I recently had my attention drawn to a conference held during 2024 and organised by the ‘Transnational Institute of Social Ecology’ and was held in the city of Athens Greece. The conference theme was to build a Social Ecology based “inclusive and diverse ‘we'”. Below in italics are a couple of extracts from the published conference report by the ‘Netzwork for Kommunalismus’. (For the full conference report visit https://trise.org/2024/11/07/social-ecology-aims-to-build-an-inclusive-and-diverse-we/). I have chosen to draw attention to this conference because to me it is yet another example of the inability of progressive intellectuals to transcend what I characterise as the historically determined anthropocentric paradigm of thinking which has a dominant hold on the entire range of international left, centre and right wing political thinking.

In this case, although this left/progressive wing differs radically from both the right wing and centrist wing of politics, by it’s own extracts it demonstrates that it is still firmly located within the current and historic assumptions within the overall anthropocentric paradigm of thinking. It contains a common set of anthropocentric assumptions which are spread across all political tendencies. It is an assumption that the intellectual ability of certain privileged sections of humanity have both the theoretical and practical means to eventually save the biosphere of planet earth from the ravages to it introduced by the human species and perpetuated in the latest capitalist iteration of hierarchical mass society forms. The opening paragraph of the report illustrates this ideological and practical contradiction most explicitly.

“Social ecology no longer occupies a niche in political theory, but has become a growing movement worldwide. Always linked to a practice of prefiguration – building the future society in the here and now – it offers social movements from Barcelona to Rojava an inspiring theoretical foundation. Conversely, it allows the theory to be applied to existing projects that live a prefigurative, decentralized, egalitarian and cooperative practice – from local food systems of Ukrainian small farmersi to socio-ecological waste management – which in turn enriches the theory and allows it to constantly evolve.” (Conference Report)

In this opening paragraph Social Ecology is conceived by its advocates as “an inspiring theoretical foundation” for future practice and that under such theoretical influence, human practice will not be used to further enrich human practice but will be used to enable intellectually derived theory, to evolve!  In other words practice is to be used to enhance the theories of intellectuals.  How convenient for the intellectuals!  The doers are to serve the interests of the thinkers, as they since the formation of ancient hierarchical mass societies! Theory, however, does not follow the materially based bio-chemical process which is the material foundation of the process of evolutionary development. Evolution in the biology of life on earth occurs by real practical cellular and multi-cellular adaptation or mutation within life forms resulting in material changes to the organism.

In contrast, theoretical understandings frequently mutate or adapt according to what is fashionable or proposed by powerful or successful influencers. Therefore, it degrades the meaning of ‘evolution’ to apply it to human thought processes which can be led and frequently misled by powerful influencers. Examples being belief in an invisible, all powerful Gods; influencers who led 20th century Russian people into believing that Lenin and Stalin were essential for ending the autocratic of rule of the Czar; or those adult influencers who persuade children that fairies actually exist, or that politicians will implement their promises.

Ideas merely create virtual thought entities exclusively in the brains of humans which even at their most accurate do not replicate real life. In real life it is the success of practice which proves the relevance of any ideas flowing from it. It is not the intellectual success of plausible sounding ideas which go on to enrich practice. It was plausible at one stage in human thinking to consider that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. Both ‘influential’ assumptions were totally wrong. It is an inherited anthropocentric conceit which assumes that thinking determines being, when in fact every single birth of a human being from within the womb of a female member of the species, proves that their actual ‘being’ actually determines the possibility of their eventual thinking.

So in fact, as with all animated species of life on earth, the foundation of all practice is always practice, whether this is exercised by human life forms or non-human life forms. For millions, if not billions of yearly circuits of the planet earth around the sun, life on earth had no intellectually produced deas or theories to base itself upon yet it clearly did pretty well to evolve practically over those millions of circuits until a few thousand years ago when the social divisions of labour under hierarchical mass societies allowed the creation of a privileged section of such societies to specialise in abstract levels of thinking.

Indeed, I suggest that the pre-human hominid species also did a pretty good job of evolving into the modern Homo sapiens species without a separate category of intellectuals pretending to understand life on earth better than the rest of their communities and then informing them of how they should think and act. This reversal or inversion of reality by anthropocentric forms of thinking, if accepted by the rest of us, assumes that the intellectual classes who produce these ideas are the most important class, and the rest of us should simply accept their ideas. This class based socio-economic division of labour has led to a bifurcation of humanity into thinkers and doers. The thinkers make presentations, key note speeches and written works and the doers are supposed to accept the thoughts of the thinkers. Just like has happened in religion and politics ever since mass hierarchical mass societies were formed from the previous hunter-gatherer and pastoralist bands of the ancient near east and Mediterranean regions.

However, in reality, life on earth to survive, as it has over millions of years, does not need the class based anthropocentric thoughts of privileged sections of the human species to save it from extinction. Life on earth just needs humanity to stop doing what it has been doing by its mass society modes of excessive extraction, production and consumption. It is these hierarchical mass society modes of production, not just its latest capitalist based iterations, which are the historic problem for life on earth. When humanity decides to stop doing what it has been doing to life on earth locally, regionally and now globally, then, life on earth – as a dynamically balanced whole – will continue to to replicate itself as its DNA and cellular structures have been enabling from their first emergence. At this point it is well worth considering the following extract from the above noted conference report, which references the attendees and its aims.

“Hundreds of activists and researchers drew an impressive picture of the current social ecology movement at the 5th conferencei of the Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (TRISE). With over 30 presentations, six keynotes, four book launches and a film screening, each followed by a Q&A section, the three-day program was extremely dense and the range was enormous. Thematic blocks revolved around classic social-ecological topics such as the relationship between nature and society, decolonization, direct democracy, dual power, urbanism, commons, criticism of patriarchy and the Kurdish freedom movement. Despite the diversity, a common understanding of social transformation (bottom-up, autonomous, anti-authoritarian, inclusive, etc.) was palpable, uniting the participants in the spirit of the often-cited “unity in diversity”.”(ibid)

Note the massive contradiction between the content, form and location of the conference and the later stated aims of “bottom-up, autonomous, anti-authoritarian, inclusive, participation”.  We are informed of the many “presentations, keynote speeches, book launches, film screenings” and these are anything but bottom-up, non- authoritarian and inclusive. For a start, in all probability some institute selected committee or other decided to choose and invite the key note speakers, decided which book launches would be permitted to be promoted, and whose films should be screened. If so these are all top-down prior impositions upon the conference form no matter how much consultation was involved prior to the event. Then of course, there is the venue. It is unlikely that all the “hundreds” of participants lived just a walking distance away from the venue, so the participants, no matter how ‘diverse’, must have had sufficient time and resources to enable them to attend the three day conference.

This suggests to me that those in attendance were already privileged in some way or another and were from a socio-economic category far above the impoverished lower strata of their societies, which incidentally are among the key populations which are suffering most from the economic exploitation, ecological destruction and pollution caused by the current functioning of hierarchical mass societies and need to be directly involved in any useful changes to the mode of production of their societies. That fact, plus the fact that the negative ecological effects of the hundreds of attendees travelling to and from the venue, the ecological effects of heating and lighting in the venue and the ancillary costs associated with such conference type activities, are not mentioned, is noticable. Clearly these ecological side-effects of their ‘intense’ deliberations are considered acceptable to the attendees and organisers despite their claim to be concerned with ongoing ecological degradation.

This further  suggests to me that, despite any good intentions, the ecological dimension presented in this Transnstional Institution Conference is a subsidiary concern to the primary concern driven by the anthropocentric egotism of bourgeois determined modes oF thinking. For it is this paradigm which sees humanity as the key determining positive factor for life on earth and that the rest of life on earth is secondary to this perspective. It amounts to a form of anthropocentric exceptionalism of which the rampant religious, cultural and national exceptionalisms are merely the historic, self-deluded sub-divisions of this egocentric cultural sickness. The fact that humanity absolutely depends upon micro-organisms, plants and algae, simply to breathe and be able to present key-note speeches, is simply myopically or arrogantly overlooked.

Incidentally, making  films, also depends upon plants, insects and animals being the bearers and sustainers of the food chains we all eat, so as not to collapse mid-presentation, or mid-journey to conferences. Within all anthropocentric focussed deliberations, all of these absolutely  ‘essential species’ are way, way in the background and simply taken for granted as an ‘exceptional’ human right to consume or destroy them irresponsibly, irrespective of the ecological consequences!   In fact conferences of this kind, like all such conferences, are actually doing nothing to challenge or end such self-absorbed presentations and self-determined film productions and their constant, considerable and increasing ecological footprints.

I view them as just yet more examples of the phenomenon of dedicated teams of privileged ‘experts’ and ancillary technicians, jetting round the world making documentaries about endangered species, pollution, ecological  destruction  and climate extremes, whilst in doing so are adding their own negative quantitative addition of pollution, resources depletion and ecological damage to the overall problem for life on earth – as a whole! In the real practical world, bottom up initiatives need to be locally based and bottom-up ecological initiatives should also involve the least ecologically destructive practices possible and involve local communities as much as is possible. Why not use these obviously available resources to promote locally based discussion groups, based upon a ‘life on earth’ perspective, rather than a human centred perspective? Another interesting point to consider is the repeated intention at  this conference on the stated aim of welcoming diversity to its movement.

Welcoming diversity, if it is to be anything more than virtue signaling or a pious, unfulfilled aspiration, needs to actually welcome constructive criticism. My long experience (sixty plus activist years) in social movements and political tendencies has led me to observe that constructive criticism is the last thing most of these pretend bottom-up movements organisers will accept. They tend to either ignore or attack such critics.  Those who consider themselves to have understood more than the average person do not like it to be pointed out that perhaps their assumptions and opinions are not always as valid as they currently think. It will be interesting to see whether this ‘social ecology movement‘, eventually adjusts its theoretical understanding to match the actual inter-dependent evolutionary reality of life on earth – as a whole – and then adjust its social practices to protect that same inter-dependent reality of life on earth, of which we humans, compared with photosynthetic organisms and even insects, are arguably the least important part of the whole planetary biosphere.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2024.)