Part 4. The necessity of revolutionary leadership.

For most of the 20th century, there was a dream among a minority of the worlds populations, that a revolution to overthrow the exploitative mode of production known as capitalism, was both necessary and possible providing it had the ‘correct’ leadership. The concept of a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production was developed in the 19th century and was the result of two independent factors coming together during that period. The first factor resulted from the progressive industrialisation of manufacturing controlled by those who owned capital. This scaled-up development in the means of production had created a mass working class employed in large numbers in factories, mines and commercial enterprises, living in relative poverty and whose daily lives had been severed from a direct nutritional relationship with the land.

The dispossession of the agricultural population from private and ‘common’ land meant as workers they had no direct independent means of sustaining their lives other than being employed by the capitalist class. Unlike previous land owning ruling elites, the capitalist class engaged in productive and commercial activities for one main and overriding purpose – to increase their capital and revenue. The capitalist motive for engaging in production was (profit) and their methods of production (industrialised manufacture) created the most abhorrent employment practices and conditions of living for those they employed. Riots, sabotage, and reforms (for voting and trade union rights) seemed the only way of challenging this new form of capital-owning, elite power that had replaced the power of the landed aristocracy. When these tactics were tried and failed some people started to think about revolution.

Of course political revolutions were known to have previously ocurred, but these had only resulted in changes in the make up of the elite strata ruling the hierarchical mass societies. They spectacularly failed to improve the condition of the working classes in agriculture, manufacturing and commerce. For a considerable period of time, there were only vague ideas of how working and peasant classes might back revolutionary minded intellectuals in order to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and replace with something else. However, with the arrival of one particular individual named Karl Marx a more detailed revolutionary perspective was introduced. Among other things, Marx had made a detailed study of the Paris Commune and noted that ordinary everyday working class citizens once abandoned by the French ruling elite had organised themselves to keep the social form of the Paris commune operating in a satisfactory manner.

He was not the only middle-class observer of the Paris commune to realise this potential of the ordinary working citizens to facilitate the functioning of social affairs at that time. Indeed, in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1865, it was well known that Russian peasant agricultural communes were largely self-governing. However, Marx made an extensive study of the Paris Commune and concluded that;

“…plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their ‘natural superiors’ and, under circumstances of unexampled difficulty, performed their work modestly, conscientiously and efficiently..” (Marx. Class Struggles in France. Page 76.)

Marx was also one of the very few who seriously studied the economic and social logic of the system of capitalism and to do so at a forensic level of detail. He concluded that the capitalist mode of production would lead to the destruction of all previous modes of production. It would sooner rather than later begin to fully control the international economy until it dominated the entire world. In other words, the capitalist mode of production despite its fundamental contradictions, would sooner or later economically, politically and militarily destroy all other human socio-economic forms of organisation and make global humanity subservient to the capital investment needs of the capitalist classes. Nevertheless, the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production would also result in repeated crises of relative overproduction.

“Since the aim of capital is not to minister to certain wants, but to produce profit, and since it accomplishes this purpose by methods which adapt the mass of production to the scale of production, not via versa, a rift must continually ensue between the limited dimensions of consumption under capitalism and a production which forever tends to exceed this imminent barrier.” (Marx. Capital Vol 3 page 251.)

The rift, which resulted from the mass production of commodities and services at a rate beyond the means to be profitably sold would create economic and financial crises. The resulting layoffs, bankruptcies and business failures would plunge the working classes into desperate poverty and trigger social unrest. However, in replacing indigenous modes of subsistence production during its global spread, capitalism had also create a large-scale, international working class. Consequently, due to capitalisms cycles of boom and bust, this would create extreme conditions of living which would threaten – at a global level – the existence of the very working people who it exploited in its factories, mines, farms, shops, and commercial premises. Marx reasoned, along with many others, that in order to save themselves from continual devastation (wars, unemployment, occupational diseases etc.) working people would sooner or later be forced to socialise the means of production and prevent them being used for personal greed by private capitalists.

From then on, the dream of revolution imagined that production in every country experiencing such revolutions would be used to satisfy general social need rather to satisfy particular elite private greed. This concept of a workers revolution then became a dream of a widespread liberation from want and warfare, in contrast to the pro-capitalist (bourgeois) narowly focussed dream of ever increasing profits for the few by ever increasing levels of production. It was a dream strenouously and exhaustively promoted by some 20th century middle class intellectuals, particularly Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia and Chairman Mao in China. It was eventually pursued in reality by millions of working people in Russia and China. The masses employed in factories and farms etc., were persuaded to become followers of these supposedly great, forward-looking men. Those among the Bolsheviks such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin etc., actually claimed to be guided by the detailed studies of Karl Marx.

However, instead of facilitating workers to organise economic and social affairs for themselves, they systematically organised the workers in industry and peasants in agriculture and created a top down hierarchical mass societies with themselves as a new elite in place of the previous elites. In these Bolshevik and Maoist versions of revolution,, the workers remained highly exploited wage slaves as previously (something not advocated by Marx) and the new elite ruled as ruthlessly or more ruthlessly than the previous elites had done – also not something advocated by Marx. The political complexion of the elites in control of these hierarchical mass societies had certainly changed, but socially and economically nothing had been fundamentally revolutionised. Under this form of political revolution, pollution, ecological destruction, and physical exhaustion continued and regular assassinations and concentration camp internments of rivals replaced occasional assassinations and imprisonment of rivals by previous elites. The dream of something better had become a nightmare of something worse.

Consequently, for millions of working people the dream of a revolutionary transformation of capitalism by being led by a so-called revolutionary sectarian vanguard was over. Working people in Russia, China and elsewhere had trusted their educated, middle class radical politicians of the 20th century and had been betrayed by them. In the rest of the world the working class were promised better futures under welfare state capitalism run by educated, middle class liberal or social democratic politicians, and they too were betrayed as the western hemisphere hierarchical mass society systems simply continued, but also under a different political elite. The masses there also remained highly exploited and precarious wage slaves and wars, occupational diseases and unemployment continued to blight their lives. In fact by the mid 20th century, other problems were also developing. The combined productive efforts of workers, directed by the bureaucratic elites in all hierarchical mass society countries (of whatever political, religious or secular persuasion) were producing in order to sell at a profit, which led to pollution of land, water and air as well as climate change.

By the 1970’s the dream of green and pleasant lands courtesy of private or state based capitalism was only kept alive by a few dogmatic mini groups or sects.
Although, those 20th century hastily and badly constructed day dreams of elite vanguard-led revolutions are also mostly over, the problems created by capitalism are not. In fact, the living nightmare of an alienating, war torn, ecologically destructive, patriarchal, inhuman capitalist mode of production has on many levels  become far worse and therefore, still requires overcoming. However, three crucial interconnected material and ideological factors have changed which informed the basis of 19th and 20th century day dreams of revolution. These new factors have to be understood and factored into any consideration of the contemporary contradictions which are now causing cracks in the socio-economic dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. I will argue in the remaing sections of this article that anti-capitalists and single issue reform based activists can no longer cling to the formulas, cliches and policies of previous centuries and expect to be treated as credible by citizens of modern hierarchical mass societies.

The first change is to the occupational aggregations of working people. The days of huge numbers of productive workers in daily and hourly solidarity-inducing contact in factories, mines, offices have been replaced by automation and robotic assembly lines. The dream that the intensely exploited industrial, commercial and agricultural masses would would be the workers of the world who would eventually unite because they had nothing to lose but their chains, had mostly been made redundant. Many working people had been forced to become self-employed in the advanced countries and the few remaining aggregations of workers are now in hospitals, government bureaucracies and educational establishments. The second change is to the mass consciousness of working people. Few are now in awe of the middle-classes, elite forms of authority and politicians in general. The experience of the last four or five decades has produced an almost universal distrust of politics and politicians in all countries, particularly among the younger generation. Working class consciousness has also become more focussed on individual rights and on an entitlement to conspicuous levels of consumption. Solidarity was never general and continuous, but it is now particular and specific.

The third substantial change has already been mentioned and that is the failure of past revolutions to address, reduce or end the numerous forms of exploitation, oppression and alienation endemic to hierarchical mass society forms of living. If revolutions are understood to require considerable effort and sacrifice only to deliver more of the same hierarchical alienation under a different label (Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, National Socialism in Germany and Italy etc.) then these socio-economic models now and in the future will not even be considered as a possibility, let alone as a probability in the majority of peoples minds. The above noted changes rooted as they are in reality, mean that in a severe crisis workers joining mass political parties and followng another self-appointed male vanguards is clearly extremely unlikely. Solidarity among the disparate sections of the population including the working class sections, will have to evolve from curent particular class and sectional issues into a more general humanist perspective.

With these changes in mind, we need to ask ourselves why then are some activists still operating with pre-modern categories such as nations, religions and other sectional ideologies when a global movement is not only necessary to fix the social, economic and ecological problems humanity now faces, but also desirable? And why a local sectional focus continuing now that humanity is also globally wired up? Yet in the 21st century, practically very term used to encourage collective action expresses some form of unity – but only partially and narcissistically; their group issue being  presented as the most  important. Nationalism focuses on a particular nation, Judaism on Jews, Islam on Muslims, Catholicism on Catholics, Protestantism on Protestants, Feminism on Females etc. Evangelism, Methodism, Calvanism, Marxism, Socialism, Comunism, Fascism, Sectarianism etc., are all likewise essentially narrow ingrained categories, resembling habits, which conserve the same historic superior/inferior divisions of us and them as if we are not a species; as if our problems are not universal ones. We only need to look how much social unity these ideologies have – over generations – actually destroyed within global humanity.

All these categories (and many others) seek a unity based upon a narrowly drawn set of criteria and conforming to ideas which exclude all other non-conforming categories of human being. Therefore they are all ideologically and practically reactionary however much some individuals within them wish to include others. And it gets worse. When reactionary ideological criteria align with the socio-economic dynamic of hierarchical mass societies, then the authoritarian tendencies within them can become extreme to the point of totalitarianism. In any serious crises, total internal control of hierarchical societies is exerted by their elites along with total warfare against other rival hierarchical mass societies. It is not that only some societies become fascistic, but all such societies in such situations become fascistic.

This is why in the 20th century, Stalinist Russia resembled Nazi Germany with their police states and concentration camps and draconian laws against criticism. This is why Putins authoritarian Russia in its 21st century military blitzkrieg on Ukraine also resembles Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg on Poland etc., and Putin’s crack down on dissent resembles, that of the Nazis and Stalinists on their 20th century internal critics. Incidentally, it is also why the Zionist control of Israel in its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank along with it’s crack down on its own internal Jewish and Arab citizens criticism, also resembles the Nazi treatment of countries they invaded and internal dissent during their period of absolute power.

There has been a disastrous failure in Europe and the west, to recognise that the totalitarianism of 1930’s Germany and Italy, which was self-identified as fascism, was not something new or specific to Germany. It was (and is) common to all hierarchical mass societies both in their expansionary colonial stages and in their current declining stages. Concentration camps and assasinations were used by Britain in Africa way before the Nazis and Stalinists used the same strategies and tactics of social control and incarceration. British atrocities in India prior and during the period of the British Raj, toward the native peoples, were similarly racially diected as the Nazis were towards the Jews and the people of the east. The visceral brutality of North Amercan elites against the native Indian peoples and the total war inflicted by the North on the South in the American Civil war were every bit as barbaric as the Nazis against the Jews and Eastern peoples and as the British, Germans and French were during their periods of colonial possession in Africa and Asia.

When historical reality is seriously considered, the self-satisfying liberal myth that totalitarianism (Fascism) is something only a few other countries descend into is shattered. More people need to wake up to 2023 reality, look around the globe and recognise that totalitarianism is a systemic tendency of all hierarchical mass society elites. But why? The thin edge of the wedge that is inserted into the social fabric of hierarchical mass societies that leads to fascism, begins with the discriminatory practices between genders, occupational activities and rival hierarchical mass societies. After distorting the basic humanity of a critical mass of the elite citizens of such societies, the hierachical mass society process leads by degrees to the violent spectacle of humanity being the only species of life on earth that systematically kills it’s own species in huge numbers and on a continually recurring basis. Its socio-economic process also leads to the spectacle of global elites who in the 21st century will only ask for a pause in, and not declare or condemn a clear case of openly perpetrated genocide, a crime against humanity when it happens in Gaza, because it may negatively effect their international business interests or their political support from an electorate whose votes for re-election they rely upon.

This model of society and its leadership form is itself nothing but an inherited contradiction based upon prejudiced elitist assumptions. In ancient as well as modern reality, no one person has any characteristic or aptitude which exceeds the collective characteristics and aptitudes of the community in which that person resides. It is nonsense to suggest and act as if it were otherwise. Even a brief familiarity with the history of hierarchical mass societies and their hierarchical-led movements of reform or revolution reveals the utter inability of any of them to reproduce anything other than replications of the existing hierarchical mass society contradictions. Worse still by adopting the leadership model copied from all previous elite based forms, the process reproduces the worst reactionary elements in those becoming leaders and those who have chosen to be followers. Considering even a potted history of the movements or trends initiated by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Blair, Bush, Biden, Macron, Popes, Bishops, Business tycoons, etc., at the top levels and those on lower local levels, demonstrates the tragedy of adhering to the logic implicit and explicit in the hierarchical mass society form.

And the effect of this socialisation process also occurs in more cases than those at state and country level. For example as recently as the post-second world war decades, Radical feminists disrespected and distanced themselves from socialist and liberal feminist, Zionist Jews turned on more humanist Jews, Islamists on more tolerant Muslims, Stalinist communists turned violently on Trotskyist communists, and each other. Trotskyists also turned on other Trotskyists. Narrowly drawn category ‘isms’ are a form of intellectual cancer, which tears away at their own structure and narrow form of unity. The leaders (and their immediate supporters) are required to pretend to an excellence which they clearly do not possess and never will posses. Their followers are required not to think and act to their own level of collective ability but to await guidance and follow orders. Put crudely those who wish to have a shepherd in charge of their lives need to be prepared to, and are expected to act like sheep. Those who wish to have a warrior king in charge of their sect or societies must act like dutiful soldiers and execute (literally as well as metaphorically) their every command to kill their fellow human beings whether innocent or guilty. Enough is enough of that, the future would benefit from a different model.

Finally, any crude dream world understanding of how revolutions occur needs to be replaced by a more accurate level of understanding. freed from the patriarchal myth of an extraordinary individual (invariably a man) stepping in to save the day. Revolutions are not identical with uprisings, which make pleas directed at elite leaders to authorise reforms which will treat them less harshly. Revolutions only occur when the politial and economic elite are viewed as the problem not the solution. The previously mentioned Paris Commune was set up by committees of ordinary citizens. In Russia, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky did not create the Soviet Committees; the workers and peasants did. Neither did the Bolshevik trio create the socio-economic crisis; the Russian elite system did. The Bolsheviks did not start up the factories after the owners had abandoned them; the workers committees did. The mistake the urban workers and rural peasants made in Russia, China (and elsewhere), when their systems collapsed and they restarted it, was letting the Bolsheviks and Maoist elites take over control of their local and regional commitees and dictate what they subsequently did and what they thought. Enough is enough of that also.

For a revolution to occur the existing elite led system (in general) has to decay and at least partially collapse and the people working at the coal face (so to speak), whether in small groups or large, have to self organise and start (or keep) the socio-economic system running and encourage other workers to do the same. Then they need to resist elites (any elites) insistence on taking back control when the workers have stabilised the socio-economic crisis. Until those two aspects, elite disintegration and citizen willingness to continue socio-economic activity favourably coincide, then talk of revolution or of exceptional individual talents are of no practical consequence. Indeed, such imagined superior abilities can be a hindrance to collective self-activity and collective learning from experience. Nevertheless the empire of capital will eventually collapse from it’s own internal contradictions and those surviving such a collapse will have the opportunity to replace hierarchical mass societies with non hierarchical societies with full knowledge of being one species which is able to cooperate when not being urged or compelled by circumstances to compete.

This does not mean doing nothing whilst awaiting the inevitable catastrophic collapse of the capitalist mode of production, small group, local non-sectarian solidarity can begin now as they have with food banks, local campaign groups that are not blinkered to the wider struggle of other human beings in foreign lands. It seems logical that if the way humanity – as a global species – is currently organised socially and economically is self-destructive and destructive of the environment and ecology upon which all life depends, then human beings – as a whole – are the agents responsible for halting and changing this destructive and self-destructive trajectory. Therefore, to consider oneself as a humanist first and foremost, is the only way to be factually consistent with our species biological identity. Humanism only needs the addition of a revolutionary perspective and enough of us, to begin the process of humanity undoing the intense alienation that hierarchical mass societies have caused by the exploitation of humanity, plus all the other species of life on earth and of course the planets limited natural resources.

Roy Ratcliffe (December 2023)