It is a fact that the elite ‘establishments’ ruling over hierarchical mass societies everywhere are having victories over the opposition of their own citizens and the citizens of other rival countries to their own. By using their armed and unarmed forces of so-called law, order and control and utilising the deteriorated condition of working class economic and political resistance, the elites are able to attack the living conditions of the bulk of their populations. On the one hand they have introduced austerity, the devaluation of currency and the withdrawal of health and social services to the lower paid and the poor in their countries; and on the other some elites have ordered their armed forces to bomb and invade the citizens of other countries such as in Ukraine and Palestine. It seems nothing at the moment can slow down or stop the elites from implementing the policies and actions they deem necessary to assert the domination of their international system of elite wealth and privilege accumulation over the welfare of the ordinary people of each country.

The Putin’s, the Biden’s, the Trump’s, the Sunak’s, the Macron’s, the Trudeau’s, and the Netanyahu’s, etc., are everywhere victorious. However, it is worth remembering that victories can come at enormous cost to the victors. These are often called Pyrrhic Victories and I suggest this is exactly what we are witnessing currently. A Pyrric victory is one in which the costs to the winner’s side in achieving a victory are so severe, that it amounts to almost the equivalent of a defeat. The term was originally coined in response to the alleged remarks of an ancient Greek general called Pyrrus.

The elites of the colonial empire established by ancient Greece, were resisting the rapidly rising power of the then rapidly developing Roman Empire. King Pyrrus, of Epirus, (in ancient North West Greece) who was also a military leader, led the Greek military campaign wars against the Roman armies of invasion and won many of them. However, the victories came with such losses to his own troops and military resources that he is said to have exclaimed; “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” No humane based thought was expressed by Pyrrhus for the citizen army ‘grunts’ on both sides who were urged by their elites to kill each other by the thousands and did. Thus as a reflection of this observation, the idea of a Pyrrhic Victory was introduced.

A similar example could be made for Britain in the case of its victory in the Second World War. Although the Second World War was declared at the time of the German invasion of Poland it was actually conducted by the UK because Hitler and the German ruling elite were intent upon undermining and taking over control of parts of Britains vast Colonial Empire. British elites had previously conquered and/or annexed countries and peoples, and hence gained much of the wealth of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The German elite, wanted control of some of these countries to exploit for themselves. So the war against Hitler was not primarily a war against Nazi Fascism nor against the annexation of Poland, as it is often depicted, but a war of the British elite to keep a controlling hold of the exploitable assets of their far flung Empire.

However, the war costs of the British victory in 1945, had so depleted the economy and the population of Britain, by multiple millions of pounds (owed to American Lend Lease contracts and others) and multiple millions of allied working people killed, that it no longer had the resources to retain the empire anyway. Thus, for the UK elite this represented another example of a Pyrrhic type victory which they eventually spun as a necessary heroic sacrifice to defeat Fascism. Note that Pyrrhic victories become so costly because the elites orchestrating them are far more concerned to win than they are bothered about the number of ordinary citizens and soldiers that get killed. For this reason they will keep the fighting going until there is so much slaughter the victory becomes a Pyrrhic one.

Of course, the concept now has a much wider application than military affairs and can be used in terms of any effort to successfully achieve a certain end but that the cost of success brings with it severe devastation or destruction of the person or persons aims in achieving it. Thus, someone who by working so hard and long at work finally becomes the boss of his firm but whose health suffers so much he dies prematurely could be considered a pyrrhic type outcome.

If the effort of any achievement undermines the purpose of obtaining it, most would ask was it really worth it? Not so the elites. I consider most of the elite class war victories over their ‘people’ which were mentioned in the opening paragraphs can be classed as Pyrrhic ones. And this phenomenon is applicable to much of the current economic, political and military events unfolding in the 21st century, particularly in Europe and the Middle East.

For example, the eventual victory of the botched campaigns led by advanced country elites to resist the global Covid 19 pandemic was at the cost of far more old, poor and essential workers dying than was necessary and in the elites losing the last shreds of their reputation for competence, integrity and humanity in governance. In addition, many elites of numerous nation states, by using their police, military and legal forces, since 2008 have won repeated victories over their citizens resistance to austerity and precarious employment strategies, but again at the cost of losing the respect of the masses they govern. In yet another example we are currently witnessing the victory of the Putin oligarchy over their Russian opposition challengers, and citizen protestors. But this has come at the cost of being exposed as ruthless, heartless gangsters.

Almost at the same time the Palestinian people are experiencing (and we are witnessing) the overwhelming military victories of the Israeli Zionist colonial enterprise aimed at eliminating the lives of unarmed Palestinians whilst flattening the buildings and infrastructure of Gaza and the West Bank. In this way the Zionist final solution to their Palestinian question is being accomplished by removing their physical existence from the territory of their historic homeland and making Gaza completely uninhabitable.

However, the costs of this Jewish Zionist victory over Gaza and the West Bank has come at the expense of an utter and almost complete loss of global support and sympathy for the Zionist colonial enterprise. The sympathy they gained from being victims of Nazi genocide, they have thrown away by replicating much of it against Palestinian civilian men, women and children. Most ruthless governing elites in post 1939/45 modern times, either try to hide or deny the mass killing of human beings, now known as crimes against humanity, so as to partly humanise their ruthless rule over hierarchical mass societies.

It is an undoubted fact that most ruthless elites are fully aware that fratricide, matricide, infanticide and genocide are the most heinous crimes that human beings can commit and so they are normally reluctant to advertise or publicly admit committing them. The Russian political oligarchy headed by Vladimir Putin and the Jewish political tendency of Zionism headed by Netanyahus’ clique (and supported by a majority of Israeli’s), however, have no such qualms and openly and publicly admit and celebrate the killing of civilian Ukrainian and Palestinian men, women and children.

Indeed, unlike the Russian people it seems a majority of Israeli citizens also wish for the death or displacement of all Palestinians. Jewish Zionism and its followers in 2024, therefore represent a special authoritarian case in which a majority of it’s countries ordinary citizens are in agreement with and complicit with the strategy of their elites, even when they dislike and distrust the current elite personnel. This break by many current elites and their followers with the previous mass society consensus against genocide and crimes against humanity, represents a paradigm shift in their previously professed morality.

Such an genocidal attitude to other members of the human family, was unambiguously declared as unlawful after the Second World War, but is now clearly back as a policy option for the 21st century elites in Syria, Russia, Israel, Myanmar and elsewhere. Materially and intellectually supporting this genocide is also an elite option for those international elites who retain trade and diplomatic relations with the perpetrators of genocide. Russia has its own group of allies to support its crimes against humanity and Israel has its Genocidal Alliance of the elites in the US, UK, France, Germany, Canada etc.

The years 2023 to 2024 therefore mark a definitive break of the world’s political elites with its pretensions of democracy and civil rights. They are now exposed as calculatingly inhumane, human beings which is something of an outstanding contradiction. In 2024, therefore, there is the continuation of an open struggle between which version of humanity is to prevail in future. Is it to be one of ruthless, militarised, nation-states constantly at war with each other, in which any kind of depravity is allowed and practiced; or is it to be one of peaceful cooperation and mutual support? It is blatantly obvious that the only defenders of a humane present and future now lie with the ordinary people of the world.

The vital question that remains to be seen, is whether this exposure of the US, UK, Germany, France, Noway etc., and Canada, as a Genocide Alliance Support Group for Israel will be made to suffer politically for their ruthless contempt for the welfare of their own and other citizens. Particularly, since essentially the same set of national elites also managed to tragically botch up the response to the Covid 19 Pandemic. They enabled huge numbers of their citizens to die by incompetence, greed and a lack of preparation when they provided obsolete and insufficient supplies of PPE and ventilator equipment; when they failed to implement early Covid testing and when they issued non-negotiable instructions to send infected parents and grandparents back into care homes during a severe public health pandemic.

All that incompetence, rule breaking, elite parties and open ended covid supply contracts was bad enough. However, they have now been party to the supplying of equipment and ideological support for the Israeli mass killing of the citizens of Gaza and the West Bank. The international elites are used to getting away with a high level of incompetence which causes devastation to ordinary working people, whilst siphoning off wealth produced by the combined efforts of their working people. For a further example, in the UK, Europe and the US, the elite managed to avoid any serious repercussions both during and after the 2008 global financial collapse, their system created and which they failed to prevent.

But historical evidence suggests there is another phenomenon among mass societies which can eventually manifest itself on the basis of repeated bouts of elite incompetence and ruthlessness. There are many historic examples where resigned acceptance of elite incompetence by citizens, becomes transformed into an active rejection of not just individual elites but of the elite based systems themselves. This phenomenon is often quietly expressed in the colloquial form of ‘enough is enough,’ or ‘how long do we let them get away with this, before we do something about it?’. Or considered more philosophically as; ‘when does an existing discontented social quantity become transformed into a new socially active quality?

Quantity into Quality?

At a philosophical, biological and social level the phenomenon of repeated increments of the same elements becoming transformed into some new phenomenon is known as the transformation of Quantity into Quality. For example repeated quantitative additions of heat to water can only continue so far until at a certain point water ceases to be a liquid and boils away into a powerful, machine turning gaseous form – steam! Similarly, reducing units of heat from water can only go so far before water ceases to be a liquid and becomes a hard, titanic-sinking solid – ice! The continual intake of units of alcohol or drugs can transform a competent healthy person into an incompetent addict.

Historically, when elites treat ordinary people as less than human for too long the latter eventually begin to organise, not in order to endlessly and uselessly complain, but to resist or rebel. In this latter regard, the social and political context of the entire capitalist mode of production in its nation state units, has radically changed in the months from October 2023 to February March 2024. The levels of military and political violence perpetrated against civil societies globally which persisted throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, has reached an undoubted peak in 2024. But this sheer quantity of openly committed violence has triggered a new quality to emerge within the non-elite sections of human societies.

The symptom of quantitative additions to an oppressive process is producing a qualitative different result which has now occurred in the consciousness of the ordinary citizens of many hierarchical mass societies. In this regard, the mixture of young and old, male and female, dark and pale skinned protesters in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaigns is significant. In addition, the latest multi-ethnic, multi-gender, multi-generational, mass demonstrations against Jewish, Zionist genocide and against European and Western hemisphere elite support for Israel, is also significant. Both these examples indicate a potential paradigm shift in the internal social relations of hierarchical mass societies. Hopefully, ‘the times they are a changing’.

The problem to be solved in the 21st century is that the old paradigm of thinking and being is still entrenched in elite strata of all political tendencies, left, right and centre. Advanced society elites of all political persuasions wish to retain hierarchical socio-economic forms and less advanced society elites want to create their own viable hierarchical national forms. The various denominations of religious elites also want religiously dominated hierarchical national forms and the so-called revolutionary left radicals want socialist or communist led viable hierarchical mass society forms. In other words, they all want to organise and work for a viable national country with a full complement of modern essentials.

However, to be viable in that way each country needs a large enough territory, adequate electrical supply, effective transport systems,, decent homes, good schools, excellent hospitals, efficient bureaucratic state institutions, land, air and sea military forces, old folks homes, creches, theatres etc. All the above noted elites, want all of the above facilities at a period of history in which the planet can no longer bear the existing hierarchically determined facilities obtained by the extraction and destruction of its organic and inorganic material. The proposals for any new mass society developments are in effect symptoms of wilful eco-blindness and self-indulgent wishful thinking.

A revolution in thinking and ‘being’ is needed to replace the above. A revolution in producing and thinking now and in the future, needs to be based upon on how humanity can maintain the inter-dependent, inter-connected and inter-related life forms essential to stabilising earth’s climate, removing historic pollution and ceasing ecological destruction. Only in this holistic way will humanity enable it’s own species to also survive. This means a definitive end to the constant resource wars between nations and people. It means a critical mass of ordinary people is required to initiate a process of rejecting the old basis of religious, political, gender or ethnic identities and who have started to think of themselves as equally valuable human beings who are working together as one species.

Humanity, by it’s own anthropological definition is one single species but its historical traditions continually distort this fact. Humanity needs to end this distortion and become conscious of the need to save what is left of the many interdependent essential life forms on planet earth. Those who think about the future seriously cannot fail to conclude that the last thing that life on earth needs is another century of hierarchical mass society internal and external conflicts and economic natural resource depletion and competition based upon ancient disfunctional identities. Anciently derived identity groups fighting each other for what resources are available on planet earth is a vision based upon a nightmare past and present not a vision for a viable and worthwhile future.

So I repeat, that in my opinion, life on earth needs a critical mass of Homo sapiens, who also reject the anthropocentric arrogance and technofix nonsense that currently assumes that some sections of the human species are superior to all others and to all other forms of organic life and who are capable of solving everything. The current indulgence in elite fantasies, such as imagining and suggesting creating modern up-to-date city dominated nations for all nine billion human beings on earth, and organising a colonising trip to Mars for a few science savvy Noah’s when things finally collapse on earth, need to be ridiculed for what they are and for what they represent.

In actual fact they represent a continuing failure of their proposers to also face up to, address and reverse the myriad of self-inflicted problems humanity has created for itself and for life on earth. In the 21st century, humanity and life on earth in general has reached the limit of its ability to support the existing hierarchical mass society levels of production and consumption, never mind suggesting the continued expansion of human mass societies in their present form. At the same time as reaching that natural resource limit, humanity in 2024 has demonstrated its absolute inability to control the destructive actions of the elites in charge of them.

It should be sobering to reflect that between 2014 and 2024, there was nothing anyone or any collective group or nation could do to prevent a powerful but numerically small number of elite war cabinet members, in control of a rogue nation such as Israel from engaging in mass genocide, nor was there earlier the means, for anyone to prevent another rogue elite in Russia from invading another nation. If their leading governing cabinets decide upon such action then that is all it takes.

These instances also indicate that nothing could prevent a future coterie of rogue elites from unleashing nuclear destruction on any country if they decide to. If those facts on their own do not convince people that they need to be part of a movement to end the present system, then it’s hard to imagine that further changes in climate related disasters, ecological losses of key species, and rising sea levels will convince them to rise up and become activists. So far saving the future of life on earth and the future of their children and grandchildren has not created mass movements of resistance and change.

Any serious study of hierarchical mass societies since they began way before the common era (BCE) reveals they have continually been a serious problem by introducing systemic inequality, exploitation, oppression and inhumanity into the social life of the human species and dumping its production results and consequences onto life on earth in general. Hierarchical mass societies have now reached a stage were, if they are allowed to continue, they will continue to endanger more of those life forms which are essential to support the future life processes of all life on earth.

The future as well as the present really does depend now on whether the current generation of young people are willing to resist the divisive and reactionary historical traditions of inherited group identities and the respective exceptionalisms they have been immersed in since childhood. That task plus overcoming individual constraints and joining forces with other members of our varied species is the only scenario that would begin to resist the descent into further chaos and internicine warfare. The past and present generation have singularly failed in that regard, even though a few past and present minorities have often tried to address some negative aspects and done so with considerable effort. It now falls to a new generation.

Roy Ratcliffe (February 2024)