“A Lesson too late for the learning?”

Large swathes of the world are currently either being burnt to destruction by grassland and forest fires, flooded away by swollen rivers and incessant downpours, or being bombed into rubble by orders of some unhinged military or political elites. All of this mayhem is creating immediate devastation for people, animals and vegetation. Even many of the so-called advanced countries where these fires, floods and fighting are occuring are being plunged into pre-industrial and pre-medieval conditions as electricity, fresh water and food supplies are compromised or totally interrupted. The much depleted modern emergency services (fire, flood and health) are stretched beyond their capacity to fully respond. The much celebrated 20th century precarious normality can now be gone in the space of a day or two!

The focus of media attention is of course, primarily on the places where these disasters are occuring, but the repercussions of these extreme climate events will be much wider. The world’s climate, like the worlds economic system is globally connected. A loss of arable land by fire, flood (or war) in one region has geographical implications and time dependent repercussions upon other regions. The current mode of production dominated by capital and capitalists has been more concerned with speculation and immediate returns on investments to have bothered to make sure sufficient defences and reserves are available to deal with such frequently predicted disasters. It will therefore, take time to make devastated land fertile again and time to repair accidentally and deliberately destroyed buildings and infrastructure before production and distribution of essentials can return to pre-disaster levels.

In the collapsed  intervals between, it will not be the elite who suffer. Indeed, given the current climate instability, pre-disaster levels will only return if these predictable disasters are not followed too closely by another. The present unprepared situation in 2023, like the predicted, but unprepared Covid Pandemic crisis, should come as no surprise. Disasters such as these have been warned about for years, sometimes decades, before unfolding,  but governments and oppositions comprised of pro-capitalist elites have preferred to ensure that the future profits and dividends for themselves and their supporters are secure rather than their countries citizens, their infrastructure and services.

Bailing out their banker buddies with billions after the 2008 financial crash was preferred by elites to ensuring billions were spent on robust sea, river and fire defences and that emergency services were amply staffed and adequately paid. During the late 20th and early 21st century decades when the systems elites were creating the means for the number of millionaires and billionaires to mushroom, the basic urban infrastructure was neglected, jobs for workers were reduced, or made precarious and intentionally under valued and underpaid.

The same period witnessed repeated climate warnings and dire predictions by scientists which were denied or discredited by elites of all persuasions until the evidence could no longer be denied. The tactic was then changed into engaging in a period of protracted ‘pie crusts and promises’ discussions and delays interspersed by the annual rounds of COP meetings. This was a tried and tested strategy of procrastination for the governing elite have ensured that the capitalist mode of production is designed and modified to enable the needs of capital to dominate over the needs of humanity.

So despite the widespread knowledge in the late 20th century, of the progressive deterioration and pollution of air, water and soil quality, plus the intentional and unintentional culling of essential insects, plants and animals over the past fifty or more years, the systems elites and their supporters have ploughed on literally, metaphorically and industrially, by encouraging production and consumption regardless of the consequences for life on earth in general. The current elite strategy of pretending to be promoting a solution to climate change, pollution and ecological destruction by ‘green’ production methods is all form and no substance.

The maximum amount of production and consumption possible to facilitate the acquisition of profits and to accumulate wealth is still the elites reason d’ etra. In addition to the elite motive of uncontrolled greed, too few of the global population are aware of, or concerned about, the future of life on earth, to bother with the serious study of the socio-economic system and to trouble themselves with the level of activist commitment needed to produce a radical transformation. The hierarchical mass society system and its commoditised rewards has captured humanity, both physically, intellectually and emotionally. The desire for unlimited electrical energy has become a drug for many modern users; the desire for it has now become a ‘conditioned’ need and so any risk to ensure a present and future ‘fix’ will be contemplated. Even some on the left have hopped on the nuclear energy bandwagon on the basis that they would prefer future generations to suffer further nuclear contamination rather than themselves make do with less electricity now or an intermittent supply in future.

The distractions of immediate gratification, entitlement and self-satisfaction has saturated the daily thinking and activities of overwhelming numbers of all classes. The consequences therefore, are eerily predictable. The elite and their supporters in the middle classes will continue to keep the present system producing and consuming whilst ignoring or covering up and fudging the problems and avoiding radical solutions whilst they do so. It is obvious that humanity cannot and would not want to entirely undo the complex division of labour and technology within mass society formations, but humanity needs to do something to bring production and consumption into an ecologically balanced relationship with the rest of life on earth before too much imbalance triggers much larger extinction events.

The obvious first step would be to end the ability of the class who are the key instigators of the process of ever increasing production and consumption to continue to pollute air, sea and land, to cut down forests, and dig open cast mining scars wherever they see fit. Since it is the ruling elites, who through ownership and control of capital investments and the technical means of production, are the key instigators of ever increasing production and consumption, these capitalist organisations need to be prevented from doing so. Furthermore, since from decades of overwhelming evidence they clearly will not voluntarily reduce production and consumption to a level compatible with radically reducing climate warming, and ending ecological destruction and pollution, they will need to be forced to do so. However, as this class has all the organs of influence and power within its control, this will not be an easy or simple task.

Consequently, preventing them from continuing business as usual will require a strong and determined popular movement with a clear intention to remove them and their ilk from those decision-making positions of power and influence. Indeed, any such radical movement would also need to remove all decision-making positions of power and influence so that the wielding of power – in all its manifestations – (economic, financial, political and military), by a minority can no longer be used to take mass society communities in directions that have not recieved unanimous approval by all citizens. However, such radical revolutions do not occur as a conspiracy of a few so-called revolutionaries, they are the result of large scale dissatisfaction among populations who have tried to improve their situation over long periods of time without success.

When dissatisfaction has turned into desperation for a ‘critical mass’ of people and existential problems simultaneously exist for the wider  masses, then a revolutionary movement can start to form. A study of past top-down revolutionary changes, (eg .the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution) suggests that an additional factor to the above internal tensions which can trigger revolutionary events are irreconcilable antagonisms and splits occuring within the ruling elite. However, even then, as in the Arab Spring, maintaining or creating positions of power and leaving a new elite in control of those positions, does not solve the inherited problems for the natural world in general or for the bulk of humanity in particular.

An additional, conservative factor in the 20th and 21st centuries, is that the elites have now created an international brotherhood of alliances and mutual pacts of cooperation and defence such as United Nations (UN) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, (NATO). Although these are ostensibly agreements to defend each others hierarchical mass society system against foreign overthrow and conquest, they can easily be used to defend each members hierarchical systems against internal attempts at overthrowing any hierarchical system. These alliances have been used this way in the past and will be undoubtedly used in that way again. Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that for close to a century, national elites have been characterising organised internal dissent as the work of foreign countries or their willing agents among the indigenous populations.

In the event of serious attempts to oust the elite or change the system there is every possibility that these elite international institutions will be used to prevent or reverse such a revolutionary transformation. There would therefore, need to be a considerable atrophy or dissolution of such elite alliances for a challenge to the hierarchical mass society formation in any particular country to prove successful. Until such processes have matured and decayed sufficiently the hierarchical mass society system dominated by capitalist elites will continue until some form of ecological or climate collapse will occur. Indeed, I suggest that what is most likely to happen before enough people (a critical mass) emerges prepared to advocate a revolutionary change to social forms of production, is a catastrophic system collapse either due to another destructive world war or a domino like series of ecologically or climatically triggered catastrophes.

I would love to be wrong in this latter regard but either way, in the wake of any form of existential catastrophe, or an unexpected revolutionary change of socio-economic direction, it will be essential to any future construction or reconstruction of human mass societies that the knowledge of, and lessons learned from, the past and present are preserved and made widely available. It would be a tragedy of immense proportions for humanity to continue to make the same tragic historic mistakes yet again and replicate the past pattern of recreating yet more hierarchical mass societies on the self-destroyed ruins of previous hierarchical mass societies. The alternative form of mass society to a hierarchical one is obvious from the logic of the form itself. Since the skills and activities of the whole community are needed to allow mass societies to function, so the whole community should ensure that an effective means of collective decision making – by the whole community – is designed and implemented.

Such a collective decision making process would be the obvious arena for all proposals and actions to ensure that present and future production levels should not pollute, damage or destroy any part of the remaining life on earth support system which had survived and to restore as much as possible of what has already been lost. Such a community led programme of action producing goods and services for need rather than greed would solve the problem of unemployment for there would also be a probable desire to correct all the past neglect and restore to life on earth what has been intentionally and unintentionally taken away from life on earth. Producing for sustainability and restoration of lost balance instead of production geared to elite private wealth accumulation would create worthwhile jobs for all along with reduced hours of working.

As the most conscious and knowledgeable species of life on earth, the time is well overdue for humanity to re-establish an acute awareness of our responsibility to understand and protect the complexity and inter-dependence of life on earth. Therefore, every new recruit to viewing humanity from the ecologically sustainable standpoint of the rest of life on earth, rather than viewing life on earth from the unsustainable standpoint of current anthropocentric humanity, will become a vitally important part of the tasks ahead. I suggest the further evolution of our bio-chemically conscious, self-conscious human species into a non-discriminatory supporter of life on earth – in all its varied forms – is a more sustainable and worthy alternative than continuing to be the equivalent of a self-indulgent, alienated species bent consciously or unconsciously on destroying all the organisms on its own planet.

“The times, they are a changing”.

The starting and ending sub titles are borrowed from my teen age memories of singing Bob Dillon songs.

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2023)