, serfs, peasants or wage-slaves providing the (N-M-G-R + A – D) means of support for their elite survival. Consequently, no other species of life on earth, no matter how large its individuals have become, (Whales, Elephants, Giraffe’s, Gorillas, Bison) have ever taken more from the biospheres organic and inorganic resources than its species needed to survive. None of the forest life networks, the plains life networks, the jungle life networks, the shallow and deep sea life networks, of life on earth, no matter how large their numbers have become, or how long they existed, have ever caused whole-scale, climate change, global temperature rises, plant, insect, fish and animal extinctions or inorganic pollutions of air, land, rivers, seas and lakes.

Only one species has done that, and in fact it has not always done so. It is only since some sections of the human species began a career in forming hierarchical mass societies and being under the control of top-down de-humanised elite state-run systems, whose modus operandi was aggressive physical confrontation, conquest and consumption of everything useful, that the dynamic balance of life on earth was increasingly disturbed. A new biological paradigm of one class within one species, taking whatever they could from whoever or whatever they chose, began an explosive increase in extraction, production and consumption, which has in the last 100 years has finally come close to a tipping point in which the dynamic balance of the biological system of life on earth has become systematically imbalanced, one vulnerable species at a time. If the current system of over-extraction is not ended and reversed, the remaining imbalance will be accelerated and possibly result in an eventual avalanche of species losses – until…..? At least the last set of predatory dinosaurs didn’t make themselves extinct.

Before the onset of hierarchical mass societies, humans in groups large and small (tribes and confederacies) lived modestly and relatively frugal lives which did not normally or perminently imbalance the biological system which produced and sustained them. A real revolutionary overthrow of that system cannot be achieved by replicating its top-down social form, such as having Priests Kings, Czars, Juntas, Vanguardists, Fascists, Bolshevists, Stalinists, Royalists, Supremacists, Liberals, Aristocrats or highly placed Revolutionary Comrades at their helm. The modus operandi, of discrimination, physical force, intimidation, or regimes of punishment, does not stem entirely from the personality traits of the ‘leadership cadres’, although much does, it stems equally from the sociological essence of the hierarchical, mass socio-economic system itself.

Yet apart from aggressive predatory species, life on earth has always been a system of species, cooperation, mutual support, resource sharing compromise and toleration (or even celebration) of the ‘other’ life forms. That is the only way life on earth has survived and evolved for billions of years in its earliest single-celled forms and for millions of years in its later multicellular plant, insect, animal and mammalian forms and it is the only way life on earth can continue evolving rather than further genocidal regressions at the hands of anthropocentric fixated elites. A broad spectrum of interconnected and interdependent varied and spectacular life forms of the plant, insect, animal, bird, fish and microorganism species forms, is not a luxury or a wistful tree-hugging dream option for life on earth, it is an essential material prerequisite. We either positively embrace it or continue in denial.

Roy Ratcliffe (August 2026)

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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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