In the final part of this series, I suggest it is important to fully recognise that a significant part of the destruction taking place under the auspices of the now almost universal hierarchical mass society systems is in the realm of emotions. It is not just the external inorganic and organic material of the planet, which is being destroyed by production for profit, but also the socio-psychological essence of the human species. At its fundamental bio-chemical and evolutionary foundational levels, the human species has evolved into a social species par excellence. The existence of each individual human organism not only depends upon the extended contributions of their biological parents and their nurturing support, as many other animal species do, but also upon the support of many other significant social individuals making up the complex divisions of labour spread across our communities. Our individual lives or our social systems could not function as they do without these thousands of other men and women who ensure that the delivery of some aspect of mass society living is kept constantly in motion.

Furthermore, these complex human social systems are also absolutely dependent upon the contributions of millions of other complex, bio-chemical organic species in nature that initially provide the oxygenated air we breath, the clean water we drink and the material basis of the essential organic food chains that we obtain from the life-cycle of plants, insects and animals. Even a partial understanding of this network of species and inter-species dependence and interdependence of life on earth, gives rise in the human species to particularly strong forms of emotional attachment to parents and significant others in the form known as various types of love and affection. Thus forms of emotional attachments already exist between family and friends as well as among close associates within the wider community. However, a more comprehensive understanding of this close knit web of inter-connected life can give rise to an affection for and love of life and nature in general.

The problem for humanity and the rest of life on earth is that the social form of hierarchical mass society structures, are such that for most human individuals even the above noted partial understandings of their absolute dependence and inter-dependence upon life on earth, is truncated, distorted and frequently eroded or obscured by the enforced competition created by these societies. Hence, the phenomenon in hierarchical mass societies of extreme forms of indifference and even antipathy to the welfare of other human, plant, insect and animal life forms, that all human beings depend upon to exist and survive. Furthermore, the competition within these societies is frequently so intense that the alienation and estrangement from ‘life on earth’ in general and from other human beings in particular is so severe that it results in hatred and fear between individuals and communities. Murder, extreme physical violence, war and genocide, are not ‘natural’ symptoms for they are completely absent from the interactions of the millions of other species of life on earth, yet are now commonplace among many human beings who become socialised within hierarchical mass societies.

Moreover, this tendency resulting in hatred, war and genocide is still not universal among the human members of hierarchical mass societies. It remains a minority aberration among a relative few members who are deeply traumatised and/or socialised by hierarchical society structural alienations and estrangements. However, this problem of hatred, war and genocide becomes exponentially dangerous and exacerbated when the minority who are so affected by the structural alienation and estrangement become concentrated in the hierarchical elite power structures of such societies. It is these elites at the head of political power structures in war cabinets, financial cabals, industrial monopolies, and government beaurocracies who can enforce the practical results of their own accumulated alienation, indifference, competition and hatred upon the majority of their citizens. Therefore, in considering any future form of human societies the emotional biological essence of humanity needs to be seriously considered, understood and nurtured, because this also expresses – in human form –  the more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the unique inter-dependent essence of life on earth.

Therefore, in order to build upon and maintain social cohesion, within future human communities, there will need to be close positive personal interactive and intellectual relationships as well as wider cultural ones. But close interactive relationships for humans are only possible by frequent close and egalitarian proximity. Other life forms such as birds, insects and ruminant animals can associate in extremely large flocks, swarms and herds, of multiple thousands, but as mature organisms these are their own gatherers and individual consumers of essential nutrition, resting and nesting. Consequently, apart from reproductive activity, (and with a few exceptions) long term close intimate relationships in these collective species are almost entirely missing. An individual wildebeest, bat, swallow or bee, does not seem to feel lonely by the lack of such close interactive relationships in a herd, flock or swarm, but humans are different in this regard.  Humans can feel desperately lonely even among  large numbers.  Extreme loneliness (a compounded form of alienation and estrangement) within cities of millions is already a massive debilitating and ‘unnatural’ contradiction of the essence of human evolution. It is a condition which has been socially introduced and consolidated by the hierarchical mass society form.

So in order to counter this unnatural existence in future, the human species needs to aggregate within a smaller egalitarian unit within any larger aggregation. In this socio-economic regard, it has become clear that hierarchical mass societies produce more practical problems than they solve and these problems have become existential for all forms of life on earth, but that is not all. In fact the emotional problems these social forms create for humanity are also existential, as murder, war, genocide and even suicide indicate. This suggests that a transition away from such social forms has become essential on the basis of multiple considerations. However, it is unlikely that a future alternative form of human society will emerge by directly transitioning from existing capitalist based alienated hierarchical mass societies to non-capitalist based mass societies, as some on the left in the past and present have imagined.

A direct transition from one social form  to another by gradual reform or political revolution has proven impossible throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The altered circumstances created by neo-liberal capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has made it even more unlikely by the altered scale and altered relative proportions of the classes and sub-classes within hierarchical mass societies. This extended and differentiated class composition, makes it highly unlikely that one class will ever become united enough to be able to implement transitional reforms or sufficiently united to actually carry out succesful revolutions. In fact Engels, Marx’s closest collaborator, had already come to that same conclusion way back in the 19th century. He noted that;

“All revolutions up to the present day have resulted in the displacement of one definite class rule by another….One ruling minority was thus overthrown; another minority seized the helm of state in its stead and refashioned the state institutions to suit it’s own interests…..Even when the majority took part, it did so – whether wittingly or not – only in the service of the minority….”

Is that not exactly what happened in the Russian revolution of 1917 and the Chinese revolution of 1949? The masses became the much slaughtered cannon fodder in a series of battles, the results of which simply enabled a new elite regime of ‘communists’ to replace an old regime of ‘elite’ capitalists or aristocrats. Engels continues rather hopefully;

“….but the proletariat grown wise by experience had to become the decisive factor – was there not every prospect then of turning the revolution of a minority into a revolution of the majority? History has proved us, and all who thought like us wrong. An insurrection in which all sections of the people sympathise will hardly occur; in the class struggle all the middle strata will probably never group themselves around the proletariat so exclusively that in comparison the party of reaction gathered around the bourgeoisie will nigh well disappear.” (Engels. ‘The Two Tactics of Social Democracy.’)

Note that Engels asks himself and the reader a rhetorical question “was there not every prospect then of turning the revolution of a minority into a revolution of the majority?” but he asks it without fully answering it. No matter: history has provided the emphatic answer to that rhetorical question raised by Engels in the 19th century. It came in the form of what transpired within a very short period of time in the cases of the 20th century revolutions in Russia and China. The masses who took part in these politically orientated civic ‘revolutions’ were disarmed and ordered back to an alienating form of producing as much raw and finished material production as could be designed and completed. That return to high levels of industrial production ‘as usual’ was implemented while the new Bolshevik or Chinese communist elites got down to the business of ruling with an iron fist and attempting to encourage the workers in other countries to follow the Russian and Chinese 20th century examples.

In the same article, Engels further notes that by that 19th century stage the industrialised production of efficient weapons of mass destruction in the hands of professionally trained armies was such that it would be foolish for working people to line up against the military forces of modern states behind barracades, with bricks, stones and assorted home-made weapons or guns meant purely for sport. These informal weapons would prove useless against well trained armies equipped with the latest form of automatic (now computer designed and guided) weapons. This realisation led Engels to consider and suggest the alternative of a Parliamentary road and a reformist transition to a post-capitalist form of mass society. Yet this was a proposal which has repeatedly been proven to be sterile. Interestingly, it is at that point that another firm principle established by Marx was abandoned by Engels and by subsequent self-appointed followers of Marx who declared themselves to be ‘Marxists’. Marx on behalf of himself, Engels and others who previously thought like him, had repeatedly written;

“The emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the working classes themselves. We cannot therefore cooperate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes.” (Marx/Engels. Selected Correspondence. Progress page 307.)

It seems very few people have stopped to consider why this was a firm principle adopted by Marx and not just some throw away patronising deference to the then largely uneducated masses he and Engels were in contact with. He had already reasoned in a series of writings known as ‘The German Ideology’ that a change in the mass consciousness was necessary in order to go beyond hierarchical mass society systems and secure an alternative mode of production. He reasoned that this could only be achieved by the direct pactical involvement and experience of the masses themselves. After a long section on the ‘Real Bases of Ideology’ in that particular document, Marx ended the section with the following;

“Both for the production on a mass scale of this Communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a ‘revolution’ ; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” (Marx. ‘The German Ideology. Section D)

Leaving aside the Victorian use of the male term for humanity as well as the fact that the form of community controlled living espoused by many during Marx’s lifetime was not what transpired in Bolshevik controlled Russia or Maoist controlled China (or elsewhere) I suggest it is important to register that Marx really meant. He not only consistently refers to a socio-economic revolution in how society functions in securing it’s natural (N-M-G-R + A-D) biological and social processes, but also to a need for a revolution in human consciousness of that process. And that these revolutionary transitions are not going to be achieved by theoretical or intellectual means. Philosophical debates or training courses focussing on thinking things through are not the main means of revolutionary changes to how people live and produce.

Such revolutionay changes only occur on the basis of pactical steps worked out and consistently implemented in practice. Any implementation and ownership of new modes of living and producing will only be achieved by the process of people persistently creating them in their technical and social practices and not by means of  a process of elites producing documents and others reading or analysing them. Life on earth is primarily a practical process, not a theoretical or ideological one. The insightful opinion on working class self-activity expressed by Marx in 1846 was not altered by his later analysis of the Paris Commune in 1848 in which he noted 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. Struggles in France. Page 76.)

Yet by 1917, Lenin, the self-declared (and often naively hero worshipped) ‘Marxist’ was already successfully convincing a majority of his Bolshevik Party members that;

“…the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of that class…It can only be exercised by a vanguard that has absorbed the revolutionary energy of the class…..The dictatorship of the proletariat does not fear any resort to compulsion and to the most severe , decisive and ruthless forms of coercion by the state.” (Lenin Collected Works. Volume 31 p 421 and Volume 32 p 21.)

The firmly held position of Marx on the emancipation of the part of humanity forced into slavery and wage (or salary) slavery, being by their own practical efforts had been reversed by the ‘Marxist’ Lenin (and his subsequent imitators) into working people being forcibly led by and ruthlessly coerced into, industrial production by an authoritarian state elite into performing activities determined by that elite. To my knowledge, no Bolsheviks or ‘Marxists’ then (or since) have argued against that Leninist reversal of Marx’s clearly and repeatedly espoused Revolutionary-Humanist principles. In considering the other 20th century tendency which still lingers on in the nostalgic memories of uncritical followers of that 20th century vanguad tradition we can read the assertions of the supposedly ‘Marxist’ Leon Trotsky who around the same period as the Lenin quotation above, declared;

“…we can have no way to socialism except by authoritative regulation of the economic forces and the resources of the country, and in the centralised distribution of labour power in harmony with the state plan. The labour state considers itself empowered to send every worker to the place where his work is necessary. And not one serious socialist will begin to deny to the labour state the right to lay its hand on the worker who refuses to execute his labour duty. (Trotsky. ‘Terrorism and Communism.’ Page 153.)

Fascist levels of state orchestrated oppression in order to increase levels of production and consumption are more than hinted at in this assertion of what was necessary in Trotsky’s understanding for creating a post capitalist mode of production. Fascist levels of authoritarian oppression and exploitation were openly put into practice by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and the majority of their Bolshevik supporters. There are many other such examples of past middle-class left revolutionary intellectuals and politicians departing from the revolutionary-humanist and pro-feminist principles and practices adopted by Karl Marx and those who adhered to his revolutionary-humanist ideas. Sadly it is those departures which have lived on in the inadequate political and historiographical legacy of these particular anti-capitalist trends and are being reproduced and replicated again in the 21st century. However, for those interested in understanding this inadequacy further, I have documented a great deal of these authoritarian and inhumane departures and sectarian dogmatic posturings in the free download section in the previously mentioned banner below the blog picture heading.

Yet the vanguardist trend still continues to pop up every so often in different guises. Here are a couple of extracts from a 2024 anti-capitalist manifesto – this one advocating a concept of eco-socialism.

“Ecosocialism replaces profit with measurable social and environmental needs, for instance human happiness and aligning human society within planetary boundaries again. We start from what is sustainable and necessary for a good life for every human on the planet. This means guarantees on quality of life for every single human – and we build a global economy that can sustain that. For instance we could aim for a global energy usage of 3.5 kilowatt per person, powered by renewables and geothermal.”

This group of anti-capitalists and self-claimed ‘marxists’ seem to have directly copied the Bolsheviks and also ignored Marx on the question of the necessity of workers emancipating themselves and of the working class ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” In this ‘manifesto’ Marx’s proposal of ordinary working citizens practically implementing a new form of living by their own collective decisions has been abandoned by a second generation of so-called ‘Marxists’. These modern elites – in waiting – have already anthropocentrically (and generally patriarchally) decided that the criteria for deciding on future global human production should be the abstract formulation ‘human happiness’. They even propose, without knowing what that future holds, that a 3.5 kilowatt allocation of electricity per person should be provided for each individual!

Note  that they consider that the global economic activity of humanity should be built on the basis of sustaining that anthropocentic abstraction human ‘happiness’. Their primary concern is not with raising their own or other peoples consciousness of the ecological necessity of sustaining life on earth as a whole – without which nothing beneficial is possible in future. This formulation is reminiscent of Lenin’s boastful disclosure in 1921 of the state commisions abstract calculation of how just many pairs of workers shoes (two pairs each!) would be necessary to produce in the following five year plan. Whilst during the same 1919-1921 period Lenin was also threatening to severely punish working people and even shoot them if they failed to obey state orders, a policy his successor Stalin enthusiastically continued. This 2024 manifesto is also full of the earlier noted abstractions and thus it implies similar socialistic central planning and state enforcement procedures.

Note also in the above extract the all inclusive use of ‘we’ is not defined as the working classes collectively deciding ‘what is to be done’, because like Lenin’s ‘what is to be done’ this has already been decided upon in this manifesto by a modern restricted planning group from within a current ‘marxist’ vanguard group. They are already fulfilling and practicing their own self-elected role to explain to ‘uneducated’ working people what needs to be done and confidently assuming that their own particular reasons why will be shared by future generations. This particular 21st century left manifesto, therefore, represents another mixed regurgitation of past abstract formulas together with an idealised wish list compiled by members of a self-selected political sect. Moreover, the fundamental class orientation of this wishful thinking self-indulgence becomes blatantly obvious from the following extract.

“Transport is not just about getting around. Being able to move, stay connected, and access different parts of the world is a fundamental part of our humanity and we reject its commodification for profit.”

I suggest that in this extract, modern anthropocentric middle class obsessions with foreign ‘enlightenment’ (read ‘self-indulgent’) travel are being considered by this vanguard planning group as fundamental parts of humanities future ‘entitlement’. When in actual fact the two superficial aspects; staying in contact and access to different parts of the world’, have become a fundamental part of capitalist; Facebook, Tik Tok technology and Airline and Cruise ship profit making and is not a fundamental part of basic humanity. In the current ecological context, does not ‘access to different parts of the world’, now represent a part of Marx’s “muck of ages” which needs to be got rid of?

Indeed, humanity by the billions can hardly feed themselves, find a decent home or afford decent health care, let alone “access different parts of the world” except by the dangerous life threatening means of small boats across dangerous channels and seas. Furthermore, even without the profit motive, any form of future mass travel in terms of the production, maintenance and propulsive energy required for mass transport vehicles and the infrastructure they require, would be a massive drain on the earths resources. De-coupling mass transport from the tentacles of capital investments, would still mean it would also represent a substantial element of the production, extraction, pollution and material destruction of the environment, therefore, of its climatic stability and of its essential life forms.

Air, sea and land transport in whatever form of vehicle or propulsive energy used already constitutes one of most environmentally unfriendly and costly of the non-essential activities of modern hierarchical mass society living. The desire to frequently exit the local community for enjoyment and stimulation rather stay within it to produce social integration, enrichment and the mental well being of young, old and infirm, is not a fundamental part of humanity, but a product of the existing hierarchical mass society system harnessed to the capitalist mode of production. But in any case for genuine revolutionary-humanists now, what in future is considered ‘fundamental parts of humanity’ should be decided by those future working citizens. They will be the ones constructing any post-capitalist future. They are the ones who will be left with the ashes and ruins of the current elite profit-driven economic system and they are the ones who will have to do the best they can with what is available and intelligently decide what is sustainable and not.

If there was even an ounce of humility and understanding of what is necessary, something would become clear to these “philanthropic persons from the upper and lower middle classes.” – of all political persuasions, currently sat at their laptops formulating ‘blue’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’ or ‘red’ manifestos explaining what future working citizens should all be implementing. It would become clear that imaginatively constructing a future for others to follow – is not their affair!
I further suggest that the task of contemporary revolutionary-humanists is to sum up as diligently, accurately and honestly as possible what mistakes have happened in the past and what is really happening to all life on earth in the present period. Or as Marx once suggested to his collaborators, and I consider this advice is still relevant almost 200 years later;

“We do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world, through criticism of the old one. ….But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair; it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists..…We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it doesn’t want to”. (Letter from Marx to Ruge in 1843. Emphasis added, RR)

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2024)